PETER ARNETT'S BAGHDAD

BAGHDAD --- I was awakened as the sun was rising by the rumble of a bomb blast that echoed across Baghdad. It was my second morning back in the city following a summer vacation, and I had gone to bed the previous evening after a dinner with Iraqi friends who insisted to me that things were better than before.

Then came the explosion, and I soon found it was a bomb that had been planted on the north side of the Aike Hotel several blocks away. The Baghdad bureau of the US TV news company NBC was located at the hotel, and was clearly the bomb target, and while no Americans died in the explosion, a local security guard was killed and others wounded. This was the third bombing in successive days.

When I returned to my hotel, the 17-story Palestine, where many Americans stay, I found that large construction site cranes were moving 16-foot tall concrete blocks into position to build a protective wall around the hotel. More US soldiers than usual were in neighboring streets. By late afternoon the wall was completed. A journalist colleague told me matter-of -factly, "We're next".

No, I decided, things are definitely not better in Baghdad.

When I had left the Iraqi capital early this summer the city was flat on its back, as desperate as Tokyo and Berlin after World War Two and Seoul after the Korean War. The people were shell-shocked from the war's bombings --- and from the looting and the criminality and terror attacks that followed. I had been covering the Iraqi crisis for the previous seven months and I had grown tired of the heightening cloud of fear and apprehension that had spread through the city. And I grew depressed watching American soldiers being killed as they struggled unsuccessfully to bring stability to Baghdad. The United States military occupation and post-war political management of Iraq was clearly failing.

But while I was tired of the war and could leave for awhile, not so the Iraqi people, the 25 million souls swept up in a conflict most of whom had no part in causing. With the borders to neighboring countries sealed tight against them, Iraqis had no where to go as the crisis deepened. They awaited their fate with a mixture of disappointment, anger and hoplessness.

When I came back to Baghdad this week I looked up old friends and acquaintances. I wanted to find out if they had survived the terrible car bombings and criminality of the summer. And I wanted their report card on Iraq, now that nearly six months have passed since President George W. Bush prematurely declared victory on May 1 in the war against Saddam Hussein.

One of my friends is a businessman, another a street sweeper, a third a primary school teacher, a fourth a driver, a fifth an intepreter. None of them has a direct role to play in Baghdad's future. They have no role in the administration of the city or its politics. But they are part of the silent majority of the population whose opinions and attitudes will ultimately determine the success or failure of United States efforts in Iraq to stabilize the nation and bring prosperity and democracy.

My favorite family is the O'runs who I met a decade ago when I featured the father, Salman, a street sweeper, in one of my TV stories. They live in a simple home in the crowded Sheik Omar district of central Baghdad, and I was concerned about their safety during the war because they were near an important target area. The parents and six children survived the heavy bombing that rattled their windows and walls each night by hiding on the stairway while their 17-year-old daughter Noora read the Islamic holy book, the koran, out loud.

The father was unemployed in the first months after the war because no one was paying street sweepers. And he remains unemployed today, with the rent due, one of the estimated 70 percent of all Iraqis out of work because of the economic dislocation of the war. Salman told me he was hoping for tips from pilgrims from neighboring countries making their annual visits to the nearby Sheik Omar mosque which is a favored islamic shrine, but the increasingly dangerous situation in Baghdad stopped the visits. So the O'runs like millions of other Iraqis have no money to pay the rent and very little food.

But what is worse is a tragedy that has plunged the family into gloom. Their daughter Noora was engaged to a young policeman Raof Jassim, a childhood sweatheart, and they had planned a simple wedding later this year. But he was swept up in the wave of violence that was descending upon Baghdad during the summer. The young man was taken by kidnappers and was murdered when his parents could not pay the ransom demands. In addition to kidnapping there have been escalations in other violent crimes such as rape and murders that the newly-recruited Iraqi police force is only now managing to contain.

Noora was dressed in mourning black when I met the family the other day. She had just returned from her weekly trip to the cemetery in the Bakuba district where her fiancee is buried, in itself a harrowing journey in these dangerous times. Her father Salman observed angrily that "it is not safe to live in this country anymore." Like millions of Iraqis, Salman had passively accepted the Saddam Hussein regime, and rejoiced when it was overthrown because he believed in American promises to quickly rebuild Irtaq.

"Saddam Hussein took everything for himself and gave little to us," Salman said. "But he did give us security. Where is it now. And where are the jobs?" A few hours later in another part of the city I noticed a new new slogan scrawled on a factory wall, "There is no security without Saddam". That was wishful thinking. Saddam Hussein remains on the run but one thing is certain in Iraq's uncertain future, his days of power are over.

As I travelled around Baghdad meeting with my friends, I noticed some positive changes from early summer. The city itself is cleaner. Shopkeepers seem to have got their pride back. Streets have been cleared of garbage, dust and war debris. Store windows have been polished clean. There is still not too much to buy, but there is an air of business enthusiasm not visible a few weeks ago.

Iraqi policemen are now everywhere. And my driver, Yasir Achmed, tells me that unlike the abusive officers of the old Saddam regime, these American-trained police are courteous to the public. Yasir told me,"The traffic police will still give you a ticket, but they don't threaten to send you to jail if you don't give them a bribe."

There are also mainly well-polished automobiles on the streets, unlike the unsightly decrepit, patched up cars that clogged highways early summer. The reason is that Baghdad motorists are using their best vehicles because there is less a threat of car hijackings. My business friend Thamer Saadi Bunia had his son's SUV hijacked in in June, and his own Mercedes survived an attemped hijackiing in July. "But these days, no worries on the road," he told me. "And I even drive in the late evenings, something I would never do earlier in the year."

But these are essentially surface improvements. Underneath, the situation has worsened. The United States assumed when it launched the war in March that the Iraqi population would welcome them with open arms because of the assumption that everyone hated the former regime. But the welcome has failed to happen. The Americans are failing to win Iraqi hearts and minds.

I've noticed since my return that there is little visible commeraderie in the streets of Baghdad between the American troops based here and the local people. At the time I left on my vacation, hordes of kids routinely hung around American military checkpoints and patrols, begging for chewing gum and selling canned sodas. The soldiers happily bantered around with them.

Today they're not smiling at each other anymore. For the Americans, too many of their soldiers have been killed at close range by Iraqi killers pretending to be friendly. The favored techniques: hand grenades dropped off overpasses on to passing humvees, assassinations at close range in crowds, or at greater distances by remote controlled bombs.

More than 80 Americans have died in action since the war officially ended in May, a circumstance that US officials blame on Saddam loyalists or international terrorists intent on discrediting or defeating the military occupation. They are no doubt part of the violence. The major car bombings seem appear to be from those sources. And the continuing conflict in the so-called "Sunni Triangle" west and north of Baghdad is clearly a last-ditch effort at resistance by Saddam's diehard loyalists.

But there is clearly another element at work here, a growing resentment amongst the people over America's unfilled promises for reconstruction and political development. The population in Iraq is an armed one, with rifles common in all households. In addition, scores of thousands of Iraqi soldiers just melted away from the battlefields with their guns during the American advance on Baghdad in March and April. So the military expertise is there, and so apparently is the incentive to attack, with the rapid climb of US casualties to show for it.

One final element in the American failure to win the hearts and minds here is the inevitable confrontations between nervous foreign troops with little knowledge of the culture or the language, and an exciteable population impatient for the promised improvements to their lives. There have been enough incidents of mistaken, or accidental and sometimes deliberate actions against innocent civilians to create enormous suspicion of the US presence. The armed American soldiers in their helmets and body armor are looking more menacing than friendly to the Iraqis.

And what applies to the Americans applies to other foreign troops. Iraqis are well aware that President George W. Bush is turning to the international community to help alleviate the significant stress caused by the military occupation and political management of Iraq. American officials are endeavoring to re-engage the United Nations in Iraq reconstruction in an effort to persuade nations such as South Korea to provide combat forces in considerable strength to lower the American burden.

But there is no reason to believe that other foreign forces will be more welcome than the Americans. British troops have taken casualties in the south of the country, and the headquarters of the UN itself in Baghdad has been attacked twice by car bombers in recent weeks. Iraqis from Governing Council members to the man on the street say they prefer the recruitment and deployment of more Iraqi troops and police forces than foreigners.

My interpreter Ali Barari tells me that bringing more foreign troops to Iraq would eat up important financial resources

without bringing the desired security improvements. "What Iraq needs are more Iraqi troops, not foreigners. Our police are stabilizing Baghdad, our army can stabilize the countryside," Ali told me.

My businessman friend Thamer who travels to neighboring countries, agrees that the Americans should leave Baghdad in the hands of the Iraqis. But he does see the need for US forces to give broad security support for Iraq along its borders and in the sunni triangle. "Let's face it, we are ill prepared for the general defense of our country. We need the Americans to give us our protective umbrella for years to come," Thamer told me.

President Bush's stubborn insistence on a predominant role for the United States in Iraq reflects his administration's vision of a new world order, a pax America, a view that has emerged from the crisis of 9/11. This justifies the strategy of pre-emptive war, launched without direct provocation. For this United States government, the Iraqi war and its bloody aftermath is the most important it has fought since Vietnam. While his support at home is beginning to waver, most Americans buy into Bush's argument that Iraq is a crisis that has to be resolved in the United States favor: to lose in Iraq is an outcome that would be disastrous to the region and to America's reputation.

Comparing the Iraqi involvement with the Vietnam War is becoming a tempting one for military analysts, particularly the earlier period of Vietnam in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I covered the Vietnam war from beginning to end. In Vietnam the struggle was against international communism, not international terrorism, and it centered initially on the battle to "win the hearts and minds" of the people, a phrase that originated in Vietnam and is being repeated in Iraq.

The Vietnam war was unpopular with most of the world. The US could muster up combat troop support only from South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Like Iraq, Vietnam was also seen as a must-win war for the United States. To loose in Vietnam, the Americans argued, was to lose all of Southeast Asia to the communists, just as to lose in Iraq would mean the region being engulfed in terrorism.

The initial American military efforts were aimed at creating an effective South Vietnamese army, but when this failed American troops were sent in to fight the communists. In Iraq the green troops of the Iraqi army have yet to prove they can fight effectively against the resistance.

As the United States role grew in Vietnam, policy makers justified the committment by talking of creating a "new South Korea" in South Vietnam, the country that had emerged strongly from the Korean War in the early 1950s. The US talks today of creating a "democratic" Iraq that would be a positive example to the authoritarian nations of the region.

Some critics saw Vietnam's offshore oil potential as one reason for America's interest in Vietnam, just as Iraq's oil is seen as reason for US efforts in Iraq today. Vietnam's oil potential has not been realized, Iraq's has. As the Vietnam war continued, Americans at home began complaining bitterly about the increasing costs in troops and money.

The big difference between the Vietnam and Iraqi wars is that the first was launched in a vain attempt to derail a nationalist, post-colonial revolution while the second was to overthrow an enfeebled, discredited dictatorship.

I've covered twenty wars in my reporting career, and the story of Iraq is as tragic as any of them. More people died in Vietnam, and the wars of Afghanistan and Beirut were longer. But the Iraqi people were led for 30 years through three wars by a brutal regime that demanded complete allegiance and sacrifice.

The United States lost a chance to destroy the Baghdad regime after the Gulf War in 1991, but for reasons not yet adequately explained it let Saddam survive. This past decade has been most punishing for the people here because strict international sanctions were divised to cripple the country. In this way, it was believed, Saddam Hussein would be overthrown by an angry population, but in fact Saddam prospered while his people were paupered. And now as we have seen, even with Saddam gone from power, their misery continues.

I have painted a desperate picture of Baghdad today, and it is an accurate one. But one must always take into account the human capacity for defying crisis. My second day back in Baghdad had begun with the roar of a bomb blast at a journalists' hotel. It ended late evening at a wedding party in the Palestine Hotel, where handsome Said Hasan wed pretty Wasn Ali as a score of guests applauded and a local band made wedding sounds.

The whole party had walked three blocks to the hotel because vehicles are banned in view of the security scare. The band played on as the bride in her flowering wedding gown and her tuxedo-clad husband were frisked by the security men. They walked on past the towering concrete protection walls and the US tanks and into the hotel and their reception.

I walked outside and saw confetti strewn on the dusty, bullet pock- marked streets around the hotel. Life does go on.

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