Dexter Filkins is the greatest war correspondent of my generation, and I would say this even if we weren't friends. We've reported together on occasion; Dexter knows better than anyone how to work your way into bad places, and work your way out again. He's also the author of a great new book, coming out imminently from Knopf, called "The Forever War."  I e-mailed him some questions about his Times story today, and here are his answers:

Jeffrey Goldberg: In a review in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani quotes Farnaz Fassihi writing in 2004: "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes, and it can't be put back into a bottle."  The question is, is the genie back in the bottle?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments ­that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.

Having said that, it's pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.

JG: The most astonishing detail in your article today is your description of a parade through Ramadi, which included "American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets nor body armor, nor carrying guns." You wrote, "The festive scene became an occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so much better, so fast." How much of this can be credited to the surge in troops and the shift in tactics last year, and how much to the notion that Iraqis simply got tired of the killing?

DF: Astonishing indeed. I haven't seen Americans soldiers walking around Iraq without helmets since the summer of 2003, when the Americans, who were popular in southern Iraq for having taken down Saddam, used to do that.

What's happened in Anbar really doesn't have anything to do with the surge and, in fact, it is one of the main reasons why the surge has worked.

In Anbar, two things happened: Al Qaeda overreached and the Americans wised up. If you will recall, the Americans came into Iraq in 2003 in a very heavy-handed way, often sweeping up large groups of young males who had nothing to do with the insurgency. In a tribal society, ­where everyone is related to everyone else, ­the Americans dug themselves a very large hole.

Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, through sheer ruthlessness, became the dominant player in the insurgency. And while the guys from Al Qaeda were very good at killing Americans, a goal with which many Sunnis sympathized, they also wanted to kill Iraqi ­Shiites, who they consider apostates, and anyone associated with the Iraqi government. Ordinary Iraqis, it's now clear, didn't want to go along.

Sheikhing up Al QaedaAnd the sheikhs in Anbar didn't go along. So when Al Qaeda started murdering the sheikhs, the sheikhs went to the Americans. The Americans, chastened by their earlier mistakes, grabbed the opportunity. They made a deal. They crushed Al Qaeda in Anbar. The result is the calm you see today.

The Sunni Awakening, which began in Anbar, spread rapidly to other Sunni areas of Iraq, and that took enormous pressure off the Americans and the Iraqi government as the surge kicked in.

JG: One tribal leader you quote, Hamid al-Hais, puts most of the blame for the chaos of the previous years on Paul Bremer's decision to disband the army. Do you agree?

DF: I don't know. I don't think there are any one-line explanations for any of this. But it's pretty clear that decision had a lot of bad consequences.

JG: Is the average Iraqi better off today than he was under Saddam? Or, put another way, is the average Iraqi who was not directly tied to the regime better off today than he was six years ago?

DF: Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five years.

JG: Is Iraq a democracy?

DF: I don't think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.

JG: How do you, as an American, feel walking through Baghdad today vs. two years ago?

DF: I'll answer with two snapshots from dusk. I went running in the park in front of the New York Times house the other day as the sun was going down and I felt no threat at all. People waved, people smiled. It felt very normal.

A couple of days later I went to Sadr City, also at dusk. Sadr City is a vast slum that takes in about three million people. It's the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia, and it's been the scene of heavy fighting, as recently as a few months ago. I was with some Iraqi friends. It felt perfectly normal. Then one of my Iraqi friends said to me, "What do you think would happen if you were alone?" And I said, "What?" And he and the other Iraqis laughed and said: "You'd be dead in ten seconds."

Let me just say: I left.

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]

No time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – "How To Sound Smart This Week" will provide the Cliff's Notes.

Pre-bris, he was a baby Schwarzenegger: Everyone's favorite wimpDoes counting superdelegates put you to sleep? This week, the big-idea magazines are all obsessing over the presidential campaign, but it won’t be that hard to change the subject while still sounding respectably erudite. Just bring up one of the following eye-opening essays.

In The New York Times Magazine, Annie Murphy Paul looks at the distinct possibility that fetuses can feel pain. This has major implications for the abortion debate, so you shouldn’t be at a loss for discussion questions, but there’s also a Jewish angle. Scientists think that people who are exposed to pain as babies might grow up to be more pain-sensitive:

Anna Taddio, a pain specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, noticed more than a decade ago that the male infants she treated seemed more sensitive to pain than their female counterparts. This discrepancy, she reasoned, could be due to sex hormones, to anatomical differences — or to a painful event experienced by many boys: circumcision. In a study of 87 baby boys, Taddio found that those who had been circumcised soon after birth reacted more strongly and cried for longer than uncircumcised boys when they received a vaccination shot four to six months later.

Is it possible that one of the central tenets of Judaism causes male wimpiness? Does that explain, like, all of American Jewish pop culture? Dazzle your audience with this possibility, and they’ll forget about Obama’s performance in Maine instantly.

Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, Lori Gottleib takes advantage of the Valentine’s Day season to propose a deeply romantic idea: If you’re a woman over the age of 35 and you’re still single, maybe you should lower your standards. “Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics,” Gottleib advises – otherwise, you’ll never be able to organize a stable family life.

Mention this article in the vicinity of anyone male or female, married or single, and you're bound to provoke a strong reaction. It makes everyone involved look terrible: women are either demanding, men either shallow or, if it’s possible that their wives married them out of desperation, pitiable. Also, halitosis is so much worse than bad taste – isn’t it? Actually, that’s another direction you can take the conversation: Would you rather marry someone with perpetual coffee breath, or a collection of Cosby sweaters?

Last week: Super Tuesday

Market collapse: Hyman Minsky would not approveNo time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – "How To Sound Smart This Week" will help you convince those around you that you’re a big ball of erudition.

Start the conversation with an eye-opening statistic: “Did you know that thanks to the subprime meltdown, American households are losing over two trillion dollars a year?”

Follow up by referencing ‘60s-era economist Hyman Minsky (bonus chutzpah points if you refer to him as “my favorite 60s-era economist”), who believed that Wall Street placed too much emphasis on taking risks. “Minsky predicted all this years ago,” you could add, “and he thought the only solution was to change the culture of Wall Street. Once you wind up in a period of panic like the one you’re in, it’s too late for politicians to do anything.” That, at least, is the gist of this week’s New Yorker piece on Minsky.

Of course, you might go on, that won’t stop those politicans from trying. The Nation points out that while both Edwards and Clinton have called for an end to foreclosures and a freeze on interest rates, the Obama campaign has taken a much more centrist approach.

“Essentially,” you could say, “Obama is blaming people who took out irresponsible loans, rather than financial industry. Max Frazer in the Nation thinks this might be because he’s received almost $10 million in support from people involved in the real estate market. Then again, Clinton’s raised even more, and she’s not banging the personal responsibility drum.”

As for the Republicans, there’s not much they can do about the meltdown if they want to hew to good conservative principles – or so says Ross Douthat in a video conversation at the Atlantic website.

Bringing things full circle, you could end with another fun stat: “Did you know that there are currently more choreographers in the US then metalcasters?” What that means, according to Christopher Caldwell in this weekend’s Times Magazine, is that Republican candidates need to stop talking about liberating entrepreneurs from tight restrictions, and Democrats need to give up the rhetoric about backing the factory man over the fat cats. The new economy is firmly in place, and any solution to the mortgage meltdown is going to have to pay attention to the choreographers.

Last week: Cloverfield

Jamie has already alluded and linked to the big, sopping valentine Andrew Sullivan delivers to Barack Obama in next month's Atlantic. At the risk of affirming an official Shvitz position on this cover story, let me just say that it's one of the most homiletic and trite pieces of political journalism I've seen in a long time.

One is told, repeatedly, that Obama is the cure for what ails America because he's post-Boomer, multiracial and has an evocative full name that will cause some pleasantly puzzled expressions in Lahore and Jakarta. The man is the message, in other words, and never you mind about his policies, experience or whether or not he'd make the best wartime commander-in-chief.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Now consider this hypothetical. Long before sacred terror afflicted these shores or most Americans had even heard the name Osama Bin Laden, a civil war was raging in the Islamic world that pitted the theologically pure against the reformist, the moderate and the apostate. We've seen how Abu Musab-al Zarqawi treated his co-religionists, who weren't up to snuff and were thus "polytheists" worse than Jews and Christians. In Darfur, a genocide that has been blessed and encouraged by Bin Laden, is currently underway to eliminate black Muslims whom their Arab Muslim killers refer to as "niggers." If we're to judge a candidate for high office on the basis of his gene pool, I can't think of a better rallying point for Al Qaeda than a "brown-skinned man whose father was an African" and "attended a majority-Muslim school," then came to America and discovered Jesus Christ. If you thought hope was powerful, wait until you see the audacity of dashed expectations.

Obama's heritage neither qualifies nor disqualifies him as president any more than Hillary's protean head of hair does her. And, as if to underscore the nonsense of his previous observation, Sullivan goes on to laud Obama for taking up his non-Muslim faith:

The best speech Obama has ever given was not his famous 2004 convention address, but a June 2007 speech in Connecticut. In it, he described his religious conversion:

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

That would be the same Rev. Wright who traveled to Libya in 1984 with Louis Farrakhan to gladhand Muammar Qaddafi, and who spoke of 9/11 with the same roosting chickens rhetoric that has now become cliche on the radical fringes. Obama's spiritual awakening comes in a distant second to his political opportunism, since he has an odd way of rewarding his favorite apostle and phrasemaker. He disinvited Wright from delivering a public invocation last February, on the exact date he announced his White House run. According to one of the Obama's spokesmen, "Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but because of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself." Well, why shouldn't a church led by a man of questionable motive and political affiliations not have to defend itself when it is openly credited with imbuing the divine spark in a possible leader of the free world? If Wright had such a impact that Obama took up religion because of him, isn't he deserving of something more than this calculated and weasely distancing? In short, how is Obama's religiosity any different, or any less meretricious, than that of the other candidates?

I don't doubt that Obama is the freshest national politician the U.S. has seen in a quite a while. I admire him a lot and -- glib Skype conversations with my co-editor aside -- I still haven't made up my mind not to vote for him. But what benefits him and the country least are the kinds of shallow and sanctimonious hosannas that depict him as a saintly figure. Sullivan is good enough to confess that he's suffering from a kind of electoral affirmative action impulse that esteems black religiosity for being just that. Fine. But when it comes time for the 101st Airborne to touch down on Waziristan, or garrisons to be shuffled in Iraq so as to maintain the hard-won security that's been established there, I suspect we'll need tougher metrics for assessing leadership than smiling white condescension.

This may come as a shock to some readers but, as Joe Klein long ago indicated, David Petraeus is from the Democratic military establishment, not the Republican one. Here is Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic:

The idea that General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are front men for the administration is ludicrous. Until he took the job as overall ground commander in Iraq, Petraeus was a favorite of liberal journalists: the Princeton man who enjoyed the company of the media and intellectuals, so much so that he was vaguely distrusted by other general officers who envied the good ink he received. As for Crocker, he is a hard-core Arabist, a professional species that I once wrote a book about: He is the least likely creature on earth to buy into neoconservative ideas about the Middle East. Neither of these men are identified with the decision to go to war. If I had to bet, I’d say that Crocker especially would have been against it, like his other Arabist colleagues. Thus, these men have no personal stake in proving the president right. They and their staffs are much more likely to provide a balanced analysis of the reality in Iraq than senators and congressmen looking over their shoulders at opinion polls and future elections. As Petraeus said, “I wrote this testimony myself,” meaning, the White House had nothing to do with it. Watching them brief Congress Monday, I came away convinced that they made a better impression on the public than anyone else in the room.

Cunning Linguist: Former Bush speechwriter Michael GersonDarkness. Light … harm/evil … challenge … enemy … defeat and destroy. Eyes open … alerted. We’ve been a continent shielded by oceans. Carnage known only in Civil War. Foe: Political ideology, not a religion. Our view of the world—‘challenge we did not ask for in a world we did not make.’ People turn to America. Much grief but many questions. Who is the enemy?

An update is needed on Bismarck's line about politics and sausages being two things whose creation should never be witnessed. These slightly poetic and heavily world-historical jottings constitute the early notes of George W. Bush's speechwriting team's State of the Union address for September 20, 2001. "Team" might actually be the most significant word to take away from above extract, which comes to us courtesy of former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully in an already classic piece in this month's Atlantic, titled "Present at the Creation." It's less Profiles in Courage Scully is concerned with and more the hubris of one Michael Gerson, another former wordsmith for the executive and, as we now know, not accidentally the most famous presidential speechwriter since Ted Sorenson.

Scully's essay is a partial critique of Gerson's new self-fellating memoir, Heroic Conservatism, in which the head hero is none other than Gerson himself. Known for his studious evangelicalism -- in Revenge of the Nerds terms, the Gilbert to Bush's Booger -- Gerson's greatest flourish, says a disgruntled ex-colleague, was not rhetorical but autobiographical:

[Gerson] allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them. Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized, “Mike, we’re at war” version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role. The narrative that Mike Gerson presented to the world is a story of extravagant falsehood. He has been held up for us in six years’ worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House. In reality, Mike’s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories—a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.

The "Mike, we're at war" bit derives from Gerson's factitious addition of his own name to a famous bull-session statement made by President Bush shortly after the Twin Towers were incinerated. Gerson, like all good Beltway showmen, got in nice and cozy with Bob Woodward, who duly regurgitated his source's self-aggrandizing quotes without bothering to check them against other administration officials, most notably the speaker-in-chief.

Matthew Scully commands instant respect for being a meat-and-potatoes conservative who not too long ago published a meticulous and morally serious book about vegetarianism. (Christopher Hitchens reviewed Dominion in the Atlantic and said, "Scully shows a martyrlike patience in the face of [the militant taunters of animal rights activists], as befits a man who's had to hear innumerable jests about veal and spotted owls at carnivorous Republican fundraisers.") Anyway, it's clear he's been saving his carnivorous tendencies for a rather different cut of meat.

We all know that David Frum first suggested the phrase "axis of hatred," which later became more memorable and at least as provocative as any construction by Hannah Arendt. "Evil," though, was never the invention of Gerson, despite his best efforts to give the contrary impression. It was Scully's. Also unwarranted for Mike's clipfile are: "This conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing;" "Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign;" "The war on terrorism will not be won on the defensive." If only there were someone in the Bush administration with so peacockish a desire to claim credit for the policies which followed from these high-flown phrases.

Minuting the finest hours is usually the work of presidential biographers long after their subjects have expired and years after poring through musty archives. What fun that so divided a White House with so unending a supply of defectors gives us the real story as the rough draft of history. It was a major point of all the moist profiles of Gerson that he liked to come up with Bush's best lines while sitting in a local Starbucks, beating back the "solitude of writing" with, presumably, calls for global democracy and Venti foam lattes. Here, at last, is the decaffeinated version:

My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

The more I cut and paste from this hilarious hatchet job, the more I think the parallels to the Kennedy era are frighteningly apt. As a speechwriter, Ted Sorenson was a model of humility and self-abnegation, for which he must have exhibited martyrlike patience in the face of his grandstanding and reckless and feckless boss. With the Bush administration, we've got it backwards: It's the king who sits small, while the pudgy and pious court servant chews away at his ear and struts around the palace like he owns the joint.

Word has it that Matt Yglesias will join the The Atlantic's expanding blogger outreach program. I've begun to notice an aesthetic common to this august monthly's recent Beltway hires: Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan, now Yglesias. Is there some kind of algae in the Potomac that makes Washington pundits sprout facial vegetation?