FOR A majority of Americans, this week marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed.
It has been about a year since Gen David Petraeus arrived to command US forces in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker took over as the chief US diplomat, and the military deployed 30,000 more troops to protect and rebuild neighbourhoods.
Officials now running the US effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new security, political and economic policies - in particular, sharply reduced violence - are continually weighed against the first four years, when Iraq unravelled in insurgency and sectarian strife.
"I came to Washington to describe what we're doing," Charles Ries, Crocker's senior deputy in charge of recon- struction, said during a visit last week. "At almost every meeting, somebody wants me to describe what we used to do . . . I know why people raise these questions, but I don't feel it's something I can speak to. The times were different then."
Today's policy is fundamentally different from the impatient mindset of 2003, in both lower US expectations and a less imperious approach to dealing with Iraqi authorities. "In those days," Ries said, "we decided what [the Iraqis] needed, and we built it". Today, he said, Iraqis are asked what they want, and then told that while the US will help, they will have to pay for most of it themselves.
Yet as the administration now requests additional war funding and calls for a pause in promised troop withdrawals, some question its right to a second chance. "Like a tourniquet," the troop increase "has stopped the bleeding", Democratic senator Jack Reed, a former army ranger and member of the armed services committee, reported last week after his 11th trip to Iraq. What he has not seen, Reed says, are the surgery and recovery that would begin to heal the wound that Iraq has become.
Others see the past year's successes as fragile and reversible, and less consequential than the pain that preceded them. The White House tends to dismiss such longer memories. In addition to new directions on the ground in Iraq, officials point to a newly effective structure designed to avoid the kind of ad hoc decision- making that led to early bureaucratic gridlock and mistakes, such as decrees dissolving the Iraqi army and banning Baath Party members from government jobs.
The once-bickering State Department and Pentagon now report new levels of co-operation.
One of the more troublesome realities is that Iraqi leaders have been slow to take advantage of the "breathing space" that the troop increase was supposed to create. But in congressional testimony next month, both Petraeus and Crocker are expected to argue that enough movement has been made to justify continuing the strategy, and to warn that an abrupt withdrawal of US troops could jeopardise the gains of the past year.
As the administration struggles to focus on Iraq's future, it is competing with a presidential race locked in debate about how the war began and how to end it, a Democratic Congress determined to fight over every additional dollar, and a weary public.
Some public views about the situation in Iraq have eased over the past year. But others have hardly budged. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, almost two-thirds said the war was not worth waging and less than half believe the US is making significant progress.
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)