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The streets of Baghdad

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

April 23, 2004

Baghdad, Iraq - My first full day back. So what seems to have changed in six months? The electricity is still off half the time. In Baghdad, you get power for three hours; then it's off for three hours. Gasoline is still short. People have to buy it on alternate days, depending whether their license plate ends in an odd or even number.

Baghdad is still a huge traffic jam. Roads that American officers planned to re-open in October are still closed. That's mainly because the occupation forces fear they will be more vulnerable to attack in their Baghdad stronghold, the so-called "Green Zone," which sprawls across the city center.

Imagine a Manhattan seized up because some foreign army had taken over and walled off 25 or 30 square blocks of Midtown. The daily frustration and anger of a semi-crippled city is what the Green Zone causes here. Knowing this, U.S. authorities planned last fall to shrink the zone drastically, re-opening highways and an important bridge across the Tigris River.

But the cast-concrete walls, earthen berms and razor-wire hedges that protect Americans and block Baghdad traffic have not been pulled back. In many places they have expanded.

I was startled at heavy new fortifications around the main entrance to the Green Zone. In October, visitors to the seat of power in Iraq used to walk up to be registered, searched for weapons, and allowed to enter. Now the entrance accepts only military traffic and its fortifications -- walls, razor wire and towers at the gate with machine guns on top -- spill out into the street.

Such new defenses often mark the spot of a recent car bombing. At the Green Zone entrance, it happened Jan. 18 -- a truck bomb that blasted dead about 20 people and injured 120.

These are only first impressions after six months, but they are not good.

America's presence in Iraq made a big improvement in people's lives the moment it toppled Saddam Hussein -- but it's harder to see how U.S. rule has added much in the way of real improvements for ordinary Iraqis in the long, grinding year since then