By Howard LaFranchi - Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Before I left my home in Maryland for a month of reporting in Iraq, I asked my three children to send a greeting to the three daughters of our Baghdad bureau’s driver, whom I got to know during an earlier stint. The two younger children sent nice drawings and "hello from America," but my 14-year-old son sent a longer letter. One sentence in it surprised me: "I’m sorry about what’s happening in your country," he wrote, "but I hope it will be better soon."

That simple sentiment from one kid to others he didn’t know has come back to me repeatedly as I’ve met with dozens of Iraqis in formal interviews and in chance encounters on the streets.

The gratitude felt by most Iraqis for the removal of Saddam Hussein remains, but has been offset in many ways by the country’s deteriorating security situation. Violence that before was hidden in the hated regime’s torture chambers and killing fields has been replaced by a more public and indiscriminate variety.

Increasingly, Iraqis blame America for this violence – after all, it didn’t exist before the Americans came – tempting more of them to wish US soldiers would go away. That sense of American responsibility for Iraq’s deterioration trickled down to a 14-year-old in Maryland who felt compelled to say “sorry” for the state of affairs.

How can America address the current slide, in which it keep getting more blame for the bad and less credit for the good?

One way, some Iraqis suggest, is for the US to set a date for the departure of its troops, and stick to it. Get through January’s planned elections – which most Iraqis look forward to, despite the risks, as the country’s first-ever democratic elections – declare “mission accomplished” so that American blood and treasure will not have been expended in vain, and go. It may fall short of an idealistic picture of a free and prosperous Iraq as model for the entire Middle East, but it will be an accomplishment, if a more realistic one.

Iraqis seem to understand there are risks to this scenario. What if, without the prop of the US military, the country’s factions are unable to get along and sink into more bloodshed, possibly even civil war?

Some Iraqis say that won’t happen because their countrymen and women want a strong nation, and they understand that in the modern world a country divided among factions – or even split up into several smaller countries – would certainly be weaker. People talk about Israel wanting a weak Iraq, but they also say that most of Iraq’s other neighbors also prefer something weak next door, if not in destabilizing turmoil.
Others say Iraqis, after nearly a century of a nationhood that was created by foreign decree, and three decades of a dictatorship that perpetuated a false stability, must be allowed to sort things out for themselves.

I asked my driver what he thought of all this discussion, what he thought the Americans should do to turn "sorry" to "you’re welcome" and end this experience as Iraqis’ friends.

First, he said, the troops should leave. "American soldiers not bad," he said, "good men from a good people. But no one wants another country’s soldiers on his streets." That echoed what I’d been hearing from many, but not all, Iraqis.

And what about the risk of Iraq collapsing into Iraqi-on-Iraqi war?

Clicking his tongue and shaking his head, he said, “I am sure that will not happen. Problems, yes. But look,” he said, extending his ring finger. “My wife is Shiite. I am Sunni. My grandfather married Kurdish. It’s like this in all Iraq. So problems, but no war.”

That may seem naive to some, yet it carried a certain hopeful wisdom. As did a letter he brought from his daughters for me to take home to my children. (One side is in English, the other in the original Arabic, in script that will amaze them).

“We hope also that all Iraqis and Americans would be friends some day,” they wrote. Along with that came hellos to all my children’s friends, the kind of thing it seems kids around the world would say. Having opened with “By the name of merciful God” – not something most kids I know would think to write – it then ended with the single word “Peace.”

By Howard LaFranchi
Staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor

When times are rough and unsure, human nature prompts us to seek out the things that are comfortable and habitual, to reassure ourselves that amid the chaos there is still some normalcy. To reassure us, I guess, that there is life amid the turmoil.

That’s what I see going on in Baghdad night after night, despite the car bombings, kidnappings, and street battles that are on everybody’s mind here and which suggest that day by day things are getting worse. Families head out for ice cream, for meals in jam-packed open-air restaurants, to haggle over a new washing machine in a street-side market.

On Thursday night, the start of the weekend in Baghdad, cars idle in bumper-to-bumper traffic on commercial Karada Street. Barber shops spiff up young men seated in rows of chairs, friends hang out at juice shops that squeeze “cocktails” of banana, pomegranate, melon, and orange, while shawarma stalls shave meat for snack seekers.

It’s the end of summer in Baghdad – schools take up on Oct. 2 – so added to the stir-crazy security situation is last-minute loafing before serious work starts up again.

Friends and family back home ask me if there’s anything like normal life in Baghdad these days. I respond affirmatively and offer as exhibits A and B Faqma’s ice cream shop and the Al Mahba outdoor restaurant.

Patrons at Faqma’s line up a dozen deep to sample a Baghdad tradition: crisp, fresh waffle cones filled with homemade ice cream. Behind plate glass, white-uniformed young men dip cones, pull on ice cream machines, and man waffle stations. There are no chairs inside, so patrons sit street-side on makeshift benches. Anxiety over security isn’t evident – until you stop to talk to people. Families say they come out, get their treats, and hurry straight home as quickly as possible.

Ahmed Ibrahim, Faqma’s co-owner, says the crowds can’t make up for what their ledgers tell them: Business is down. What’s more, he adds, life in general was better before the war. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Iraq that the country is better off today than under the old regime, Ibrahim says Iraq’s chaos can be laid at the feet of US President George W. Bush – and his face hardens as he says this. Then a smile begins to crack. “Now,” he says, “we might have to kidnap you, because if the Americans get word through your writings of what we are saying, they will come close us down.”

I play along. “Not to worry,” I say, “Americans love the solace that ice cream provides as much as Iraqis, so if they did come here to arrest you, they’d quickly forget their mission once they got one of your sundaes.”

In another neighborhood, it’s the Mahba restaurant where Baghdadis are doing their best to enjoy life’s diversions. The tables are all open-air. The half-dozen next to the street are occupied by groups of men, while behind a wall and in a garden of trees festooned with garlands of cheap holiday lights, tables are occupied by families. Even small children are running circles around tables at 10 o’clock at night.

Most diners have come here for plates of masgouf, a river carp and traditional weekend meal.
Fathers with small children in tow visit the tiled tank where the fish swim, to select the right specimen for the meal. The choice made, the maitre d’hotel nets the fish and drops it on a concrete slab, whacking it with a wooden club. A small boy then scoops it up and drops it in a scale, which a waiter carefully reads to calculate the price. The chef then scales and splits the fish to charbroil it over wood coals.

Other habits have been shaken by Baghdads new realities. But the ritual of the masgouf meal remains the same.