The Tyrant Is Gone but the Trauma Remains

Baghdad —  A year after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein is a prisoner, but the nation he once dominated is riven by violence and instability, and its continued occupation has aggravated anti-Americanism throughout the region.

The war was supposed to do more than end one man’s tyranny: The Bush administration said it wanted to eliminate what it called Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, bring democracy to Iraq and the region and improve the lives of Iraqis crushed under a brutal dictator.

Indeed, Iraqis gained new liberties: freedom from Hussein’s oppressive security apparatus, an open press, the right to worship regardless of creed, the first steps toward a representative government and the beginnings of a vibrant consumer economy.

But the U.S. occupation also has unleashed dark forces -- notably ethnic and sectarian divisions that threaten to pull the country toward civil war. Common crime, kept on a tight leash during the time of Hussein, now flourishes, overwhelming the inexperienced, under- equipped Iraqi security services. A secure Iraq seems distant.

Washington says it went to war to stem the tide of terrorism. Today, Iraq has become a magnet for foreign jihadists and an incubator of home-grown bombers and assassins. Hardly a day passes without the wanton slaughter of Iraqi civilians.

U.S. officials argue that, in the long term, the new Iraq will be a more stable place -- democratic, a participant in the global economy and a reflection of its diverse groups. In the short term, however, many view what has happened here as bringing more instability to the world’s most volatile region.

Iraqis don’t see how a nation that put a man on the moon can’t fix matters here. In Iraq today, the U.S. is blamed for virtually everything that goes wrong. Bombings, long gas lines, unemployment and a lack of electricity are only a few of the problems. Yet it receives only grudging credit for the undisputed improvements.

Sagging beneath the weight of so many expectations and global politics are the Iraqi people, traumatized by three decades of tyrannical rule and almost-constant warfare and deprivation. The urge to get on with a life that has some degree of normalcy is palpable in the streets.

“People are just sick and tired of the violence, of being bombed,” a young U.S. lieutenant, Michael Breen of the 1st Armored Division, said as he motored through the streets of Baghdad the other day in his Humvee. “Iraqis basically want what we all want -- a good life for themselves, an opportunity for their families. But first they want to stop the bombs going off.”

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About these articles

These articles were written and reported by Times staff writers John Daniszewski, Alissa J. Rubin, Patrick J. McDonnell, Mark Magnier and J. Michael Kennedy in Baghdad and Bob Drogin in Washington. Times staff writer Sebastian Rotella in Baghdad also contributed.

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Freer, Not Happier

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Saddam Hussein is gone, but Iraqis feel they’re living under a new oppressor: chaos marked by violence, uncertainty and fear.

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To hear the residents of this country ravaged by war, terrorism, occupation and resistance tell it: It was the worst of times. It is the worst of times.

The people of Iraq are sick of all the chaos, the violence, the lack of security -- and most of the time their sour, depressed state overwhelms any fragment of hope or relief in their daily lives. Yet many also believe that their futures will be better.

“The main problem is, we were expecting something, and we found it was an illusion,” gallery owner Ala Salim said. “There are no elections. There is no government. People cannot go out at night. Naturally people are unnerved.”

Saddam Hussein is gone. The hated Mukhabarat secret police no longer control the country with their vast bureaucracy of oppression. Newspapers and prayer leaders shout a variety of opinions, and people buy satellite TV dishes, imported used cars and home appliances with abandon. Shiite Muslims practice their religion without fear of the state. No one is compelled to mouth paeans to the leader. Freedoms previously undreamed of are taken for granted.

Yet few are happy. The freedom feels like anarchy and abandonment. Instead of being oppressed by a tyrant, people are oppressed by a welter of criminals, insurgents, petty bullies and encroaching theocrats. Some are fighting back -- for Islam, for power, for vengeance or just in blind fury. Others have adopted a kind of fatalism, refusing to be cowed, determined to work for democracy even at the risk of being killed as “collaborators” of the U.S.

American and British forces are active in their pursuit of insurgents but spend little time fighting crime or on routine patrols. On guard against attacks -- which number about 20 a day -- they engage less and less with the population.

For security, Iraqis in the grip of crime rely on their own weapons and families, or plead for help at the bunker-like stations of their newly reconstituted police. Merchants now sell a gamut of defensive items, from Kalashnikov rifles to surveillance cameras to electric prods. But the police themselves are underequipped and frightened. In some places, they show signs of falling back into habits of corruption and connivance with the underworld.

One year ago, Iraqis looked at the gathering storm against Hussein’s regime with a mixture of dread and hope.

At the time, Jalil Khadim and his family were too afraid to speak of their hatred of Hussein but gave voice to their fear that one of them might not emerge alive from the U.S. bombing. His four young children were so afraid then that his wife, Souhad Raad, who broke down in tears during that interview, was stockpiling Valium to see them through.

A year later, sitting in the same cramped living room (but now without electricity), they had come through the war unscathed, and the anxiety level was the same.

Raad said she was thinking of taking Mina, 6, out of school because an explosive device had been found nearby. Jalil said he goes to his shop to eke out a living for only three hours a day, because he is afraid to leave his family alone.

Raad said the home of friends of her parents had been invaded by robbers, who tortured the elderly couple and their children for eight hours in the mistaken belief that they were a family of money changers. “They cut their ears and beat them,” she said.

“Please write down, we need a president,” she pleaded. “We are not safe. We are afraid.”

Accustomed to warnings, half-measures and eleventh-hour diplomatic standoffs, few people believed before the war that U.S. and British forces would actually carry out their threat to invade the country and depose the dictator. After it happened, few anticipated that life after Hussein would be so difficult.

Arasat al Hindiya Street was once considered Baghdad’s most glamorous, with the city’s best restaurants and boutiques. Today, most of them are shuttered. A few have been shattered by bombs. Garbage blows down the sidewalks at night. People are afraid to walk here.

Salim, 45, an artist and sculptor, runs the Eastern Living art gallery with his wife. But the customers don’t come anymore. On a recent afternoon, it was as quiet as a mausoleum.

“Unless civilization will prevail, there will be no good work in Iraq,” Salim said ruefully. “This street, for example -- it was alive. Now ... “

If scattered statistical evidence is true, Iraq now has a murder rate worse that New York’s at its height and a kidnapping rate worse than Colombia’s. Many prominent or affluent people have gone into hiding or left the country.

As one drives through the once clean streets of the capital, hulks and shells of buildings are everywhere -- destroyed when? During the war? During the looting? By terrorist explosions? Fallen into neglect during 12 years of sanctions? It is all ugly. Consumer goods spill off sidewalks and into Baghdad’s streets, evidence both of a newly liberated market and the lack of municipal control over merchants.

Occupation officials routinely refer to the city as bustling, a sign that times are improving. But Iraqis don’t feel that way. Almost every family has a death or some other horror to tell from the past year, and residents routinely arm themselves and watch the street outside their windows for lurking strangers.

Hussein has been conquered, but not the fear in Iraqi hearts.

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Here for the Long Haul

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As a new rotation of troops prepares to set up camp in Iraq, commanders see progress toward stability. Some civilians see abandonment.

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The U.S. military is bringing in tens of thousands of fresh troops to replace departing soldiers a year after launching its lightning march toward Baghdad and gearing up for a deployment that is expected to last at least another year -- and could drag on indefinitely.

Despite the unrelenting scenes of conflict and carnage in this country, U.S. generals reflecting on the anniversary are proclaiming progress toward greater stability.

“We have clearly shown that we ... are capable of making tremendous strides in the rebuilding of a country that had been neglected by a dictator,” Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. “And we’ve been able to restore freedom, some semblance of a better quality of life, and economic prosperity that continues to grow every day in a remarkably short period of time.”

Since U.S.-led forces invaded last March, 571 American service members have died in Iraq and more than 3,200 have been injured, most of them after President Bush declared an end to active combat May 1.

Iraq’s return to sovereignty June 30 will alter the nation’s political leadership and officially end the occupation. But coalition troops will remain, U.S. officials say, although no formal agreement yet exists with any Iraqi authority.

Commanders expect violence to continue to rise in the run-up to June 30. Roadside bombs killed nine GIs in Iraq during a recent four-day period, despite military advances in detecting and avoiding so-called improvised explosive devices.

Attacks against U.S. troops and casualties among coalition forces are down since a high of 82 troops died in November. In February, 20 U.S. personnel died in Iraq, compared with 47 in January.

The reduced casualty numbers for U.S. and coalition troops since November have a troubling corollary: a surge in killings of Iraqis in bombings and assassinations. Insurgents are seeking out “softer” targets as U.S. forces increasingly pull back to their barracks and leave daily security concerns to the locals.

Hundreds of Iraqi police, corpsmen and other security officers have been killed. More than a dozen Iraqi police stations have been bombed or come under fire; at least half a dozen police chiefs have been assassinated.

Civilians have suffered the worst violence -- most dramatically March 2, when an estimated 200 Shiite pilgrims were slain by up to a dozen suicide bombers who struck religious celebrants in Karbala and Baghdad in synchronized assaults.

The unremitting bloodshed has served to escalate criticism of U.S. forces, who are now accused of being more concerned with their own safety than that of ordinary Iraqis.

“When the Americans are attacked, we see their helicopters and their Humvees arriving on the spot,” Hassan Jalil said as he stood near one of the bombing sites in Karbala, echoing the criticism of many who said U.S. forces had failed to protect the shrines and other targets. “Where were they when we need them to help us?”

But U.S. commanders vehemently deny they are bunkering in and abandoning the cities.

“Any organization that interprets the increasing Iraqi role in the security mission as a sign that coalition forces are either losing their resolve or moving to remote bases to avoid casualties will be making a deadly error,” Sanchez said.

Everyone agrees that the threadbare collection of Iraqi police, civil corpsmen and border guards cobbled together since spring is in no way ready to take on the full burden of security. Many of them are courageous. But the forces lack training and basic equipment -- vehicles, radios, body armor and weapons.

“The most frustrating factor for me is ... that I could not get the quantities of equipment that I needed to go ahead and give to the Iraqis who wanted to do the job,” Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said last week.

The insurgency is in disarray, the general said, but he acknowledged that it was far from defeated.

Rather, he and others say, the murky armed opposition is changing, especially since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December.

“We’re transitioning between enemies,” said Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling of the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, where the military has identified 14 still-active insurgent cells.

The armed opposition emerged last year largely as remnants of Hussein’s decidedly secular Baath Party. But since then, commanders say, an alliance of ex-Baathists and Islamic extremists -- mostly home-grown but including some foreign elements -- has emerged.

“This is a multilayered insurgency we’re fighting,” said Maj. John Nagl of the 82nd Airborne Division in Khaldiya, a volatile Sunni Muslim town west of Baghdad. “We think the Baathists are increasingly being marginalized.”

U.S. forces say that their intelligence capabilities about the insurgents have improved substantially in a year and that tips are flowing, although many have proved false. The hope is that the community sources developed in the last year will be passed on smoothly to the new units rolling in.

The rotation of troops is expected to continue through May. Between now and then, officials say, the size of coalition forces will decline from about 130,000 to 115,000.

Compared with the troops who fought their way here last spring, the replacements have a major advantage: They know they are coming as an occupying army facing an insurgency. Last year’s warriors, prepared for big battles, ended up spending much of their time putting down a guerrilla enemy and working on community projects -- rebuilding schools, setting up city councils, policing gas lines and repairing damaged infrastructure.

Despite such outreach, U.S. troops have few illusions about being appreciated by the Iraqis. Talk of U.S. liberators being tossed flowers a year ago is seldom heard these days. Many say they are happy just to be tolerated.

“This is how I’m welcomed in Fallouja,” Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine of the 82nd Airborne said recently, holding up a foot-long shard of jagged shrapnel -- the remains of a mortar shell that almost took out his Humvee.

“When we leave, there will still be a very determined enemy,” said Drinkwine, whose paratroop battalion was scheduled to pull out of Fallouja in the coming days, to be replaced by a Marine unit. “There will still be a lot to do. But I think we will have made this a better place.”

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Transition, but to What?

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Building a democracy doesn’t come easily in a country unfamiliar with the concept -- and where the word of factional leaders is what counts.

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Earlier this month, U.S. officials hailed the belated ratification of an interim Iraqi Constitution as the first serious step toward greater stability.

But the elaborate ceremony highlighted a major problem that looms on the not-too-distant horizon: Although Iraq now has a law by which a transitional government could operate, there is no agreement on what kind of government will take power June 30, when the U.S. has promised to hand over authority to Iraqis.

The snag is just the most recent example of the trouble the U.S. has had in making good on its ambitious promise to create a self-governing, democratic system in Iraq.

Senior officials at the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority downplay the problems, emphasizing that the interim Constitution is a breakthrough, the first real effort by the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council to compromise.

“Everybody gave up something he or she wanted,” one official said. “They are all clearly behind the law.”

But he acknowledged that it was unclear whether the support would last.

“There are people expressing reservations, but how profound they are we’ll have to see,” the official said.

In the best of circumstances, democracy-building is difficult, but in a country that lacks a democratic tradition, it is far harder. In Iraq it is made worse by the rising strife between minority Sunni and majority Shiite Muslims and between ethnic Kurds and Arabs. Fears of civil unrest are becoming increasingly widespread among Iraqis.

Assassinations have become commonplace. Shiite groups have killed scores of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and now appear to be targeting a succession of Sunni clerics. Sunnis have targeted Shiites, especially clerics and some political leaders.

It has become widely accepted among Iraqis that in order to placate the factions, government power and ministries will be divided among the different sects and ethnic groups in a way that is roughly proportional to their community’s share of the population. But although this may be necessary for short-term progress, it looks likely to contribute to the instability and is reminiscent of Lebanon during the 1980s. The U.S.-led coalition put an international imprimatur on the sectarian and ethnic division of power early on by dividing the Iraqi Governing Council along those lines.

Since April, the United States has offered three successive proposals to transform Iraq’s single-party dictatorship into the Western-style democracy President Bush promised would become a beacon for the region. None of the plans has received Iraqi support.

“We are at the very beginning of a transition and much further back than the U.S. government would like us to believe,” said Marina Ottaway, an expert in post-conflict situations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Generally speaking, at this point we don’t have a transition plan. There has been a succession of game plans, all of which the U.S. has been forced to abandon.”

The disintegration of each plan, like so much else that has plagued postwar Iraq, is at least in part the legacy of U.S. decisions. Some of them are now viewed as mistakes, others as unavoidable moves -- but all with unwanted consequences that are still reverberating.

Among the most troubling of the U.S. moves, say political scientists and post-conflict experts in the United States and Iraq, were the failure to stop the wide-scale looting in the weeks after the war, the decision to disband the army, and the creation of the Governing Council along religious and ethnic lines.

The looting undermined the U.S.-led coalition’s credibility with Iraqis early on, allowing a sense of lawlessness to become entrenched. It also enriched criminals who are believed to have used the stolen goods to help finance their activities, prolonging the postwar uncertainty.

The decision to disband the regular army was vigorously protested at the time by Iraqis because it put 400,000 armed men out of work in one fell swoop. It also deprived the U.S. of expertise.

Disbanding the Iraqi army also helped feed the anti-American insurgency, creating a large number of armed men willing to either actively or passively support the insurgents.

“If you add these things up, disbanding the army, the looting, you get a growing delegitimization of the coalition, and the liberators turn into occupiers and the occupiers into an unwanted foreign power,” said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, a research organization that tracks conflict.

Finally, the distribution of seats on the U.S.-backed Governing Council set a precedent that now seems all but impossible to change. It was probably unavoidable, according to many experts, because it was a way to reassure the previously persecuted Shiite and Kurdish communities that they would take their rightful place in the government of Iraq.

“It was a genie that was let out of the bottle for good reasons but that cannot be put back in,” the Carnegie Endowment’s Ottaway said.

The U.S. is spending $458 million on contracts to promote democracy, but it is difficult for an occupying power to instruct people in democratic principles.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that although people are uncertain about what they want, they know what they don’t want: a government imposed by the United States.

In January, 700 Iraqi tribal leaders, many of them wearing Western business suits underneath their robes, gathered to hear a discussion of democracy by Larry Diamond, a Stanford University expert on the subject.

After listening politely, the men, most of them Shiite Muslims, appeared puzzled as to what to make of his lecture. But they were sure of one thing: They would listen closely to the instructions of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country’s senior Shiite cleric.

“We know about democracy -- we have had democracy since the time of the prophet Muhammad -- but the democracy according to Islam is different, the Sharia [Islamic law] is different,” said Sayeed Sahib Zamila, wrapping himself in his black sheik’s robe. “We are going to apply what his eminence Ayatollah Sistani is saying, and we are not going to apply any other point of view.” The incident illustrates a fundamental difficulty the U.S. faces in Iraq. Although Iraqis and Americans use the same language to describe their goals -- “democracy,” “freedom,” “equality” -- they attach deeply different meanings to the words. And for each of the groups in Iraq long repressed by a despot, the only leader they can trust is one of their own.

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Waiting in the Dark

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The lack of electricity is only a small piece of the difficult economic picture in Iraq, but for many citizens, it is emblematic.

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Abu Muslim, manager of the Butterfly Electric Appliance store, leaned against a stack of cardboard boxes in front of his shop and smiled. “Generators are selling very well,” he said, wiping dust off his black pants. “Prices have even gone up -- to $170 now from $70 during the war just for the smallest one.” His gain is Iraq’s loss. A year after the invasion, electricity remains down most of the day in Baghdad and is patchy elsewhere in the country.

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority offers many reasons why the juice isn’t flowing. The system is decrepit. It never had the power advertised. And its distribution has become more equitable. Saddam Hussein used electricity like everything else: to serve the aims of the regime, leaving Baghdad and his hometown of Tikrit glowing like used-car lots while the Shiite-heavy south suffered daily brown- and blackouts.

“Now we’re looking at distributing it more evenly across Iraq,” said Randy Richardson, senior electricity advisor for the CPA.

None of that washes with an Iraqi population led to believe that the Americans would bring them peace, freedom and prosperity in short order after decades of tyranny and economic mismanagement.

“We’ve been promised so many times that the electricity would come on, security would improve, the economy [would] get better,” said Dauvaod Mohammed, owner of Kitchen Furniture in Baghdad’s Karada neighborhood. “In the 1990s, when Iraq had electricity problems, Saddam had it working within three months. The U.S. is so much richer, and they still don’t have it on.”

The lack of power is only a small piece of the difficult economic picture here, but for many Iraqis, it is emblematic. Not only does the electricity shortfall deter companies, investors and consumers from spending, it also affects another enormous problem: the lack of security. Rubble-strewn streets are left dark and inviting to carjackers, muggers and saboteurs.

“I agree it’s all taken a long time, and people are frustrated,” said Tom Foley, the CPA’s head of private-sector development. “But I think in 12 to 18 months it will be a whole different story.”

In fact, there are signs of hope in the economy, although whether they will become the boom some coalition officials predict remains to be seen.

A torrent of cash should start flowing through the monetary system in the coming months, following this month’s awarding of $5.8 billion in water, communications, security and infrastructure contracts.

Wage increases for government officials are starting to work their way through, leading to an uptick in consumer spending.

A cellphone network is in place, although it’s already overloaded.

About $5 million a day is returning from overseas bank accounts.

There has been progress in rebuilding the financial system, with banks again taking deposits, although the country still lacks electronic money transfers, credit facilities, ATMs and even checks.

“If you’re going to pay everything in cash, it slows things down, and it’s obvious in this security environment it increases the risk,” said Marek Belka, an advisor to Iraq’s Finance Ministry.

The country’s new currency -- the face of Hussein has been replaced by images of fountains, minarets and sundials of yore -- has quickly gained acceptance and stabilized at about 1,450 dinars to the dollar.

A clear priority for Iraqi planners and coalition forces is the creation of jobs -- both for economic reasons and to channel disaffected young men into the workforce rather than the insurgency. Rows of shops in Baghdad’s commercial district remain shuttered, gutted or reduced to rubble.

A recent U.S. Treasury Department study found that the $5.8-billion spending spree could create up to 1.7 million jobs this year, though many people on the ground remain skeptical. The unemployment rate is believed to be about 28%, with an additional 20% underemployed.

So far, for most Iraqis it comes down to a matter of faith in the coalition, economist Humam Shamaa said, and that is in short supply. The U.S. has not been open about how it’s spending money or where oil revenue is going, he said.

Although there is a great deal of spending to be done in Iraq, he fears it will largely benefit American companies, with relatively little trickle-down benefit for Iraqis. And he sees enormous corruption ahead as a few “Ali Babas,” or thieves, find ways to skim money, leaving relatively little in the hands of average citizens.

“There are many clever ways to steal money,” he said. “I hope we can have a new strategic relationship between the U.S. and Iraq, but they’re not giving us a clear idea what they’re doing in many areas, so many Iraqis are suspicious.”

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A Source of Optimism

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Iraq’s oil fields are making a comeback, and that’s good news for the U.S., which is counting on the revenue for reconstruction.

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When American engineers fanned out into the rich oil fields of southern Iraq on the heels of the U.S. invasion last year, they were dumbstruck at what they found. Impoverished Iraqi villagers had already carted off anything that wasn’t cemented down -- even the copper wiring.

Pumping stations throughout the fields were stripped bare, and to make matters worse, there was no quick fix for the ancient equipment because there were no spare parts.

It got worse: There were so many holes in the pipeline that it resembled a sprinkler system. Iraqis living along the line had discovered it contained fuel that could both power their cars and command a hefty price on the black market.

A year ago, Iraq’s oil industry, the nation’s primary source of wealth and the reason for its strategic importance, was a shambles. Now there are at least cautious expressions of optimism that Iraq can regain its footing as one of the world’s key oil producers. It is producing about 2.3 million barrels of oil a day, putting it within striking distance of prewar figures.

Soon, said Mike Stinson, the retired ConocoPhillips executive who is the senior U.S. advisor to Iraq’s Oil Ministry, “Iraq will have a good but slightly shaky base from which to begin.”

That is welcome news for the United States, which is counting on oil revenue to fund much of the country’s reconstruction. But although exports have begun, significant hurdles remain to again make Iraq one of the petroleum industry’s major players, a spot it once occupied by virtue of its reserves, which rank third behind Saudi Arabia and Canada.

Iraq, among other things, faces the daunting task of producing and exporting oil in the face of creaky, outdated equipment, pipelines that are routinely blown up by saboteurs, leery international investors, civil strife and engineers who have basically missed out on the last generation of technological advances.

The effort to replenish the country’s coffers will also be stymied by domestic demands for fuel. Even now there are long lines at gas stations, with much of the increased demand resulting from the massive glut of imported autos in the country since Hussein was deposed. Energy-guzzling appliances, especially air conditioners, are being sold by the truckload.

Meanwhile, suspicions run deep about U.S. intentions, and talk persists on the street that the Americans may be more intent on absconding with oil than helping the country.

“We know why Americans are in the region -- for oil and to have a base of power,” said Salem Mohammed, 55, a retired teacher. “Iraq is a strategic place.”

Fears that the United States embarked on its military campaign to gain physical control of Iraq’s oil assets appear unfounded. But some industry watchers say the U.S. could influence the industry in more subtle ways.

The fuel shortages in postwar Iraq have led to what Stinson calls “one of the greatest movements of materials and products that’s ever been done in the world.” Each day, thousands of trucks and barges haul in U.S.-subsidized petroleum products from Turkey, Kuwait and Jordan in an effort to make up for the shortfall. But because Iraqis pay a pittance for their fuel -- pennies per gallon -- Iraqi smuggling rings are turning a profit by selling gas to buyers in those same countries, where prices are about five times as high.

The stated goal of the Coalition Provisional Authority is to raise the oil production level to the prewar 2.5 million barrels per day, but that is a somewhat misleading mark of success, because Iraq at its peak was producing 3.5 million barrels a day. And about 400,000 barrels a day are now being pumped back into the ground to maintain pressure in the wells.

Crispin Hawes, director of Middle East and African affairs for the Eurasia Group, a business research firm in New York, said engineers might have done themselves a service by taking the start-up more slowly -- as Kuwait did after oil fields were burned out during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He said that in that way, Iraq’s equipment could have been modernized, which might have proved more profitable in the long run.

“Over the next few years, the Iraqis may have to drop back down again, and that’s not necessarily bad,” he said. “Clearly there’s a revenue path here to reduce the burden on the U.S. Treasury. There is a perfectly reasonable imperative to generate export revenues. But it has ignored some of the long-term issues.”

Iraq’s oil woes can be divided into two parts: the north and the south. The south is far better off in that it is dealing primarily with how to increase loading capacities at dilapidated port facilities around the southern city of Basra.

The north, however, is much more problematic because of sabotage that has allowed only a relative trickle of oil to make it through its pipelines to ports. Hawes, for one, believes that the sabotage is most likely the work of tribal leaders accustomed to being paid off by Hussein to leave the pipelines alone.

Still, there is a note of optimism: Iraq, under the guidance of U.S. forces, has begun to assemble a police force of 14,000 whose job will be to protect the pipelines. As the force has grown, the acts of sabotage have fallen.

Oil analyst Glen Carey, who has spent much of the last year in Iraq, is not effusive in his praise of the industry, but he acknowledges progress in the face of daunting odds.

“On balance,” he said, “they are struggling with a very difficult task and doing the best they can.”

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Did He Have Them?

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Weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found, and the debate still rages over whether Hussein fooled or cooperated with U.N. inspectors.

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President Bush could not have been more clear about the threat when he addressed the nation on the eve of war in March 2003.

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” Bush said.

After all, the CIA had reported in a classified National Intelligence Estimate the previous October that Iraq was fast rebuilding its nuclear weapons program and had “begun renewed production” of a witches’ brew of blister agents and deadly nerve gases.

The agency also warned that “all key aspects” of Iraq’s offensive bio-warfare program were active and that most were “larger and more advanced” than before. It said Iraq had built truck- or rail-mounted facilities to produce bacterial and toxin bio-warfare agents and possessed drone aircraft “probably intended” to spray germ weapons.

There is no question that Iraq had built a huge arsenal of illicit weapons in the past. But had it built them again?

Under U.N. Security Council resolutions passed after the Persian Gulf War, U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors scoured Iraq for seven years.

Despite Baghdad’s elaborate efforts to conceal evidence and deceive the U.N. teams, the inspectors found and destroyed huge stockpiles of nerve gases and lethal toxins, scores of long-range missiles and a massive covert program that was frighteningly close to building a nuclear weapon.

When U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq in late November 2002 after a four-year absence, they found no sign of recent production of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and no significant stockpiles of leftover arms.

In fact, most of Iraq’s major chemical plants, biotech labs and nuclear facilities were in ruins. The only major progress they saw was in Iraq’s proscribed missile program. Under U.N. order, Iraq destroyed more than 50 Al-Samoud 2 missiles in the weeks before the war.

But the inspectors also could not prove that other illicit weapons or delivery systems did not exist elsewhere in Iraq.

Many U.S. policymakers viewed the failure to find chemical and biological weapons or production facilities as proof that Hussein’s regime was hiding them -- as it had in the 1990s -- and defying the U.N. Four months after the inspectors returned, the United States invaded.

Once the war began, thousands of U.S. troops were required to wear special suits to protect against possible chemical or biological agents. The Pentagon warned that such attacks were likely as U.S. forces approached a series of chokepoints around Baghdad.

Special CIA-trained teams followed combat forces to assess any suspect weapons found. If they detected lethal chemicals or germs, they could call “mobile exploitation” teams to collect samples and conduct field tests. Those teams, in turn, could call in another group of experts to disable or eliminate the weapons.

But no illicit weapons were found. And with no backup plan to search further, no comprehensive effort was made in the early weeks to protect former weapons production facilities, laboratories or other sites where incriminating documents, computers, components or other crucial evidence might be stored.

As a result, widespread looting after the war crippled follow-up searches by the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a former Army field artillery brigade from Ft. Sill, Okla. Delays, disorganization, inadequate equipment, faulty intelligence and other problems also hampered the early hunt.

By late May, U.S. military “site survey teams” had visited more than 300 suspect facilities identified before the war by U.S. intelligence. In nearly every case, the sites had been bombed, looted or already visited by U.N. inspectors. Iraqi scientists interviewed by the teams or taken into custody all insisted that Baghdad’s chemical, biological and nuclear programs had been destroyed or abandoned long ago.

In June, the CIA officially joined the search. David Kay, a former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq and outspoken hawk before the war, was named special CIA advisor in charge of the newly created Iraq Survey Group. Rather than merely visiting suspect sites, his team sought to gather documents and other clues that might lead to weapons.

Some of the evidence was intriguing. The team found a clandestine network of labs and safe houses run by Iraqi intelligence, reference strains of several biological organisms from the 1980s, old equipment hidden in scientists’ homes, and documents showing that Iraq had sought to buy missiles from North Korea.

But the trails led nowhere and Kay grew frustrated. The CIA assigned only two Arabic-speaking clandestine officers to his group, and they were reassigned to counterinsurgency duties in November. By then, Kay had concluded that Iraq had destroyed or abandoned virtually all its chemical and biological weapons and large-scale production programs in the early 1990s and had made none since. It also had made no substantive effort to rebuild a nuclear weapons program, he believed.

“We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 28.

He blamed a variety of factors, including the dubious reliability of Iraqi defectors, the worst-case assumptions underlying U.S. intelligence analysis, and the difficulties of spying in a police state.

Experts now say a vast array of U.S. intelligence from Iraq, especially after 1998, suggested illegal weapons production or concealment activities but never provided ironclad evidence.

And analysts were reluctant to give Iraq the benefit of the doubt because Hussein had fooled them before. The CIA denied that anyone succumbed to White House or Pentagon pressure. But analysts knew that any finding exonerating Iraq would put them in conflict with senior administration officials.

A presidential commission, an internal CIA panel and two congressional intelligence oversight committees are investigating why the prewar intelligence was so flawed and whether analysts were pressured to elevate the threat.

The CIA insists that the jury is still out and that Kay’s replacement in Iraq may yet find convincing evidence that Hussein was building illicit weapons.