The Rough Guide to Baghdad (Page 3)

If Iraq's social geography were reduced to political antipodes, one pole would be the fortified and manicured American-occupied Green Zone: a huge palace and office complex built by Saddam. The other pole would be the fetid, baking eastern Baghdad slum of Sadr City, also known as Al Thawra (the revolution).

To enter the Green Zone is to consume a thousand-milligram tablet of denial washed down with fresh-squeezed orange juice. The air conditioning here is superb; everyone looks happy.

David Bourne is working his laptop at the Iraqi Business Center, an empty, glass-walled subsection of the Convention Center. Bourne, wearing a crisp media-blue oxford shirt and dark slacks, exudes Ivy League confidence. He is here to do good and to do well, at once.

"When we get the business center running, local subcontractors will be able to network and learn about bidding," he explains, as if the occupation weren't already fourteen months old. "A lot of the reconstruction hasn't begun yet, and the center will facilitate capacity-building with local firms." He pauses and then adds with considered honesty: "A lot of Iraqis think it's just about who you know. But government-funded work requires competitive bidding, transparency, quality control, all that."

He won't comment on how Halliburton and Bechtel got their huge slices of the $18.5 billion reconstruction pie. But that's already a matter of public record. Bechtel got the first installment of its no-bid billion-dollar contract on April 17, 2003, after secretive dealings with the US Agency for International Development. Halliburton also had an inside track.

On the other side of a glass wall, a uniformed janitor pushes a Zamboni-like buffer across a shining expanse of floor. Iraq seems a thousand miles away.

Now unplug from the Matrix, and the temperature suddenly soars to a brutal 115 Fahrenheit. The air reeks of sewage; hot, furnace-like gusts blow grit into your eyes. An urbanized plain of misery and squalor opens before you: the hyperviolent Sadr City. The wide boulevards, laid down in the late 1950s by the optimistic planners of the Qasim regime, are now flooded for blocks at a stretch with ankle-deep pools of green, algae-rich sewage. Heaps of garbage smolder on the medians and in empty lots. Pirated electrical wires crisscross dense side streets of mud-brick homes. Small flocks of mangy goats and sheep, shepherded by women in flowing black abayas, forage in the trash.

The lumpen Shiites who live here are derided by Baghdad's more urbane Sunnis as sharugees--an insulting term meaning "easterners" but connoting ignorance and filth. Like the N-word among some African-Americans, streetwise young Shiites have defiantly appropriated sharugee for their own use.

The sewage problem in Sadr City is not merely unsightly; it is a major health threat. As the head of the local public works department, or Baladia, explained it, the sewers here were never great, but the constant backup and nauseating overflow is a new problem. First there was bomb damage and then, as garbage trucks were looted or destroyed, trash clogged the sewers. Most of the special trucks needed to clear the backed-up lines were also looted. The last four were recently commandeered by US contractors for use all over Baghdad. Bechtel has the $1.8 billion contract to rebuild Iraq's water, sewage and electrical systems. Electrical clearance work and the rebuilding of water systems is also being carried out by a company called Washington Group International. Local engineers say the firm has done next to nothing.

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