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One of the perennial difficulties of evaluating military operations lies in finding useful metrics of success by which to judge the effort. This is especially so in a battle for the hearts and minds of a population. Most statistics do little justice to the question, and media reportage often focuses on one-off events that may obscure more incremental, but important, developments. Fortunately, there has emerged a generation of Iraqi bloggers who provide their own insights.

The story that most Iraqi bloggers tell is a straightforward one of the fear that has enveloped their lives as the country veers toward civil war. “Sunshine,” the precocious blogger at Days of My Life, provides a harrowing look at the terror that has overtaken her childhood as she describes murdered relatives, the decision of her best friend’s family to flee the country after terrorist threats and the inconceivable dangers (as well as school quizzes!) of her daily life.

In a posting from December, shortly before her 15th birthday, Sunshine asks, “What is the meaning of ‘BAD DAY’?” and proceeds to describe how her neighbor was shot when he walked over to say hello the previous morning: “A bullet entered his leg, he fell down on the floor. … I got panicked and started to cry and shake hysterically, I ran and brought handkerchiefs, and started to put them on his leg, he was bleeding, the driver came to drive me to school, I told him to wait, ... I went to bring my mom I was out of breath, and couldn’t talk, I was terrified. ... I kept crying shaking and spreading so many handkerchiefs on the floor to cover the blood, I don’t know why!” In class that day, Sunshine tries to make sense of what she has experienced: “I was hoping that it is just a nightmare, but unfortunately it was true, horrible but true, this is my life.”

Less than a week later, Sunshine writes about how she pooled the funds of her fellow students to buy a desktop computer for a friend whose father was slain by terrorists after buying his daughter a computer desk the weekend before he was planning to buy her computer. After persuading her friends to contribute and tricking the bereaved girl into accepting their generosity (by telling a white lie about the cost), Sunshine gives her friend lessons on how to use the machine.

While Iraqis such as Sunshine suffer through the violence at home, many others have fled. According to one recent U.N. report, as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees are spread through the Middle East and the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, many Iraqi blogs are maintained by this combination of refugees and earlier generations of expatriates who fled the Saddam Hussein regime. “Iraqi Rocker” captures the combination of hope and despair that these departing Iraqis feel in his final December posting from his homeland: “I’ll leave Baghdad in 2 days, I’m going to Syria as first step to the world, I’m not going to see death anymore, I’m not going to hear car explosions again, I will back to life again, I’m not living dead anymore, I’ll be back to my humanity in 2 days, good bye Baghdad.”

On her Thoughts from Baghdad blog, Fatima, who also left Baghdad late last year, concluded her time in the city with a four-part series of postings titled “Signs of a Dying City,” covering everything from the inability of families to hold weddings, to terrorist posters demanding that entire universities shutter their doors, to her aunt’s decision to abscond the city without first taking the risk of traveling across town to say goodbye. From Syria, where Fatima lives while awaiting the birth of a child, she keeps in touch with her husband, who writes that he cannot bear seeing the bodies that lie bound and hooded in the streets: “This man was probably a father, a son, a husband to someone who will not only not know the fate of their loved one but may not be able to bury them and go visit them in death.”

This handful of postings captures the desperation that has overtaken Iraq in general, and Baghdad in particular. Moreover, they show the stakes in the “surge” of American forces to stabilize the city. As the Iraqis who can afford to flee the country, those who cannot have become internal refugees. Mohammed at Iraq the Model reports that some 20 trucks a day used to leave the city, packed with the furniture of families who had been forced by militias and terrorists to leave their homes — amounting to 1.8 million internally displaced people, according to the U.N. The rending apart of multiethnic communities by this violence appears the surest path to civil war.

But in the face of these challenges, and continued terrorist attacks in Baghdad, most Iraqi bloggers report that the early stages of the surge operation are a success. In late February, Mohammed at Iraq the Model wrote that despite ongoing terrorist attacks, “the general feeling [in Baghdad] is still closer to hope and appreciation of the plan than pessimism.” He continues: “More families are returning to the homes they were once forced to leave, and we’re talking about some of the most dangerous districts such as Ghazaliya and Haifa Street. Al-Sabah [a daily newspaper] reports that yesterday alone 327 families returned home and that the scene of vans loaded with furniture of refugees leaving Baghdad is no more.”

“IraqPundit,” a self-described Iraqi exile, writes that relatives who had been forced by terrorists to flee their home of 30 years had returned under the protection of the Baghdad security plan: “The kind of thugs who had been terrorizing Sunnis, at least in my relatives’ part of town, have been forced to disperse as a result of the crackdown, and they no longer decide who can stay and who must go. My relatives were welcomed warmly by their old neighbors, who wanted to see this return as a sign of increasing normality.”

The “Iraqi Atheist” writes similarly good news about the return of normal life to the infamous Haifa Street but concludes on a pessimistic note: “I don’t really know what to feel. Happy to know the violence is going to end? Scared that it could very well continue from where it left off? Or sad because deep inside I think I know it will?”

These Iraqis, who understand and support the value of the U.S. mission more than most Americans do, remain dependent upon coalition efforts, and their continued hope for their country’s future remains one of the best metrics of success in Washington’s effort to bring the war in Iraq to an acceptable conclusion.

Blog Roll

How to find the blogs mentioned in this article:

Days of My Life

http://livesstrong.blogspot.com

Iraqi Rocker

http://iraqirocker.blogspot.com

Thoughts from Baghdad

http://thoughtsfrombaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq the Model

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com

IraqPundit

http://iraqpundit.blogspot.com

Iraqi Atheist

http://iraqiatheist.blogspot.com