one step forward, two steps back, down ina babylon

• Soldiers stopping cars hand out leaflets warning drivers to check their vehicles before they set off, because of bombs which can be easily and quickly attached with magnets.
• Concrete anti-blast walls still surround almost every significant building here, and stretch along streets where there are markets bringing relative safety, but turning the pavements - where the vendors' stalls are - into narrow, claustrophobic canyons.
• There are numerous sandbagged machine-gun posts. There is even one looking out from the walls of the ministry of agriculture compound.
• Residential districts are protected with chicanes of concrete bollards, coils of rusting razor-wire, oil drums filled with concrete, sawn-down trunks of date palm trees and more check-points, protected with sandbags.
• One day, our anonymous BBC car is waved on by two policemen, but then everybody is doing urgent U-turns and heading back the way they came.
• The street is cordoned off - there has been a roadside bomb. Two people are dead and two cars are wrecked - their bonnets thrown up and twisted, tyres blown out, dents in their doors from the impact of the explosion.
• Shopkeepers are sweeping up glass from their front windows. One man - still in shock - rails against the American occupation. "Is this the freedom they brought us?" he asks. And he curses the bombers: "How can people call themselves Muslims and do this?"
• The next day, two bombs - one in a car in a car-park, the other by the roadside - kill 16 people. They were out shopping and at least 50 more were injured, but it barely makes the news. Baghdad is getting better now, is it not?
• It is getting better, but this could simply be the eye of the storm, like the calm circle in the middle of those dramatic satellite photographs of hurricanes.
• The second stage of this hurricane could be revenge. Thousands of people have been threatened, burned, bombed and shot from their homes.("Painfully slow progress in Iraq," BBC, 11 Oct. 2008)