US forces lost the fight for acceptance at Abu Ghraib
With the handover of power to an interim government late last month, something resembling normality has begun returning to Iraq - though there is a sense that things can never be the same again between Americans and ordinary Iraqis.
The images of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at the now notorious Abu Ghraib jail has led to a profound change in how the people see the troops.
For example, art galleries displaying Abu Ghraib-inspired sculptures and city walls spray-painted with Abu Ghraib-related graffiti show how the images of abuse have burned themselves into the minds of Iraqis, possibly blighting the relationship between the two countries forever.
'I feel annoyed whenever I see American soldiers,' said one 15-year-old Baghdad schoolboy who brags that he's already driving a car. 'When I see them on the street I avoid them. It didn't used to be like this.'
There have always been tensions between the soldiers and the country's citizens. Such discontent is most prominent among political and religious activists as well as artists. They gather in places like Baghdad's thriving Hewar Gallery, a cafe popular with the anti-American intellectuals.
'I have a piece of art that shows a man raping a woman,' said cafe regular Abdul Karimal-Khalil, 44, a sculptor whose latest series of works include images gleaned from the testimony of an Abu Ghraib prisoner.
At the very beginning, with the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime, the US soldiers could at least count on the friendliness of Iraqi children, who waved at them and showered them with attention.
American military officers, charmed by the warm welcome they received, lavished money on schools all over the country, hoping they would win the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation of Iraqis.
But thanks to the ubiquity of satellite television, the images of prisoner abuse have slowly soured that once flowering relationship.
'In the beginning, the Americans were good soldiers, they liberated us from Saddam,' says Hassan Abbas, a 14-year-old who watched the images on Al-Arabiya, the Arab-language satellite news channel. 'But after what happened in Abu Ghraib, I hate them.'
When US soldiers first arrived in 15-year-old Hossein Adel's Baghdad neighbourhood, children used to bring drinks to the Americans on patrol. There was even one particular soldier who used to kick a soccer ball around with the youngsters.
But relations withered, said Hossein, as the months wore on and US security measures created greater physical distances between the soldiers and ordinary citizens.
The Abu Ghraib pictures represented a nadir. 'It's just like what we see on television the Israeli people doing to the Palestinians,' Hossein said.
In moments of candour, US military officials concede that the images of abuse have made their mandate to win over the Iraqis all but impossible.
'I think that anybody who saw those photos, who was on the tipping point whether he was going to accept coalition forces or whether he was going to fight coalition forces, that probably may have turned them in the wrong direction,' said one senior officer.
Yussel Abdul-Kareem, a gifted 15-year-old student who did not have much of an opinion until she saw the images, said they politicised her. 'Those American soldiers seemed to enjoy the torture,' she said.
Yussel said she was struck by images of a female soldier taking part in the abuse.
'How could she do that?' she asks. 'I think she's a monster. I still think about those images. I think about carrying a gun and going to Abu Ghraib and killing everyone I see just for revenge.'
