Michael Totten continues his must-read series on The Future of Iraq, Part IV.

I don’t think many Iraqis today are afraid of the state. But everybody was terrified of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian government. Speaking their minds could get them imprisoned or killed. It could get an entire family dragged off to prison, tortured, and painfully executed. Before the Baath Party regime was demolished, it was extremely difficult for journalists who showed up in Baghdad to read the mood of the street. Everybody appeared to be fanatical supporters of Saddam Hussein even though few Iraqis actually were.

That’s not true anymore. But habits of mind go down hard. Concealing opinions from the authorities became a survival mechanism, whether the authorities were Saddam Hussein’s mukhabarat, militiamen in the neighborhood, or American soldiers.

Before the Status of Forces agreement kicked in, I asked U.S. Army Colonel John Hort if and how he and his men took all this into account. Effective counter-insurgency isn’t possible when counter-insurgents have no idea what the general population is thinking.

“How do you measure public opinion?” I said to him. “How do you know what people really think? We all know about this tendency in Iraq where people tell you what they think you want to hear – or what they want you to hear, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. If you ask what Iraqis think of the American military while you’re standing there with guns in your hands, they might say oh, we love you guys. Then someone from the Guardian newspaper comes along and asks what they think of the imperial occupation forces, and the same people might say we hate them. So what’s their real opinion? Do you take this sort of thing into account? Do you have Iraqis feeling out the opinions of people for you?”

“We do,” he said.

“And they report back to you?” I said.

“Right,” he said. “We have the Iraqi Advisor Task Force. They aren’t spies. That’s illegal. But they’re hired to measure atmospherics. They monitor the mosques. They hit the restaurants, places like that. And we get these reports almost every other day. Over time we’ve seen the atmospherics and compared them to what you were talking about, the guy on the street talking to the U.S. soldier. Do they match up? And if they don’t match up, we have to figure out what we need to change about the way we’re presenting ourselves.”