After a few minutes, a very scrawny American guy came out of the nearby house and walked over to greet us. He was casually, even sloppily, dressed with longish lank hair and teeth that reminded me of late-season corn on the cob. There was something decidedly creepy about him. Certainly, he didn't inspire any strong feelings of security. After a slightly confused exchange, it became clear that we weren't even at the Erinys headquarters. This was a different security company with different blue shirts and a separate compound. The man offered to help us, but we told him we had another appointment and had to move on. We asked if he knew where the Erinys compound was -- we knew it was close. He shrugged and said that there were lots of security compounds in the area and he wasn't sure which was which.

Though Mansour lies in the heart of Baghdad, it feels more like a suburb, or like parts of Los Angeles. Imagine driving through a suburban town in which, at any given moment, you're likely to come across a roadblock manned by up to a dozen heavily armed men, marking the entrance to a small compound. If you live inside, you will have to show an I.D. and have your car checked for explosives whenever you enter the compound. Though right now Mansour seems to have the highest concentration of these compounds, they are quickly springing up all over Baghdad. For Westerners, it's increasingly unrealistic to live outside the bounds of these mini-Green Zones. Iraqis whose houses get inadvertently annexed by these zones choose to rent their homes to whichever company has taken over. Others choose to stay and accept the trade-off: hassle for high security.

We did eventually find Erinys that day. As it turns out, they are a very large and high-tech operation with a contract to guard oil pipelines throughout the country. For that, they employ more than 10,000 Iraqi guards. Advising a handful of journalists on the safety of their living situation wasn't exactly the company's regular gig, but they were incredibly amenable to helping us and, the following morning, a consultant came by our house to advise us. He recommended that we increase the number of guards and line the inside of the wall in front of the house with sandbags. In general, he felt that we could make the house safe enough to warrant staying.

Then came the change in the atmosphere, and the threats.

The viciousness of the attacks on the four Blackwater employees in Fallujah illustrated, in an incredibly depressing way, the shift I felt on the streets of Baghdad. An explosive anger just below the surface of daily life. Of course not all Iraqis want to kill Americans. But the violent minority could easily tip the country toward yet another out-and-out war with the coalition. As I write this, coalition forces are fighting Saddam loyalists in Fallujah and nearby Ramadi and followers of Muqtada al-Sadr in a number of cities throughout the middle and south of Iraq. At least 18 U.S. Marines have been killed over the last three days, with 12 more reported slain today in Ramadi; at least 130 Iraqis have been killed. The next few days on those fronts will be very telling.

On the surface, the clashes in Fallujah and Ramadi aren't related to the Shiite actions: The Saddam loyalists of Fallujah don't historically have much in common with Shiite hard-liners, who were persecuted under Saddam's rule. In that sense, the timing couldn't be worse. The coalition is now fighting battles on several different fronts simultaneously. Their hard clamp-down may quell some of the violence. But I think it's more likely that it will severely aggravate it. Al-Sadr's followers, including his well-armed Mahdi militia, will fight fiercely to block his arrest. If enough of them get gunned down, non-Sadrists might join the fray. Though al-Sadr doesn't command nearly the same respect as the more moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, his outspoken vilification of the United States may position him as a "mouse that roared" figure and enable him to sidestep into Iraq's severe leadership vacuum.

But even before the current crisis, something may have happened to ordinary Iraqis that cannot be reversed. When I sensed the country's mood change before I left Iraq, I wasn't hanging out with Saddam loyalists or members of al-Sadr's militia. I was in Baghdad talking to average people.

To be fair, I think part of what changed in the last few weeks was me. After seven months in Baghdad, with low-level stress all the time and high-level stress a few times a day, the heightened danger and the disappointment of seeing the country fall apart was too much.

Last May I felt some sense of optimism about the future of Iraq. But since then I've witnessed the nation's slow decline toward the present chaos. The occupation, perhaps doomed from the start, is proving to be a failure. I've heard from plenty of CPA employees (off the record, of course) that the governmental situation is a mess. Reinventing an Arab-nationalist socialist dictatorship as an American democracy is too great a task. The Bush administration's fantasy about how it was going to transform postwar Iraq reminds me of a "Star Trek" episode in which a confident multicultural, quasi-military group beams down to a planet where people are following the wrong leader. The Enterprise crew quickly implants American-style democracy and, by episode's end, are light-speeding toward another galaxy, safe in the knowledge that the changes they've wrought are good and right and will endure. It doesn't work that way in real life.

Though I was against the war, when I first got to Iraq I couldn't help feeling (especially after a trip to the mass graves) that getting rid of Saddam would improve the lives of Iraqis. Now I'm no longer sure.

In my final weeks in Baghdad, I started feeling constantly on edge. The gunfire that I had become so accustomed to hearing as part of Baghdad's background noise was suddenly sending my stomach into my throat. Getting stuck in traffic no longer felt like a petty annoyance; it felt like a trap. When I visited a university to interview some students, I encountered a much more hostile reception than I had at the same university last fall. Pretty much all the American journalists I knew began saying they were Canadian (much to the chagrin of the actual Canadian journalists). Certain news reporters started "covering" stories about events in Iraq by recycling what they read on the Web and watching CNN instead of actually going to the scene.

Then, too, I became very worried about the safety of my driver, Thamer, and my translator, Amjad. In the last month, Iraqis working for American news outlets such as Time magazine, Voice of America, and the Washington Post have been threatened and killed. (Both Time and the Washington Post moved out of their relatively low-key houses and into hotels within security compounds.) While neither Amjad nor Thamer expressed any fear to me, the idea that they might be targeted truly terrified me. Neither had exactly advertised the fact that he worked with an American but, after seven months, word gets round.

The same experienced war correspondents who warned of the danger to our house told me that they believe the situation in Iraq right now is much more hazardous than it was during the actual invasion of the country (and they were both in Baghdad for it). It's a question of the unknown. The increasingly large X factor of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

On the day before I left, I was driving back to my house with Amjad, Thamer and another journalist. I was famished and asked Thamer to stop at my favorite roadside kebab stand to get some sandwiches. Amjad, the other journalist and I stayed in the car while Thamer jogged across the street (with its raised dirt median) to the kebab stand. I slouched in the back seat and watched a man sweeping the sidewalk nearby. Across the street, two men in jackets and ties sat at a small plastic table, eating a mound of food from the kebab place and laughing at some shared joke. Down the block, a woman in an abaya looked over the pile of lettuce at the vegetable stand. Cars passed us -- junky orange-and-white paneled cabs, new-looking Mercedes, minivans filled like buses, a black car with no license plate.

Across the street, Thamer stood waiting for the kebabs with some other Iraqis. Amjad and the other journalist played games on their phones. The black car without a license plate passed us going in the other direction. Then, a minute later, it passed us again. I told Amjad to move into the driver's seat and take off. We sped away, making a bunch of fast turns to be certain we weren't followed. Minutes later we were at the house and Amjad went back to pick up a confused but understanding Thamer.

It's possible that the driver of the black car (which contained at least one passenger) was lost or looking for an address or cruising for prostitutes. That he had no idea some Westerners were hanging out in a parked car, waiting for some sandwiches. It's possible I was experiencing a case of short-timer's paranoia. I've seen too many bad cop movies where the old sarge who's retirin' in a week to finally do that fishin' he's been talking about for so long gets blown up in the third scene. There's no way to know. But right now in Iraq, the assumption of danger is the safest bet. It is not safe.

Recent Stories