Baghdad

Time magazine has dutifully chosen Barack Obama as its Person of the Year. Fair enough -- but a much more interesting choice would have been Nouri Al-Maliki, prime minister of Iraq. When I was in Baghdad back at the start of 2008 it was universally held that Maliki was finished.

British politicians and officials told me of their profound frustration. Well-informed opinion held that he had no power base and was in any case too weak and irresolute to confront the warlords who then governed large tracts of Iraq. There were vigorous attempts to dislodge Maliki and engineer a more decisive successor. These all failed and Maliki has gone on to prove all his critics, and especially the British, hopelessly wrong. He's confronted Sunni militias. He's taken on and apparently defeated the private armies which governed Basra and Sadr City. Most stunning of all, Maliki has comprehensively outwitted the Americans.

I was in Baghdad for the final, frenzied negotiation at the Status of Forces agreement, which sets the terms for US withdrawal. The document that was eventually agreed by the Iraqi parliament bore no resemblance to the one put forward by US diplomats last spring. There is no talk of long-term bases on Iraqi soil, while Maliki now has operational oversight over American military operations.

The United States cannot attack any foreign country from Iraqi soil. US contractors, such as the loathsome Blackwater Corporation, must obey local law -- surely the reason Blackwater is now, mercifully, pulling out.

There is no longer talk of Maliki the pitifully weak prime minister. Instead senior Iraqis fret that he may use the increasingly well-equipped Iraqi army to impose himself as strong man.

You can see the effects of Maliki's new dispensation just by walking round Baghdad. It is a much safer and more cheerful place, all but unrecognisable from the town I last visited at the start of the year. Director and cameraman Jim Foster and I joined Captain Todd Looney and his 120-strong Charley company at a combat base just outside the massive Shia slum of Sadr City.

For the first half of last year Captain Looney and his men had fought a brutal battle against Mahdi army insurgents. Four of his Abrams tanks were destroyed, three of his men killed, and Charley company took approximately a dozen casualties. Now the insurgent leaders have fled the area -- local people say they have gone to Iran. There are still almost daily shootings and bombings, but they are low key and mainly ineffective.

One night we joined US troops on foot patrol. They ended up at a local bar, where locals were playing dominoes, drinking tea, and smoking hubble-bubbles. Captain Looney and his men took off their helmets and joined in. After six horrible years, US forces seem to have got to grips with the art of counter-insurgency.

The tragedy is that they have found the winning formula just as they prepare to leave Baghdad. Under the Status of Forces agreement US troops must withdraw from towns and cities in six months' time. Some Iraqi officers and politicians insist that the national army and police are now strong enough to keep control. Others are more gloomy and say that Iraq will return to the violence and bloody civil war which swept the country before General Petraeus's so-called 'surge' in the summer of 2007. Yet others say that army will soon be used as an instrument for vicious internal repression, just as it was by Saddam. No one really has a clue.

I received a pessimistic answer to this question when I asked the head of the local 'Sons of Iraq' group in Sadr City, one of the many American-funded militias which have sprung up across Iraq over the last 18 months -- and done so much to confront the insurgency. The name of this Sons of Iraq chief was Abdul, and as his 11-year-old son served tea in a tiny backstreet garden, he told me his haunting life story. Thirty years ago, as a young university student, he was conscripted into Saddam Hussein's army and fought for ten years against Iran.

Then, in 1991, he must have been somehow involved in the uprising against Saddam that followed the Iraqi expulsion from Kuwait, and was brutally suppressed. Abdul spent the next 12 years on the run, hunted by Saddam's secret police and only able to visit his family in secret.

With the fall of Saddam in 2003, he returned to university and completed his degree. As supervisor of the local Sons of Iraq, he was subject to threats. Several of his force have been killed, others kidnapped.

He told me he is resigned to the prospect of yet another war. 'I don't have a good feeling about the American forces leaving in six months, ' he told me. 'I think things will deteriorate. I believe the militias will come back. Instead of building our country, I think we will go back to fighting.' I told Abdul how privileged I felt to meet such a brave man. At that he rose from his chair, went into his small home, and brought back a beautiful carpet which he told me had been hand-woven by his mother. 'I want you to present this to President Bush, ' he told me, 'to thank him for removing Saddam Hussein.' I told him I would do what I can.