By Howard LaFranchi - Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Before I left my home in Maryland for a month of reporting in Iraq, I asked my three children to send a greeting to the three daughters of our Baghdad bureau’s driver, whom I got to know during an earlier stint. The two younger children sent nice drawings and "hello from America," but my 14-year-old son sent a longer letter. One sentence in it surprised me: "I’m sorry about what’s happening in your country," he wrote, "but I hope it will be better soon."

That simple sentiment from one kid to others he didn’t know has come back to me repeatedly as I’ve met with dozens of Iraqis in formal interviews and in chance encounters on the streets.

The gratitude felt by most Iraqis for the removal of Saddam Hussein remains, but has been offset in many ways by the country’s deteriorating security situation. Violence that before was hidden in the hated regime’s torture chambers and killing fields has been replaced by a more public and indiscriminate variety.

Increasingly, Iraqis blame America for this violence – after all, it didn’t exist before the Americans came – tempting more of them to wish US soldiers would go away. That sense of American responsibility for Iraq’s deterioration trickled down to a 14-year-old in Maryland who felt compelled to say “sorry” for the state of affairs.

How can America address the current slide, in which it keep getting more blame for the bad and less credit for the good?

One way, some Iraqis suggest, is for the US to set a date for the departure of its troops, and stick to it. Get through January’s planned elections – which most Iraqis look forward to, despite the risks, as the country’s first-ever democratic elections – declare “mission accomplished” so that American blood and treasure will not have been expended in vain, and go. It may fall short of an idealistic picture of a free and prosperous Iraq as model for the entire Middle East, but it will be an accomplishment, if a more realistic one.

Iraqis seem to understand there are risks to this scenario. What if, without the prop of the US military, the country’s factions are unable to get along and sink into more bloodshed, possibly even civil war?

Some Iraqis say that won’t happen because their countrymen and women want a strong nation, and they understand that in the modern world a country divided among factions – or even split up into several smaller countries – would certainly be weaker. People talk about Israel wanting a weak Iraq, but they also say that most of Iraq’s other neighbors also prefer something weak next door, if not in destabilizing turmoil.
Others say Iraqis, after nearly a century of a nationhood that was created by foreign decree, and three decades of a dictatorship that perpetuated a false stability, must be allowed to sort things out for themselves.

I asked my driver what he thought of all this discussion, what he thought the Americans should do to turn "sorry" to "you’re welcome" and end this experience as Iraqis’ friends.

First, he said, the troops should leave. "American soldiers not bad," he said, "good men from a good people. But no one wants another country’s soldiers on his streets." That echoed what I’d been hearing from many, but not all, Iraqis.

And what about the risk of Iraq collapsing into Iraqi-on-Iraqi war?

Clicking his tongue and shaking his head, he said, “I am sure that will not happen. Problems, yes. But look,” he said, extending his ring finger. “My wife is Shiite. I am Sunni. My grandfather married Kurdish. It’s like this in all Iraq. So problems, but no war.”

That may seem naive to some, yet it carried a certain hopeful wisdom. As did a letter he brought from his daughters for me to take home to my children. (One side is in English, the other in the original Arabic, in script that will amaze them).

“We hope also that all Iraqis and Americans would be friends some day,” they wrote. Along with that came hellos to all my children’s friends, the kind of thing it seems kids around the world would say. Having opened with “By the name of merciful God” – not something most kids I know would think to write – it then ended with the single word “Peace.”