A World Upside Down
A large, angry mob was squaring off in the center of Basra against tense British troops backed by tanks and heavy machine guns, so I asked the Iraqis what they were doing.

"We're here to rob the banks," one man explained cheerfully.

I must have looked surprised because another man explained that mobs had already used rocket-propelled grenades to break into several banks, but that the safes inside were still intact. "So we've come to rob the banks, but those British soldiers won't let us in," he said indignantly. "We're very upset."

Iraq today is at once exuberant and upset — and caught in a vacuum of authority. Now that we've overthrown the tyrant of the Tigris, our big challenge is to move immediately to fill this vacuum and restore order.

Perhaps it's churlish to say this so soon after an impressive military victory, but we may have underestimated the risk of chaos in postwar Iraq.

"The robbers come at night, 20 or 30 together, and throw grenades" and break into private houses, complained Muhammad Jassem, a middle-aged man in a crowd gathered around British troops in Basra. "They ask for money and if they don't get it, they shoot you on the spot."

"We go to the British and ask for help," he added, "and they say they are not a police force."

"Now that Saddam is gone," mused Imad Saleh, a 30-year-old businessman who is delighted by the dictator's departure, "everything has gone crazy."

Revenge killings are becoming more common in Basra, and enjoy popular support. I poked around Basra for a top Baath Party official whom I had interviewed in the fall, Muhammad Al-Nuaimi, and asked people if they knew where he was.

"He has escaped," one man said disappointedly. "If we find him, we will kill him."

Andres Kruesi, an intrepid Swiss representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, sits in his office in Basra and struggles to restore basic services in a lawless city. "To get electricity and water back on," he said in frustration, "you need to have security and the sense that people can drive to work without getting their cars stolen."

When a Red Cross car and a Basra utility department vehicle went out together to try to restore power to the city, he said, a mob allowed the Red Cross vehicle to pass. But the Iraqis dragged the engineers out of the city car and tried to steal it.

One distraught man named Karim Sobhi said he was grateful to the Americans for ousting Saddam. But he insisted that the needs of ordinary Iraqis were being neglected, saying, "Our prisoners of war are getting good treatment from the Americans — but no one else is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11KRIS.html