One Year Later:Where Is Iraq?

John Daniszewski was in Baghdad throughout the war and has continued reporting there during the U.S. occupation. This is his impression of the conflict’s aftermath.

One year ago today, I walked down an empty stretch of Sadoun Street toward the pointed gun barrels of Marines who had just reached the center of Baghdad. Perhaps it was dangerous, but I felt only relief and elation. The arrival of the Marines meant the 21-day war was over, and Iraq would have the possibility of a better, peaceful future.

On that day, I was soon surrounded as happy Iraqis, no longer shut in with their fears, came pouring into the streets.

Today, I can no longer walk down Sadoun Street. As an American, it is not safe for me to do so. During my last trip to Iraq a few weeks ago, I could only drive past the cafes, shops and ice cream parlors where I had once lingered. With assassins in the streets on the lookout for Western interlopers, the shopkeepers and restaurateurs seemed to wish that I would just move on, quickly.

A year after the fall of Baghdad -- after the deaths of more than 600 Americans, the wounding of 8,000 others and the allocation of untold billions of dollars -- the hopes of April 9, 2003, seem further than ever from reach.

I had visited the country on and off during the previous eight years and shared the foreboding of many that a conquest of Iraq would be messy. Iraqis are a people as complex, diverse and driven as any in the Arab world. Although the majority had hated Saddam Hussein, many Iraqis also distrusted and harbored grudges against the United States. Yet as the fighting came to its supposed close, it was possible to push aside those uncertainties and imagine a better future.

Unfortunately, the seeds of today’s problems were planted even before the war was declared over.

The Marines moved in on the eastern side of the Tigris River in Baghdad. The U.S. Army was on the western side, mopping up pockets of resistance. But neither had the means, or any evident mandate, to enforce law and order.

As U.S. troops stood by and did nothing, a paroxysm of looting erupted. It is hard to describe the chaos -- fire and rampage sweeping like a plague through just about every enterprise and institution in the country. By the time it was over, the country was left far more shattered than it had been during the war.

Electricity, which had failed only in the closing days of the war, was nonexistent, people needed food deliveries and clean water, and the economy no longer functioned. But everyone believed that U.S. forces -- the most powerful army in the world -- would swiftly take care of whatever was needed.

It was nine days after the fall of Baghdad before the U.S. Defense Department finally let the U.S. civilian authority, led by retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, into Baghdad. For reasons of security, Garner and his makeshift team set up shop in Hussein’s Republican Palace and began to construct what came to be known as the Green Zone.

In those days, a few guards and some mild strands of concertina wire were deemed enough to block the gates to the zone, a heavily fortified 4-square-mile district including the buildings that serve as the occupation authority’s headquarters. Now the Green Zone barrier is hundreds of yards of reinforced concrete -- a Berlin Wall in the middle of Baghdad.

Still, back in May, most Iraqis had an open mind about the U.S.-led occupation and hailed the removal of Hussein. Most expected the U.S. to quickly call a council of opposition parties, set up a new government and prepare to leave the country.

But the replacement of Garner with L. Paul Bremer III in mid-May brought another series of shocks to the Iraqi population. Bremer said it was too early for any grand council or turnover of meaningful power to Iraqis. He abolished the Iraqi army, saying that its soldiers had in effect dissolved the army by fleeing during the war. That pen stroke left about 500,000 men desperate for work, creating a reservoir of anger that would come back to haunt the U.S. leadership.

The months of May, June and July were marked by the beginnings of the anti-U.S. insurgency, scattered attacks that were dismissed at first as the last spasms of the “dead-enders.” At first, the resistance took the form of rocket-propelled-grenade and automatic-rifle ambushes of passing convoys. When such actions became too deadly for the attackers, the guerrillas adopted the “stand-off” tactic of roadside bombs, detonated by remote control. Military spokesmen reluctantly acknowledged that U.S. forces were facing 15 significant attacks a day.

As summer heated up, the lack of electricity made the discomfort of the 120-plus-degree temperatures even more acute. Complaints from ordinary Iraqis about the inefficiency of the occupation grew louder. Anger was palpable, and the occupation authorities began to scramble for answers about why the power could not be restored.

At the same time, sabotage became a more frequent tactic of the insurgents. For every halting step forward by the coalition experts to restore normality, the guerrillas would force a step backward. Iraqis who had begun to hope in the future now began to believe that the U.S. officials inside the palace were indifferent.

By late summer, it was becoming more difficult to dismiss the guerrillas as merely the die-hard remnants of an overthrown regime. The attacks were too persistent and becoming deadlier. A huge bomb Aug. 19 killed chief U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others, causing the United Nations to begin withdrawing its foreign staff, which had provided an international dimension amid the U.S. domination. Ten days later, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, a cleric politician with credibility among the Shiite Muslim masses, died along with more than 100 others in a massive explosion in Najaf.

The seating of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in July had done little to satisfy public demands for an end to occupation, and the council itself soon proved feckless and disorganized.

The killing of Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusai, at a safe house in Mosul soon after briefly lifted spirits and set off volleys of celebratory gunfire.

But as the long, hot summer simmered into a sultry autumn, attacks mounted and became more lethal. Helicopters began to be hit by guerrilla missiles. In November, 110 coalition members died, roughly the same as during the war.

Inside the Green Zone, blueprints were being prepared to upgrade the power infrastructure, create a cellular telephone network and assemble a modern Iraqi army and police force. Government employees began earning decent salaries. The borders were open for trade.

But for the most part, to ordinary Iraqis, the improvements were slight and meager in relation to expectations.

The capture of Hussein in a “spider hole” close to his home village near Tikrit in December seemed at first as if it might deflate the former Baathists and intelligence officers who seemed to be the backbone of the resistance.

But in some ways it liberated them. No longer encumbered by the crimes of their former leader, they could style themselves as patriots for Iraq and win over more of the public in a nationalistic struggle against America.

Another girder of U.S. hopes for Iraq seemed to collapse this month when at least one segment of the unhappy but generally quiescent Shiite Muslim population turned to open revolt, led by the firebrand cleric Muqtader Sadr.

I had interviewed him in November and found in him a sort of puckish delight in standing outside the negotiations with the United States, biding his time, promising a revolution to oust what he regarded as the triple threat of America, Britain and Israel occupying Iraq. Sitting cross-legged in his mosque in the southern town of Kufa, surrounded by adoring acolytes, he made no bones that he expected to be killed, like his father and brothers before him, who were slain by Hussein’s agents.

He seemed to look forward to it.

Today, U.S. forces are losing lives on two fronts -- against Sunni Muslim insurgents mixed with foreign religious extremists, and against the newly awakened Shiites.

Violence and fear have become the country’s twin plagues. During last year’s war, the level of civilian casualties was horrifying, even if they were accidental and often unavoidable because of the tactics used by the old regime’s defenders. But the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq has made those three weeks of combat pale by comparison. Murders, political violence, reprisals, kidnappings and theft have made the entire country a danger zone.

I can count five friends or fairly close acquaintances who have died in the last 12 months in Iraq -- two by heart attacks, one in a road accident and two by assassination. I consider them all war victims. Eight of my Times colleagues were seriously injured in a terrorist bombing on New Year’s Eve. When I saw their injured faces, I wanted to cry.

For Iraqis, the suffering has been enormous. They are disappointed, disillusioned and -- in many cases -- blindly furious and eager to lash out at the foreigners in their midst.

On my last day in Iraq last month, I visited a young second cousin of mine from Texas who, as a reservist, has been sent to Balad in the Sunni Triangle, where the U.S. is in the midst of constructing what some Pentagon planners hope will be a permanent base.

Seeing her bright, shining face in the sea of desert camouflage uniforms, a young woman eager to do a good job and please her commanders, but also to stay safe and please her worried mother back home, I wondered how we Americans and Iraqis found ourselves in this predicament.

Hussein is a prisoner, his sons are dead, and there is no more threat of weapons of mass destruction, whether or not they existed. On one level, the job that the U.S. military set out to do last year is finished. But the country is in chaos, and to simply pull out might only make things worse.

When I watched the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down last year in Firdos Square, Iraqis and Americans together laughing and enjoying the spectacle of the tyrant’s humiliation, I wasn’t aware what a brief and precious moment that would be.

Where does it go from here? And where will we be one year from now?

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

In stories after April 9, 2004, Shiite cleric Muqtader Sadr is correctly referred to as Muqtada Sadr.

--- END NOTE ---