[Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq in these pages. His work can be found at markdanner.com.]

...vox populi, or, in journalese, vox pops: man-on-the-street interviews: in today's Iraq, a rare, almost unheard-of pleasure. Such journalistic toe-dippings are generally attempts, among other things, to find "the great quote" -- the person who manages to articulate, in his or her own way, the broader narrative, the plotline already determined. Such exercises are thus simultaneously a matter of evidence gathering and of analytic confirmation. On this day we wanted answers to questions which had to do, at bottom, with why these Iraqis had risked their lives to come out to vote: our questions, that is, fit in with the central narrative about the war, and especially about why America had fought it, what had brought America to Iraq in the first place. Before us, after months of explosions and suicide bombings and dead soldiers and civilians, stood people who might seem the perfect symbols of liberation, who embodied the war's purpose in a single image: Iraqis waiting to express their voices in an exercise of democratic will. We needed now the image to speak.

*

For the most part, though, they didn't seem to want to cooperate. Why are you here, I asked a young man wearing a Ray's Pool Hall shirt. "Why?" He looked surprised. "To vote." But why, why did you come? "We are a normal people, an independent people. We want to be like other people, to vote. We need security, stability -- that's all." He volunteered nothing about Saddam, about the war, the Americans, the occupation; when asked he seemed reluctant, like many of his neighbors in line, to discuss them.

A young woman, wearing a beautiful sea-green abeya, asked by a colleague about Saddam, grew annoyed. "No, this is not about Saddam. Forget Saddam. I am an engineer and I have no job. Neither does my husband." Then, a bit exasperated, "We want a normal country."

I looked behind her: on the low roof of the school building, a policeman stood watching with his AK-47. We asked an old man, wearing a checked kaffiyeh and a white beard, what he expected from the elections. He too seemed reluctant. "I already talked to the press," he grumbled. But what did he hope to accomplish by voting? He thought a moment. "Now we'll have good officials. Now we'll talk to them and they'll talk to us. Before they just hit you, beat you, punished you." He was eighty-three, had lived, he said, under eight governments. "The monarchy was the best. There was stability then."

Among these mostly middle-class people I heard this thought expressed again and again: the desperate need for security, for stability -- for normalcy. Several, when I asked why they had come out to vote, looked at me with varying degrees of surprise or condescension and said, "So we will have a government. Look around, we need a government." Some, when I asked whom they'd voted for, refused, smiling: this is democracy -- secret ballot.

Others, when asked several times, offered the names of candidates -- but only the famous ones, those leaders of the main lists, for of course the "security situation" -- the bombing, the kidnappings, the beheadings -- had prevented any public campaign; there had been no rallies, no door-to-door canvassing for votes, no chance even to learn who was running; indeed, many of the candidate lists were, in effect, secret. Only the names of the party leaders were widely known, Iyad Allawi, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, Ibrahim Jaafari, and a few others, all of them among the exiles returning from London and Washington and Tehran, who had dominated the American-appointed governing bodies since the fall of Saddam.

It seemed like a country fair, this gathering, a kind of journalistic grand buffet: the beautiful women in their traditional dress, young men in T-shirts and sweatpants, old men in their kaffiyehs. We met engineers and builders and schoolteachers, an elegant former government minister, and "one of the last eight Jews in Baghdad." (This last man, who would give his name only as Samir, told me he could be certain of his exalted status because "I know all the other ones.") After the "hotel journalism" and all the fear, it was a delight to move among this crowd. And yet, as a political matter, these people did not offer the desired symbolic justifications, the capstone in the narrative building already under construction that day. What would be the verbal equivalent for the images that already were dominating the world's television screens: the lines of people, the purple fingers, the explosions in the background which made the voters flinch but not waver? We needed someone to say: Thank heaven Saddam has gone, thank heaven the Americans came, thank you for giving us democracy. And no one -- at least here in this voting place in Baghdad -- seemed to want to say it.

*

My favorite voter that morning was the former minister, Dr. Ahmed Dujaily--an elegant eighty-year-old engineer wearing a traditional sidari on his head and a beautifully tailored blue pin-striped suit--who had served as minister of agricultural reform in 1966 and 1967 ("the last brief time of good government") and offered, after we complimented him on his suit ("Ah yes"--smiling, gazing down at himself --"I wear this for weddings, parties... elections also"), in an English bespeaking a fine English education, what I took to be the most enlightening dialogue of the day:

So, we began, for whom had he voted?

"In fact, I voted for List 169..." -- the so-called Sistani List.

That is the Shiite List? You are Shiite?

"Yes, I am Shiite but I am Iraqi before anything. Religion is for myself. This election is for Iraq."

And why are you voting?

"I feel I must give service to my country and I voted for these people, Abd al-Hakim and Jaafari, because I trust them...."

And how do you feel about Saddam? a colleague put in.

"Well...of course, I am happy the Saddam regime is abolished. He is not human, he is an animal...."

Who abolished it?

"Who? Why, he did."

Well (trying another tack, and gesturing upward, at the buzzing Blackhawks), those helicopters, who are they?

"They are the Americans."

Yes, and are they good or bad?

"Good or bad?" A puzzled pause. "Not good or bad. They are the Americans."

No, no, what I wanted to ask...

He knew, of course, what we wanted to ask. He smiled and tried to be helpful. "Listen, we thank Americans for destroying the regime of Saddam but they did many things that were not required of the country. They made many, many mistakes here. I know what the Americans want." He smiled; he was matter-of-fact. "They want military bases. They want to dominate the new regime. They want the oil."

"Saddam was a criminal, a lot of people were killed. Now these others" -- he gestured in the vague direction of the most recent explosion; he meant the insurgents -- "they are bombing one place, another place. This doesn't help, this does nothing for the country." Then, a bit of history -- from the 1920s but clearly relevant to him today: "When the British kicked out the Turks, the Shia, you know, fought the British also. But the Sunnis stuck with the British, and the British took those who stuck with them and formed a government."

Now, clearly, it was the Sunnis who were fighting, and the Shiites who were "sticking with" the occupying power, this time the Americans. "But the elections should be carried forward, whether the Americans like the results or not," he said. "This is determined by the people. We want an independent country." As for the Americans, "when they came people were happy but they made many, many mistakes in the occupation. After all these mistakes, now they will not leave. They will have their military headquarters established in Iraq and when they leave I do not know. The bases, the oil... And of course" -- he gestured at the voters, grinned, and, with a philosophical roll of his eyes, said -- "they are using Iraq for propaganda for their own elections: ‘Democracy and the Republicans.'" ...