A SUICIDE bomber struck my hotel in November 2005. One wing is closed, and plastic sheeting is still taped to the window frames in my room, devoid of glass. Sewage bubbles up from the drain in the bathroom floor, writes LARA MARLOWEin Baghdad.
All this is secondary to the tragic smile of the night receptionist, whose son was killed in the bombing.
One hovers between indignation and pity for the desperate Iraqis who try to gouge you to the last dinar.
I couldn't help smiling at this echo of rip-off Iraq in retired US Gen William Odom's assessment of the Sons of Iraq militia. "Let me emphasise that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty," Odom told a Senate committee.
"I've heard, for example, the cost in one area of about 100 sq km is $250,000 per day. And periodically, they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased."
With the occupation costing $411 million daily, who's counting?
There's only an hour of mains electricity each day now. Yet despite increasing hardship, most of the people I meet tell me life is improving. The explanation is simple: at the height of the Sunni-Shia civil war in 2006-2007, some 80 bodies were found on the streets of Baghdad each morning. Now there are "only" three or four. There is still car-bombing and kidnapping on a scale that would shut down any normal country, but in Baghdad people are almost cheerful.
The Sunnis feel the Americans are at last protecting them, and prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's repression of the Shia militia, Jaish al-Mehdi, and the Sunni al-Qaeda strikes civilians on all sides as non-partisan and long overdue.
There are light moments: I saw US and Iraqi soldiers eating melting ice cream at a joint checkpoint on Jadriya Bridge. There are symbolic moments: I saw a Humvee gunner train his 50 calibre machinegun on an Iraqi boy who pointed his middle finger at him. The child dropped his hand and scowled impotently.
Grievances resurface quickly. A US army officer yesterday reminded me that his unit, Alpha Company 4-64, was the one that fired a tank shell at the Palestine Hotel on April 8th, 2003, killing two journalists. I saw them carried out, dying.
The officer was still at military academy when it happened. The case is now taught in army courses, he said. He claimed it was an honest mistake. But nothing he said lifted the chill that fell over our meeting.
What then must it be like for Sunni and Shia?