IN THE WAKE OF THE SURGE: Michael Totten patrols with the troops in Baghdad:

Everyone was friendly. No one shot at us or even looked at us funny. Infrastructure problems, not security, were the biggest concerns at the moment. I felt like I was in Iraqi Kurdistan – where the war is already over – not in Baghdad. . . .

“This is not what I expected in Baghdad,” I said.

“Most of what we’re doing doesn’t get reported in the media,” he said. “We’re not fighting a war here anymore, not in this area. We’ve moved way beyond that stage. We built a soccer field for the kids, bought all kinds of equipment, bought them school books and even chalk. Soon we’re installing 1,500 solar street lamps so they have light at night and can take some of the load off the power grid. The media only covers the gruesome stuff. We go to the sheiks and say hey man, what kind of projects do you want in this area? They give us a list and we submit the paperwork. When the projects get approved, we give them the money and help them buy stuff.”

Not everything they do is humanitarian work, unless you consider counter-terrorism humanitarian work. In my view, you should. Few Westerners think of personal security as a human right, but if you show up in Baghdad I’ll bet you will. . . .The soldiers were talking and acting like aid workers, not warriors from the elite 82nd Airborne Division.

“Man, this is boring,” one of them said to me later. “I’m an adrenaline junky. There’s no fight here. It won’t surprise me if we start handing out speeding tickets.” So it goes in at least this part of Baghdad that has been cleared by the surge.

“When we first got here,” said another and laughed, “shit hit the fan.”

It was all a bit boring, but blessedly so. I knew already that not everyone in Baghdad was hostile. But it was slightly surprising to see that entire areas in the Red Zone are not hostile.

Anything can happen in Baghdad, even so. The convulsive, violent, and overtly hostile Sadr City is only a few minutes drive to the southeast.

Read the whole thing. He has lots of photos, too. Like Michael Yon, he’s an independent journalist supported by his readers, so if you like his reporting, consider hitting the tipjar.

UPDATE: Reader Kjell Hagen emails from Norway:

It is interesting to read/listen to Michael Totten and Michael Yon. It is so incredibly different from here, where all commentators, from left to right, take it as a given that the US has lost the war, with no proof of their assertion, of course. It will be interesting to see when, or if, a more nuanced picture gets out.

The US has certainly lost the media war in Europe. Luckily, that is not a critical arena. I think the war is about to turn the right way. The ugliest year in WWII was the last. People tend to demand that wars should get gradually more peaceful. They don´t. They usually get more and more ugly, and then one side collapses. There are clear signs of Al Qaeda getting desperate and a lot weaker now.

Let’s hope. I don’t know if the “media war in Europe” was ever winnable, as there are plenty of people in Europe — and some in America, alas, for that matter — who would like us to lose in Iraq, because it would advance their own political agendas. Let’s hope that they’re proven wrong, though I think so many people are so invested in failure that even the greatest success won’t be allowed to be portrayed as a success for years.

Meanwhile the surge seems to be polling a bit better in the United States.