In Iraq, the Day After

Fragile is the term American officials rely on to describe this Iraq, and indeed, it is that. At this moment, the country feels as though it could recover, economically if not physically, blessed by oil reserves that are potentially the largest in the world. Crumbling, it feels as though it could just as well remain a powerless, pliant country buckling under its own weight, dependent on a United States that seems determined to dictate its future.

The spectrum between those poles relies on the question of power. The struggle for that power -- a series of elections this year is one avenue, and money, guns and repression are another, more familiar means -- pervades almost every aspect of life in Iraq today.

Fragile, repeat the Americans. Dangerous, say many Iraqis, bracing for more violence.

"Before the storm, there's always quiet," said Amal Salman, living with her family in Karrada, above a street lined with vendors hawking hats emblazoned with "Budweiser," "Wisconsin" and "Baylor Crew." A kiosk offered posters of Turkish soap operas that have become a sensation in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Arab world. Pictures of Hossam al-Rassam, a popular Iraqi singer, were in short supply.

When she was 13, Salman chronicled the fall of Hussein in her diary. "No one realizes they are gone, all of them, forever," she wrote in 2003. She stayed optimistic during Baghdad's darkest chapter. "The sun will set today, but it always rises again. Everything rises again," she said then. "I don't know how to express it, but I understand it."

Now 18, she worried.

"It's always most dangerous when it's calm," she said.

The Culture of the Shoe

Standing in Firdaus Square on April 9, 2003, the Marine recovery vehicle doing its part, it was difficult to imagine that the United States truly understood the country it had inherited that day. Iraq was a place brutalized by war and tyranny, imbued with ambivalence about the future, shaped by yearning for the past. It never abided by American preconceptions. It never hewed to the United States' construct of what a country should be.

In months, the unanticipated forces that would shape Iraq were soon unleashed -- a Shiite Muslim revival, disenfranchisement of Sunnis, the import of a radical strain of Islam, the hardening of sectarian and ethnic identities, and the onset of a lawless culture of men with guns. An Iraqi friend once called their legacy the culture of the shoe, known here as the kundura.

"When anyone is against you, when anyone has differences with me, I will put a kundura in his mouth, I will shove a kundura down his throat, I will hit him with a kundura, and so on," he said at the time. "We live in a kundura culture."

Today, many of those forces seem to have fitfully run their course.

"There is a disintegration in the entire sectarian establishment in Iraq," said Wamidh Nadhme, a political science professor sitting in the Adhamiyah quarter, over a leisurely lunch of a wintertime soup that mixed turnips with balls of ground meat. "Everyone now is trying to wash their hands of the blood that had stained them."