Carper's Corner

Statement

Carper's Corner

I returned home a week ago from a four-day congressional delegation mission to Iraq and Kuwait. I arrived back in Delaware just in time on a Monday morning to participate in the sendoff of 150 members of a military police unit of the Delaware National Guard at Fort Dix, headed to Iraq.

The situation awaiting them in Iraq remains dangerous, and the challenges our troops face there are daunting. The assessment we received in an hour-and-a-half-long meeting with General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker was sobering, but it was not devoid of hope.

Americans and Iraqis continue to die in Iraq in numbers that are heart-wrenching. The numbers of those seriously wounded are even greater. Iraqi borders leak like sieves, often allowing foreign insurgents and weapons to enter without difficulty.

We heard first-hand accounts from American troops of Iraqi police who were intimidated from performing their duties for fear of deadly reprisals by militia members. We also heard of some Iraqi army units still reluctant to take the lead in patrols and other operations.

In a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world, output remains pitifully low. Although the United States has recently started a dialogue with them, Iran and Syria continue to create problems within Iraq. The effects of long, and sometimes multiple, deployments are taking a terrible toll on our troops, particularly those with young children back home or with businesses they need to run. And as temperatures approach 120 degrees, electricity is still unavailable most of the time in Baghdad.

On the political front, the Iraqi Parliament remains besieged by divisions that, by comparison, make the U.S. Congress look like a bastion of bipartisan cooperation. Despite months of prodding, Iraqi lawmakers have yet to agree to plans to share their nation's vast oil wealth or to share power.

Similarly, most Baathist party members who ran the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein have been purged, and efforts to bring in the most capable to serve in some capacity have been blocked, further fueling the Sunni insurgency. Proposed changes to the Iraqi constitution, adopted almost two years ago, have yet to materialize. Moreover, while there's been a lot of talk about provincial and municipal elections, even the legislation mandating elections has yet to be approved by the full parliament.

Despite the unrelenting flow of bad news, all is not gloom and doom in Iraq today. That message was delivered to me loud and clear by most of the two dozen members of the Delaware National Guard who I met shortly after landing in Baghdad. They expressed — almost to a person — their frustration that news stories emanating from Iraq are overwhelming negative and that stories of positive developments are not being reported or are drowned out by negative news. Amidst the doom and gloom, they said there are positive developments. Here are a few of them:

While electricity in Baghdad is still hit-or-miss most days, the availability of electricity in most provinces outside Baghdad exceeds the levels that existed before the overthrow of Saddam. Significantly, several days before our arrival, the availability of electricity in Baghdad finally exceeded the levels existing prior to the regime overthrow.

While 107mm shells were fired into Baghdad's International or Green Zone during one of our briefings there, much of Baghdad remains far calmer than it was just a few months ago. Many of the "bad guys" appear to have gone underground, for now, or have headed for other parts of the country to cause mayhem.

On our second day in Iraq, our congressional delegation donned helmets and body armor, and headed out of the International Zone onto Haifa Street aboard Strykers or armored personnel carriers. A curfew had been lifted earlier that morning in the capital city, and there were a lot of people on the sidewalks and cars on the streets. Many of the pedestrians — young and old, men and women — returned our waves. To my surprise, a number of them smiled when waving back.

We walked through one of the residential neighborhoods alongside Haifa Street where a major urban redevelopment project is underway, led jointly by the Americans and Iraqis. One combat-trained U.S. Army colonel walking with us said there are days when he feels more like a city planner than a combat soldier, but he wasn't complaining. The relative calm we witnessed along Haifa Street contrasted sharply with the situation there several months ago - a situation highlighted by the pock-marked buildings we saw that had been hit by gunfire from earlier firefights.

The calm was also in stark contrast to the sectarian violence that exploded in many parts of Iraq a year ago when a sacred Shiite mosque — the al-Askariya in Samara — was bombed, allegedly by Sunni insurgents or by others intent on fomenting civil war among Shiites and Sunnis. The bombing did just that as Shiites murdered Sunnis by the hundreds and destroyed dozens of Sunnis mosques in the weeks that followed. A second bombing of the same mosque in Samara just a few days before our delegation's arrival elicited a different response this time. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, immediately after the bombing, went to the mosque, denounced those who did the bombing, promised retribution against them and imposed an immediate curfew. His quick action won kudos from Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds alike, as well as from Americans.

An even more dramatic turnaround has occurred in Anbar Province, the large Sunni-dominated province that stretches just west of Baghdad all the way to the Syrian border. Ever since the toppling of Saddam's regime, violence and insurrection have dominated Ambar province. Among the Americans badly wounded there was Sean Barney, a member of my Senate staff and Marine reservist who was shot in the neck by a sniper in Fallujah and nearly killed.

Earlier this year, though, a new chapter began to be written in Anbar Province. One by one, Sunni tribal leaders began to redirect their anger and fire away from American and Iraqi troops and toward al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group of Sunnis who had infiltrated the province, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

Remarkably, a joint effort by the Sunni tribal leaders and coalition forces has succeeded in driving virtually all of al-Qaeda out of Anbar. As calm has returned to the area, the United States Agency for International Development has come in to help rebuild and get the economy moving, while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has begun several major public works projects, including a waste water treatment plant near Fallujah.

Efforts are now underway to replicate in other provinces the minor miracle that has occurred in Anbar. And while no one, including me, expects that to be easy, no one in Iraq or in the United States, even just one year ago, would have believed possible the dramatic turnaround we have witnessed in Anbar.

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