KEY POINTS:
The arm-wrestling competition is instigated over breakfast at the Hamra Hotel by the shaven-headed waiter. He plonks a beefy elbow on the cash desk and presents a hand. "You. Zarqawi," he says to one of the reporters living in the hotel, a slight New Yorker. He is referring to the dead Sunni leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. "Me. Moqtada," he adds, naming Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite preacher who leads the Mahdi Army, infamous for its sectarian death squads.
The waiter giggles. Then "Moqtada" twists "Zarqawi's" arm in a deft, powerful movement and pins it down. Contest over. Iraq's sectarian question is bloodlessly resolved. But only on this March morning, for a brief second, on the neutral ground of the Hamra Hotel, in what was once one of the more pleasant neighbourhoods of Baghdad.
In the week after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, I moved into the deserted Hamra. Its pool, famous even from the Saddam days in a city largely bereft of swimming pools, was empty. Later, the staff filled it, and through the era of the United States-directed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the first postwar administration - that briefly ran the country, "internationals" would visit the Hamra and its pool to socialise. When the suicide bombings and the kidnapping and murder of foreigners began, the armed guards appeared and the first concrete blast walls went up along its perimeter. They saved the hotel from destruction by the massive suicide car bomb that flattened the apartment block next door. But not from damage: a long crack runs down from the top floor.
It was never beautiful, but the Hamra used to have a certain charm. Of all Baghdad's hotels, the Hamra was cared for. Now, the lifts work sporadically and the walls are water-stained. The little patio by the pool, with its creepers on trellises, is dusty and unloved.
These days, you don't see people sitting chatting by the pool. There are no parties on Saturdays either. The young American aid worker, Marla Ruzicka, who was their driving force, was killed in April 2005 when a suicide car bomb hit her vehicle on the airport road as it was aiming for a US convoy. Now, only the slender pigeons come to drink at the pool's edge.
When they are startled into flight by an explosion or gunfire, the reflection of the water paints the undersides of their wings a shimmering blue.
The Hamra's post-Saddam decline has matched the descent of Baghdad and Iraq over four years since the US-led invasion.
There was a time, even three years ago, when you could still walk through Baghdad's streets, although with care, picking the safer neighbourhoods to avoid criminals with guns. Scenes from those days return like flashbacks: a sheep standing on a carved wooden balcony in the old part of the city; boys walking hand in hand on a wet Eid al-Adha through the riverside amusement park; the Zayouna district on a Thursday afternoon, the start of the weekend, with young men on powerful motorcycles drag racing down the street; lovers walking by the river.
You could visit the book market in Mutanabi St (hit by a suicide bomb earlier this month) and leaf through the yellowed pages - cowboy novels and cheap thrillers in English, old science textbooks, religious volumes and language primers. And buried among them odd hints of books that were riskier reading under Saddam's regime: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, a few novels by Graham Greene, The Day of the Jackal and The Scarlet Letter.
In those days, the possibilities of reconstruction and violent collapse were locked in an equal race. You could go out for a pizza in the city's Arasat district and listen to live Spanish guitar music. Or sit in the street and eat shawarma sliced from the huge turning cylinders of dripping meat. And hope against hope, for the Iraqis' sake, that it might all turn out for the best.
Even as 2003 turned into 2004, the violent themes were rising. The sectarian assassinations had started in the western suburbs of Baghdad, dismissed airily at the time by officials at the CPA, who could not see trends where they were bloodily in evidence. The suicide bombers were beginning to attack Shiite targets and in the Sunni Triangle a rag-tag resistance to the presence of US forces was coalescing into an effective insurgency as fighters quickly learnt how to confront American armour with ever more sophisticated roadside bombs.
But still you could move around the country - to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala to visit the grand mosques and the lanes of the vast Shiite necropolis on the desert's edge (a dangerous place now, where the bodies of inter-Shiite factional violence are dumped). You could drive to dirty, bustling Basra in the south, once a cosmopolitan port city, now run by the Shiite militias. Fallujah, too, was only a 45-minute journey, a violent place, but where the insurgent leaders were courteous and welcoming at first and wanted to tell journalists their story.
No longer.
Now the war that never ended is entering its fifth year.
And the country's horizons - those visible to Westerners at least - have collapsed in upon themselves like an imploding star, super-heavy with the weight of communal, insurgent and terrorist violence.
First, it was independent travelling outside Baghdad that stopped. For me this meant risky runs out of the capital, sometimes with my head wrapped in a kefiyah, heading out through traffic-snarled and dangerous towns where insurgent gangs would pay the cigarette boys who hawked their wares at cars' windows to call them if they saw an ijnabee - a foreigner.
Then, slowly, it was travel within the capital itself. To the edgy suburbs first: Ghazaliya with its palm-lined streets; Dora, overshadowed by its smoking power station; old Adhamiya's tangle of lanes that finish abruptly at the Tigris where the old men play dominoes amid American raids. Places I once walked through.
Gradually, the well-heeled areas joined them: Mansour with its villas, gardens and private pools, which became a place of snipers and snatch gangs. Even "safe" Karrada, with its shops selling mobile phones, washing machines, satellite dishes and DVD players, home to the National Theatre, became a place too dangerous to linger. So the city contracted neighbourhood by neighbourhood, until travel became a guerrilla operation.
Finally, on my most recent visit three weeks ago, the Baghdad I saw was viewed largely from one of the Hamra's balconies. From atop a guarded "compound" wall.
Then there are the sounds of Baghdad, felt physically as jolts within your body, each one signifying another event that has happened to someone else, not you - that awful soundscape of booms and cracks, among the car horns and the call to prayer.
From here, inside the "compound", the reality of the world beyond is no longer urgently observed but pieced together painstakingly like a jigsaw through glimpses, disconnected facts and fragments of conversation.
While we call them compounds, in reality they are castles that squat amid the capital and countryside. The civilian ones enclose clusters of hotels, occupied by journalists, NGOs and businessmen, guarded by snipers on the roofs, small private armies, sandbagged.
The architecture of these castles has brought with it a specialised language and imagery of division. If there is a defining physical feature of the new Iraq, it is not to be seen in grand new engineering projects. It is not even symbolised by the vastly expensive white elephant of the new US embassy rising out of the Green Zone. Instead, it is visible in the thousands of kilometres of poured, reinforced concrete, hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of blast-resistant separation between us and them.
Iraqis know them simply as "concretes", borrowing the English word. But for those who construct the barriers, both military and civilian contractors, there are subtle differentiations. There are "Hescos" - the vast, circular wire-covered bins of river gravel, originally designed for flood defences and now used to withstand the biggest bombs. Then there are the waist-high Jersey barriers, and the T-barrier also known as the Texas barrier and as the Bremer barrier after the US proconsul of Iraq, Paul Bremer, in whose time the first 6m high blast walls appeared. It is the blank, grey, soaring face of these T-barriers that has come to be the symbol of the new Iraq.
The "concretes" form lanes, chicanes, stockades and perimeters. Most of all, they make up the castle walls that surround the Green Zone and circle ministries, bases, compounds and "outposts", police stations, provincial offices and checkpoints.
They form walls within walls, standing in rings like sarsen stones around the chapels and laundries, the sleeping blocks and shops.
For Iraqis, the boundaries mostly are not of the physical kind. Instead, they exist in the country's violent psycho-geography as invisible, shifting areas of threat and fear that are urgently sensed and that sector their daily lives. They are the areas controlled by this or that faction, sect or gang. They are the unseen threats posed by the jumpy guard on the castle wall, or the edgy US gunner in his Bradley.
Judgments on what movement is possible are made on the basis of these mental maps. They are rules of life that insist Sunnis avoid certain hospitals, the Baghdad city morgue, the Ministry of the Interior, even petrol stations, for fear of the Shiite militias.
Elsewhere, journeys across the narrow cut of the Army Canal, where it slices through Adhamiya, are carefully calculated on both sides by Sunni and Shiite now that sectarian cleansing has separated the communities.
It is cross-checked against patterns of the violence on the news, to establish a daily "weather report" that tells what bombs have exploded where, which mosques have been attacked, where the death squads are active - indicators of the likelihood of being stopped at an unauthorised checkpoint by vengeful members of the "other" community, dragged out and killed. It is a cycle that reached its apogee after the bombing of the Golden Dome of the Shiite al-Askari mosque in Samarra in February last year. They are the little decisions that touch every aspect of Iraqi life, the slow, grinding separation of every stratum of Iraq's collapsing society.
The rehearsal space of Baghdad's Symphony Orchestra is in the capital's largely Shiite Shaab district. Hassam al-Din al-Ansari, aged 64, the orchestra's composer and principal violinist, is in his office tuning his violin and improvising little arpeggios as he does. Like most in the orchestra before the invasion, he sustained his poorly paid musical career with another job, in al-Ansari's case as a deputy manager in the Ministry of Industry.
It is an oppressive day late in September 2006. The electricity, inevitably, is down. It has been out for 40 hours, one of the musicians complains. Without a generator to light and cool the theatre, the musicians arriving to warm up before rehearsing find themselves on a stage playing in a stifling gloom peering at scores lit only by a distant skylight. In the heat, the stage smells of sweat and dust and resin.
When it becomes too dark, the musicians abandon their efforts to use the stage and cram into the kitchen, which has windows on two sides. It is instantly a pick-a-stick of competing elbows, bows, flutes, music stands, cellos and French horns.
"We are challenging the situation," al-Ansari says with a sigh, "by trying to not be too far from the public. We are trying to put on a concert every month, but circumstances are very difficult."
So the performances that the orchestra do put on are private and rarefied, little events for a small audience who do not have to travel very far or have their own security, and put on mainly at the city's two subscription-only "country clubs". Other events are by invitation only, for government officials and diplomats from the Green Zone. Even Iraq's music has become gated.
The difficulties in assembling the musicians for rehearsal have led to another kind of fragmentation: of the very music itself. Complicated symphonies, al-Ansari admits, are too difficult to prepare, especially with no certainty that all the musicians will be able to appear. Instead, their performances are dominated by overtures, fragments of larger works and short pieces - Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. The war, too, has forced the orchestra to break into smaller units, ad hoc chamber ensembles more easy to assemble and to perform around the city when they can.
"We could just stop work. We could submit," says al-Ansari, "but we are determined to challenge the times we live in and to do our best. In the 1950s, we used to get a lot of Russian films in Iraq. We were just talking about this a quarter of an hour ago ... there was a film from the Second World War, from the battle of Leningrad, about the orchestra there that continued broadcasting on the radio through the German attack. The film showed different players and how they came to the concert and the difficulties they had because of the fighting. I feel," he says with a sad resignation, "we are living that old film.
"It took me three hours to reach the concert that we held last Sunday. There was an IED [Improvised Explosive Device] on the road that held me up. Some of the players could not make it at all. We feel like we are battling in our own war."
Throughout Iraq's collapse into violence, al-Ansari has continued with his compositions, including one for oboe, two violins, viola and cello called, without irony, The Good Land. It is about Iraq. "This is still a good land," he insists. He pauses for a moment of further consideration. "Maybe the land is good," he adds, "but sometimes the people are not good ... "
Okay," says my friend Wael, "I've got a joke for you ... you wanna hear it? A husband is waiting for his wife to return. It is getting late and he turns to his brother. 'Do you think she has a lover?' the husband asks. 'Try not to worry,' the brother says. 'She's probably been killed by a roadside bomb.' "
The good land breeds a fatalist humour to confront the horror of daily life.
I have heard Iraqis tell jokes about suicide bombers; about George Bush and al Qaeda's dead leader Musab al-Zarqawi, and firebrand preacher Moqtada al-Sadr. Once, not long after the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers was revealed, I came across a group of teenage boys playing roughly in a river, a game that involved trying to pull down the other boys' shorts. "Abu Ghraib," they told me they called it, after the prison.
Wael, who collects these jokes, explains it is "the Iraqi way to defy the miseries that they are going through".
And out of its dusty soil, its canals and groves, the good land breeds bombs and corpses too. They are markers on the military maps of Iraq's disintegration. Some of those charts also reveal a hidden picture of Iraq hatched in areas of colour. A month ago, I saw an Iraqi army chart projected on the stained wall of an outpost in a violent suburb of Baqoubah, north of Baghdad. It is at the epicentre of the most deadly fighting between US forces and insurgents, both nationalist and jihadi.
The projection showed the "areas of operation" of the rival insurgent groups: a bright patchwork of overlapping kingdoms that impose taxes and deal out their own version of justice - sometimes summary, sometimes through their own courts. On the ground, they are protected by snipers, booby-trapped houses, machine guns and roadside bombs.
We are constantly looking for new metaphors - new ways - to describe Iraq. While we in the West argue about semantics - like whether there is a civil war or not - Iraq's violent disintegration has moved relentlessly to a new phase. The question now is whether Iraq, in large measure and large areas of its territory, has become a "failed state". And while there are arguments about what "failed state" means, there is agreement at least on most of its attributes.
A failed state is one that can no longer provide security and social requirements for its citizens; that has descended into factionalism and warlordism; that cannot guarantee the integrity of its own borders, and lacks the ability to sustain itself. All of which perfectly describes large areas of today's Iraq.
Four million of its people have been displaced, with no indication that this is slowing, despite efforts to encourage families to return under the Baghdad Security Plan.
The country's professional classes - its great well of expertise - have been some of those most vigorously attacked and not simply for their sect or religion, but for being professionals. For as different groups have fought for control of hospitals, ministries and universities, Iraq's technocrats have been violently pushed aside.
The education system, too, has been gutted, both of its teachers and students in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle, to the north and west of Baghdad, the birthplace of the insurgency. In other, less-violent areas, both Shia and Sunni, armed groups have moved in to insist on a strongly Islamic identity for schools. So those parents who can afford it would rather have their university-aged children educated - and remain - abroad, in Cairo, Damascus or Amman. They are the young people you see at Baghdad's heavily defended airport waiting for their flights, a country's future, queuing patiently to flee.
The health system is slowly imploding in the worst-hit areas, with doctors leaving, notably women, who have been targeted in all the professions. The judicial system is in collapse across the country. The courts are almost non-existent, police officers are widely implicated in sectarian death squads, political killings in the south and other serious criminality including corruption and bank robbery.
Iraqis have their own explanations for this descent into the abyss. The transition to self-rule was too fast, say some, too slow, say others. The Americans were too involved in setting the political agendas. What all agree on is that the "rebuilding" of Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime was ill-conceived.
What is also true is that Iraqis of all classes and denominations were long ago sounding warnings about the risk of disintegration.
It is 2005 and I'm at the Russafa amusement park by the river. It is half-deserted despite being holiday time. It's one of my favourite places in Baghdad - a place to see Baghdadis smiling. Although the killing has begun in earnest, the park is still - just - a refuge from the bloodshed for families and courting couples.
The scooter boys hang out at the entrance smoking, pulling wheelies and selling short rides up and down the road. A year later, some of these scooter boys will be"patrolling" Sadoun St, in the heart of the city, working as scouts for the gangs hunting foreigners to attack in their discreet,"low-profile" convoys masquerading as ordinary town cars.
Inside the park's metal gates, subsiding concrete paths lead under the eucalyptus trees to the handful of rides and attractions. There is a ghost train and "pirate ship", the most popular ride, on which the laughing boys dare each other to hang on to the girders as it lurches from side to side.
At the ping-pong table, older boys play deadly serious games surrounded by a small, admiring crowd, while parents stand and watch the youngest children atop the horses of the merry-go-round.
Another jostling crowd of boys tries to grab the guns at the air rifle stall, practising their shots in a country that needs no more marksmen. The scene is dominated by the park's ancient rollercoaster, a bone-shaking ride that takes you up above the Martyr's Memorial. As you climb up with screeching wheels and halt before the drop, for a moment you are level with the shuttling Black Hawks and the little two-man bubbles of the Kiowas as they wheel on their circuits above Baghdad.
Abdel Razik Ahrim, the park's manager, is worried about what the war is doing to Iraq's children. He is worried about the violence, about the ever more wild and disrespectful behaviour of the teenage boys who come to the park. He has his theory about the way in which things are going wrong.
"In a place like Iraq," he explains, "democracy has to go through many stages. It has to be gradual. You cannot switch suddenly from dictatorship to democracy, otherwise there will be bad consequences. People need guidance." He compares it to the boys running wild in his park. "It is not the small kids, but the teenagers. In Saddam's time, the gangs were broken up. You couldn't wear a 'uniform'. Some of the boys were exiled. The misbehaviour comes from the fact they do not understand the concept of freedom - that it requires you to exercise personal responsibility as well. It needs time to settle down."
But it shows no signs of settling, not even in the midst of the present Baghdad Security Plan and the surge of 20,000 extra US troops.
How did this happen? How did the hubristic experiment of George W. Bush and Tony Blair to bring democracy forcefully to the Middle East fail quite so wholly? Instead of acting as a "beacon" to the region, it has dangerously destabilised it.
As America's weakness in the Middle East has manifested itself, Shia Iran has asserted itself in Iraq and throughout the region, setting the scene for a power struggle with Sunni Saudi Arabia.
It has been part of a comprehensive US foreign policy failure throughout the Middle East and the wider region. And so Afghanistan is facing yet another war; Lebanon, although now free of Syrian troops, is facing a dangerous political and sectarian crisis, a consequence of US and British backing for Israel's long-planned summer war against Hizbollah. Palestine, too, is close to civil war following the rejection by the US and its allies of the results of free and fair elections, and their failure to engage with Hamas. More widely, American and British policy has alienated young Muslims and encouraged others on the path to jihad and terrorism, a tendency that has been reflected in electoral support for Islamists across the region.
But it is in Iraq itself that the experiment has failed absolutely. A search for items to place on the plus side of the balance sheet in Iraq is a frustrating exercise.
Yes, there is a largely free and aggressive media. But its workers are being slaughtered.
Yes, you can now use the internet. But only when there is electricity. And only if you can afford it.
The consequence of the democratic process has, with bitter irony, been to concentrate power in the hands of those Shia parties whose supporters have been behind the worst of the violence.
Even Kurdistan, often held up as a success story, on close examination harbours dark and dangerous trends. Human rights are abused in the prisons, some of them run with almost no accountability. In northern Iraq, according to senior US military officers, Kurds are pushing forcefully - and sometimes violently - down to expand the area that they control.
Then there are the outright failures. Billions of dollars were allocated for reconstruction, but in the end, you have to ask, what has been achieved?
I look around searching for the existence of grand projects: new hospitals, a refurbished electricity grid, modern new universities. And I come away baffled by the waste and maladministration.
But it is in terms of human rights that the Bush-Blair experiment in Iraq has failed most completely. How many people have died is the subject of rancorous debate - but 150,000 is a low estimate in a range that some research has claimed could top 655,000. You see the bodies dumped on the streets, on rubbish dumps, in canals and in the sewers - sometimes beheaded, at other times bearing the marks of torture.
Did all this go so badly wrong because it lacked legitimacy from the very start? Was it because too few troops were deployed at the beginning to secure and rebuild Iraq? Certainly, allowing the wholesale looting and destruction of the country's key infrastructure was, in retrospect, insane.
I remember the insanity of those days, Basra's entire infrastructure being stripped in the handful of days between its fall and the fall of Baghdad. There are images from then that have stayed powerfully with me: a truck hauling a huge electric power generator at walking pace along a motorway to be broken up for copper, sparks arcing from its skidding base.
A few days later and it was Baghdad and the looting of a cache of weapons - ammunition, explosives, grenades and RPGs - hidden beneath the Ministry of Planning, weapons that would later fuel the insurgency.
Mistakes were compounded by mistakes: Paul Bremer's de-Baathification process disenfranchised a whole sector of society, a Sunni minority centred on the Sunni Triangle, which in turn created the conditions for an insurgency that others cheerfully exploited.
But the simplest explanation for this disaster is that the invasion unpicked a complex and brutal state, invested with powerful competitions and contradictions. And having done it, none of its architects had a plan for putting it back together. This was a country arbitrarily conceived by the post-Great War powers, whose competing sectarian and ethnic interests - Kurd, Shia, Sunni - were forever straining apart. Those responsible for tearing it apart again needed to take responsibility for reconstructing it.
That, and the fact that from the very beginning Iraqis of all callings did not want a US-led occupation and were deeply suspicious of its motivations. It was not just that Iraqis were convinced that the Americans coveted their oil; there was also a cultural abyss that made the Americans and their allies seem not just invaders but somehow alien as well.
And perhaps, on the issue of oil, Iraqis are right to be suspicious, watching as the country's new oil law is set to transform its industry from one that is nationalised into one in which large parts of its industry effectively will be privatised, with US and other international oil companies offered some of the most corporate-friendly contracts in the world.
The consequence has been that those behind the Iraq war - as with all the king's men and Humpty Dumpty - could not put the country together again, because they did not understand what they had broken.
And when they tried - through elections and writings of constitutions and an attempt to find a sectarian consensus for effective government - it was to discover that there was little common ground on which to build reconciliation.
So, instead, they quickly brushed the shards together, announced that Iraq was fixed again and again, and then looked on, appalled, as the violence got worse. Now that the whole exercise is teetering on the brink of failure, some of those who supported the invasion most strongly have taken to blaming the Iraqis for their own misfortune, as if they atomised their own state.
War infects a country's consciousness until you cannot speak anything but war, see anything but war, hear anything but war. It measures out the day in its predations. You wake to war and travel through the war. You work and eat by permission of the war. When you sleep it is through the noise of war. It defines what is possible: leisure, education, courtship, friendship, what you can or cannot say. Where - and even who - you can be.
So Baghdad merchants lock up their Karrada stores at 3pm to avoid the kidnap gangs linked to the militias who would trade them for the money that feeds the war. Women stay indoors with their children or close by the neighbourhoods where they are known. Weddings are deferred, mixed marriages break up and educations are left unfinished. Names are changed by deed poll to hide sectarian identities, while Sunnis place religious pictures on walls in Shiite areas for dissimulation.
Thus Iraqi society, in terrible, small increments of loss and denial, is breaking down. All the while, the violence percolates through society, infecting everything it touches.
In the Sunni Triangle, tribes that support al Qaeda in Iraq are now fighting those who do not, using the war to settle decades-long blood feuds.
In the Shiite south, which British troops plan to vacate, a war is under way in the vacuum that planned withdrawal is creating, pitting the political parties against each other.
The violence demands new ways of living. A friend of mine lives close to the Sunni stronghold of Ghazaliya. It has been victim of sectarian attacks by Shiites from neighbouring Shola, involving assaults by large groups of gunmen. He tells me how his neighbourhood is being transformed by war.
These days, he says, the men take turns climbing on the roofs as watchers against attack. He is a peaceful man, but knows that soon it will be difficult for him not to volunteer to join the watches when all the other men are joining. Then he, too, will be sucked into the conflict as a participant.
It is not the only transformation. "People are afraid to leave the neighbourhood - to go to hospital or shop. They're afraid they might be abducted because they are Sunnis from Ghazaliya. Some builders in the neighbourhood went round asking if there was a doctor who lived there.
"They want to persuade him that they will build a small clinic, so people do not have to risk travelling far. They also want a shop built so that people can buy basic food."
As neighbourhoods turn into fortresses, travel becomes ever more difficult for ordinary Iraqis.
Among them is taxi driver Jawad, who has to queue for 2 1/2 hours to fill his battered Corona with petrol.
"I'll tell you what I've seen today," says Jawad, whose father is Sunni and mother Shiite, although he identifies himself as a Shiite.
He grimaces and shows a mouth full of broken teeth. He is 61 with his hair hennaed orange and brushed back.
"The army stopped me at a checkpoint in Dora today. I was leaving my home when they halted me so they could take away a body."
Jawad has rules that help him to survive. He does not drive too early and finishes at 4.30pm before the roads become too quiet and risky. And there are large areas he avoids. "I avoid areas that are bad for Shiites and I try to avoid the Sunni hotspots like Ghazaliya," he explains. "Of course, it is a very dangerous job. My car is an old one, so it is not attractive to thieves ... "
His silence suggests it is only a part of the problem.
He then tells a story that contradicts his "rules" for staying alive.
That is also oddly typical of a city where Shiite death squad members will still talk to their old Sunni friends by mobile phone. It is a story that persuades me it is better for him not to publish his surname.
"I was going into an area controlled by the Mahdi Army about a month ago when I see this guy come running barefoot. It is an area where the Mahdi Army were doing sectarian cleansing of Sunnis.
"He is shouting, 'The Mahdi Army want to kill me! They want to kill me!' Then he tells me he is a Sunni who had gone to the area to attack it. This guy is shouting at me, 'Please, please for God's sake take me away.' And you know, I had my wife and daughter with me ... but I took the risk and rescued him."
It is an odd tale that defies the present violent situation as powerfully as al-Ansari and his musicians. It is one of the small and daily acts of courage across all of the communities that, even as Iraq has splintered, has prevented total disintegration.
In the end, I am left with two powerful and contradictory images of the Iraq seen earlier this month, as the beginning of the war's fifth year approaches. Two images that sketch out the country's possibilities.
One is of the main street that runs through Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province. There are craters from roadside bombs that hit the passing American patrols, turning the surface of the carriageway into a moonscape.
The houses and offices are pitted with gunfire; the metal shutters on the abandoned shops are bulging, pregnant where they have been sucked out by many blasts. There are no people on this street. Those you see are hiding in the alleyways afraid of being caught in a crossfire. It is a desiccated scene - all of its life sucked out. For that is what war does.
Then I think of a second scene: a little corner of Baghdad, a Shiite neighbourhood close to the Hamra Hotel that I walked through. It is bustling with shopkeepers selling fruit, people mending cars, boys on scooters and
