The scale and seeming purposefulness of the sabotage has been the source of countless rumors. Iran's slick, twenty-four-hour Arabic-language news station—the only television available for weeks after the war—helped popularize one in particular. "The Christian right wing which controls Washington seeks to wipe out Eastern civilization," declared one commentator, adding that this evil intent was "based on the ideology of Francis Fukuyama that says ancient cultures have no value because America's superior culture has replaced them."

The vaunted accuracy of American bombing did not help the invader's reputation. When bombs strayed into civilian neighborhoods, it was assumed that these were deliberate targets. Leaving aside such "mistakes," the bombs also happened to destroy many of Baghdad's modern architectural showpieces. "Even Saddam's palaces, they were the property of the people, not of Saddam," complained a political scientist at Baghdad University.

Yet the loss must still be placed in the context of a land that has probably been ravaged more often by war than any other on earth. One of the world's oldest bodies of literature is the series of Sumerian laments for the destruction of the cities of Eridu, Nippur, Ur, Turin, Sumer, and Unug. Since its founding by the Caliph al-Mansour in 762 AD, Baghdad has itself been conquered by foreign armies no fewer than fifteen times, and razed to the ground more than once. Considering its fabled wealth and glory in medieval Islam, the city has markedly fewer historic monuments than, say, Cairo, Damascus, or Istanbul...

...I find Karim on a noisy street corner outside the hotel where he is staying, looking bemused and slightly uneasy. A former Communist, he fled the country three decades ago. He runs a publishing house in Damascus that has long been a haven for Iraq's exiled intellectuals. Now on the fringe of the furious politicking among Baghdad's myriad new parties, he has not been encouraged. Between fundamentalists intent on seizing power and Baathists determined to keep their clammy grip, and amid tensions between the "insiders" and those coming from abroad, there seems little room for dreamy liberals of the old school.

Naseer Ghadire, a young writer who has never left Iraq, tends to agree. Intense, thin, and with a passion for French philosophy and the Beatles, Ghadire spent six years at a Shiite religious seminary and three in prison before deciding Nietzsche was right about God. "No one wants to admit it," he says. "But the fact is that the only ones who really fought Saddam were either religious people or a handful of atheist intellectuals. The rest all felt that whatever his faults, he represented them, he expressed their nature."

Ghadire's own loathing for the fallen regime is unquestionable. And yet he says that just before the war, he confessed to himself that he had no desire to be "liberated." "It would mean I would have nothing to define myself against, nothing to fight against. I would have to be responsible, to think of living a 'normal' life." And besides, he adds, the sight of American soldiers slaps him like an insult...

...What makes the picture doubly uneasy is the Iraqis' own conflicted feelings. It is hardly possible for them to like America when they consider Washington's record of first supporting Saddam, then punishing his people with sanctions, then bombing the place to get rid of him. Yet neither do they have much liking for anyone else —none of the neighbors, and certainly not fellow Arabs who defended Saddam in the name of Arab honor. The Americans are an obvious affront to national pride, and perhaps even more acutely to religious pride. But they are also the only guarantee of security just now, and of the return to normality that is inherent in the promise to rejoin the wider world.

The ambivalence cuts across ethnic divisions. Kurds regard the two Bushes as national heroes, yet they fear that America may again betray them as it has several times in living memory. Christians yearn for Western protection, yet worry that the end of Baathist secularism may have uncorked the wicked genie of political Islam. The Shiite clergy, despite schisms over their proper role in politics, deliver a surprisingly uniform message. America has served its only purpose by getting rid of Saddam. Its army is here at our sufferance, and sooner or later we will make them leave.