Concern about deteriorating law and order is such that some women have stopped driving to work or coming at all. Others have given up their jobs to accompany children, who used to go to school by themselves.
"I'm nervous when I go to the office. I don't know anyone who's been robbed, but I just feel unsafe," said Jinan Salim, a chemical engineer, as she waited for a bus. New police and security guards are being trained, but not enough are yet in place.
Superficially, life on Baghdad's streets looks bustlingly normal. Three-quarters of the shops are open, and pavements in middle-class areas are piled high with newly delivered stocks of TV sets, satellite dishes, fridges, fans, and air-conditioners. But the power supply on which they depend is erratic. Repeated blackouts keep people's nerves on edge in the fierce heat of summer.
Even in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq the economy has been hit hard. Lucrative revenues from cross-border trade have dried up and the region's 13 percent slice of national oil revenues under the oil for food program is under threat. Civil servants and other workers have gone unpaid and unemployment is rising fast.
Hundreds of civil servants in Baghdad have lost their jobs. The closing of the information ministry threw the "minders" who spied on foreign journalists out of work but thousands of translators and editors in magazines and broadcasting who did a non-repressive, professional job are also on the street. Some have found work in the spate of new newspapers which have emerged.
Three months is too short a period to restore a war-damaged country and a society repressed by 30 years of political tyranny. But the ease with which people give their opinions and the wide range of views expressed in the newspapers are a dramatic sign of change. They also undermine the coalition's claims that Iraqis need time to be allowed to govern themselves.
Iraqis want the coalition to help to provide security and restore an economy crippled by sanctions. On the central issue of governance they want to do things on their own.
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