Quietly Surviving in A Not-So-New Iraq

The regime's grip was both brutal and banal. Yousif told me about relatives and friends who had come under suspicion. Some had disappeared, some were dead, some were in exile.

He also described what had happened after he established an e-mail account with the state-run Internet service provider: His messages were taking days to reach their recipients abroad. When he complained, officials told him to write more simply to make it easier for the intelligence service to read his e-mail.

As we talked, U.S. forces were beginning to arrive in Kuwait, and an invasion seemed likely. I waited until the end of our time together to ask Yousif whether it was a good idea for President Bush to topple Hussein. I remember how trapped he looked by the question. "We want change," he said, "but we want it a different way."

The rest of his answer became the ending to the profile of Yousif -- whose identity I shielded by using the pseudonym Ahmed -- I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, my employer at the time:

" 'They always say, let the Iraqi people decide,' he says. 'That's like telling a man in jail to free himself. He can't.'

"The only thing Iraqis can do, Ahmed says, is wait. They have no influence over the US. They can't change their government themselves. 'We are like cockroaches feeding on sewage,' he says. 'We survive.' "

I saw Yousif briefly in August 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion. He showed off his newly built house, a stylish villa with a circular atrium decorated with a stained-glass window. He described how his sons had explored two ransacked houses in his posh Baghdad neighborhood. The intelligence service had used one building to store weapons and the other as a repository for files, including cassette tapes of international phone calls to or from Iraq.

Like many Iraqis, Yousif was still giddy that the Saddam time was over. Baghdad's mood was lighter; the anti-American insurgency was just gaining momentum.

I was happy to visit Yousif again this past March. He is now the general manager of his own firm, which imports and sells seeds, fertilizers and other agricultural and industrial goods. His company's sales to the private sector were $1.1 million in 2006, he told me; he expects them to reach $2 million this year. "I have an optimistic feeling," he said.

But the post-invasion conduct of the Americans continued to dismay him. When militaries topple governments, they usually maintain order, he observed. "But the Americans, they came here, and they break all the walls for the people, and all the laws fall down, and they let the people like this, so the people live like in a jungle."

When a client fails to pay for goods or services, Yousif asks mutual friends or members of the client's family or tribe to intercede. In the absence of a viable court system, shame-by-network generally makes people pay up. "You can close the book after a while," he said.

Yousif had once been pained at the thought of U.S. intervention; he now appeals for its continuation. If there is a rapid U.S. pullout, he said, "the scenario is very clear: The Kurds immediately will spin out. In the south, the Shia will spin out immediately, from eastern Baghdad to the south." The splintering could be avoided, he argued, if the Americans continue shepherding Iraqi politicians toward new elections and help them to build better security forces. "If you decide to come to this, you have to continue it; this is a commitment," he concluded.