The Audacity of Hope

within hostile territory, self-contained communities with their own power and sewage
systems, computer lines and wireless networks, basketball courts and ice cream stands.
More than that, one was reminded of that unique quality of American optimism that
everywhere was on display—the absence of cynicism despite the danger, sacrifice, and
seemingly interminable setbacks, the insistence that at the end of the day our actions
would result in a better life for a nation of people we barely knew.
And yet, three conversations during the course of my visit would remind me of just how
quixotic our efforts in Iraq still seemed—how, with all the American blood, treasure,
and the best of intentions, the house we were building might be resting on quicksand.
The first conversation took place in the early evening, when our delegation held a press
conference with a group of foreign correspondents stationed in Baghdad. After the
Q&A session, I asked the reporters if they’d stay for an informal, off-the-record
conversation. I was interested, I said, in getting some sense of life outside the Green
Zone. They were happy to oblige, but insisted they could only stay for forty-five
minutes—it was getting late, and like most residents of Baghdad, they generally
avoided traveling once the sun went down.
As a group, they were young, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, all of them
dressed casually enough that they could pass for college students. Their faces, though,
showed the stresses they were under—sixty journalists had already been killed in Iraq
by that time. Indeed, at the start of our conversation they apologized for being
somewhat distracted; they had just received word that one of their colleagues, a reporter
with the Christian Science Monitor named Jill Carroll, had been abducted, her driver
found killed on the side of a road. Now they were all working their contacts, trying to
track down her whereabouts. Such violence wasn’t unusual in Baghdad these days, they
said, although Iraqis overwhelmingly bore the brunt of it. Fighting between Shi’ites and
Sunnis had become widespread, less strategic, less comprehensible, more frightening.
None of them thought that the elections would bring about significant improvement in
the security situation. I asked them if they thought a U.S. troop withdrawal might ease
tensions, expecting them to answer in the affirmative. Instead, they shook their heads.
“My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks,” one of the
reporters told me. “One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We’re the only
thing holding this place together.”
That night, our delegation accompanied Ambassador Khalilzad for dinner at the home
of Iraqi interim President Jalal Tala-bani. Security was tight as our convoy wound its
way past a maze of barricades out of the Green Zone; outside, our route was lined with
U.S. troops at one-block intervals, and we were instructed to keep our vests and helmets
on for the duration of the drive.
After ten minutes we arrived at a large villa, where we were greeted by the president
and several members of the Iraqi interim government. They were all heavyset men,
most in their fifties or sixties, with broad smiles but eyes that betrayed no emotion. I
recognized only one of the ministers—Mr. Ahmed Chalabi, the Western-educated
Shi’ite who, as a leader of the exile group the Iraqi National Congress, had reportedly
fed U.S. intelligence agencies and Bush policy makers some of the prewar information
on which the decision to invade was made—information for which Chalabi’s group had
received millions of dollars, and that had turned out to be bogus. Since then Chalabi had