It’s been a hectic week of jarringly upbeat U.S. press conferences, soccer fever, odd run-ins with Iraqi officials, and the usual litany of woes from friends and colleagues in Baghdad.

Party like it's 2003

By now, you know that Iraq won its first Asian Cup soccer championship, which led to massive street celebrations, an uplifting burst of national unity and no small number of casualties from “celebratory gunfire.” A couple of colleagues and I watched the Iraq-Saudi Arabia final in the Green Zone living room of Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

A slew of Iraqi, British and American officials piled onto couches and picked at fruits and pastries as the match was projected onto a large wall. The same politicians who bash one another when we call them separately for comment were kissing hellos and sitting side by side.

The former speaker of parliament, a Sunni, puffed on a thick cigar as he chatted up his archenemies, representatives of the Shiite cleric and militia commander Muqtada al Sadr. Representatives of the Shiite powerhouse formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq rubbed elbows with Sunnis, Kurds and rival Shiites from the Sadrists and Fadhila Party.

The impossibly tall British ambassador hobnobbed with Charles Heatley, the onetime spokesman for the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) who mysteriously has reappeared in Baghdad. In fact, the entire surreal evening smacked of Baghdad circa summer 2003 – many members of the original Iraqi Governing Council, the first U.S.-appointed Iraqi administration, were in attendance.

“Ah, we’ve come full circle,” said one cynical Iraqi cabinet minister, surveying the partygoers. “It just goes to show that the Americans are back to square one: the CPA days.”

Meet the Crockers

Leila Fadel, our fierce Baghdad bureau chief, spent the week polishing up a profile of Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. (Shameless plug: her piece should be out later this week; look for it on www.mcclatchydc.com

All week long, it’s been Crocker this and Crocker that. He once met the mufti of Syria. He speaks fluent Arabic. His office was mortared. Do the Sunnis like him? Do the Shiites? Do the Kurds? Does the appointment of a veteran Arabist come too late to salvage the U.S. mission in Iraq?

After a particularly long day of such ruminations (she was so entrenched in the story that she’d begun to just refer to the ambo as “Ryan”), Leila took a break and invited some journalist friends over for homemade cookies.

The only shop that sells brown sugar is too dangerous to reach nowadays, so Leila, an accomplished chef, improvised and made sugar cookies. We couldn’t find real M&Ms, so the doughy circles were dotted with candy-coated knockoffs called Bonibons.

Even as the guests toasted her culinary skills, it was apparent work was still on Leila’s mind."Betty Crocker and Ryan Crocker,” she mused, “a match made in heaven.”

Or Baghdad.

OKC in the KDP

Homesickness is a funny thing. It creeps up in the oddest of places. It struck this week at the Baghdad headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, where I was scheduled to interview a party official.

Typically, I have to be more Arab than American while reporting in Iraq. Survival in the so-called Red Zone (i.e., anywhere outside the Green Zone) calls for Arabic-only conversations and blending in by donning a scarf and modest clothing.

But perhaps because my entire family is on vacation without me right now or perhaps because the peshmerga guards at the KDP office greeted me with, “Americhi?” (American?) by way of ascertaining my threat level, all I could think about was Oklahoma City.

The minister was a half-hour late for the appointment, so I sat alone in the frosty waiting room of Saddam Hussein’s former protocol office. A dozen or so armed guards milled about and peeked in from time to time. I flipped through notebooks, trying to look professional, when I was really daydreaming about Ulysses S. Grant High School and lazy days at Lake Thunderbird.

I made the mistake of opening my day planner. I had never noticed the map of the United States on the back pages. There it was: Oklahoma, straddled across the planner’s middle fold. Middle America. The heartland. Twisters, football, plains. A flyover state, where the waving wheat/can sure smell sweet/when the wind/comes right behind the rain.

I found myself tracing the Oklahoma panhandle with a ballpoint pen as a lump rose in my throat. The peshmerga thought I was suffering from dehydration and brought in bottles of water.

Sweet defiance

The first car bomb of the day went off at 10:20 a.m. Our hotel windows shook, smoke rose from a nearby square, the usual.

Later, we found out the explosion killed at least 16 people outside Faqma Ice Cream, a popular summertime spot where the workers turn scoops of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream into works of art. They drizzle chocolate syrup over the ice cream and arrange little wafers into intricate designs.

One of our Iraqi staff members missed the bombing by five minutes – only because a curtains vendor she was meeting happened to be late for an appointment. I hear Faqma is in such bad shape that it’ll probably be a while before anyone lines up for milkshakes again.

Today is my last day in Baghdad and the Iraqi friend who narrowly missed the bombing helped me decide on a goodbye treat for the staff. Faqma was no longer an option, so we decided to head over to a fabulous bakery near the Babylon Hotel. I put on a scarf because my sleeves only covered my arms to the elbow. My friend shook her head and said we weren’t going to dress like that today.

She was in short sleeves, no headscarf and a skirt that stopped at mid-calf. I was in a longer skirt, with barely covered arms and bare head. Luckily, our security adviser was on another assignment and didn’t see us leave the hotel in what might as well have been our birthday suits, given the ultraconservative climate of post-liberation Baghdad.

At the bakery, we hurriedly made our selections and paid for the beautiful little triangles of cheesecake, chocolate mousse, apple pie and carrot cake. My friend told the clerk how happy she was that the bakery had not only continued to stay open in the face of nonstop car bombings, but insisted on still selling fruitcakes at Christmas and pastel-colored pastries at Easter.

“Don’t say another word! You’ll jinx us!” the clerk replied, not joking.

On the short ride home, I asked my friend what the hell we thought we were doing – going to a bakery, two hours after a car bombing in the same area, with our hair and arms on full display for the militants who’d congregated at every corner along our route.

“I just get so tired of it. When it was safer, I wore the scarf, and now it’s dangerous and I refuse to wear it,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. I just don’t care what happens to me.”

Quote of the week, No. 1

Sahar, one of our Iraqi correspondents, has been living in the hotel with us because her neighborhood in Baghdad has grown too perilous for her to make the daily trip to and from the office. An example of why she had to move is here, on our Iraqi staff members’ blog.

It’s been a delight to watch Sahar and her two wonderful children lapping up 24-hour generator-provided electricity, wireless Internet, hot showers and room service. But today she showed up in the newsroom glum-faced and announced that a problem with a water main in the hotel had flooded her room and forced the family to move, yet again.

“We are Iraqis,” she said matter-of-factly. “It seems displacement is our fate.”

Quote of the week, No. 2

Earlier this week, I met up with my favorite U.S. military public affairs officer. Actually, he’s a former senior PAO who’s now working on training programs for Iraqi troops.

The officer sipped an iced latte in the Green Zone and reflected on his days as a gatekeeper for journalists covering the U.S. war effort. He said the generals weren’t a bad lot, and that they usually took to heart the gentle reminder he offered when a media blackout was requested: “If you don’t want to talk about it, you probably want to ask yourself why you’re doing it.”