Notes from Jane Arraf

Jane is a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor who has been reporting from Iraq off and on since the late 1990s. She writes of Her Iraq. Here are some excerpts:

It's so much safer now that sometimes it seems as if the violence that erupted here was a fevered dream and that the war is over. It isn't.

I sit next to a woman wearing black and an expression that suggests something terrible has recently happened. She lost her brother in a suicide bombing in January at a tribal reconciliation meeting when one of the sheikhs sent in his 14-year-old son to blow himself up.

And then there are currents so far below the surface that you only occasionally see the ripples – of a world where tribal justice trumps any court, where genies mentioned in the Koran can do more harm than men with guns, and where normal people make accommodations to survive in an abnormal society.

"Threats and violence have become the Iraqi way of life," says Nermeen. She takes precautions – not staying home alone, making sure she's not tailed – but believes the only list that determines when you die is that drawn by fate.

In my years going back and forth between Iraq and the US, I've become convinced that it's only distance that makes things look simple. The labels we use – Baathist, insurgent – don't mean nearly as much to Iraqis as they do to us. Even the Iraqis who returned from exile with their fixed ideas of wrong and right found themselves in uncertain territory. And those who lived here through Saddam find themselves strangers in their own country.