Letter From Baghdad

The children came out to cheer, and the adults waved from their doorways, as Staff Sgt. Jason Pond of the 101st Airborne Division led a patrol of infantry through the northern Baghdad district of Kasra. "They [the Iraqis] are friendly to us, and we're friendly back. They come to us with their problems, and we try to fix them," Sergeant Pond said about his work. Teenagers approached his patrol to report looting at a nearby government office, parents asked him where they might treat a son suffering from an accidental gunshot wound, residents of a middle-class neighborhood complained of squatters who had moved into an abandoned youth center. In some cases, there was little that Sergeant Pond's patrol could do, but the residents appeared happy that at least one outside authority had taken an interest in their well-being.

Revisiting the same streets the next day, I listened to an outpouring of grievances--not about the US troops, whom residents consistently described as "very polite," but about life in postwar Baghdad, where there's one hour of power all night, where salaries are unpaid, where gangs hijack cars at night on the roads and where gas is in such short supply that frustrated drivers pull pistols on each other at service stations. "It is very difficult without a government, very difficult," said schoolteacher Hamid Jassem. Another resident, who identified himself only as an oil-sector employee, was more militant: "America came here saying they wanted to help the Iraqi people, and we helped them defeat Saddam Hussein.... Well, we're going to organize popular resistance against the Americans, like the Palestinian intifada, if they don't give us some help."

Nearly a month after Saddam Hussein's statue came down in Firdous Square, an event that has come to mark the collapse of the old order, Iraqis offer very mixed reviews of the US invasion. The swift melting away of Baathist resistance in Iraq's capital has made it unnecessary for the United States to maintain the kind of tight security measures that make life under other military occupations so onerous. Moreover, US soldiers and Marines appear to honestly believe themselves liberators. I have yet to see any of the humiliations inflicted on the occupied that are part of life in the Palestinian territories.

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