HAMADAH, Iraq -- This small, rural village in the Diyala Province north of Baghdad experienced a revolution a month ago. It had been controlled by al-Qaida and its band of teenage killers who terrorized the place. The mayor of the nearby city of Muqdadiya lived here -- until al-Qaida blew up his house and he fled. The village became a ghost town.

Then, for the first time in five years of war, U.S. troops showed up. They captured key al-Qaida leaders, and the rest ran away. Local citizens formed a makeshift security force, and people returned to the streets. Suddenly, it was a new day.

"I told everyone this is a golden opportunity," says Hassen Nssaif Jasim, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Iraq army who leads the local security volunteers. "Don't lose it."

Isolated towns like this one, with a population of 750 and a dirt road as the main thoroughfare, are highly vulnerable to al-Qaida. "It's easy to intimidate them," explains an American officer. "They get up in the morning, and there are a bunch of heads in the soccer field."

At this village level, the war on terror is less a grand ideological struggle than an elemental fight to replace men with guns who want to prey on the local population (al-Qaida) with men with guns who want to help it (us). It doesn't take a romanticism about human nature to realize most people will prefer the latter.

Gen. Mark Hertling, who commands American forces in the north, recalls being introduced in the village of Himbus to a 12-year-old girl who had pointed out where the al-Qaida thugs were hiding. "I asked her why she had done that," Gen. Hertling says, "and she said, 'They killed my two brothers, my father couldn't farm, and I couldn't go to school.'"

It would still be that way without U.S. forces. Iraq is a mind-bogglingly complex country that defies generalizations, except this one -- where U.S. troops have a substantial presence, there is more security, more grass-roots political ferment and more economic activity. Continued...