Michael Goldfarb sporting a mustache - fitting in, as much as you can, is an important consideration reporting in Iraq.

The Mushkeelah for a reporter trying to convey what is happening in Iraq is that no single report or series of reports can encapsulate the complexity of the situation there.

On the surface it seems as if the Bush Administration has created the wet dream of radical libertarian ideologues with sinecures at conservative think tanks. in Washington D.C. Iraq is a place with no taxes, minimal public services, served by unregulated free markets where the buyer must always beware and a well-armed citizenry takes care of its own security.

But to be honest, the American military presence is not what you might guess from looking at the pictures you see on television. In the streets of the cities or on the highways running between them, you won't see a lot of soldiers. My frame of reference for this is my experience covering Northern Ireland. There were more troops on the streets of Belfast the first time I went there back in 1992 than there are on the streets of Baghdad.

I didn't see any foot patrols in Baghdad. Although the one evening I was out late I got caught in a small traffic jam behind a humvee. The soldiers in it had stopped a car in the next lane and were inspecting it. It was hard to see anything else. Then the hummer moved on. When the traffic began moving again we drove past the vehicle. Its windows had been smashed in and its driver and passengers were standing in the streets shouting at passing traffic. It was a relatively new car and the guys inside were in their early twenties and looked middle class. My guess is they had been stopped because the car had no license plate, and the windows had been smashed in because the young men probably refused to open them when ordered to.

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I worked my way into Iraq gently. I had covered "major combat operations" from Erbil in Northern Iraq/Kurdistan and have many friends there. I decided to go there first. I flew to Diyarbakir in Southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish part of the country, and then drove the four hours to the border crossing in Silopi. It is a well-known route to me. The first time I went there was in 1996. The Iraqi Kurds were fighting each other and one faction, the KDP, had invited Saddam to send his army over the cease-fire line to help rout the other faction, the PUK.

As I drove through Silopi that time I saw one of the most surreal things I've ever seen: an eight-mile long tailback of trucks: semi's, gas tankers, flatbeds. They were lined up two and sometimes three abreast waiting to get across the border into Iraq. They were waiting to get across the border into Iraq. The drivers lived in the 100 degree heat in their cabs for up to a week at a time ... depending on how inefficient the Turkish officials felt like being. Gangs were welding extra fuel tanks underneath them. No matter what goods they were bringing into Iraq they all brought some black market gas or oil out.

Just before the war started, I was back in Silopi. There were no trucks ... and the town was eerily empty.

This time when I got to Silopi normal service had been resumed. The massive queue of trucks stretched for at least six miles. More interestingly, the trucks were carrying real consumer goods. A harbinger of what I assumed were better times in Iraq.

I was supposed to stay in Mosul. I had important business there. The family of my friend, Ahmad Shawkat, lives in Mosul. During the war, Ahmad was my translator. At the time he was living in internal political exile in Erbil, an hour's drive away in the Kurdish safe area. When major combat operations ended he moved his family back to
Mosul and started a weekly journal of political ideas. He was murdered in October 2003 by one of his political enemies.

Ahmad was more than a translator. He was my guide to the heart of his country and culture. I wanted to visit with his people and pay my respects at his grave.

An American NGO, had been conducting Democracy training in Mosul and they offered me a place to stay in their group house. A week before I was due to depart they withdrew the offer for security reasons. Apparently the man who rented them their house had received death threats. Because he rented to an American outfit he was considered a collaborator. He told the NGO to leave.

So I stayed in Erbil. My home away from home in Iraq. Spring had come early. Everyone was in a positive frame of mind. There was more money around than I had ever seen. Some of the economy came via U.S. aid programs, some from exiles returning home. It is still a poor country. But the first time I had been there Erbil was African-like in its poverty, now it is more like Ciudad Juarez.

In the Bazaar, the street where the jewelers and goldsmiths have their shops is crowded with women from the peasant villages nearby. Gold is still the way people hold their wealth here. Underneath the long skirts and abayas of the women is worn the equivalent of your savings passbook. From ankle to ear, gold chains are the family's security. I went to the jewelry shop owned by the brother of my driver Sami Abdul Qadir. Fuad is taking 2,000 dollars a day on average.

Kurdistan is enjoying its best times ever and it can give you a skewed sense of what's going on in the rest of Iraq. Just drive over to Mosul or down to Baghdad and things are very different indeed.

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On the highway down to Baghdad I had my, what's wrong with this picture?, moment. We were racing along for hour after hour when it finally hit me. I hadn't seen any U.N. vehicles. In every conflict zone I've ever worked you see U.N. convoys as well as vehicles from the Red Cross and all the major relief NGOs. Their absence and the chaos in Iraq are linked.

I confess I was nervous driving to Baghdad. I needn't have been. The only dangerous moment came as we entered the outskirts of the city. We were on a three-lane road coming into town. Traffic ground to a halt for no particular reason other than there are too many cars and too little space on the highways for them. Across a small concrete divider three lanes were leading out of the city. Those lanes also had crawled to a stop. Immediately opposite us, on the outbound side, was an American convoy, two semis carrying construction equipment guarded by three humvees. The convoy was a sitting duck for anyone with a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher ... and there are thousands of folks who have them. I was a sitting duck if the RPG missed the convoy, or if it hit someone's fuel tank and started a conflagration. For five minutes I sat with Sami wondering if I'd done enough in my professional life to warrant a small obituary in the New York Times. Then, as traffic jams are wont to do, for no reason at all we began to move forward. I was safe.

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The biggest Mushkeelah for reporters doing a big documentary like Fear and Anger, the View from Iraq, is that in the time it takes to put the piece together, events will make your material out of date. The day I left the country, the Bush Administration's man in Baghdad, Paul Bremer picked a fight with Moqtada al-Sadr by closing down his newspaper. Two days later, the private military contractors' bodies were mutilated in Fallujah. The U.S. military found itself in a two front war it could not hope to win ... unless it was willing to kill everyone in Fallujah and Najaf. Suddenly it looked like a general uprising was about to happen. I was already back in London.

In the end I needn't have worried. The general uprising didn't take place. And, given how well armed Iraqis are, it could have happened. So my documentary is a record of disillusionment and pessimism and sadness and anger. It was the mood in the Arab parts of the country the day the U.S. went into Fallujah and it is the mood now that the U.S. has pulled back.

If the CPA folks inside the Green Zone had stepped outside to the streets where I was wandering, gathering the material for the documentary ... usually the only American around ... perhaps they would have known better than to go into Fallujah all guns blazing ... but then again perhaps not.