"...optimists are harder and harder to find."

Rory McCarthy returns to Baghdad after two months and finds that even the optimists there are losing heart.

A wave of fury and despair among Iraqis has drowned out the few voices that filled me with hope. Those of my Iraqi friends who clung resolutely to their optimistic dreams are finally losing heart. They shrug their shoulders and begin to list the unrelenting failures of the new Iraq.

It is not that the power supply has still not improved. It has worsened. Four months after television screens across the world showed the victorious toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdous Square, power cuts are more frequent, not less. In many Baghdad homes the water that flows from the taps is brackish and undrinkable. Water treatment plants, short of electricity and poisoned by their own rusting pipes, are failing.

[...]

Two months ago eager aid workers were arriving in droves, filling empty hotel rooms and beginning dozens of long overdue projects. After last week's bombing at the UN headquarters in eastern Baghdad, those same young people are hurrying to leave. Many UN staff, some deeply traumatised by what they have suffered, have already gone.

At the weekend the Red Cross, an organisation with a reputation for enduring the riskiest of environments, from Afghanistan to Chechnya, announced it would drastically reduce its staffing. Yesterday Oxfam pulled out too.

So to help deal with the steadily crumbling security situation, we're starting to recruit the old Mukhabarat sadists into our service. Charming. Bet that goes over really well with all those liberated Iraqis.