I’m wondering what Baghdad was like during the Iraq War, and now. It’s a huge city that has been around forever, and wasn’t exactly a 3rd World city before the war, from what I understand. I know it has even had historically recent glory days.
Presumably there are/were rich people who live[d] there and owned/managed the big hotels and office buildings. There must’ve been high-end neighborhoods. Did any of those people stay during the war? If so, what was daily life like for them? If not, what happened to their properties while they were gone? Have they returned?
Have there been any books or documentaries on this topic?
Try reading Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, which details the year after the fall of the Hussain government in which Iraq was governed by the interim Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This gives an independent account of live in Iraq in the post-war environment. The author ventured outside the Green Zone and talked with non-partisan locals, as well as examining various CPA efforts to revitalize the Iraqi economy and educational system. His conclusions were that much of the damage to the basic Iraqi infrastructure and economy was already done during Gulf War I and the subsequent mismanagement by Hussain, who enriched himself and his cohorts while trying to give the impression of being a leading military power developing biological and nuclear weapons; the actual money from Iraqi oil sales was largely funneled into a string of palaces and money laundering operations, while the basic infrastructure of the country was allowed to disintegrate. The second Gulf War essentially destroyed all major infrastructure and services that Iraq had left, especially in hard-hit Bagdad. He noted that while many of the efforts undertaken by the CSA were with genuine intent rather than the malfeasance described by critics of the administration, they were so misguided, misdirected, and mismanaged that they amounted to pouring billions of aid dollars into a large pit, dousing it with kerosene, and setting it aflame.
I don’t know any book or authoritative source on the current economic and social conditions in Iraq, other than that it hasn’t changed much since the war. Although there is now a de facto government it is subordinated to other interests (primarily American and British) and substantial parts of the country are essentially ungoverned, at the control of tribal groups. There are no major business or industrial interests currently operating in Iraq; even oil production is at a fraction of the pre-war levels.
Pre-Gulf War Baghdad wasn’t a terrible place, it was probably comparable to Tehran. Meaning it was in a dictatorial-style country with little to no civil rights, but the city wasn’t in terrible shape and was fairly pleasant to live in in the “grand scheme of things.” (When I say that, I mean compare Baghdad in 1989 to pretty much any large city on the planet, say prior to 1800 and it was probably a lot nicer. Baghdad did have running water and electricity and wasn’t completely covered over in shanty towns like some modern megalopolis hell holes.)
Shortly into the Gulf War, Baghdad was essentially wrecked, no electricity, poor standard of living for all. Saddam Hussein was interviewed at some point (if I recall correctly) in between the beginning of the coalition bombings but before the coalition ground invasion, and the interviewer pointed out that in just a few days Baghdad was in worse shape than it had been after almost an entire decade of war with Iran.
After the Gulf War Baghdad never returned to its pre-GW state. Like much of Iraq, Saddam really let a lot of stuff stay broken after the Gulf War. In the interim years Baghdad was a better place to be than it has been since the current Iraq War started, because it was a damaged city but it wasn’t a battlefield. Battlefields are always bad places to be, and Baghdad (at least parts of it) remained very militarized for many years into the conflict.
I haven’t read enough about Baghdad right now (in the past year or so) so I’m not sure how it compares.
Baghdad also had fairly nice, modern highways and such criss crossing it. A lot of major cities in the world still are sadly lacking real modern road systems.