I could not believe my ears. I apologise for the inconvenience, said the Iraqi policeman as he finished searching our car. We were at the checkpoint in front of the Alhamra hotel in Baghdad.
Over the past week I had grown accustomed to the rediscovered humanity, as another policeman put it, of Iraqs law enforcers. But this was too much. With its policemen behaving like this, it is little wonder that Iraq is being perceived as a threat by its neighbours. Any visitor from most other Arab countries, where an encounter with the police is considered lucky if it is limited to verbal abuse, may be so shocked by this treatment as to return home bent on regime change.
I have just spent eight days in Baghdad and Amara (a town just north of Basra). I went to assess the damage inflicted upon my country over the last twenty-five years, since I was forced to leave with my family as a teenage boy. I was looking for a glimmer of hope while expecting the worst. It did not help that five bombs exploded in Baghdad upon my arrival, on the first day of Ramadan, killing forty-two Iraqis and one American soldier. The victims included two children and nineteen women.
As the eight days went by, I started to revise assumptions formed under the influence of western news coverage dedicated almost exclusively to the reporting of violence.
Indeed, for the majority of Iraqis the security situation is as close to normal as it has been since 1991, when Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait and the long war with America began.
And it is Saddam Hussein who stands to lose the most from the new Iraqi police service. Unlike the occupying authorities cooped up in their fortified compounds, perched on the periphery of Iraqi society like a fly on an elephant, the new police service represents tangible evidence of regime change. Despite its circumscribed powers and lack of resources, it is the first institution of the Iraqi state to be outside Baath party control in thirty-five years.
The effects are beginning to be felt. The wave of lawlessness which gripped the country upon the fall of the regime has largely subsided. Night curfews have been lifted and Baghdad residents are gradually venturing out of their homes. Many now eat out in outdoor cafes and restaurants, instead of hurriedly grabbing takeaways. Goldsmiths on Karrada Street, one of the few revived shopping destinations in the capital, displays its wares late into the night, a big change apparently from just weeks ago.
There are plenty of other signs of Iraqs rebirth conspicuously absent from the news bulletins. Baghdad is bustling with commercial activity. Government employees representing a significant part of the citys workforce have been receiving salaries ten times higher than before the war. The streets are clean thanks to an arrangement whereby city hall pays $3 per day to anyone willing to pick up a broom or shovel. The absence of import duties means that the streets are full of new cars. Children from poor families I visited during my stay were eating bananas a fruit so far unknown to most of them.
The eyes of activists in the General Union of Iraqi Students as well as other student organizations were bright with energy. Like many of their contemporaries elsewhere in the world they have a faith in their ability to change the world. When I met them, they were planning to patrol schools along with the police to intercept terrorists. They are locked in a political battle with the United States troops who have occupied a hostel at Baghdad University. They are also organising against the Ministry of Higher Education which has the bizarre idea that there should be only one student union in the country.
A generation or more of Iraqis were forced into exile by the Saddam regime. Many are now returning to set up political parties, newspapers and to seek out business opportunities. Some are intent on resuming careers and lives interrupted by the brutal dictator and his adventures.
A rosy picture? No, Iraq could plausibly turn into a collapsed state following the Balkan or the Afghan models. Its institutions are in ruins thanks to the combined efforts of Saddam Hussein and the Coalition Provisional Authoritys (CPA) decrees on the dissolution of the army and de-Baathification.
The decision of Paul Bremer (head of the CPA) to dissolve the army instead of reforming it perpetuated Iraqs weakness and compounded the humiliation felt by tens of thousands of Iraqi military men. The decision to de-Baathify has struck a large swathe of the Iraqi professional class. It was a move too indiscriminate to be fair.
Meanwhile, the political scene is dominated by returned exiles, who are bound to clash sooner or later with emerging local leaders. In a bid to overcome deep distrust of politics, many politicians are donning tribal and religious identities I met a sheikh who played the drums in a 1970s rock band. Others are hedging their political bets by keeping armed militias at the ready.
Neither Iraqi nor coalition policy-makers have a clear idea about what to do. It remains an unprecedented situation for what was a relatively well-off developing society, as liberation combines with occupation, post-totalitarian confusion with post-war reconstruction.
The most dangerous ingredient is the ongoing political violence. Most of the suicide bombers and other assailants who target police stations, schools and international organisations are thought to be foreigners. The assassination of three judges this week targets another institution of the new Iraq, which, like the police, is not inherited from the Baath period.
Some reports from the country seem to imply that Iraqis welcome at least some of the violence as legitimate resistance to occupation. During my eight days I did not meet a single person who shared this view. Indeed, the vast majority of people in Iraq especially women, who represent 60% of the adult population do not want the Americans to leave anytime soon.
They do not harbour warm feelings towards the occupying forces (children who wave to the Americans are scolded by parents and teachers who do not like them to get used to the presence of foreign soldiers). Iraqis only grudgingly admit gratitude for liberation from Saddam Hussein. Often they describe it as a coincidence of interests. But they want the foreign troops to stay because the various thugs, terrorists and political and religious militias still at large would turn the country into a meat grinder if the troops left tomorrow.
Many Iraqis, especially those who were hurt physically or emotionally at the hands of the Americans and their allies, do not feel sorry for their casualties. Even when they insist that non-Iraqis are responsible for the attacks, it is clear these would not be possible without some Iraqi support. It is their way of saying that this is somebody elses battle, being fought at the expense of Iraq, and that they are incensed by it, as they fear that each attack, no matter what the target, pushes further away the day when they can return to normal life.
Iraqis want to regain control of their future and to become truly independent and free. They are sick of violence of all kinds, whatever the pretexts. They are tired of empty rhetoric and ideologies. Most Iraqis want to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and move on. Whoever cares for them should help them do just that.
