Iraq is in most respects further along the road to recovery than we could have expected before the war. All major public hospitals in Baghdad are again operating. Sixty percent of Iraq's schools are open. Nationwide distribution of food supplies has resumed. Despite some damage to the oil wells, petroleum production exceeds domestic needs, and exports should begin again soon. More Iraqis are receiving electric power than before the war.

--George Ward, former coordinator for humanitarian assistance in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, writing in Friday's New York Times

The press communiqués put out by ORHA, America's Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, have the tone of a publicity agent's handout. Every little step, such as paying doctors an emergency $20 wage, is declared a historic leap toward democracy. On the ground it is hard to see much improvement. The phones are still broken, power still sporadic, money scarce, prices soaring, shortages everywhere, and security largely absent. Iraqis observe, by way of contrast, that during the Gulf War of 1991, when bomb damage was far more extensive, there was hardly a pause in the payment of state salaries.

--Max Rodenbeck, Middle East correspondent for The Economist, writing from Baghdad in The New York Review of Books