Reality and myth jostle for place in the Iraqi capital

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) – 'We are now beginning our descent to Saddam International Airport.' The lights dim in the Boeing 747 as the captain makes the announcement.

It's not an airline you'll find on travel agents' computer screens. Started by a renegade Qatari sheikh, Gulf Falcon Airlines runs daily flights between Baghdad and Damascus with three planes and the goodwill of the Syrian government. Tickets are payable in cash -- $250 for foreigners and a fraction of that for Iraqis.

From the air, the Iraqi capital is a patchwork of dark and light – entire neighborhoods plunged into darkness for hours a day by electricity cuts. Eleven years after the Gulf War, air travel and electricity are among the many things in Iraq that have been cobbled back together through a combination of U.N.-approved imports, sanctions-busting and ingenuity.

Cosmetic touches disguise the disrepair. At major intersections in Baghdad, strings of colored lights, illuminated faces of Saddam Hussein and even flashing palm trees make parts of the capital look almost festive. New BMW's and government-subsidized Japanese cars imported through the Gulf Arab states jostle with broken-down heaps new before the first Gulf War. Soon the old cars will disappear. As part of its campaign to 'beautify' Baghdad, the government has banned taxis more than 18 years old from the city streets – a move that spells financial doom for many of their owners.

In neighborhood after neighborhood, huge new mosques keep rising. Built by the government, they are such a sensitive subject, journalists aren't allowed to take pictures of the biggest ones. Even among devout Moslems, the leadership's building boom seems to have little support.

"We have a lot more need for hospitals and schools," said one Iraqi. "As Moslems, we can pray even in the street."

It's not a criticism that would ever be heard publicly. No one is allowed to criticize the Iraqi president or his instructions. In the Iraqi leadership's mythology, everyone loves Saddam Hussein. So much so that they have demanded new statues of the president be erected at almost every turn. Under construction for months, the statues three and four-stories high are covered in white sheets before they are unveiled. In the wind, the canvas billows like a shroud around the likeness of the president.

On the roof of the Military Industrialization Commission, bombed repeatedly by the U.S. and its allies and repeatedly restored, a bronze-colored likeness of the president, smaller than most statues, raises a rifle in his favorite public gesture of defiance. In daylight, the statue looks like a tin soldier. At night, the likeness of the man and the gun casts a huge shadow against the building.

In the portraits and statues, the Iraqi president is the liberator, the savior, the hero. In reality, for increasing numbers of Iraqis who dare to quietly utter it, the leadership is one of the many things they have been made to endure.

For millions of Iraqis, survival is still a matter of difficult daily calculations. A construction worker can make $50 a month – more than many government employees. But although government food rations keep people from starving, they are not enough to put things like chicken on the table. A $1 a chicken is almost a day's wages on many salaries. Children's shoes can be had for less than $2 but in poor families children have to share a pair of shoes with their nearest siblings.

For the upper classes, deprivation takes on other forms such as the isolation of not being able to buy magazines or not being able to travel abroad – of not being able to have a normal life.

For many of the rich and poor, the biggest villain is still the United States. The U.S. is held responsible for keeping sanctions in place for more than a decade. Almost universally here, the U.S. support for Israel in the raging violence in the Palestinian territories is seen as further proof that Washington is an enemy of the Arabs, and not just Iraq.

But perhaps emboldened by the prospect that sooner or later, the Iraqi leadership will go, there's a lingering and seemingly increasing rumbling that some of Iraq's problems are from within.

'It's as if you have guests who come to stay in your house. They may destroy things in your house but you know they will leave eventually," said one Iraqi.

The persistent underlying sentiment – that Iraq is greater than the sum of its leaders – that with or without them, Iraq will endure.