But others look at the daily violence and long for the comparative stability of an iron-fisted dictator. "What have we gained from it all?" asked Tariq Ibrahim, 59, a retired Oil Ministry surveyor. "We had more security before than we do now. If you weren't against the regime, they wouldn't bother you, so you just carried on in your life."
The rough game plan of the United States was to send in the military to remove Hussein and then send in cash to buy peace through reconstruction. But that plan has sputtered and stalled because of the violence. Of $24.1 billion that Congress allocated in the past two years, only about $5.2 billion had been spent by the beginning of November, according to U.S. government figures. Projects built or paid for by the Americans are sabotaged and destroyed by the Iraqi insurgents.
An Iraqi police officer stands guard near a polling station in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. Shiites account for an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's population.
(Ghaith Abdul-ahad -- Getty Images)
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Power plants were supposed to be churning out 6,000 megawatts by now, according to the Defense Department. Instead, slightly more than half of that -- 3,289 megawatts -- was available this month. Houses get, on average, 8 1/2 hours of electricity a day, according to the Iraqi government. But many Iraqis dispute that, saying the daily average is closer to two or three hours.
Oil production, Iraq's chief source of income, is below prewar levels because of threats against workers and attacks on oil and gas lines. There were two such attacks in January 2004; in November, 30 were reported. Refineries are still limping. Iraq must import twice as much gasoline as it produces. Iraqis who need to buy gasoline can expect to spend a full day in lines that stretch for blocks. For those who do not want to wait, black-market entrepreneurs sell it on the roadside at 10 times the price at the pump.
Hospitals, starved of equipment and supplies under a 12-year embargo, have improved only slowly. The U.S. government is funding the construction of 87 health centers and renovation of 17 hospitals.
Most damning, Iraqis say, is the lack of work. Various estimates put the unemployment rate between 25 percent and 48 percent; some economists say it is closer to 70 percent. Formerly state-run factories sit idle without power, and private companies are deterred by corruption and violence in the streets.
To many Iraqis, those streets are home. Tens of thousands of Fallujah residents remain outside the city, their homes destroyed or their fears too great to return to a place battered by fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents three months ago.
American forces in Iraq now stand at a postwar peak of 150,000, along with 25,000 troops from other countries. Polls indicate that 80 percent of Iraqis want foreign forces to leave, but withdrawal depends mainly on replacing U.S. soldiers with Iraqi security forces. The total number of Iraqi security personnel has slowly climbed; U.S. and Iraqi officials say there are 125,000 partly or fully trained Iraqi personnel on the street. But their performance under fire has been mixed.
"Not many Americans want to go on missions with the Iraqi National Guard," said an Army captain and West Point graduate responsible for patrols on Haifa Street, a particularly lawless section of Baghdad. "They are scared they might be shot. The ING tend to shoot everywhere."
The Iraqi guardsmen and police have reason to be nervous. They are targeted, hastily trained and under-equipped. Fewer than one-third of the police had bulletproof vests as of last fall. Many wear black masks so they will not be recognized on the street. More than 3,500 have been killed in the last 20 months.
For average Iraqis, the political violence is only part of the story. As law enforcement collapsed at the end of the war, crime exploded. Kidnappings for ransom are so numerous that most are not reported. Murder, robbery and theft are commonplace. According to a compilation by the Brookings Institution, as many Iraqis are killed by common crime as by political crime.
"With the lack of security measures, disorganized crime became organized crime," said Hania Mufti, Baghdad director of Human Rights Watch. "Then, at some point, there was a merging between organized crime and political crime."
The result is misery for Iraqis. "The election was supposed to be happy. We did not expect to hold them under these conditions," bemoaned the country's justice minister, Malik Douhan Hasan.
No wonder, then, that some Iraqis are afraid and cynical.
"I am not going anywhere" on election day, said Ibrahim, the retired Oil Ministry worker. "I will close the door of my home and will not open it till after the elections are over. I have stocked food, got a generator for electric power, and I will watch everything on TV. If I go out and something happens and I get hurt, what for?"
The wonder, perhaps, is that so many Iraqis do want to vote. A survey conducted in late December and early January for the International Republican Institute found that 80 percent of Iraq's approximately 14 million eligible voters intend to go to the polls.
"Of course I am going to vote," snapped Maha Salem, 35, a teacher buying fruit at a stand in a neighborhood called New Baghdad City. "Let me tell you something. Life has become so difficult under the occupation and the terrorists' operations that we have to say enough is enough."
"This is my fate," she added, "and I have to decide it."
Special correspondents Sahar Nageeb, Bassam Sebti and Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
