Vorlon Whispers

The formal transfer of power from Paul Bremer's occupation authority to the new Iraqi government waits till the end of the month, but with the self-dissolution of the interim Iraqi Governing Council, we have witnessed an effective transfer. From now on, American advisers won't be running Iraqi ministries -- won't dare try -- and allied troops on the ground will be consulting Iraqis before launching new raids on assorted bad guys. Best of all, the region's governments, including nefarious Iran and Syria (up to their eyeballs fomenting trouble within Iraq), will know it's too late to sabotage the hand-off -- because it has already occurred, by surprise, ahead of deadline.

No one else will say this, so I will. The Bush administration has handled the transfer of power in Iraq more cleverly than anyone expected, including me. The summoning of the U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, looked like very bad news (a poisonous old Arab League chauvinist who brokered the sell-out of Lebanon to Syria in 1982). In grim moments, I believed the Bush people were cynically using him to wash their hands of Iraq, and as it were, dump the quagmire back in the swamp of the U.N. Instead, they froze the ground beneath Brahimi's feet, and skated rings around him, haggling behind his back with Iraq's new political heavyweights to leave him endorsing a fait accompli. If it were not vulgar, I would say the Bushies suckered the U.N. into signing on to the New Iraq through Brahimi. A sovereign, free Iraq which will, incidentally, have a few things to say about the U.N.'s $100-billion "oil-for-food" scam, in due course.

Will this new Iraq be plausibly democratic? Too soon to count chickens. An Iraqi government that includes all non-violent factions, with or without elections, is already better than that for which we could have plausibly hoped. Elections on top of this will be gravy.

That self-dissolved Governing Council seems to have served its purpose as a public incubator of a new Iraqi political class, wonderfully unlike those in adjoining countries. The Americans have moreover done a superb job of playing politics, intra-Iraqis: a job of horse-trading beyond anything achieved by British imperialists in the past. I didn't agree with all the dirty tricks (and especially not with the CIA's unconscionable settling of accounts with Ahmed Chalabi, getting the Iraqis to raid his headquarters to bring him down to size), but we have a presentably benign government at the end of the day.

Real praise ought to be showered on the Iraqis. This new political class -- consisting of returned Sunni and Shia exiles, Kurds, tribal lords, Shia clerical henchmen, and the odd, semi-halal, Baath-party "technocrat", has proved capable of forming workable coalitions whenever something has had to be achieved. If you read your history of American constitutional wranglings in the 18th-century, you will appreciate how far they came in how little time.

Can they stand up to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Wahabi terrorists, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Shia blackshirts? Yes, with continuing American help. These are every bit as much America's enemies as Saddam Hussein was, and I daresay the U.S. Marines will continue to oblige. They have done a magnificent job of reducing the numbers of psychopaths loose in Fallujah, Najaf, Kufa, and elsewhere, for much too little praise.

On the ground in Iraq, it is obvious from the range of sources the Western media do not bother with, that things are still going exceedingly well. There are more than 8,000 municipalities in Iraq, and serious violence in only five or six. Free elections for local governments have taken place or probably will in most of the others. The foreign troops are already out of sight and out of mind in much of the country, where crops are growing, generators are humming, and people are going about their lives.