In an excellent report on the Iraq War last night, ABC’s Nightline correspondent Terry Moran had a fairly balanced and thoughtful take on the state of Iraq on the eve of parliamentary elections this week. The report married up the most recent optimistic Iraq poll numbers with some fascinating man in the street interviews that was so much a cut above the usual network Iraq coverage I felt it worthy to impose on my brother to get me a rush transcript of the show and relay some of the more interesting segments.

What made the report different was the admission up front that network war coverage had been inadequate:

There’s a fascinating poll out today. A poll of Iraqis and the results may surprise you. One thing I learned our our trip to Iraq a couple of weeks ago, it’s not the place Administration officials describe every day from their podiums. Iraq can above all be a complicated place. A place where real people are struggling every day to get by and to build their nation amid terror, occupation, and the wreckage of three decades of tyranny. Much of the media coverage here is one dimensional. Many of our politicians lack all credibility, so listen as we did to the voices of Iraqis themselves.

That results of the recent poll taken by ABC, Time Magazine and other media organs came as something of a shock to those who had become inured to the idea of Iraq as a place where if you stick your head out of the door you’re more than likely to get your nose shot off.:

It was in a tea shop in this village north of Baghdad that we heard something we hadn’t really expected; optimism.

(Questioning patron of tea shop): If today is better than it was last year, why? Why did that happen? What happened?

Because we have elections now. It’s much better, he told me.

And that, it turns out, is how most Iraqis feel. According to the new ABC News poll conducted with Time Magazine and other partners. Get this. 71% of Iraqis say their own lives are going well now. 64% say they expect their lives will improve eve more in the coming year. But how can that be? The bombings. The kidnappings. The beheadings. Isn’t that the reality of Iraq?

Is it any wonder that Senator Lieberman and others who have recently been to Iraq are qualitatively more optimistic than 6 months ago?

There must be something in the air. And listening and watching the Iraqis being interviewed on the segment last night even a blind man could see it; it is hope. Hope born of the recognition that the democratic process is moving forward and cannot be stopped. Listen to this Iraqi doctor who sees the worst of Iraq everyday – bloodstained civilians who are victims of both Zarqawi’s mad suicide bombers and the Sunni insurgency:

(Doctor) We have helped and we think the future for Iraqis will be so good. Now we are, every day, there’s a point from everything. Those civilians still fall down and the blood everywhere on this. I don’t know if that will stop or no. I hope that in the next elections that will be different.

(Reporter) Have you lost hope?

(Doctor) No, not yet.

(Reporter) No? After all you’ve seen?

(Doctor) We have changing to democratic. We have to pay the price. We are paying the price.

As the segment points out, that price is more and more being paid by the Iraqi security forces. On the road to Baquba, the convoy my brother was riding in was attacked by a roadside bomb, killing an Iraqi policeman. Earlier, he interviewed the dead policeman’s Commander who showed him a wall where a handwritten list of the fallen had been placed. There were 41 names on that wall. And that could be one reason why the Iraqi people have so much confidence in their security forces. The poll showed that more than 2/3 have confidence in the police and the military. Not only are the people expressing confidence but I suspect they are grateful that not only so many are willing to try to do a very dangerous job but that their numbers keep growing. The Iraqis are apparently not intimidated that the insurgency has specifically targeted police recruiting stations as well as the police in general.

But there is also trouble with the police force in some areas as the segment points out:

In Anbar, overwhelmingly Sunni – heartland of the insurgency and scene of the fiercest fighting only 1 in 10 said they have confidence in the Iraqi army and only 3 in 10 are confident in the police. They fear the country’s security forces are becoming dominated by Shia militias. In the offices of a Sunni political party we met a man that said he was picked by Iraqi police while walking in his neighborhood. They beat him, burned him, and strung him up by his arms. His crime it seems – he’s a Sunni man out one night and fell victim to a predatory Shia gang operating as a police force.

I posted on this problem with Shia militias here. This is how I described them:

Herein lies the seeds of destruction for the new Iraqi state. Because of the nature of the insurgency and the inability of both American and Iraqi forces to protect the population, dozens of Shia militias have sprung up over the last few years. Some are small adjuncts of tribal and village councils and operate sometimes as death squads, targeting Sunni inhabitants who may or may not support the insurgency. Others like Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army engaged in operations against Americans until soundly defeated last year in Najaf and Sadr City. Al-Sadr has since laid down his arms and several of his followers have joined the new government.

But by far the largest and most problematic militia has been the Badr Brigade (renamed the Badr Organization of Reconstruction and Development ) which controls large areas in southern Iraq and is closely associated with the largest political party, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The militia dominates police and government offices in several southern provinces where they have attempted with varying degrees of success to establish a strict Islamic code of law.

One of these militias may or may not have been responsible for the death of Stephen Vincent, the National Review journalist who was killed in Basra last summer.

And the other worry is the revelation today by a former Iraqi general that there may be as many as a dozen secret prisons run by militias connected to Iraq Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a former Badr militiaman with close ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. In fact, this article in the Washington Times quotes the general, Muntazar Jasim al-Samarrai, as saying that an Iranian intelligence chief was in charge of interrogations and the insurgent suspects were routinely tortured and killed.

If true, this is extremely worrying for the future of an independent Iraq. It is unclear how much influence the mad mullah’s wield with the SCIRI, the party almost guaranteed to receive the largest plurality of votes in the elections. Their spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali al Sistani is a fiercely independent patriot, a conservative who recognizes that Iraq’s future must be a secular one that embraces all religions and ethnic parties. But some politicians like Jabr may have dual loyalties or could even be working to undermine the new government.

But before the problems with the militias can be solved. Before Iran can be confronted for aiding and abetting the killing of thousands of Iraqis. Before Zarqawi and his Merry Band of Beheaders can be driven from the country and the Sunni insurgency tamped down to a manageable level. Before all this, there must be hope:

All Iraq is struggling to recover from the wounds of decades of war, oppression, and now occupation. One thing you keep coming across, a sense of what is central in that struggle; elections. And in our poll, 76% of Iraqis said they are confident this week’s elections will produce a stable government in Iraq. And nearly everyone we talked to expressed that hope – that these elections will finally set Iraq on course.

I certainly hope the Iraqis are a people blessed with a lot of patience. They’re going to need it.

UPDATE

The Captain links to a New York Times story highlighting Sunni participation in the election and thinks there is a possiblity we’ve “turned the corner” on defeatism at home:

The Sunni participation puts the last of the building blocks in place for the establishment of a consensus democratic republic. The reporting of the Times indicates that the American media might finally start recognizing what will shortly become obvious to all whether they do so or not: that a free Iraq exists, thanks to an administration that steadfastly refused to listen to the Chicken Littles of the opposition and the whiners of the Exempt Media at home. The war may finally have turned the corner in the only place it could be lost—here in America.