After several weeks of pessimistic, defeatist cover stories (“Mission Not Accomplished,” “Are We Stretched Too Thin?” etc.) TIME Magazine this week publishes an astonishingly upbeat piece. You know things are improving in Iraq when even TIME can no longer pretend otherwise: Where Things Stand.

Security, which almost all Iraqis say is their major concern, is far better in both the north and south than it is in the capital. Electricity is much more reliable outside Baghdad. There are almost no power cuts in the south, a region that often had six or less hours of electricity a day before the war.

Schools are mostly back to normal, and commerce is booming as goods flood in across the Turkish and Kuwaiti borders. The military presence of the U.S. in the north and the British in the south is far less visible than are the U.S. forces in and around Baghdad. Despite sporadic ambushes, the foreign troops are largely tolerated by locals, who tend to view them as a necessary evil until a viable Iraqi administration is in place.

There are many complaints—about the increase in banditry on the roads, the slow pace of reconstruction, the rise in prices, the shortage of jobs caused in part by the U.S. dissolution of the Iraqi government and army. But when people in the north and the south were asked whether life has improved since the war, the answer, in Arabic, often came automatically: “Tab’an ahsan” (“Of course, better”). In the village of Duluiyah, in central Iraq, Abdel Fattah al-Juburi, a longtime opponent of the Saddam regime, says of the occupation, “It’s clear we got the better of two evils.”