Oil But No Gasoline, Rivers But No Water

By Bobby Ghosh

In Baghdad, you learn to savor small pleasures. When the weather turned unexpectedly cool one recent evening after a long sequence of 113DEG-plus days, people emptied out of their houses, braving the ever present threat of violence in order to enjoy a brief reprieve from the heat. As I stood in the front yard of TIME's Baghdad bureau, feeling the welcome breeze against my face, I asked my Iraqi colleague Harith if a sharp drop in temperature was common for the month of June. He shook his head. "This is a gift from our God," he said. "He knows many of us have no electricity, so he gives us a cool breeze so we can sleep at night."

These days, that's one of the few mercies Iraqis can hope to get. When President Bush addressed Americans last week on the state of the war in Iraq, he said that in the year since the U.S. returned sovereignty to an Iraqi government, "we have made significant progress." But here in Iraq, healthy indicators are hard to come by. Everyday life in much of the country has deteriorated in measurable ways. According to the Brookings Institution, Iraq's power system generated less electricity in June 2005 than in June 2004; crude-oil production is down, as are revenues from oil exports; the mile-long lines at gas stations are back after subsiding a few months ago. Many Baghdad neighborhoods have had little or no water supply for several weeks. It's small wonder that Harith was so grateful for the brief temperature drop: his neighborhood routinely gets less than four hours of electricity a day.

While few Iraqi residents would probably say their living conditions have improved over the past year, they do have a new object of ire: Iraqis now blame their woes as much on the government elected in January as on the Americans. That's encouraging news, a sign that Iraqis realize they can't depend on the U.S. to solve all their problems. But it's also a reminder of how far Iraq has to go. In his speech last week, Bush said that "the best way to complete the mission is to help Iraqis build a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." A year after the handover of sovereignty, none of those conditions are close to being met. The government has been promising an improved power supply but has failed to deliver. It fingers insurgents for blowing up water pipelines but seems unable to repair the damage. It claims success in operations against the rebels, but their ability to strike in the heart of Baghdad is undiminished. The mood of high optimism that followed the Jan. 30 election has long since disappeared. "We have oil," says Hamid, an Iraqi who is TIME's security coordinator, "but no gasoline. We have rivers but no water. We have guns but no security."

It's all taking a toll on Iraq's citizens. While most maintain a remarkable resilience in the face of the suffering, there is also a growing sense of bitterness. Hamid, for instance, used to be a wedding singer and hopes one day to become a kindergarten music teacher; it has been months since we last heard him sing. Iraqis who work for foreign companies, especially American ones, are in double jeopardy--branded as traitors and infidels by terrorist groups and identified as lucrative targets by kidnapping gangs. A year ago, we would have accompanied this article with a picture of our Baghdad staff members, and we would have told you their real names. Now we can do neither of those things for fear of endangering them and their families.

Perhaps the most telling indicator of Iraqis' state of mind is what they watch on TV. A year ago, when TIME's Iraqi staff members gathered around the office TV set for a break, they tended to watch Lebanese music videos and Egyptian sitcoms. These days, they almost always watch the news, usually on one of the many Arabic channels that offer endless images of death and desperation in Iraq. So grim is the mood that even escapist entertainment provides no relief. "The news is our life," says Rashid, one of my Iraqi co-workers. "And our life is the news." The sobering reality for the Bush Administration is that it's becoming harder to persuade Iraqis that either one is going to get much better.