PROGRESS.

Baghdad's residents confront enormous problems in this summer of liberation and discontent.

But Baghdad is not a broken city.

This is not Berlin 1945, or even Sarajevo 1995. A wounded city struggles back to life if not yet to normality -- whatever that would mean in this traumatized nation -- and begins to experience constituency politics.

Flying low in a Black Hawk helicopter at 9 o'clock one night last week, I was surprised by the thick streams of traffic flowing down many of the Iraqi capital's main boulevards. Electric lights twinkled across most of a metropolis that spreads willy-nilly into the night like Los Angeles.

Open shops, brutal daytime traffic jams and comfortable, air-conditioned villas coming onto an active rental market for foreigners are signs of an incipient municipal recovery in the slow, difficult awakening from the national 30-year nightmare.