The Real Iraq
Amir Taheri writes from Baghdad:

'THE Iraqi Intifada!" This is the cover story offered by Al- Watan Al-Arabi, a pro-Saddam Hussein weekly published in Paris. It finds an echo in the latest issue of America's Time magazine, which paints a bleak prospect for the newly liberated country. The daily Al Quds, another pro-Saddam paper, quotes from The Washington Post in support of its claim that "a popular war of resistance" is growing in Iraq. Some newspapers in the United States, Britain and "old Europe" go further by claiming that Iraq has become a "quagmire" or "another Vietnam." The Parisian daily Le Monde prefers the term "engrenage," which is both more chic and French.

This chorus wants us to believe that most Iraqis regret the ancien regime, and are ready to kill and die to expel their liberators.

Sorry, guys, this is not the case.

But the Saddamites and the Western press peanut gallery can dream, can't they?

Neither the wishful thinking of part of the Arab media, long in the pay of Saddam, nor the visceral dislike of part of the Western media for George W. Bush and Tony Blair changes the facts on the ground in Iraq.

ONE fact is that a visitor to Iraq these days never finds anyone who wants Saddam back.

There are many complaints, mostly in Baghdad, about lack of security and power cuts. There is anxiety about the future at a time that middle-class unemployment is estimated at 40 percent. Iraqis also wonder why it is that the coalition does not communicate with them more effectively. That does not mean that there is popular support for violent action against the coalition.

Another fact is that the violence we have witnessed, especially against American troops, in the past six weeks is limited to less than 1 percent of the Iraqi territory, in the so-called "Sunni Triangle," which includes parts of Baghdad.

And it's time to go through the Sunni Triangle with a fine tooth comb.

Elsewhere, the coalition presence is either accepted as a fact of life or welcomed. On the 4th of July some shops and private homes in various parts of Iraq, including the Kurdish areas and cities in the Shiite heartland, put up the star-spangled flag as a show of gratitude to the United States.

"We see our liberation as the start of a friendship with the U.S. and the U.K. that should last a thousand years," says Khalid Kishtaini, one of Iraq's leading novelists. "The U.S. and the U.K. showed that a friend in need is a friend indeed. Nothing can change that."

In the early days of the liberation, some mosque preachers tested the waters by speaking against "occupation." They soon realized that their congregations had a different idea. Today, the main theme in sermons at the mosques is about a partnership between the Iraqi people and the coalition to rebuild the war-shattered country and put it on the path of democracy.

Even the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr now says that "some good" could come out of the coalition's presence in Iraq. "The coalition must help us stabilize the situation," he says. "The healing period that we need would not be possible if we are suddenly left alone."

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