At a glance, things would seem to be going to hell in Iraq. Occupying forces and civilian aid workers are killed every week, along with dozens of Iraqis. Iraqi democracy has hardly taken root. Daily life doesn't work, unemployment is rampant, everybody hates the occupation. And, yes, Spain's threatened pullout weakens the occupying coalition, politically if not militarily. The new Spanish prime minister has called both the war and the occupation "a disaster." Obviously things couldn't be worse.

Or is that all wrong? Is the U.S.-led Iraq operation, in fact, succeeding? Water and electricity are almost back to pre-war levels, though only a few months ago, everyone pointed to the lack of electricity and water as crippling proof of the failure of the invasion and the occupation. The Iraqi governing council has adopted a preliminary constitution that is impressive by global standards, revolutionary by Middle East standards. The Iraqi people are overwhelmingly glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power and soon to be tried.

And not everybody hates the occupation: A recent major poll of 2,700 Iraqis sponsored among others by ABC News, the BBC and Germany's ARD network found that 48 percent think the invasion was right, while only 39 percent thought it was wrong. Fully 70 percent see their lives going well today.

Even outside Iraq, there are murmurings of approval for the coming transformation of the region, sometimes from surprising sources -- like Lebanon-based Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Fadlallah recently welcomed changes and excoriated bad governance in the Middle East. He told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius: "It is not fair or accurate to lay all the blame for this deformed [Middle Eastern] political process on the shoulders of the West."

At the very least, then, there are two ways of looking at the situation in Iraq -- either as a failed project or as a work in progress. Is the glass empty -- or at least half full? The Spanish hold the first view ("disaster"), and it is widely shared in Europe. The Bush administration holds the second view, and it is widely shared in America. Whether they were for or against an invasion a year ago, Americans today see Iraq as an important front in the war on terror.

Each view is, of course, driven by political interests. The Bush administration can't afford to fail in Iraq and so must view every piece of bad news as only a bump in the road toward a good end. Many Europeans, still outraged that the United States mounted a war over their protest, have an emotional interest in seeing the American colossus stumble and fail.

What's wrong with the European view -- apart from overlooking many facts on the ground -- is that it focuses on the wrong political entity, the Bush administration. The focus should be on Iraq, but anti-war Europeans are so blinded by their visceral dislike of President Bush, with his unfortunate habits of swagger and oversimplification, that they forget the larger goal: what's best for the Iraqi people. Should Iraqis have been left in the grip of the world's most vicious living dictator, under whom more people were brutally killed each year than have died in the war and its 12-month aftermath? Should they be abandoned now, with their transformation into a pluralistic democracy and free-market economy only just begun? What matters is how Iraq turns out, and how the Middle East -- and the world -- are affected, not who brings about the change, or how.

But since the who and the how are so preeminent in European minds, we should accelerate -- if possible -- the return of the United Nations to Iraq, and possibly introduce a NATO command structure. Iraq's future should be a joint project of the world's democracies. Each should have a stake in Iraq's success. And that's where the Bush administration has failed; by gratuitously alienating our natural allies, it has created a situation where they can stand on the sidelines and throw stones.

Now's the time for the opposite. Spain's withdrawal from Iraq hands the terrorists a double victory, not just the single one of toppling a government. Incoming Prime Minister Zapatero has shown himself to be a true foreign policy amateur. The challenge now to the West's best diplomats is to find a way for him to climb down from his hotheaded decisions to abandon Iraq. His action doesn't even serve the Spaniards' understandable aversion to war; a Spanish pullout doesn't advance peace in Iraq. On the contrary, it makes things harder for Iraqis.

It's too late to argue against Iraq's future on the grounds that the war was fought for the wrong reasons. Weapons of mass destruction -- the clincher reason why I supported the war -- have not been found, but mass graves have been. The bodies are still being counted; estimates today are between 300,000 and 400,000. That's why, even in hindsight, I don't regret the liberation of Iraq. History, I'm convinced, will show that saving the Iraqi people was the right thing to do. With luck, and smarter diplomacy than the Bush administration has practiced, it may also show that liberating Iraq was the watershed that finally broke the downward spiral of a politically benighted and economically strangled region whose only notable export, other than oil, is murderous jihadists.

Rather than letting the terrorists of Madrid drive America and Europe farther apart, the tragedy in Spain should be bringing us together. For more than two years, many Americans with longstanding connections to Europe have despaired that it would take a major attack on the continent to create for our friends in Old Europe the transformative experience that we had after 9/11. The events of 3/11 have partially done that. The French ambassador to Washington calls them a "wake-up call" for Europe. Le Monde editorializes that, "It's vain, absurd, and cowardly to think that any country is sheltered [from attack] by its foreign policy choices."

Now is the moment for both sides of this transatlantic playground brawl to come down off their high horses and find a way to make common cause -- against al Qaeda and for Iraq. We've been squabbling, in many cases for the wrong reasons -- like Bush's style and Chancellor Schroeder's election needs. We should now cooperate for the right reasons: Iraq's future, and our own. Once again, as during the Cold War, we gave a common enemy. For that, we need a common fight.

Peter Ross Range, a former Time Magazine correspondent in Germany and Vietnam, is editor of Blueprint Magazine.