WAR

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee charged Saturday that President Bush has no plan for pacifying Iraq in his last nine months in office, and intends to "muddle through and hand the problem off to his successor." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who this week will preside over a long-awaited hearing on Iraq, said in the Democrats' weekly radio address that because Bush's year-old troop increase has not led Iraqi groups to settle their differences, it has been a failure.

Love is in the air in Yousif Mohammed's shop. So is death, but that's OK, because Mohammed's business is selling flowers, and in Baghdad, where bouquets rarely top shopping lists these days, weddings and funerals are his mainstay. It wasn't always like this. Before the war, Iraqis loved buying fresh flowers to brighten up their homes and offices, or to present with a flourish to the objects of their affection.

Abu Hassan took deep breaths of joy as he crossed the double-decker bridge spanning the Tigris River. The water below may have stunk of sewage. The air may have been choked with traffic fumes. It didn't matter to Abu Hassan. He was free after nearly a year hidden inside his house, the only place he had felt safe from the gunmen and killers who had taken over his neighborhood in south Baghdad.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says he is working to prepare the Pentagon for the first wartime presidential transition since Vietnam and has asked civilian officials to be prepared to stay on at the request of the next president. Gates, who has served in seven presidential administrations, said transitions had become slower over 25 years, with more and more senior civilian positions remaining vacant for long periods.

With the sound of helicopters hovering overhead, Samir hunched behind a pile of sandbags and sank his teeth into a hamburger. The thirtysomething Beirut resident was not a warrior taking a moment of respite on the battlefield. He was a regular customer dining with his black-veiled wife and little son at Buns and Guns, a new, war-themed restaurant where every detail, from the menu and decor to the names of sandwiches, is inspired by the military world.

The blast of insecticide jolted me awake. A Mexicana flight attendant had just doused me with a chemical cloud while her colleague explained over the intercom that the Cuban Health Ministry requires arriving aircraft to be fumigated. "The substance isn't harmful to humans," we were assured, amid a chorus of coughing. Ah, the glamorous life of a foreign correspondent. Nights spent in war-zone villages without heat or indoor plumbing.

They are the sullen architecture of the "surge," gray armies shrinking the horizon. Baghdad is a city of blast walls, towering maze-like from the Tigris to the battered, seething neighborhoods of Shula and Sadr City. Concrete sentinels of last year's troop buildup, they seal and sequester. They absorb explosions from car bombs, they bottle up bad guys.

"What's it like there?" It's the question we get asked most often by people who haven't been to Baghdad, followed closely by, "Do you live in the Green Zone?" The answer to that one is easy: No. The answer to the first is more difficult. Baghdad, like any big city, is a porridge of ugliness, beauty, charm, humor, scowls, color and grayness, but with a twist: It is under military occupation, and signs of U.S. and Iraq security forces are everywhere.