A front page article in the Washington Post reports that interviews with a dozen cabbies across Baghdad reveal a genuine and substantial improvement in security throughout the city.
BAGHDAD -- Haider Abbas, a 36-year-old taxi driver, had only a few moments to answer what is often a life-or-death question in this city: Would he drive a passenger home?
The home, on that scorching afternoon last month, happened to be in Adhamiyah, a notoriously dangerous neighborhood where several cabbies had been gunned down. Abbas hadn't been there in two years. But the fare pleaded that it had become safer, so the cabbie reluctantly agreed to go.
"To tell you the truth, I thought I had just traded my life for 5,000 dinars," or $4, said Abbas, who was shocked when he arrived in the traffic-jammed streets of Adhamiyah to see shops open and people strolling in the road. "Then I suddenly realized that security really is returning to Baghdad."
In a city where few residents believe official statements on declining violence, whether from the U.S. military or the Iraqi government, some of the most reliable figures on security improvements can be found on the odometers of Baghdad's taxi drivers.
Since the Washington Post has spent the last several years reporting on the futility of the war in Iraq and burying anything that might imply that we are winning, I would hardly have expected it to report this kind of a development at all, never mind putting it on the front page. Does this mean the Post, too, is on the verge of surrender to the Bush-Petraeus surge?
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