He comes from a wealthy family, one that instilled a sense of hustle and hard work. With multiple businesses -- some perfectly legal and others that would easily get him disappeared into a coalition jail should they come to light -- he represents a key constituency of Iraq; those who did nicely under Saddam and even better under the Americans.

Cruising the streets of Baghdad's upscale neighborhood of Arrasat -- where expensive restaurants, computer stores and other high-end merchandise are hawked in the dignified manner of the wealthy - puffing on a Marlboro cigarette, he relates a story that Uday Hussein told him about his father, Saddam.

"Uday told me this story," he says, "I don't know if it's true or not. But it's about Iraq."

One day, Uday says, his father called both sons to visit him at a palace and said it was time to see which one of them could rule Iraq properly.

"This is a box of ants," Saddam says to his oldest son. "I want you to go home and let them out, control them for the night, and bring them all back to me tomorrow."

So Uday goes home, lets the ants out of their box and they all run away.

The next day both brothers return to a disappointed Saddam, who then gave the younger brother, Qusay, his box of ants. Qusay went home and that night found the same result.

The third day, Saddam told his sons, "Now I will show you how to rule Iraq."

He violently shook his box of ants, opened it and emptied out its stunned, and in some cases, dead, contents. Then he scooped the ants back into the box, closed it and tucked it into his pocket.

"That is how you rule Iraq."

Regardless of anyone's opinion about whether the American invasion of Iraq was a just cause, what is clear is that the U.S administration failed to bring a box of its own to replace the nasty rule of Saddam.

One year after the beginning of the American invasion, Baghdad is a wildly different place than the city this reporter first entered last April, as U.S. forces were finishing off the last remnants of the Baath Party.

On a superficial level, it's a massive improvement.

The streets are packed with new cars. In fact, the brand-new one I'm riding in at the moment still has the import sticker from Dubai on its driver side window, and being a luxury import direct from Japan, the steering wheel is on the right -- the other side of most cars on Baghdad's roads. Shops are crammed with Western goods, and many have new satellite television and mobile phones. Restaurants fill each afternoon with well-heeled Arab businessmen and grungy Western journalists looking for, and finding, good food.

Crime -- which threatened to destroy the city even as recently as the fall, when car-jackings, kidnappings and murder made the streets unsafe even during daylight -- has fallen due to a beefier police presence, and most Iraqis are comfortable running errands as late as 10 p.m. or so.

Schools and universities are open, and just about every imaginable cause has its own organization, political party or newspaper.

But these superficial improvements obscure the real dangers facing Iraq as it heads toward even the training-wheels version of sovereignty offered by the American occupation.

For starters, even with the improvements, a fairly competent resistance movement and shadowy terror network regularly -- and somewhat effectively -- targets just about everyone in Iraq. And every claim of progress and improvement offered by the Coalition Provisional Authority should be countered by the question, "If Iraq is going so well and the people here consider you liberators, why won't any of you venture outside the walls of your heavily guarded compounds?"

To the "liberators" of Iraq -- meaning the thousands of civil servants, political appointees, mercenary-looking security teams and contractors -- Iraq is divided in two. Saddam's former Republican Palace compound -- with its walls, tanks, sniper posts and complex rituals for entry -- is called "the Green Zone." The rest of Iraq is called "the Red Zone," and Green Zone denizens rarely if ever go there, which is not unnoticed by the Iraqis.

CPA officials will complain bravely -- and off the record -- that they're never allowed to go out, and that if it weren't for the security problems they would. In the same breath they defend the war as just and insist that Iraqis -- whom with few exceptions they never see or talk too, -- consider them liberators.

Even U.S. troops have mysteriously started to disappear from the streets of Iraq as they retire to bases and conduct far fewer patrols. Helpfully, this has reduced the number of U.S. casualties.

Safety issues aside, the CPA and its appointed government, the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, are not hated by the Iraqi people, who don't even acknowledge their existence for the most part. No one on the streets of Baghdad seems to follow anything they do or pay much attention to who they are. They're too busy trying to get work to address the still crippling problem of unemployment.

As for the U.S. troops, Iraqis have a complex emotional relationship with them. Most Iraqis consider them foreign occupiers who should leave. At the same time, Iraqis are convinced that without the Americans there would be an immediate civil war as the various leaders of Iraqi society try to fill the power vacuum.

In the matter of the use of force, almost every Iraqi seems to agree that if U.S. troops had immediately declared a three-day curfew on their arrival in Baghdad and shot the first dozen or so looters, Baghdad would not have suffered such destruction of its civil sector. If U.S. troops had done that, Iraqis would respect them as tough, like Saddam, whom they feared but respected.

But the same Iraqis who argue for a tougher stance, or grumble that the GIs can't provide security, complain about the Americans' tactics and lack of nuance in dealing with Muslim culture. And even supporters of the occupation -- those who want Bush's grand experiment to succeed -- generally seem unwilling to risk anything to help that happen.

This has been the greatest single failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. America has failed to convince most Iraqis of the ideals of democracy and pluralism. These freedoms come at the cost of putting aside immediate self-interest for the good of the whole. Democracy might offer freedom, but it also requires a voluntary abdication of some freedoms to protect others. It requires participation. And the vast majority of Iraqis remain conditioned to think that the best course is to be silent, to not draw any attention to themselves, and not to try to improve the overall situation -- just as they did for years under Saddam, when they truly needed to remain quiet to survive.

And until the Iraqi people and their appointed leaders address this issue, or the Americans find a credible way to inspire it, little progress can be made either in fighting the terrorism that plagues Iraq or the rule of self-interest that continues today. The status quo leaves the nation vulnerable to civil war as each group finds itself unable or unwilling to compromise for the greater good of an Iraq that doesn't need to be shaken and stunned - like the ant box -- to operate effectively.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2004 by United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of by United Press International.

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