NOT EXACTLY AS BILLED

Yes...we know.

I expected none of this.

We were shot at not even once. Never in the nearly nine hours we have spent walking and driving through the streets of this city did anyone flash as much as a cap pistol at us.

This is not the Baghdad everyone has told us to fear, the one they for months have shown on television at home. Not a single car exploded. There were no dead bodies that needed to be stepped over.

Make no mistake, though, this is a hard city, a trash-strewn and dusty, car-choked sprawl unlike anything you likely have ever seen up close. There is absolutely nothing glamorous or lovely here, only wildly different levels of utter poverty.

So it is a city constantly on the hustle, the only language that truly matters is that of the dollar and the dinar....

Empty pedestals are everywhere in Baghdad. One seemingly stands on every street corner. Saddam used to stand on them. Only rusting reinforcing bars rise from them now.

And they will need a Ministry of Renaming Things in the days ahead. Scores of roads, bridges, towers, mosques, government buildings and parks once bore the former dictator's name. It has all been scratched out.