A Little Patience, Please: Iraq won't look like Our Town overnight

The absolute monarchs of the op-ed pages and television commentary predicted fearful outcomes to the Iraqi Freedom operation -- hundreds of thousands of casualties on all sides, Baghdad razed, the Muslim world in an uproar, every Arab an Osama bin Laden. Well, things haven't turned out like that. President Bush and his administration explained what they would do, and did it. Unwilling to give credit where credit is due, the absolute monarchs have moved on to predict fresh fearful outcomes -- a Khomeinist dictatorship of the Shia ayatollahs, an intifada against the American "occupation," every Arab once again an Osama bin Laden. What is most striking in this immense failure: the bias against the administration, the ignorance, or the contrast with the professionalism of the military?

When a totalitarian regime is overthrown, the very first likelihood is the settling of scores. In 1945 concentration-camp survivors killed their SS guards when they could. In Budapest during the revolution of 1956, the crowds hanged Communist secret policemen on lampposts. In a final showdown with the Communists, even the newly democratic Boris Yeltsin left many dead when his tanks shelled the Moscow White House.

Since the days of the British, moreover, every previous change of regime in Iraq has involved mayhem and murder. Nothing of the kind has occurred so far in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, Arabs massacred Kurds and drove them out of Mosul and Kirkuk, stealing their homes and property. Reclaiming what is rightfully theirs, the Kurds have not killed those who so maltreated them. In Basra, the mob caught a notorious secret-police chief; they did not lynch him as they might have, but handed him over to the British. The families of victims are often able to name and identify the Ba'athist secret policemen and torturers who committed crimes against them. Many of them expressed their feelings by looting whatever of the former regime's real or symbolic property was within reach, but they have not taken the law into their own hands in revenge killings. That is remarkable, and grounds for hope.

Life is instead approaching normality. Former general Jay Garner and his staff of several hundred have teamed up with Iraqi officials and technicians. The electricity supply will soon be fully restored in all major cities, and with it comes clean water and the purification of sewage. There is no hunger; markets are operating. Gas stations are open. Schoolchildren no longer have to glorify Saddam in class. The regular police force is back at work, in new uniforms, armed and using weapons handed to them by Americans to enforce good conduct. Military lawyers are trying to establish interim criminal and civil codes. Economists are debating what the post-Saddam currency ought to be.

Administration is not government, and in that respect Iraq is still a political vacuum. For reasons that seem to have to do with departmental in-fighting in Washington, the United States did not prepare for an Iraqi government-in-waiting. Power is therefore lying in the streets -- to adopt the famous phrase coined for the Bolsheviks in 1917 -- and someone has only to pick it up. All sorts of contenders with all sorts of credentials have rushed forward, each with claims to be representing one or another of the ethnicities and religious sects which make up the kaleidoscope of Iraq. Some of these contenders are at the national level -- for instance Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and known to have the Pentagon's backing but also the blocking of the State Department -- others at regional or city levels. Out of the blue, one Muhammad Mohsen Zubaidi appointed himself mayor of Baghdad and set up so many committees to deal with municipal issues that the military has put a stop to his activities.

Other contenders still are tribal elders or sheikhs accustomed to authority and respect. The traditional Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani speak for their people, and make it clear that Kurds expect to be rewarded for their loyalty to the coalition, as well as their restraint towards a Turkey unhappy to see the Kurds enjoying freedom. For the past decade, they have shown themselves capable of running Iraqi Kurdistan at least as democratically as the Turks run Turkey: not perfectly, but not too imperfectly either.

Representing only about a fifth of the population, Sunni Muslims have hitherto governed Iraq. Ba'athist ideology began as an unholy compound of Communism and Nazism, and ended as the justification of Sunni rule over everyone else. For the Sunni minority, the downfall of Saddam is a calamity marking the end of their supremacy, and putting them in fear of their lives at the hands of those they oppressed. A would-be Sunni successor to Saddam needs the unusual credential of having stood up to Saddam, and enough civic courage to tell his fellow Sunnis how blindly cruel they have been while in power. Had the State Department been able to find such a paragon, an Iraqi government-in-waiting might have accompanied the Marines.