For decades, Mutanabi Street in Baghdad was the place where bibliophiles went to get their fix on Fridays. Bookstores line this street in an old quarter of the city, and browsers could also pour over tables full of books lined up in front of the sidewalks - religious books, old English paperbacks, dictionaries, atlases, histories of Iraq, and textbooks.

In a part of the world where books are rarely found in homes, there is a saying: books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon and read in Iraq. That's why it was so shocking to Iraqis when Mutanabi St. was hit by a suicide bomber a year ago, killing dozens and destroying cafes and bookstores.

So it was moving to revisit Mutanabi St. and see that it has been rebuilt, including the historic Shabander Cafe where writers and poets have been hanging out for fifty years. But there is a sadness here. Although the cafe has been restored, with government funds, and photos from the 1920s and 1930s still hang on the wall, Haji Mohammed, the owner, gazes over at five photos hung on the wall near the entry - the portraits of his four sons and a nephew who were killed by the bomb.

The Karradah district of Baghdad is where locals come to buy appliances like heaters, refrigerators, furniture, and small generators (electricity is still off for much of the day in Baghdad.) The main shopping street never closed down, but I haven't seen it booming like this since right after the fall of Saddam. When I asked one merchant why sales were so good, he explained: Iraqis are returning to homes they fled during the sectarian killing, and their homes have been looted, so they have to replace what was stolen. And the government is giving a stipend to returnees. What's that they say about every tragedy having a silver lining....

Abu Nawas Street which runs along the Tigris River used to be famous for its fish restaurants which were long closed but now have been refurbished. But the green strip along the river was once an hangout for unsavory types. Now it has been totally redone as a park with shrub-lined walkways, benches, tables and several mini-playgrounds with swings and slides. On Christmas Day, which was a national holiday here, the park was full of families sitting on blankets, walking by the river, and pushing kids on swings. It was such a normal scene that it nearly made me cry, and it definitely made me fearful that a crazed suicide bomber might take advantage of the crowd. I also wondered whether the government will maintain the greenery, and collect garbage (no waste barrels were in evidence). But as a step forward towards a semi-normal city this park is a great start!

 

I attended 8:30 a.m. Christmas mass at a Chaldean Christian church in the Karradah district of Baghdad. Many Chaldeans have been targetted in recent years by Islamic fundamentalists because Christians used to run liquor stores in the city, some of which were bombed. So were several churches. Many Christians have fled abroad, with thousands leaving northern Iraq where the situation is even dicier. Outside the Church of the Virgin Mary, there were two police vans for protection, along with a line of national police.

But in Karradah. Christians feel pretty safe and the church was full, with young women dressed in high heels and fancy boots and knee length skirts or fancy jeans, while their some of their mothers wore lace mantillas on their hair. A choir sang in the front near a Christmas tree, and there were several local TV cameras present; the Iraqi government has made Christmas an official holiday. When I exited the church, I saw a procession of cars passing by heading for the compound of the Shiite cleric Abdel Aziz Hakim, with his turbaned photo pasted on their hoods.  

What has been astonishing about this visit to Baghdad is the psychological shift in officials and ordinary people.

The future  is still uncertain, electricity in Baghdad neighborhoods varies from a couple of hours a day to 12 hours at best, jobs are scarce, suicide bombs still go off. Government corruption is rife and essential services absent. 

But Iraqis seem to be getting back a sense of their "Iraqi-ness." Nationalism is in the air. The security forces finally have a country to defend, instead of focusing their loyalties on sect and religion.

This sense of Iraqi-ness has returned in the past year, when people could go outside without feeling terror. Everyone I speak with says people are tired of the killing. Iraqis seem to have emerged from the worst, even though the future is still not clear.

Went to the Iraqi parliament today. The parliament meets in a dim, grim convention center in the Green Zone where Saddam once held pro forma government meetings. It used to be possible to shmooze with members in the cafeteria, until a bomb went off there over a year and a half ago, killing a member.

Since then security has been tight and an elaborate, uncomputerized system of permits and bodychecks is required to get in. Kurdish pesh merga troops guard the place - everyone seems to think Kurds are the most professional, even though other Iraqi factions get annoyed at what they claim is Kurdish overreach on territory in the north of Iraq.

Today the debate was over whether to kick out the speaker, who is a hot-tempered rabble rouser, and over how to regularize the presence of other foreign troops who aren't covered by the status of forces agreement signed between Iraq and the United States. But I went to talk with some of the most interesting members, like Shaikh Humam Humoudi. He's a turbaned cleric, and member of the Shiite party, the Islamic Supreme Council for Iraq. He also helped draft Iraq's constitution, is a gold mine of information on Shiite politics, and where Iraq's political relationship with America is likely to go in the future, and has a son in Pittsburgh. 

 

      Today I visited a Baghdad neighborhood that used to be the heartland of Al Qaeda, and Sunni insurgents. Ameriyah was a war zone, from which Shiite residents and many decent Sunnis were driven out, and car bombs directed outwards, often directly onto the airport road which runs alongside the neighborhood. This place was once so dangerous, that, even on my last trip a year ago when much in Baghdad had improved, I was cautioned not to go there. Even this time, I walked accompanied at a distance by three U.S. soldiers. But I got the feeling that I would be safe coming back on my own.

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.