EVERY day, small propeller-driven aircraft corkscrew steeply down into Baghdad airport, lessening the risk of being hit by shoulder-fired missiles. The war-blasted facility is back in full working order, and half a dozen big airlines have been licensed to use it. But the terror threat remains too pressing to admit anything but these costly charter flights, underwritten by the American government, from Amman, neighbouring Jordan's capital.
To the motley bunch of aid workers, reporters and spies on board, the flights would give travel to Iraq a semblance of the ordinary, were it not for the sharp approach angle and the greeting party of grim, gun-toting ex-Ghurkas at Baghdad's near-deserted terminal. Similarly, life in the country, for most of its citizens, would be approaching normal patterns, were it not for uncertainty about the future, anxiety over crime and violence, and the heavy footfall of foreign soldiers.
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For many Iraqis, living standards have already risen a lot. Boosted by government make-work programmes, day labourers are getting double their pre-war wages. A university dean's pay has gone up fourfold, a policeman's by a factor of ten.
Before the war, Kifah Karim, a teacher at a Baghdad primary school, took home monthly pay equivalent to just $6. Her husband earned $13 as a factory overseer. Today, with a combined income of close to $450, they no longer rely on gifts of meat from Mrs Karim's brother, a butcher, to buttress a diet dominated by government food rations. They buy 2-3 kilos of meat a week, and have recently purchased a new fridge, a television, a TV satellite dish, a VCR and a CD player.
Stacks of such goods now crowd the pavements of Baghdad's main shopping streets, shaded by ranks of bright new billboards. Prime commercial property, says a real estate broker in the Karada district, easily fetches $1,000 a square metre, four times the level this time last year. For sure, he says, there is some risk in securing proper legal title, but even under strict Baathist rule there lurked the danger that some official would take a shine to your property and seize it.
Such price rises have yet to spur much inflation. Subsidised food and petrol remain in adequate supply. Some prices have even dropped. Used cars cost one-third less than last year, the market glutted by a flash-flood of imports. Conversely, porous borders have pushed meat prices up 30%, as smugglers sneak their flocks to more lucrative markets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Baghdadis complain, but Bedouin herdsmen are doing just fine.
Yet the downward trickle has not reached everyone. Estimates of unemployment range from 60-75%. Along with around 1m salaried civil servants, some 80,000 policemen and security guards now earn decent wages, 50,000 Iraqis are on long-term reconstruction projects, and double that number profit as day labourers. But Iraq's workforce numbers some 7m. The disbanding of the army alone put 400,000 on to the street, where they get a meagre and temporary dole. Some 40,000 may be rehired, but the rest are fodder for unrest or worse (see article).
The short-term economic priority, everyone concurs, is fixing the appalling infrastructure. Slowness on this score, reckon many Iraqis, has gained America more ill-will even than its soldiers' itchy trigger fingers. Yet here, at last, real progress is being made—and that is without counting the looming bonanza of $33 billion in aid that Iraq has just been promised at last week's conference in Madrid.
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