Today's news of the arrest of an alleged group of coup plotters in Iraq's Interior Ministry comes as I am far north of Baghdad in Kirkuk. This is the town that's supposed to be the current Iraq hot spot, where Kurds and Sunni Arabs, along with Turkmen and Christians jockey for territory and power. But I found it surprisingly un-tense, and the provincial council members I met from different ethnic groups were surprisingly unified in the belief that there would be no explosion of violence here (that doesn't speak for terrorist groups like AQI who blew up a restaurant last week where every ethnic and religious group went for family meals.)

What struck me as so odd about the coup news was that I'd just talked until late Wednesday night with savvy Iraqi friends about how unliikely were the prospects of a coup. The country is fragmented politically and the army not strong or unified enough to stage a coup. And the main point: there are 150,000 U.S. troops in the country.

So it seems rather bizarre to imagine coup plotters who believed they could take over. It also seems strange that the arrests came when the Minister of Interior, who was cleaning out the ministry of bad apples, was out of the country. And they came just before upcoming provincial elections.

Prime Minister Maliki, whose party holds only 9 seats in parliament, is trying to burnish his image as a tough guy. Perhaps those arrested were really foolish enough to imagine they could take power with no army and with a superpower still militarily ensconced in the country.

I've been talking to generals - American and Iraqi - about the meaning of the changes in US status agreed in the new status of forces agreement. The International Zone - known informally as the Green Zone - will revert to Iraqi control on Dec. 31 but no one knows if they can secure it.

The Iraqi government will supposedly be taking down all the high concrete blast walls that zigzag around and through the area, and reopening roads that once ran through. No one knows how the parliament, other government buildings and foreign embassies will then be guarded.

No one knows yet who will move into the grandiose palace, with its acres of marble floors and walls and enormous marble bathrooms.

All US civilian personel are moving this month from one of Saddam's famous palaces to the New Embassy complex along the Tigris, blocks of buildings with offices and apartments that look like a prison. More to the point, they are directly across the river from a row of famous and refurbished fish restaurants and a playground, where Iraqis now dine al fresco and stroll and play by the river.

How easy it would be to fire across that river. It is hard to see how this new complex will be secured.

You can’t get away from the shoes.

Everyone in Iraq is still talking about the shoes thrown at President Bush by a journalist, even though official Iraqi TV has barely shown the incident. A Syrian channel viewed in Iraq is showing the scene non-stop, playing martial music from the days of Saddam in the background and all Arab satellite channels keep repeating the shoe clip.

Many Iraqis I’ve talked to feel shamed by the incident, since insulting a guest is considered a breech of honor. But many others say Bush was an occupier and not a guest, and the incident seems to have tapped a well of bitterness over conditions during the past five years.

The jokes about the shoes keep multiplying. “There has been a decision to prevent all journalists from buying shoes,” one joke goes. Another:” Bush will have to hold all his press conferences in mosques (where worshippers remove their shoes).” A third: “The shoes, what did they do wrong.” And so it goes: the talk of Baghdad.

Iraq is a mass of contradictions.

Security is really better. I've been walking around on streets I wouldn't have driven near a year ago. Of course, I hunker down under my head covering and black coat and don't make eye contact, or speak English except when I'm out of public view. Stores are open at night, the streets are full of shoppers, traffic jams are impossible.

And I wonder what will happen to the US embassy and all the installations inside the protected Green Zone when Iraqis take over security in the zone. When I walked through the long, sandbagged, barbed wired path into the Green Zone today, I went through five separate security checks - including two by Ugandan security guards overseen by Americans, two body patdowns by Iraqi lady guards, a dog sniffing (of my purse), a hands outstretched in a circular glass enclosure that detects explosives, and a passport check by Peruvian guards.

Security in the zone is even tighter than when I was here last year, perhaps because a female suicide bomber blew herself up in November right where I walked in, killing and wounding several people.

When the U.S. overseers go, will the Iraqis be able to prevent more of this from happening?

No, I did not see the shoes thrown at President Bush.

I arrived in Baghdad today and went directly to a neighborhood that I had followed for three years, where horrific sectarian killings had gone on and many families fled, but are now coming back. I wanted a quick reality check on whether the violence was down, and how long the improvements would last (I will write about this in my Wednesday column.)

The Bush trip was so secret that journalists weren't notified until he was already in the country. They then had to turn up at the press conference four hours early. By the time I finished my interviews and learned of the conference key bridges and roads were blocked around the city, and remained so for hours.  I finally made it by foot it into the Green Zone - the supposedly safe area - but security was so tight there that no one was being allowed anywhere near the prime minister's residence.

Guess that says something about the security situation five years on in Baghdad.

And then came the shoes. 

What's so interesting here is that the shoe-throwing - a huge insult in the Arab world - is being taken as a huge insult to Prime Minister Maliki as well as President Bush.  In Iraqi culture the failure to protect a guest is shameful.

But the shoe-thrower, an Iraqi journalist, may still become a hero (although Iraqi TV has given very little coverage to the incident.)  What he did reflects the anger many Iraqis feel about Bush's handling of this war, even among Iraqis who wanted Saddam overthrown. In a grocery store near my hotel, where men were discussing the event, one elderly man said: "Imagine this happened in a press conference. Imagine if Bush walked through the streets." 

 

Jordan is a refuge for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly from the Sunni majority who were empowered by Saddam and now feel threatened. The well-to-do hang out in hotels and cafes, some nursing dreams of a Sunni restoration ("sort of like the Cubans in Miami," one Iraqi friend put it).

But others are ordinary Iraqis who have fled because of death threats delivered during the sectarian civil war. They are barely hanging on, their money depleted, afraid to go home, and unable to work or afford schools or medicine for their children.

While I was sitting with one Iraqi woman, who has tried to help those less well off, her cell phone rang. After a quick chat, she told me, "They just kicked out a nine-year old Iraqi girl who is dying of cancer from King Hussein cancer center. Her parents have sacrificed everything to bring her here; there is no treatment available in Iraq. But they kicked her out."

She quickly got back on the phone trying to find an intermediary to get the girl back into treatyment.

It is pitiful that the Iraqi government, with an oil surplus, has done nothing to help with medical care for refugees. My Iraqi friend things Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki should fund a hospital in Amman that would treat poor Iraqis and Jordanians alike.

     Amman, Jordan is the waystation for journalists travelling to Iraq  (unless you are going in with the military through Kuwait). So few airlines fly to Baghdad, that Royal Jordanian can charge $1200 for an Amman-Baghdad round trip, a flight of about 90 minutes.

     The Intercontinental Hotel is no longer the favored watering spot for journalists, but I have stayed here for years because I love watching the Jordanian families, and politicians, who congregate in its lobbies. And then there are the weddings.

     In a Middle East that can  be all too gloomy, it is a treat to watch an exhuberant Arab wedding. I saw one on Friday night. The bride, resplendent in a sleeveless, lowbacked, sparkly white gown with train minced down the stairs with her groom, preceded by relatives with videocams, to the sound of Arab drums, clapping hands, and a bagpipe. Some of her bridesmaids had lowcut gowns, others - in the same color scheme - wore full-shouldered, long sleeved gowns with headscarves. A reminder that those who are more and less religiously observant can live together perfectly well in this region, if only the fanatics would leave them alone. 

 

Packing for Iraq is a challenge.

Body armor has been out for a while. The last time I tried to bring my own, it was confiscated at Amman's Queen Alia airport. So I borrow some when needed from colleagues.

Now that the violence is down, I'm not certain whether I still need to wear a full length abaya, or long black cloak, or whether I can get by with a black raincoat. Just to be safe I'm taking the abaya. Last year my driver's wife bought me one with yellow embroidery on the front, but I think that looks too conspicuous. So it's the ugly, nondescript polyester, drag-on-the-ground abaya with velcro closings for me. And the full bore, wrap around black headscarf, though I'll take a smaller version in case things have really become more calm.

    I'm going back to the country that no one wants to hear about anymore.

    It's amazing. the last time I was there, just a year ago, Iraq was still all over the headlines. People were still debating Gen. Petraeus' testimony about the surge.

    But now Iraq has dropped from the radar. In large part that's because the hideous violence has ebbed. (People still debate whether the "surge" worked or not - I say it was Petraeus' strategy that worked.) In larger part, it's because Afghanistan has been going south and more U.S. soldiers are dying there than in Iraq.

    It's also because Obama has won, and many people assume that means we're outa there soonest. Obama has been helped by the fact that the Iraqis themselves just voted for a status of forces accord with the United States that sets a deadline for all U.S. troops to get out by the end of 2011. And the Bush administration - which was wholly anti-timeline - agreed to that date certain.

     But guess what? Iraq isn't over. We still have around 140,000 troops in Iraq, some of them are still being killed, and Iraqi civilians are still dying. Iraq is fragmented, with all kinds of new enmities between sects and ethnic groups, and no one's sure whether Iraqis can now solve those quarrels by ballot not bullet.

      How we leave will have a lot to do with how Iraq winds up. Right now we are still the barrier keeping many of those groups from each other's throats. If Iraqi fighting flares up again, will al-Qaeda in Iraq return? Will Iran move into the vacuum created when we leave (Iran is already a major influence on Iraq but could become much more so)?

     Will Iraq become a model for the Middle East or a monument to failed U.S. policy? Will Obama's attention be dragged back to an Iraq mess, when he wants to focus on South Asia?

      I'm going back to find out. I'm also going back because I have a lot of Iraqi friends and want to know they hope for and what they fear. After all, as Colin Powell famously said, when you break it, you own it, and we broke Iraq, so we have some responsibility for what happens to the folks whose lives we upended.  My Iraqi driver is still getting death threats.

      You'll read what I learn.

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