Sitting in a battered Toyota Corona, Fadhil Murah wiped his sweaty forehead with a soiled red rag. Behind him snaked a line of cars a half-mile up Jadriya Bridge, waiting to fill up with gas. Ahead of him was another hour he would spend waiting his turn. On a day of withering heat, his words punctuated by a cacophony of car horns, he spoke glumly of his life and his city.

He had closed his construction supply store, wary of thieves. He had sold everything in his house – from his bed to the refrigerator – to support his wife and four children. He has little hope of returning soon to his former job at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, part of a government that exists in name only. For food, he relies on the $5 or so he makes a day tooling Baghdad's streets as a gypsy cab driver.

Ala al-balata, he said, Egyptian slang that means on the floor tiles, as broke as you can be.
"America could solve all the problems, serve all the people in days. It knows what the country needs. It doesn't need the opposition parties from abroad. It needs comfort," he said, his blue shirt soaked with sweat. "They came and said, 'I'll give you freedom and democracy'. So what? People should have food first, then democracy."

From the gas lines that frustrate Murah, to frequent power outages that leave many residents with only a few hours a day of electricity, from a chilling crime wave to newly opened stores bursting with expensive appliances, Baghdad is a city of great expectations and even greater disappointments. The seeming invincibility of the U.S. conquest has magnified the failures of the weeks that followed the war.

People are confused that U.S. military forces, assumed to be all-powerful, have delivered little. They are unsettled at the lawlessness that has encouraged religious forces to step into the breach and vigilantes to dole out their own brand of justice.

They are bitter at the promises – yet unfulfilled – of a better life that would follow the war. To many of its residents, Baghdad is a capital both liberated and occupied, but most of all just bewildered.

"The price was expensive," said Qassam Alsabti, an artist sipping tea at his Baghdad art gallery. "We all have conflicting feelings – joy and grief. I see people happy they are freed from what once hung over them.

But when you look at Baghdad, from up high, you see the efforts of 100 years wiped out in a month. We knew we had to pay a price, but not in this ugly way." Along Karrada Street, which runs through a spit of land along a bend in the Tigris River, Panasonic televisions, Samsung washing machines, Toshiba refrigerators and a gaggle of air conditioners, ovens and satellite dishes spill into the streets – courtesy of an Iraqi dinar buoyed by a deluge of U.S. dollars and the overnight disappearance of once-steep customs duties and taxes.

Overlooking the display is a three-room apartment, where Karima and her family of eight live in envy. "From the war until now, I've earned nothing," she said dolefully, a black veil framing a wizened face that belies her 36 years.

She once sold chewing gum from a canvas mat in the street, but now fears to go outside. She sold her daughter Fatima's gold necklace for about $65, a few dollars of which went to buy three chairs her neighbours had looted from a school. The day the war began, she took her 20-year-old son Ali to the bus station, and he went to man an anti-aircraft battery in northern Iraq. Just before the government's collapse, he returned, walking the last stretch through a cratered junkyard of burnt tanks.

"Now he sits," she said, tears running down her face. "He looks for work, he finds nothing and he comes back and sits." As she talked, the electricity went out.

Despite the palpable relief at the ouster of Saddam Hussain and the end of his three decades of repressive rule, it is often heard in Baghdad today that the country needs a strong leader, that it can be governed only by a strong hand.

Mixed in with those words is a belief, almost universal, that a country as powerful as the U.S. could almost certainly rebuild Iraq. Baghdad's residents often expressed awe at the force of the invasion. Now they are just as often baffled by its aftermath.

"It would take the Americans five minutes to provide gas, to provide electricity, to provide security," Karima said. "Not five minutes," her 13-year-old daughter Amal interrupted, "just one minute."

In a room lit by the morning sun, they traded stories, many driven by rumour. Did you hear about the three girls kidnapped as they walked to church? About the two neighbours killed by a cousin envious of booty they stole from the palace of Saddam's son Uday?

Ali said he watched last week as three men armed with AK-47s seized a car in the street below. "People don't respect each other. It's like a jungle. Baghdad is a city of five million Ali Babas," Fatima said. Ali nodded. "Everybody is carrying a pistol or a rifle," he said.

In the mean streets of Mareidy, by reputation the toughest neighbourhood in the slum once known as Saddam City, a Russian-made Kalashnikov runs $90, a Czech-made knockoff $50. Pistols and revolvers are plentiful. A black ammunition clip, glistening in the sun, costs about $1, and a bullet can go for 50 cents. The men advertise their wares by hoisting them overhead.

"Looters!" someone shouted. At that, the men turned toward the street, firing their rifles into the air. "Every bullet they fire lands on the head of some person," Rasul Jabr, a 25-year-old teacher, said as he watched the scene.

"When people buy these weapons, they'll go looting from the people." A crowd had gathered, as often happens in the neighbourhood, and Jabr's words angered some of the men firing their guns.

"I'm not a thief and neither is he," protested Abu Dhiaa, a stocky 25-year-old in a grey gown. He pointed to his friend, Arkan Saddam, a deserter from the Republican Guard. "The people we are shooting at are all Ali Babas. I'll tell you, we have a right to protect ourselves." Jabr, unarmed, retreated. "I'm not talking about you," he said.

"The people have to keep guns because there's no security," Abu Dhiaa went on. He ticked off his enemies: militant Sunni Muslims hostile to the Shiites who live in the slum; former members of Saddam's Baath Party; and remnants of Saddam's Fedayeen, a militia force rumoured to be meeting underground in a nearby neighbourhood. A shopkeeper interjected. "The thieves, too," he said.

Down the street, past a footpath cluttered with vendors hawking looted air conditioners, office chairs, windows coated in dust and metal sinks, a banner implored: "Set aside the rifles and cooperate in cleaning our city."

In front of it gathered tens of thousands of people for Friday prayers at the Mohsin Mosque. Men trudged through the dusty streets, towels thrown over their heads to shield them from a sweltering sun.

Over their shoulders were prayer rugs, from intricate Persian designs to plastic mats. Mosque workers wandered through the crowd, spraying mists of water over the men to keep them cool. At the mosque's door was Sheikh Kadhim Abadi, cloaked in a white funeral shroud to signify his willingness to die.

"They dec