Out Of The Wreckage

Oh, the hours Saabreen Kheithem spent memorizing Saddam Hussein's speeches. An aspiring journalist in Baghdad's working-class Al-Aylaan district, Kheithem, 20, could recite many of Saddam's landmark orations word for word. It didn't take much prompting from her mother, Muntaha, for Kheithem to launch into a singsong rendition of his classic 1991 "mother of all battles" harangue. Before the war, she believed this talent would help her land her dream job as a reporter at the official Al-Iraq newspaper. After all, she said, "the job of any Iraqi journalist is to convey the thoughts and wishes of the President to his people."

Not anymore. With Al-Iraq shut down and scores of independent and religious newspapers sprouting across the country, the journalist's job description is changing dramatically. So are most other occupations in post-Saddam Iraq, seven of which are profiled in these pages. Kheithem knows her dream career is doomed; no one needs her special skill now. She still wants to be a journalist, but isn't sure how to go about it. "Everything I worked for has changed," she says. "Most of the things I learned before are useless, and I don't know what I should learn now."

Freedom can be a frightening thing. The end of the Saddam regime means Iraqis like Kheithem are facing a future they never anticipated or prepared for. During more than two decades of totalitarian rule, a great many aspects of Iraqi public life — from politics and commerce to education and the arts — were twisted and corrupted. Now the people who filled those roles are trying to learn new ones. "Iraqis are like children with abusive parents," says Professor Behnam Abu al-Soof, an archaeologist and politician in Baghdad. "They beat us and starved us and they didn't teach us anything. Now we have to learn how to be a normal society. We have to go back to what I call the kindergarten of life."

It doesn't help that Iraqis must go into the big, bad world just when it is at its baddest: two months after that Saddam statue was brought down in the heart of Baghdad, anarchy reigns in Saddam's place. Some things have got better: gas lines are shorter, there's electricity most of the day and many schools have reopened. But the economy is in limbo, jobs are scarce and large sections of the population are buried in poverty. Jinan Ali Ahmed, the 7-year-old girl whose unflinching gaze looks out from Time's cover this week, lives in the abandoned guardhouse of the Tuwaitha nuclear plant, where radiation levels are dangerously high. "So far we haven't seen anything good" from the liberation, says her uncle Hilal. None of the 12 family members has a job. "If they kick us out of here," says Hilal, "we'll have to live in the streets."

The streets are a deadly place, with criminals and Saddam loyalists harrying American soldiers. It's no surprise that many Iraqis long for the relative security most had under the despot. Struggling to avoid street thugs and make ends meet in the war-torn economy, some wonder if they weren't better off before: at least Saddam gave them free food and cheap gas.

The Americans haven't managed as much — but then they want to see capitalism take root where many Iraqis are expecting charity. Two weeks ago, Paul Bremer, the new American civil administrator of Iraq, spoke of reviving the private sector and creating new jobs. But after years of cronyism and the systematic rape of the economy, few Iraqis have any understanding of how legitimate free enterprise works. Muhammed Alameen, 35, who was a commercial manager at a Baghdad trading firm before the war, believes himself to be an exemplary private-sector executive, "not like people with government jobs, who never had to use their brains at work." But ask him how his firm did business, and Alameen starts almost every sentence with: "The government instructed us to ..."

The Saddam regime is a phantom limb: Iraqis reach for it instinctively, even though they know it's no longer there. Weaned on in-your-face authoritarianism, they are perplexed by the low-key administrative style of the Americans. Bremer's predecessor, retired Lieut. General Jay Garner, was rarely seen or heard by Iraqis in the chaotic aftermath of the war, so people turned for advice and instructions to the only authority figures that they could see and hear: their imams. "Iraqis have become completely dependent on a leader who tells them what to do and how to do it," mused Syed Munem al-Musawi, the imam of a Shi'a mosque in the slumlike Baghdad suburb formerly known as Saddam City, who took charge of the protection of the National Library. "Saddam can't do that anymore, and the Americans don't want to ... so the job falls to us."

While Bremer is more visible than Garner, he can't — won't — be the ubiquitous presence Saddam was in Iraqi lives. That'll take some getting used to. "We have developed many, many bad habits without even realizing they were bad habits," says Abu al-Soof. The white-haired professor has some learning to do too. Although he regards himself as a politician, he has little practical experience. Before the war, he was an independent member of the Baathist-dominated Iraq National Assembly, a rubber-stamp body if there ever was one. Abu al-Soof was "elected," but admits the Baath Party allowed him to run virtually unopposed. As a Christian, he fit Saddam's diversity requirements. But could he win a real election? He says he will be a candidate whenever elections come, but has no clue how to conduct a campaign. "Oh, people know me," he says airily. "Ask them about Behnam Abu al-Soof, and people will tell you he is a good man. I don't have to ask them, they will vote for me." The professor, like the people in the pages that follow, may need a stint in that kindergarten of life before he can face up to his — and Iraq's — future.