OPINION
Doing something right in Iraq's mean streets

Surfing the Web the other day, we noted an item on the "Slate" Web site that recommended: "Anybody interested in the rebuilding of Iraq should read this story: It's one of the few pieces that details how things can go right."

Not having been aware of that many things going right in Iraq lately, we checked out the story, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, on the Washington Post's front page Tuesday.

Chandrasekaran's byline, via the Post's wire service, has appeared 43 times in The Advertiser — since last September atop a number of superb reports datelined Baghdad.

A 'seething' city

From Fallujah, a "deeply traditional Sunni Muslim city on the Euphrates River (that) has been regarded by U.S. troops as the most hostile place in Iraq," Chandrasekaran writes of "several bold strategies employed by U.S. commanders here over the past few weeks to appease a city brimming with discontent."

Indeed, the city "had been seething," Chandrasekaran writes, since April 28, when U.S. soldiers opened fire on a group of protesters at a school, killing 15 people and wounding more than three dozen in what the military called an act of self-defense. Local leaders concede that a few guerrillas may have fired at the soldiers from the crowd.

The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks.

Making peace in war

In an unprecedented departure, U.S. commanders are attempting to break the cycle of violence by paying "blood money" to anybody who's been shot by their troops. They've found many attacks on their patrols have been motivated by an ancient tradition of revenge.

The soldiers "changed my opinions," said one man who was shot at the school, lost his foot, but is now $500 richer. "I used to hate them, but now I realize they made a mistake and they really want to help us."

Also among the changes, soldiers now knock on doors before searching a house (thus giving women time to dress and don veils). They have reduced the military's presence in the city, refrained from driving tanks through the streets at night and ordered troops to be polite — no frisking women or imams — and abide by local customs.

Hope for harmony

Of course, the city is still a long, long way from being safe and secure. But with outside-the-box thinking like this by our military, there's hope where before the picture was unrelievedly bleak.

And make no mistake. No matter what your opinion on how we got into Iraq or whether we should have, we have no choice but to remain there until the job is done.

The job will be far more difficult than we had been led to believe. Twenty soldiers have died from hostile fire in the past two weeks; many more have died from other causes, been wounded or injured.

We are not being welcomed in Iraq as liberators, as we had hoped. But we are obliged to work to win hearts and minds in Iraq. As a nation, we cannot conscionably leave Iraq worse off than it was before we attacked it.