IRAQ: Baghdad is a city with 5,000 years of history and culture behind it but today, as Michael Jansen has discovered, its infrastructure can barely function, corruption is rife and ordinary people struggle just to keep going
Dust bearing rain spatters the city with a thin film of grey mud. The sky is light grey, the Tigris a darker shade of grey, limpid. The electricity is off and on throughout the morning, the hotel's generator roars during off times. Phones in our quarter hiss and gurgle and refuse to connect.
The city's infrastructure, largely repaired 14 months after the 1991 Gulf war, cannot bear the strain of daily commerce if there is a shower of rain. The city could easily be pushed over the cliff of collapse if power and communications are bombed.
Everyone in Baghdad seems to have taken to their cars. The streets are packed with hooting-honking vehicles and impatient motorists. The jams move slowly in a solid flow round the grand traffic circles, cars sliding off Saadoun Street, the main thorough- fare running parallel to the river on its left bank.
Halfway along Abu Nawas, the street which lies along this bank, police divert the traffic.
"A demonstration," says Raad, my driver.
"Sahafa, sahafa \," he tells the motorcycle cop.
"Ok, ok," he waves us through.
But we turn around; the demo is slung across the road, totally blocking traffic. We drive back along the ancient river where the civilisations of Mespotomia, the land between the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, emerged and flourished. We cross by another fine new bridge. All the bridges of Baghdad are handsome structures. Two were taken out in the first hours of the 1991 war by the US air force and, like power and phones, restored by a massive reconstruction effort.
I was here in Baghdad in April 1992 when the last section of the Jumhuriyah Bridge was slotted into place and all the lights in the city came on again. Baghdadis threw street parties for a week. The city's six bridges will be among the first targets of US and British bombers if there is a war. Most Baghdadis believe there will and Baghdad will be cut in half.
The overpasses which stand on concrete elephant legs could also be bombed, isolating people in their quarters, making it nearly impossible for them to secure supplies, go to hospital, carry on with their work. If that happens, this vast, sprawling city could become another Ramallah, Jenin or Nablus, suffering closure and curfew for weeks on end.
The government has given out rations to cover a three-month period. Flour, oil, rice, pulses, sugar and tea, but there will be no milk, no fresh vegetables, fruits and meat if there is war. In any case, once the power goes, there will be no way to keep food fresh.
Last time round, some of my mad Iraqi friends - who live in fine houses on the riverside - drove out into the country with the contents of their freezer and had a picnic, inviting all their chums. This time there will be no picnics; my friends have grown a decade older, many in their circle have died or gone abroad.
They still have the will to hang on and resist but not the will to have fun.
Salam, a tough-minded entrepreneur whose name means "peace", observed: "People live from day to day. We have no future. When are these sanctions going to end? They are crushing us. People don't do their jobs properly because there's no point. They do just enough to get by. Over the past 10 years, 70 per cent of the people have changed for the worse. We are not the same people who went into the 1991 war, we are not as honest, hard-working, responsible. Many children leave school to get a job to earn enough to eat."
Bribe-taking is rampant. Without bribes, civil servants would not earn enough to live. Bribes however cannot fix the frail infrastructure repaired but degraded by a decade of sanctions which prevent Iraq from importing the spare parts and equipment necessary for proper maintenance.
The oldest part of the city is at Tell Harmal, which reached the peak of its development in 1850 BC when it was the capital of an ancient kingdom. Cuneiform tablets found at the site revealed that this city was centrally planned and governed by a code of laws older by two centuries of the famous code of Hammurabi, the ruler of Babylon, 90 km to the south-east.
My driver, Raad, lives in Baghdad Jedid - New Baghdad - founded on the site of this first city to rise beside the Tigris.
This morning we had a second long detour on the way back to my hotel from Rashid Street at the city centre. Detours are a way of life here, caused by demonstrations and convoys of high ranking officials and visiting dignitaries.
The diversion took us by Bab al-Wastani, the Middle Gate, the sole standing portal of the walls of medieval Baghdad, then capital of the civilised world.
The golden brick tower, decorated with coloured tiles and inscriptions, rises high above a flight of steps. Archaeologists fear a cultural, historical holocaust if there is war. Baghdad is built of soft yellow bricks which easily turn to dust.
Our route carried us past fountained squares, massive government buildings as solid and impressive as Assyrian statuary, a monument to the unknown soldier, mosques with delicate ceramic tile domes and the riverside Baghdad Hotel, the haunt of crime novelist Agatha Christie whose husband mounted archaeological expeditions during the British raj.
Perched on its roof are letters spelling out, Happy New Year. Baghdad is a city every bit as splendid as Paris or Rome. It is a city with 5,000 years of history, a civilised city where off the modern monumented boulevards you find timeless pot-holed streets and shabby rundown neighbourhoods.
Down a narrow alleyway, a woman stands on the footpath, rocking back and forth, her head bent low. A shoe-shine boy plies his trade, an elderly man sells peeled sections of palm tree trunk, a donkey hitched to a mini-tanker of mazout, fuel for heaters, is parked in front of a shop selling computer software.
Here Sheherezade preserved her life by telling tales to the Caliph for 1,001 nights. As of today, Baghdad could have only 25 peaceful nights before the bombers return to wreak havoc once again if pundits who predict the war will begin after the Muslim feast of sacrifice on February 9th are correct.