City

I’m looking over a map of Baghdad that’s taped to the wall next to my desk. There are 9 districts with 104 separate neighborhoods within the city and 6 qadas (outlying counties) making up the province of Baghdad. I’m trying to learn their names, and I’m having about the same success as I had learning the geography of Manhattan the last time through. I don’t think the Dutch were also the original inhabitants of Iraq, but I feel like blaming my consternation on them anyway. I’ve been pulled up to the majors, you might say. I’ve been reassigned to a team dealing with the government of the Baghdad province, the major metropolitan region of Iraq, with nearly 7 million out of Iraq’s 25 million people. The team has specialists working on major urban issues such as fire, police, education, water, solid waste, justice, transportation and power. My job is governance and elections; my primary point of contact will be the Mayor of Baghdad. Or each of them, as there seems to be a schism reminiscent of certain Catholic eras, with competing popes claiming divine supremacy over those other white-hatted usurping blasphemers. In our case, there just seems to be a question of legitimacy between older institutions and the developing offices of the new government. Several older holdovers from pre-Saddam Baghdad have been fired by the newly elected city and provincial councils, but have refused to leave their offices. But most of them have been more upset about the blow to their image than the relief from their municipal duties; the councils appointed new officials to manage public services and they just bypass the old guy who merely wants to keep the nice desk and the Mercedes. So we’re keeping track of a couple of Mayors right now, expecting that the new constitution will help iron out some of the legitimacy issues. It will most likely solidify the relationships between city hall and the provincial government and make it clearer to see who can fire who. I flew around Baghdad yesterday on a Blackhawk- that’s how we commute across town here- and I was trying to come up with a comparison, a way to describe Baghdad relating it to some other city people might be familiar with. I sort of came up empty. It’s just… Baghdad. It’s just that city you see on the news every night with exploding cars and weeping women and bombed-out buildings. The helicopter hovers for a moment over all of this, and then you land. Maybe then it feels like a different city- one you can walk on and touch and listen to- and you’re not quite sure if the image you’ve seen is a reflection of the reality or the reality has been created by images of what you expect to find and this tension sits thick in the air; and heat from the sidewalk fights with heat from the sun leaving both loathing the exhausted embrace between them.