BAGHDAD -- Iraqis think of it as the social security office. And as the court of civil complaints and the central police station. It also goes by the generic name "the Authority." A single American soldier was on duty at its side gate, sitting on a chair behind spools of barbed wire.
Ikbal Abbas Muhsen, a onetime employee of the Youth Ministry, called out to the soldier. "I need to talk to the general!" she said in Arabic. She had come to ask for her job back from the people now ruling Iraq: the U.S. officials installed at Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace.
Muhsen had dressed in a black jacket for the occasion. The soldier, sitting a dozen feet away, seemed unaware of her presence.
"How am I supposed to live without work?" she shouted. "I am taking Valium! Five pills a day to be able to sleep!"
Mascara-tinged tears ran down her cheeks. "You Americans gave opportunity only to the looters. We, the educated, are destroyed. Why don't the men in charge come to meet us?"
Nearly three months ago, the Americans arrived in this capital with promises of a new and better Iraq. Today, there is still no Iraqi government. Basic services work only falteringly. For many Iraqis, each new day of occupation ratchets up feelings of powerlessness, anxiety and humiliation.
A fiercely proud people, Iraqis feel that they are losing face in the Arab world. The Arabic word used to describe their circumstances -- ihtilal, or occupation -- has for decades been associated in the region's media with the stateless Palestinians.
Unable to communicate with English speakers, most Iraqis worry about the foreigners' intentions. And even some who have long-standing friendships with Americans speak darkly about what will happen if the occupation drags on.
"Even if I joined the resistance, I don't think I could kill an American soldier," said Wamidh Nadhmi, who for years entertained U.S. reporters in his Baghdad home with quiet, cautious criticism of Hussein's regime. "I'm an old man, a political scientist. I don't think I could pull the trigger."
But the thought has crossed his mind, he said. It is an irrational response to an irrational situation.
"There are three primary causes of stress: loss, change and threat," said Buthanina Hilo, dean of the psychology department at Baghdad University. The fall of Hussein and the arrival of the Americans have brought all three, she said.
