'THE INVASION HAS DESTROYED IRAQ' - Life in Baghdad Since the Fall of Saddam

[Purveyor]

By SPIEGEL Staff

Five years after the US invasion, no one misses Saddam, but some Baghdadis are nostalgic for the relative freedom and stability they had before the Americans came.

The situation in Iraq on the eve of the anniversary of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has both opponents and supporters of the American military campaign puzzled. The body of a Catholic archbishop is found near the northern city of Mosul, and yet the US embassy in Baghdad is holding a flea market as if it were peacetime. There has been a slight rise in the number of attacks again, and Douglas Feith, one of the Pentagon's principal architects of the war, has just published a book in which he seeks to justify his decisions. The United States has been in Iraq longer than it fought in World War II. The conflict is getting long in the tooth.

In America's public consciousness, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq stagnated in the summer of 2007. At the time, more than half of respondents to opinion polls knew that 3,500 GIs had been killed, but today only a quarter of Americans know that the number has increased to 4,000. According to Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, the war has already cost the country at least $3 trillion.

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The prognoses are relatively worthless as long as it is unclear what exactly the results of the turnaround have been. Optimists point to successes among Sunnis. Close to 80,000 former Sunni insurgents have changed sides and now work for the Americans, each of them earning $300 a month. Al-Qaida terrorism has been dealt a serious blow.

But skeptics warn against being too optimistic too soon when it comes to the Shiites. Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr has extended his Mahdi militia's cease-fire, which is indisputably the main reason for the drop in sectarian murders. But no one knows whether the cease-fire is merely a strategic move, or whether it will last.

The progress of the war has long depended on both people and developments no one would have imagined five years ago. General Tommy Franks, who directed the US invasion of Iraq, merely rolled his eyes when he was asked at the time what would happen after the war, former US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith writes in his new autobiography "War and Decision." Franks' response to the question was that he didn't have time for that kind of bullshit. Indeed, there are failures everywhere Feith casts his eyes. But, as the reader soon learns, Feith is convinced that the triumvirate of planners -- then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush and Feith himself -- was infallible.

None of these retrospective quibbles appear to worry the president. "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency," he said last week in Nashville. "It is the right decision at this point in my presidency, and it will forever be the right decision."

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http://www.spiegel.de:80/international/world/0,1518,541977,00.html