What's Really Fueling the Fire?

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The most popular DVD selling on the streets of Baghdad these days is Volcano. Though its title suggests the latest natural-disaster flick from Hollywood, the film — a jerky montage of photos and video footage lifted from the Internet — depicts a wholly man-made inferno: the year-long insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq. Set to popular Iraqi military songs, it depicts attacks on U.S. convoys, the devastating results of roadside bombs and American soldiers carrying dead and injured colleagues. The footage also includes pictures of wounded and dead Iraqis in Fallujah and elsewhere.

For Iraqis, such images have come to define the American occupation just as powerfully as the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue did a little more than a year ago. Back then, U.S. Marines and Iraqis worked together to pull down the statue, an event that marked the symbolic end of Saddam's regime. The square was far from full that day. Most ordinary Iraqis were still too scared to venture out of their houses and apartments, preferring to peek through curtains at the arrival of freedom. But the feeling of liberation and joy among those who did go into the streets was obvious. As the Marine battalion I was with moved through the city, old women offered battle-weary Marines cookies and tea, while kids shouted out, "Thank you, Bush!" and "America good!" and offered flowers and handshakes.

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Now Iraqi children are just as likely to throw stones at U.S. troops or wave a charred helmet in triumph. The release of photos showing U.S. troops abusing Iraqi detainees has fueled public hostility toward the Americans. Iraqis seem to understand that their future is tied to the U.S. presence, but they're frustrated enough with the lack of security and angry enough at American mistakes to also want the U.S. gone. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll of Iraqis released last week showed that while 6 in 10 Iraqis felt that ousting Saddam was worth the hardships they have endured, a similar proportion wanted coalition troops to leave immediately.

Iraqi resentment has built up in small steps — the loss of a job, the lack of power, insecurity, the unpopular design of the new Iraqi flag. But frustrations were crystallized by the U.S. siege of Fallujah. Until recently, Baghdadis tended to view Fallujah, a town of 200,000 people some 30 miles west of the capital, as a big village notable for its conservative townsfolk and excellent grilled meats. Now, right or wrong, it has become a unifying symbol of Iraqis' clamor for self-determination. "Saddam killed the nationalist feelings inside us," says Basim Mohammed Ridha, 42, who sells fertilizer from a shop in downtown Baghdad. "The Americans have forced us to find it again."

A couple of hundred Fallujans who fled the fighting in their town are now living in tents pitched on a dusty lot in a residential Baghdad neighborhood. When I visited Umm Khalid, a sad-looking woman there, she told me that I shouldn't view her as poor. "I am well-educated. I drive my own car," she said, waving her hand around her neatly arranged, well-swept tent as if to compare it with those of her messier neighbors. The proud woman's son Fahad Salaam, 15, was playing in the front yard of the family home in Fallujah a few weeks ago when he was killed by a piece of shrapnel from an American bomb. "Where are the human rights in Iraq now?" she asked me. "Where is the freedom? Where is the democracy?"

Of course, Americans also have lots of questions. Why were Iraqis in Fallujah harboring foreign fighters hell-bent on destabilizing the country's reconstruction? Why don't Iraqis take more responsibility for their country's problems? It's still possible that as sovereignty is returned to Iraqis and the heavy footprint of the occupation is eased, the mutual antagonism will begin to dissipate. But until then, the prevailing mood for Americans and Iraqis is one of fear — fear of being caught in a suicide attack or a roadside bombing, fear of unemployment, fear of the unknown. "Fear is in our blood," my translator Ali Shaheen told me last week. "We fear even the future, what it may be hiding from us." With the handover of power just two months away, Iraq's future is closer, and scarier, than ever.