Who to believe?

A Correspondent in Iraq: Scenes of Hope and Dread By DEXTER FILKINS includes a section on the Iraqi finance minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi

Over dinner, it seemed pointless to ask why Mr. Mahdi, a brilliant, funny man with two master's degrees and a farmhouse in France, would put himself at such horrible risk. For Mr. Mahdi, like so many other Iraqi political leaders, this wave of Iraqi violence is merely a continuation of what they had already known, politics as usual...

I asked Mr. Mahdi if it had all been worth it: the invasion, the guerrilla war, the car bombings, the assassinations. He gave a surprising answer.

"We were expecting much worse than this," said Mr. Mahdi, who does not discount the possibility that Iraq could slide into civil war. "Much worse."

"We never imagined this would be easy," he said. "We were telling the Americans, you will have a mess. It is mostly the psychological situation. The suffering."