US Drawdown

OK -- eventually I was going to run out of clever witticisms and be forced to write something meaningful about this country I am bound to for the next 11 months (hooty-hoo, one month down!).

Fortunately, I can begin this quite easily by using someone else's words. Below you will find a most excellent article written by Mr. Anthony Shadid for the NY Times.

First, a little background. The US military is bound, by a security agreement with the government of Iraq, to exiting the country before the end of calendar year 2011. Further, it is bound by directive of the President of the United States to reduce military manpower in Iraq to not more than 50,000 by 1 September 2010. We are at around 90,000 and dropping as I write.

To get to 50,000, the US military has to turn over security responsibility of a lot of real estate to the Iraqi government. On 1 June, access control to a very significant piece of property became part of this transition. Checkpoints into the International Zone, formerly and probably forever known as the Green Zone, is now wholly provided by Iraq security forces.

While this makes for a bit of nervousness for some residents within, it is a meaningful waypoint for a country seeking to find its way out of a very dark place in its history. Read on:

Iraq's Psyche, Through a Green Zone Prism

BAGHDAD - The term was coined by the American military. But unlike some others - say, entry control points - the name managed to stick in the popular imagination. Green Zone always seemed to say so much, here and abroad. It was the imperial outpost of an occupation, or the citadel of a government never quite sovereign - bulwark or bubble, refuge or unreality. Muwafaq al-Taei, an architect and a former denizen there, thought about the description before settling on his own. "A state of mind," Mr. Taei judged it.

On Tuesday, the American military will formally withdraw from the last nine checkpoints it staffed in this disheveled stretch of territory that it demarcated after overthrowing Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The largely symbolic move is another in a year filled with them as the United States pulls out all but 50,000 troops by summer's end. "Another chapter," said Maj. Gen. Stephen Lanza, the American military spokesman.

But the changing mood about the Green Zone says something about Iraq these days, too, where the summer heat soars as high as people's frustrations. The country is still without a government nearly three months after voters went to the polls to choose one. People sweat as politicians speak (and speak and speak), and the Green Zone - so long an idea as much as a place - becomes yet another symbol in a country not quite yet a state.

"It has always been a place of someone's power," Mr. Taei said. The stretch along the Tigris has represented authority since King Ghazi sought support by speaking to his subjects from his radio station in Al Zuhour Palace, which he built there in 1936. Far more palaces are there now, though the old names have fallen away. Some still refer to the zone as Karradat Mariam, named for a local saint buried behind its concrete barricades. Fewer remember the name Legislative Neighborhood, one of its earlier incarnations.

Nearly everyone knows it by the name the Americans brought. "Welcome to the Green Zone," a sign reads, in English and Arabic translation. There remains an American texture to the place, where C.I.A. operatives once drank at their own rattan-furnished bar and young Iraqi kids with a knack for memorabilia marketed Saddam Hussein trinkets. (Watches emblazoned with his portrait were a favorite.) Empty cans of energy drinks like Wild Tiger and TNT Liquid Dynamite litter the streets. Rusted shipping containers vie for space with sand-filled barricades draped in tattered canvas. Signs are still in English; "Strictly No Stopping," the ubiquitous cement barriers read.

Green is still the preferred shorthand for the place, even in Arabic. That sometimes creates confusion since another Baghdad neighborhood bears the same name. An inevitable question often follows: "Their Green or our Green?" But as Mr. Taei noted, driving through the Green Zone on a recent day, past some of the palaces he had a hand in helping construct, "The history of Iraq is here.""Every single building has a story," he said, as symbol or otherwise. Mr. Taei pointed out where a fallen prime minister tried to elude his captors dressed as a woman in 1958. He cast a glance at the site where the remnants of the monarchy were executed a day earlier. He gestured toward the theater where Mr. Hussein, consolidating power in 1979, had the names of supposed fifth columnists read out to an assembly. The suspected conspirators were removed one by one from their seats.Through the window, he stared at the palaces - Bayraq, Salam and others - still wrecked by American bombing, then and now emblems of a government's remove. "What Saddam built," Mr. Taei said.

The Green Zone will indelibly be an American artifact of the occupation, but even today, it still bears the mark of Mr. Hussein. His initials in Arabic remain a relief on stone walls, the engraving of tiles on majestic arched entrances or the curves of wrought-iron gates. The monumental swords of the Victory Arch, gripped by hands cast from his own, are only now being taken down. The eight-sided minaret he considered his own style still stands next to a mosque built in the shapes of a child's geometry lesson.

In that, the Green Zone is perhaps another metaphor, beyond that legacy of American power. The United States managed to smash Mr. Hussein's government. But what it helped build in its place remains inchoate, littered with the ruins of the past. "The street there is dark, and only God is your guide," said a shopkeeper who gave his name as Abu Hussein, at a shop across the street from a Green Zone entrance. He meant that no one knows what goes on inside there. "They haven't heard a single complaint from the people," he said, sitting before a fan blowing hot air. "No official has paid a single iota of attention to any citizen here."

He had more complaints. So did Mr. Taei. So did most everyone along the street - from the traffic snarled by checkpoints along the Green Zone's entrances to the demands for badges, or badjat, to enter streets inside that are wide enough for a military parade. Some of the same grievances were heard in 2003, when the summer came and American officials clumsily tried to sort through blackouts, water shortages, crime and violence, all the while reminding Iraqis that they now had a semblance of freedom.

This time, the complaints were against Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other officials residing in the Green Zone. Selfish was a typical insult; others were sharper. No one expected them to form a government soon. Smart money lately suggested it might wait till October. "If you're a neighbor of Maliki over there, then maybe you can find a job," quipped Farouk Talal, a 27-year-old employee at a cellphone store. "You won't otherwise." Down the street, Haider Kadhem called the area "another country.""We're one Iraq; you can say that the Green Zone is another Iraq," he said. "A badge is a passport, and if you don't have a passport, you can't enter that country."

By ANTHONY SHADID