DEXTER FILKINS, NYTIMES' IRAQ WAR REPORTER (2004- 2006): "IRAQ IS IN SUCH GOOD SHAPE, I DIDN'T RECOGNIZE IT!"

NYTIMES IRAQ CORRESPONDENT - DEXTER FILKINS: IRAQ IS IN SUCH GOOD SHAPE, I DIDN'T RECOGNIZE IT:

Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business.

And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone.

Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park.

At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people.

It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock.

To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope.

The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?

There are plenty of reasons why this peace may only amount to a cease-fire, fragile and reversible. The “surge” of American troops is over. The Iraqis are moving to take their country back, yet they wonder what might happen when the Americans’ restraining presence is gone.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS:

• THE NYTIMES IS ADMITTING - ONCE AGAIN - THAT THE SURGE WORKED - AND THAT THE IRAQIS KNOW IT, AND THEY THANK US.

• ER UM... NO THANKS TO THE DEMOCRATS!

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