WANTING TO BE NORMAL:

No guarantees: Postwar Iraqis are struggling to light their homes and fuel their cars, but few would trade today's hardships for yesterday's dictator (Mindy Belz, 12/20/03, World)

Eight months after coalition forces took Baghdad and the lights went out, generators persist as a high-demand item. Mr. Yacoub returned to Baghdad from Jordan only a month ago with his wife and two young daughters. They have lived in this walkup only 10 days, but already the frustrations with power outages prompted him to pay $225 for a household generator. At home he discovered that the box had already been opened, and the generator wouldn't start.

He returned to the store. "It's yours now," the owner said. He would give Mr. Yacoub only $100 on return, then Mr. Yacoub had to buy another generator at full price. Back home, its engine sputtered and caught, only for Mr. Yacoub to discover he didn't have the right cable to connect his new power supply to the fuse box. Back to the store he went. And the late night retrofitting began. The cable finished, he yanked the engine to life, flicked a switch inside, and—lights at last.

Like his electricity, Mr. Yacoub and his family are back in Baghdad with fits and starts. Each new day in what U.S. administrator Paul Bremer likes to call "new Iraq" is a surprise, they say, and holds no guarantees. [...]

[R]esidents here believe they are safer than they were a few months ago, and certainly than they were under Saddam. "In the small towns there is already more control. Baghdad is bigger and has more immigrants, it is more insecure," said Mr. Almashmos. Like most Iraqis WORLD interviewed, he believes bombings are coming from foreigners with ties to al-Qaeda. "Iraqis don't kill other Iraqis like this," he said. He and others support the aggressive efforts of U.S. forces to go after terror cells.

"Every day you see people going to school and going to the store. They are fighting for their way of life. They are wanting to be normal," said Ghada.

Try as one might, it's hard to see how offering the Yacoubs this opportunity is a bad thing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2003 9:24 AM