The campaign posters along Baghdad's Waziriya Street are filled with promise.
"For a free and independent Iraq," pledges one. "For a peaceful Iraq," says another.
The posters are plastered on a gray, story-high concrete barricade protecting an Iraqi appeals court from car bombings. They show pictures of religious leaders vested with spiritual power and politicians wielding authority, the Iraqi general who toppled the country's monarchy in a bloody coup in 1958 and a descendant of the royal family who aspires to a revived throne.
"Your vote is precious," declares his poster, "so give it to someone who is trustworthy."
The mood across the street in stationery shops, restaurants and ramshackle cafes, lined by traffic that never surges, never stops but just crawls, is far more complicated. In the religiously mixed neighborhood, the emotions are as jumbled as the posters are clear. There is fear over the vote, hope for the future, disdain at the parties and resilience, that motif of life in Baghdad.
In Waziriya, the posters tell one story -- what Iraq's political parties view as the voters' desires. The conversations, tumbling over each other as they do on any one day, suggest another.
"The Iraqi people need someone who is tough," insisted Hussein Jumaa, a 22-year-old student at the nearby Academy of Fine Arts, finishing off a falafel sandwich at a restaurant. "They don't need someone who is always going to say politely, 'Please, sir.' "
Jumaa said he supported Ayad Allawi, the country's interim prime minister, whose tough talk and distant past as a member of the repressive Baath Party seem to make him a law-and-order favorite. It is a theme delivered relentlessly by Allawi's party on Arabic-language satellite television and on his posters, which read: "Strong leadership and a peaceful country."
Ahmed Hadi, another art student sitting with Jumaa, shook his head. He supported the slate of candidates seen by many Iraqis as blessed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the preeminent Shiite religious leader in the country.
"It belongs to the house of Shiites," he said.
As they talked, Qais Ubaidi, a minibus driver, walked through the restaurant, his impatient gait matching his attitude.
"They're all lies," he insisted, when asked what he thought of the posters. "It's a deceitful process."
A faint campaign
The election of a 275-member parliament, which will then draw up a constitution, is scheduled for Jan. 30. In Baghdad, the campaign is underway even as the capital is essentially under siege, bracing for an intensified insurgent campaign to disrupt the vote. Instead of rallies, there are small gatherings in fortified locations -- homes, offices or party headquarters behind barricades and barbed wire. Instead of speeches, there are TV sound bites. Some stations are saturated with electioneering. Instead of pressing the flesh, the candidates put up posters with their messages.
Some are simple. On one of the concrete slabs, stacked like dominoes along Waziriya Street, one leaflet from an independent candidate, Ahmed Taha, meekly says, "I am trying to introduce myself."
Others are more sophisticated.
The United Iraqi Alliance, the group fielding the most prominent Shiite list, has blanketed parts of Baghdad with messages that lean toward the moralistic. "For the sake of assuring social virtue," says one leaflet. "To guarantee the identity of Islamic Iraq," says another, graced with a portrait of Sistani, whose authority among the most religious Shiites is unquestioned.
This avowedly Shiite list draws on the history of the long-repressed community, which suffered centuries of dispossession at the hands of Sunni rulers, ousted President Saddam Hussein the last in a long line. "Our way is to revive what the criminal Baath regime destroyed," one poster declares over a map of Iraq pictured as cracked mud with red flowers atop. Nearly all the posters cite a Koranic verse. Among the most popular: "God will never change the condition of people until they change it themselves."
"Vote for security, distribution of social services and the struggle against unemployment," intones the poster of another coalition, the People's Union, backed by Iraq's venerable Communist Party. The party's posters, often bearing the most eclectic messages in Baghdad, promise "a safe childhood," "national brotherhood" or "the rights of motherhood and childhood."
Ubaidi, the bus driver, scoffed at them without exception.
"They're all put up by thieves who know how to steal very well," he said.
Plying the route from downtown to southern Baghdad, Ubaidi makes no more than $6 a day, down from $23 last fall. His profits were crippled by the weeks-long fuel crisis, which has quintupled prices of gasoline on the black market.
"There's no cooking gas, no cooking oil, no electricity and no gasoline. There's no security and everyone's a thief," the stocky Ubaidi said, as a scratchy cassette of a singer from the Persian Gulf area played over the restaurant stereo. "If Saddam participated in the election, I'd vote. Everyone in Iraq is a thief, but Saddam was a good thief. At least he provided security."
Ubaidi, the son of a Shiite mother and a Sunni father, blamed political parties for intensifying sectarian tensions. Leading Sunni groups have declared a boycott of the vote, and the most militant of them have threatened to disrupt it.
"They're all competing for the throne," he said. "Where were they before?"
It is not an uncommon sentiment toward the parties. Many of the most prominent party leaders were abroad during Hussein's rule, and often their roots are shallow in a society that was effectively depoliticized over 35 years of Baathist rule. Many Iraqis blame the former exiles for the lackluster performance of the interim government and the Governing Council before it. The Shiite slate uses the portrait of Sistani, not its own candidates, on its posters, few of which employ party names.
"People hate the parties," declared 40-year-old Fathi Abed, who runs an auto parts store on Waziriya Street, its shelves stacked with headlights, rear-view mirrors and metallic tissue boxes.
World-weary and nonchalant, Abed said he would vote, even though he insisted the outcome was preordained.
"I'll bet you," he said. "Wait till after the election, and you'll see that it's Ayad Allawi. He's going to win."
There is a sense among some in Baghdad that the United States wants the new parliament to choose Allawi, the incumbent, as prime minister. If the Americans want it, the conversation goes, so it will be. This reflects the deep vein of conspiracy theories that runs through Baghdad life these days -- from a rumor that the Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, blamed for some of Iraq's most spectacular carnage, is an American fabrication, to a rumor voiced by Abed that Iraqis who don't vote will have their monthly food rations taken away.
"Maybe it's not correct," he said, "but it's what people are saying."
Awaiting the chaos
Down the street from Abed's shop are other posters, cluttering the entrance to the city's Academy of Fine Arts, past vendors selling tea from rickety stalls with cardboard roofs and kiosks selling candy and stationery to students milling along the street.
Some of the leaflets are distributed by the Iraqi electoral commission, urging Iraqis to vote "for the sake of the future of Iraq" or women to take part in the ballot "to bring life to democracy and equality." Alongside them are the posters of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, the royalist group whose leader, Sharif Ali bin Hussein, promises "security, stability, justice and prosperity."
Around the corner sat one of the monarchist party's candidates, Muatasim Idris, who works for an engineering firm.
His campaign, like many, is a subdued one: no speeches, no rallies and no meetings. Holding out his hand, the 35-year-old Idris ticked off the threats he would face campaigning: He could be targeted in a bombing, his car could be stolen, his family could be threatened. Come election day, he said, he expects dozens of families in his neighborhood to abandon their houses near schools, where polling stations may be set up.
"I'm a moving target," Idris said, with a wry smile. "I only campaign among the people I trust -- family and friends."
"We know there will be balbala," he said, meaning confusion and chaos. "There's no way around it. You can already hear it every day. People are scared. Even in their houses, they feel scared. But we have to decide the fate of our country. We can't abandon it."
In his office, adorned with a picture of Islam's holiest shrine in Mecca and a Koranic verse inscribed on a mirror, Idris sat with his 45-year-old cousin, Ali Saleh. In a familiar lament, they worried about Iraq -- that it would take a generation for it to return to what it was before the Americans arrived, before Hussein's tyranny, before the wars and brutality that have littered their lifetime.
"We have a long history in Iraq," Saleh said. "Saddam was not new. How many generations have had to live like this?" He looked out the window of his firm, the Mustafa Factory, past the Constitutional Monarchy posters and the Communist Party leaflets on a concrete barrier outside. "Our generation has been raised on violence. They cannot solve their problems peacefully."
Members of a younger generation sat in the courtyard at the Academy of Fine Arts, graced with statues from Baghdad's Abbassid dynasty, the milieu of the Arabian Nights and the stories that give Baghdad its nostalgia. Next to a student playing "Hotel California" on an acoustic guitar was Muntasir Jalal and his friend, Dalal Mohammed. Jalal is a Christian, Mohammed a Sunni.
The vote "is our opportunity," Jalal insisted.
Mohammed rolled her eyes, then shook her head.
"I'm a Sunni, and the Sunnis are boycotting," she said. "It's going to lead to a lot of troubles. I just have a feeling."
On a nearby wall, a poster with Sistani's portrait urged people to vote. Across the courtyard was a banner: "This is how nations begin to decide their destiny . . . through the ballot box," it said.
"I don't pay attention to them," Mohammed said. "I am pessimistic. I'm pessimistic about life, about everything. I want to leave Iraq. That would be the best thing."
Jalal laughed at her. "She's going to carry an RPG," a rocket-propelled grenade.
He tried to turn the conversation in a better direction. They were artists, he insisted.
"In art, there are no politics," Jalal said, reassuringly. "We're just busy painting."