BAGHDAD Not yet three weeks after U.S. troops seized the heart of Baghdad and toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is a country poised agonizingly between its past and its future.

There is widespread gratitude to the United States for ending the brutal dictatorship of Saddam, though it is not always easy to hear that through the cacophony of voices.

For the moment, the stage is held mainly by militant Shiite clerics demanding an Islamic republic; by ambitious carpetbaggers returning from long exile abroad to seek an instant ride to power; by members of the old government hoping to align themselves with the new power brokers; and most persuasively, by ordinary Iraqis whose daily lives were upended when the old system collapsed.
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There are people, especially at moments of frustration and anger, who say that things were better under Saddam, that his straitjacket of fear was better than the chaos that followed the arrival of U.S. troops.

But catch the same people at less stressful moments, in the quiet of their homes, and they will say that they waited long years for the end of the dictatorship, that only America had the power to end it, and that what they want now is what they expected from America: a civil society based on Western-style freedoms, but also Western-style security for the individual and the family.

After nearly 24 years of misery under Saddam, Iraqis have had little time to taste life without him. There have been days of exhilaration and hope, but also of disappointment and despair. Day by day, the country stumbles forward, the trust in America and its promises still alive, but eroding. What follows are glimpses of the lives of just a handful of ordinary Iraqis, captured at random Saturday, each suggesting something of the frustrations, but also the yearnings, of a people whose lives America has turned upside down. - John F. Burns

» Short of basics (and of temper), Iraqis grope their way forward