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Violence ebbing. Wealth returning. Can this be Iraq?
A major western newspaper has noticed. The Observer, fergawdsakes. Perhaps the NYT will now get a clue? EFL to remove the hand-wringing and moral equivalency.
For there are two Iraqs in evidence these days: not just the one where weddings are bombed and young women murdered in reply. The other Iraq is harder to dramatise but it is equally real. It is a place where boring, ordinary things take place. And in taking place become extraordinary in the context of conflict.

Last week it was the opening of a new $20 million government centre next to Tal Afar's ancient ruined fort. The day before Jamil detonated his explosives' belt, the sheiks and dignitaries came in and crowded through the building's corridors, muttering approvingly as they examined its new painted walls, the photocopiers, printers and computers - some of them still wrapped in plastic - sitting on the brand new desks.

Last week the debate over whether to pull out of Iraq took on an urgent new intensity as the struggle between the Democrat-led Congress and the White House of President George W Bush finally reached a head. Driven by a presidential election cycle, six years of building animosity in US politics has finally been focused on the lightning rod that is Iraq. After four years of war, perhaps more than 650,000 Iraqi dead, ...
Wrong, it's 1/3 that or less.
... it has finally come to a single question of accounting: which of the two Iraqs is winning, the Iraq of death or an Iraq that looks to peace?

Posted by: Steve White 2007-07-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=193595