Early elation gave way to bleak realities

Editor's note: John F. Burns was Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times for five years before being named the newspaper's London bureau chief in 2007.

LONDON — Five years on, it seems surreal.

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a few Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale U.S. bombing of targets in the Iraqi capital. We were on the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein's command complex across the Tigris River.

The first cruise missile struck the vast, bunkerlike presidential command complex in what would become, under the U.S. occupation, the Green Zone. Then missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam's tyranny. Iraqis yearning for their liberation called it "the air show."

Among many on the roof, there was a sense — which seems surreal now in the light of all that has followed — that the suffering of millions of Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending. Those missiles and bombs seemed to be retribution for a ruthless dictator and the wretchedness he had visited on Iraq's people.

It was not long before events began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and helped a crowd haul down Saddam's statue, U.S. troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. At the Oil Ministry, I discovered it was the only building that Marines had orders to protect. Turning to a colleague, I saw shock mirrored in his face. "Say it ain't so," I said. But it was.

It has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what became a chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction; the absence of a serious plan for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year.

There were also instances when America's intentions were betrayed by its troops, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a teenage girl in Mahmoudiya, along with the killing of three of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the U.S. military.

At the fifth anniversary, the conflict's staggering burden is a rebuke to any who hoped Saddam's removal might be accomplished at acceptable cost. In 2003, few could have guessed that the current "surge" would raise the U.S. troop commitment above 160,000, the highest level since the invasion, in the war's fifth year, or that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 U.S. troops; or that America's financial costs, by some estimates, would exceed $650 billion by 2008, and reach perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years.

Those who launched the war will answer in history, as much as they will claim the credit if America finds a way home with honor without destroying all it went to Iraq to achieve. But if we reporters accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam's Iraq in the run-up to the war, we were less effective in probing to uncover other facets of Iraq's culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy.

From the reporting in the years since, Americans now know how traumatized Iraqis were by Saddam's brutality. They also know of the inner workings of the merciless machinery that transported victims to torture chambers and mass graves.

They know of ethnicity, sect and tribe, which were camouflaged by Saddam's totalitarian rule. As much as America's policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion. Those entrusted with the task of fulfilling the U.S. mission were confronted, from the beginning, by an odds-against calculus. Iraq, in 2003, could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is on a minimum of popular consent and trust.

The reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the 2005 elections, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it. This, too, was not fully understood at the time.

To walk Baghdad's streets on the voting days was inspiring. It was natural enough for President Bush to say Iraqis had embraced the American vision.

In truth, what the majority produced was less a vote for democracy than a vote for a once-and-for-all, permanent transfer of power, from the Sunni minority that ruled in Iraq for centuries, to an impatient, possibly vengeful, Shiite majority.

The Shiite parties that won in 2005 have clung tenaciously to power, and the Sunni parties, mostly unreconciled to an Iraq ruled by Shiites, have maneuvered to keep open the possibility of a Sunni restoration. Nothing has been settled.

Meanwhile, rival Iraqi blocs look beyond the U.S. occupation to a time when the issues of power will be settled among themselves.

American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence. Opinion polls, of dubious accuracy, have suggested most Iraqis want U.S. troops withdrawn. My own experience was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak candidly had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one many American critics of the war seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer much cheer to the war's supporters.

For it would be strange, after years of bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to stability, which they had under Saddam. For America, it is a dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.