GRIM BUT HOPEFUL:

The New Iraq Is Grim, Hopeful and Still Scary (JOHN F. BURNS, 11/16/03, NY Times)

At the Palestine Hotel, where I was taunted in the last weeks of Mr. Hussein's terror by officials of his information ministry as "the most dangerous man in Iraq" because of my articles about the regime's brutality, some of the same Iraqis, who now work as interpreters for Western news bureaus, caution me against staying in the 16th-floor room I used to inhabit. It is, they say, potentially vulnerable to the rockets and truck bombs of Mr. Hussein's die-hards.

It is a world upside down, or at least skewed, for anybody familiar with Mr. Hussein's Iraq, a world that challenges much that seemed sure in the days when the drums of war were sounding in Washington.

Then, many of us believed that Iraqis craved, and deserved, their liberation from Mr. Hussein. Despite all the disappointments of the occupation, there has been little change in that view, judging by what was almost certainly the first scientifically conducted public opinion poll in Iraq, by the Gallup Organization in late September.

Not all the findings were music to Washington's ears, especially the one in which 47 percent of the 1,178 Baghdadis polled said they were worse off under American occupation, while only 33 percent judged themselves to be better off.

But against this, and the bedrock on which American prospects here may well depend, was the poll's central finding: that 62 percent believed the ouster of Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships they suffered during and after the invasion. In addition, 67 percent said they believed Iraq would be better off five years from now than it was under Mr. Hussein, against 8 percent who thought it would be worse.

Baghdad is not Iraq, and it is certainly not Falluja, Ramadi or Tikrit, where crowds have gathered to cheer the killings of American troops, most recently in the shooting down of two helicopters.

But the random experiences of a week back in the country and among ordinary people I have talked to, by far the most common view has been that for all the American failures, as they see them, a guarantee of greater misery would still be the premature withdrawal of American troops.

These Iraqis, for the most part, do not make that the first point of any conversation, more often it is the last, but it is their bottom line.

Mr. Burns earned considerable credibility on the Right with his denunciation of his fellow pressmen. This seemingly well-balanced piece will only strengthen that. In a situation where competing voices seem diametrically oppossed in their assessments, he seems pretty reliable.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2003 10:28 AM