In Iraq, the Day After

Saddam Hussein's Baghdad was a testament to his megalomania, a strange sprawl with a disfigured sense of grandeur. After his fall, the city was stripped bare, revealing a modern creation of brick and mud, vulnerable like its people. It became a city of lanterns amid the blackouts, a city of ghosts shadowed by fear, a city that was mahjoura, forsaken. The architecture of occupation soon followed, falling like a curtain -- dull, unadorned concrete barriers colored in the somber gray of an overcast sky.

Baghdad today is a city of those walls.

The neighborhood of Dora looks like a maximum-security prison, complete with a rusted watchtower. Sadiyah has but one entrance, where waiting traffic sometimes snakes a mile. Sadr City is enclosed, then divided into three hamlets. Amariyah is surrounded. So are Hurriyah and Shuala, Bayaa and Amal. No one can see inside. No one can look out.

In two years, only the faces of the walls have changed.

They now declare the swagger of Iraqi army units: "The Lion Brigade remains a lion," graffiti reads. They warn: "Respect and be respected." They celebrate: "Long live the new Iraq." They serve as a canvas for murals that forgo Iraq's more contemporary Arab past for its older Sumerian and Babylonian glory. They carry the advertisements of the travel agencies, moneychangers and realty offices they now protect. They bear the floral patterns that, not long ago, were more familiar on martyrs' posters.

Most of all, the walls conceal.

"A ruined state" was the term Iraq's parliament speaker had for what the Americans have left behind those walls. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said it in anger after he resigned in December. But the phrase resonates, in both Iraq as a whole, a weary landscape dominated in hues of brown, the color of poverty, and in Baghdad, a city where everything these days seems twisted or torn, bent or broken, snared in barbed wire that has lost its sheen. Every median has its piles of dirt and rubble, often both. Every curb has its soggy trash.

This war's end feels more truce than treaty, more respite than reconciliation. There is no revival or renaissance, no celebration. It manifests itself most in the simple lifting of a siege.

In a roundabout once known as Ali Baba Square, water occasionally flows from a bronze fountain portraying Kahramana, the slave girl who outwitted the 40 thieves of "A Thousand and One Nights." Boys play pool on tables lining the lazy Tigris River. Trucks along Abu Nawas Street bring flopping fish destined for plates of masgoof, an Iraqi specialty.

In Firdaus Square, where Hussein's statue once gave way to American tanks whose barrels read "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust" and U.S. soldiers blared Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" over Humvee speakers, two students, Hussein al-Abbas and Amjad Abdel Hamza, took pictures of each other near the swings and park benches.

"For the memories," Abbas said.

Behind them, a poster reads: "Law builds the nation."