By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD - Iraqi military officials often refer to their American counterparts as “the friends,” a circumlocution full of Eastern subtlety that is often lost on the friends themselves. Add some more quotation marks, and it comes closer to the sense intended, “the ‘friends.’” Not sarcastic, exactly, but rather colored with mixed emotions, as in the sentence, “The ‘friends’ came by yesterday to complain again about payroll skimming.”

Americans find this hard to understand about the Iraq war, that their trillion-dollar enterprise has made Iraqis and particularly the Iraqi military not only dependent on America, but also conflicted, even resentful about that dependency. After all, we saved them from defeat at the hands of a ruthless insurgency that a few years ago indeed could have destroyed them, and we spent 4,000 lives doing it, left probably 10 times that many young Americans crippled for life, and they’re not grateful?

That is not, at bottom, how the Iraqis see it. They are grateful, many of them, but gratitude is a drink with a bitter aftertaste. They also chafe at the thousands of daily humiliations they endure from a mostly well-meaning but often clueless American military. An Iraqi politician who wishes to remain nameless (“I have to deal with the friends,” he explains) tells of traveling with the Iraqi Army’s chief of staff, a general in uniform, epaulets bristling with eagles, stars and swords. They were at the Baghdad airport, about to get on one of the few Iraqi military planes, when an American sergeant stopped him and refused to allow him to board. Despite the general’s remonstrations of rank and privilege, the sergeant made sure the plane took off without him.

This indirectly explains a lot about the current state of affairs, post June 30. Iraqis have enthusiastically embraced their newfound military sovereignty, even when, as is often the case, they’re not really ready for it. They can field troops who can fight, but they can’t fix their Humvees. They can mount their own operations against insurgents, but are reluctant to do so without air cover - which so far only the Americans can provide. They can marshal large numbers of soldiers - theirs are now more numerous than America’s in Iraq - but they depend on the Americans to handle most of their logistics, since their own are plagued by corruption and mismanagement.

Under the new Status of Forces Agreement between the countries, not only did American troops leave all population centers after June 30, but they’ve also agreed not to get involved, in or out of the cities, unless invited to do so by the Iraqis. And the Iraqi inclination has been not to invite them, partly out of pride, partly out of concern for the political blowback from their own public when they do ask for help.

This was brought into focus by the two ministry truck bombings on August 19, which succeeded because fortifications had been prematurely removed from in front of those ministries.

“It was Iraqi aspirations exceeding their ability to secure their country on their own,” says John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an author of influential works on counterinsurgency. “The Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces are improving steadily but they’re not yet able to handle these threats responsibly”

Mr. Nagl argues that the Iraqi and American militaries need to set up prearrangements by which the United States can intervene in an emergency on the ground; such arrangements are entirely possible under the terms of the forces agreement, even if they may cause political difficulties, especially in an election year.

“The government of Iraq is going to have to ask us for our help, and it takes a while for the Iraqi government to process that,” he says. “The Iraqi government is not yet able to make a quick decision. This whole incident should serve as a wake-up call that the U.S. still has a very important role to play in Iraq’s security.”

At the highest levels, despite the bluster and the perennial ill-feeling, Iraqis know they will remain dependent on the United States for a very long time, even after the internal insurgency is vanquished.

Nationalism, though, can be a dangerous and deluding force. It has, writes the analyst Kenneth Pollack in the forthcoming issue of The National Interest, “led many Iraqi politicians, including the prime minister, to take public positions unsupportive of the American presence, even though most know that America’s role as peacekeeper, mediator, adviser and capacity-builder remain critical to Iraq’s stability and progress.”

There’s an old saying that if you save someone’s life, they become your responsibility forever. It seems counterintuitive, but those it happens to know how true it is. Having interfered so intimately in another person’s fate, or another nation’s fate, it becomes very hard just to turn away.





Iraqis and their unarmed helicopters at Al Muthanna Airbase in Baghdad. Marines, right, prepared their Cobra helicopter gunship at Al Taqaddum Airbase in western Iraq.