With more than 500 parties or candidates already registered for the provincial vote, the real test of Iraqi politics will be the fairness of the votes and the ability of the government to deliver services to its citizens, the latter a sore issue for many Iraqis. Ultimately, all politics is local. In Qadisiya, there remained bitter feelings about the abandonment of tribal empowerment. Sheik Taklef told me that the governor and the Supreme Council had done little to improve services in the city. “These people don’t serve the interests of the Iraqis,” he said. “They wanted everything to go through them.” Muhammad Abdul Amir al-Shalan, sheik of the al-Aghrah tribe, agreed, saying, “There is no big local support for the governor and the Supreme Council. The services are worse now than they were before them. They are not competent. People are no longer supporting them.”

But Khudari, the governor, casts the sheiks as little more than braggarts profiteering off the Iraqi Army’s success. “We don’t think that there is a necessity to form Awakening councils here,” he said. “The tribes didn’t confront the terrorists; the local and federal governments did.”

Othman insisted that he had not worried about political pressure from Khudari but that it became impossible to push harder for the Awakening program when even the American command did not put its full weight behind the venture. Gildroy reported, however, that in her farewell meeting with Othman, he did seem to be wondering about how well he really fit into the new Iraq.

On July 16, Qadisiya Province was officially transferred to Iraqi government control. The American Embassy issued a statement congratulating the government but hinting at the tensions below the surface. “The United States and Multinational Force-Iraq congratulate the Government of Iraq on this important milestone,” the statement said. “The provincial and military leadership in Qadisiya will have to work cooperatively in order to attain the sustainable security necessary for long-term economic prosperity.”

There were tensions on the American side, too. The perspective of the Marines differed markedly from that of the American officials in Baghdad. The Marines saw the tribes as more secular than the fundamentalists in the religious parties. They were less confident that the provincial elections would be genuinely fair; and they were worried that efforts to buttress political stability appeared to have trumped the idea of democracy. After Diwaniya, Team Phoenix made trips to Sadr City and Basra: they concluded that much of the security there was the result of political deals, not the decisive application of force by the Iraqi state. And they wondered if those deals would hold.

Lemons, who is back at work at his skateboard company, had strong and unsettled feelings about his time in Diwaniya. “I am still trying to figure out the lesson,” he said. “Maybe the lesson is there are limits to what we can and cannot do in Iraq. I’ve tried separating myself from our work with the Sahawa”  Awakening  “and I can’t. I can’t ever face the tribes I worked with again because I broke a lot of promises. Those promises don’t mean much to anyone outside Diwaniya or to an overall strategy for this war, but I thought these were the promises my own government had sent me year after year to pursue. So while I would deploy again for my Marines and my Iraqi Army comrades, I don’t want to go to Iraq again if this is the way we do business.”

Gildroy, who is once again a civilian and who left Diwaniya vowing never to return, says she still believes Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy is producing results. “This war is critical to our national-security interests and has had an impact on Al Qaeda. I know we are creating a buffer zone,” she said. “We will not create a well-functioning democracy in Iraq, but we need to leave the region and Iraq in a stronger position than we went in both for their own security and to avoid another terrorist attack on America. I would do whatever General Petraeus asked or needed. I trust him and his character with my life.”

Moulton, who is headed to graduate school this year at Harvard for a joint program in business and government, said the episode illuminates both the importance of the south for the politicians in Baghdad and the brittleness of many of the gains. “Together with some brave young Polish and Iraqi soldiers, we did a lot to improve life in Diwaniya,” he said. “I can’t deny that. People were afraid to leave their houses when we arrived. Iraqis were crying when we left. But so much of what we did fell apart so quickly. It shows how fragile everything is today in Iraq. For all that we put into it, not least of all a year of our lives, I don’t know if any of it will last.”