Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - There's good news and bad news out of Iraq, but the real news is that there is finally some good news.
The best news: Between February 19 and March 2 not a single American soldier was killed in Iraq.
This is testimony to the fact that the American military units operating there -- even in the midst of a huge movement of soldiers as the old U.S. force of 130,000 is replaced by a fresh new force of 110,000 -- have ground down the opposition Sunni guerrillas to a much more manageable level both in terms of numbers and effectiveness.
This wasn't achieved with a few big battles or a few massive sweeps, but rather by a slow, steady weeding out of the bad guys, taking them down or out by ones, twos and threes and primarily doing it with information provided by Iraqis who want to see an end to this war and a future for themselves.
It doesn't hurt that the tribal leaders of the minority Sunni Arab population of central Iraq -- which has provided most of the guerrilla recruits and sheltered them -- have begun to realize that the only thing standing between them and extermination by their blood enemies, the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, is the U.S. Army and now the Marines.
The awful days of the Ramadan offensive in November, when the Americans suffered record numbers killed and wounded in a seemingly endless series of roadside bombings, are no more. With luck and hard work they may not come again.
A new life is coming to many parts of Iraq. Shops have more goods to sell, people have more money to spend and inflation is beginning to work its way back down. Iraqi oil production now is around 2.3 million to 2.5 million barrels a day, or almost pre-war production levels of 2.8 million barrels, thanks to $1 billion in infrastructure repairs paid for by the American taxpayer.
One of the hottest growth industries in Iraq is, once again, official corruption, with some of Baghdad's new bosses busy dipping buckets of kickback cash out of the river of American billions financing reconstruction. For a while, after the end of the war last April, there wasn't much left worth stealing.
So much for the good news, or sort of good news.
The bad news is that even as the Sunni insurgency wanes and attacks against American troops decline, the foreign jihad killers are refocusing their suicide bombings against Iraqis and, more particularly, against Shiite Iraqis.
In early February American forces captured a document on a CD-ROM written by Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who's believed to be an independent operator with some relationship with al-Qaeda. Zarqawi in that document signaled a shift in tactics, redirecting foreign guerrilla attacks away from the Americans and toward the Shiites.
Recently Shiite mosques and shrines in Karbala and Baghdad were targeted for attack during a major religious festival. More than 185 people were killed and hundreds more wounded.
Zarqawi may have thought the Sunni attacks in the Iron Triangle region, where Saddam Hussein's Baath Party was strong, coupled with a hoped-for uprising among the majority Shiite population in the south, would drive the Americans out of Iraq or into small enclaves where they controlled nothing.
That never came to pass, and the notion that the Shiites, oppressed for decades by the Sunni Baathists, would make common cause with those they hate was far-fetched.
The Zarqawi memorandum made it clear that the failure of the Shiites to rise against the Americans makes them the enemy. So he's launching guerrilla war against the Shiites with the aim of either defeating them or forcing them into an anti-American rebellion. This, too, is highly unlikely.
A more logical consequence is that the Shiites will continue to quietly support the American occupation so long as the march proceeds toward a democratic government and eventual elections -- elections the Shiites can win because they're 60 percent of the population.
The Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, a powerful Shiite cleric, has proved to be shrewd player in the negotiations leading toward the June 30 hand-over of power to a provisional Iraqi government. Neither he nor the Shiites are going to be stampeded by a rash of bombings. Nor are they likely ever to submit to Sunni domination again.
The question is: What kind of Iraq do the Shiites want to build?
