WASHINGTON - Four years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it remains uncertain whether a new US strategy can bring peace and stability to Iraq, despite army assertions that the situation is improving.
"I think we'll just have to wait several more months before we're in a position to make any real evaluations," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week.
"As we have indicated, the early signs are positive," he said, but added "it's a tough environment" refusing to be overly optimistic, something for which his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld was soundly criticized.
Amid a wave of unchecked sectarian violence in Iraq, President George W. Bush announced in January that he was sending in an extra 25,000 troops to quell the unrest in Baghdad and Anbar province.
"The intent is to create the climate so that the political leadership (in Iraq) can, in fact, reconcile their differences and bring back the unity of this country ... so that Iraqis can all move forward together," US military spokesman in Baghdad William Caldwell told CNN on Monday.
And he was upbeat on the results of the troop surge, saying the violence had indeed dropped in past weeks.
"I was just down in Baghdad two days ago, walking through the city, and I can tell the difference from two months ago to today in terms of the environment," he said.
"You can just sense and feel there is a difference amongst the people and how they see things."
"I mean, we still have challenges. I don't want to minimize that at all. And there's still a long ways to go and there are still threats out there, but the people are moving on with their lives and they're seeing hope for the first time."
On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best possible situation in security terms, Baghdad had risen from four or 5 two months ago to six or seven today, Caldwell said.
But his assessment is unlikely to win over a skeptical US public, weary of the war in which more than 3,200 US troops have died since the March 2003 invasion.
US presidential candidate John McCain, who earlier this month toured a Baghdad market and insisted things were improving, on Sunday defended his optimistic stand.
"I went to Iraq to gain a first hand view of the progress in this difficult war, not to celebrate any victories. No one has been more critical of sunny progress reports that defied realities in Iraq," he wrote in the Washington Post.
"We held a news conference to discuss what we saw: positive signs, underreported in the United States, that are reason for cautious optimism."
But Bush's surge strategy remains unpopular at home, where he is locked in a showdown with US lawmakers who have sought to tie funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.
US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox admitted in Baghdad, where four years ago on Monday a giant statue of Saddam was torn down, that the past years had been "disappointing, frustrating and increasingly dangerous in many parts of Iraq."
Marking the anniversary, hundreds of thousands of Shiites protested in the city of Najaf at an anti-American rally called by firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Shouting "No, No to America! Yes, Yes to Freedom!," the crowds burned and stamped on US flags.
The White House however downplayed the anti-US rallies, saying such demonstrations were a hopeful sign of freedom.
"While we have much more progress ahead of us -- the United States, the coalition and Iraqis have much more to do -- this is a country that has come a long way from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein," said spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
"Iraq, four years on, is now a place where people can freely gather and express their opinions. And that was something they could not do under Saddam," he said.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman also said it was interesting to note that there were some "peaceful demonstrations something that would not have taken place four years ago."
04/09/2007 17:35 GMT