Iraq's descent into the abyss
In January, the busy streets of Fallujah were abuzz with activity and commerce.
The fruit stands gleamed with produce. Trucks full of the construction materials that enriched the city rumbled through town. Westerners and locals mingled at the Al-Haj Hussein restaurant, home to Fallujah's famous onion-heavy kebabs.
By late November, Fallujah was the stuff of nightmares, a bombed-out ghost town, its streets full of rubble and rotting corpses. The only westerners were dressed in desert-tan fatigues, M-16s at the ready. The only Iraqis were a few hundred shell-shocked and bedraggled refugees begging for food and water.
The Al-Haj Hussein had been bombed to smithereens by the Americans.
But Fallujah - where the United States spent the better part of the year battling insurgents holed up in the city before resorting to the use of massive firepower that destroyed the city - was just one example of the American military's dilemmas and failures in Iraq during 2004.
It was a year during which nothing - not the establishment of a transitional constitution, not the handover of power to Iraqis, not the training of Iraqi security forces, not various international summits, not the promise of an election, nor the crushing of rogue cities - managed to stop Iraq's descent into chaos, violence and desperation.
'Everyone is suffering under these circumstances,' said Kais Malcon, 53, an accountant working in a Baghdad furniture shop. 'There is always hope that things will shortly get better. But every day, a new problem emerges.'
Up until the battles that broke out in Fallujah and the Shi'ite parts of the country in April, the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority could well have thought that it was rebuilding the country and winning over Iraqis.
But those battles, led by resistance fighters in Fallujah and followers of rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the Shi'ite south, stripped away the illusion of success and starkly resurrected another scenario - that Iraq could turn into a Middle Eastern Vietnam for America, an endless and bloody entanglement.
The US cause suffered a further grievous blow in April when reports documenting the Abu Ghraib prison scandal emerged. The images of naked prisoners being tortured and humiliated by US guards were a public relations disaster for Washington's hopes of bringing stability to Iraq.
With the help of United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, US officials were able to hand over official sovereignty of the country on June 30 to an interim government led by Prime Minister Iyad Alawi, a onetime CIA protege who spent decades abroad. They also handed the captured Saddam Hussein over to an Iraqi court, where he berated the judge and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the forum.
Again, Americans and their Iraqi allies - especially the country's 20 per cent Kurdish minority, which supports the US-led occupation in part because it does not affect their semi-autonomous northern enclave - hailed the bright, shining future of Iraq. 'Iraqis are going to be in control of their economy,' said Dan Senor, a spokesman for former US civil administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer.
'They're going to be in control of their natural resources, like oil. The Iraqis are going to be in control of their foreign policy, their domestic security services. They're going to be in control of the entire country,' he said in June.
The optimism was short-lived. It soon became clear that, regardless of who nominally controlled the country's ministries and purse strings, little reconstruction was taking place. Ordinary Iraqis' lives had not improved. Indeed, in some fundamental ways - fuel supplies and crime, for example - life was worse than under Hussein.
Despite Iraq's officially sovereign status, security remained under the control of the US, which wielded its firepower aggressively. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian al-Qaeda associate, replaced the captured former president as figurehead of the resistance and American bogeyman.
Fighting between US forces and followers of Mr Sadr broke out in the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City and the holy city of Najaf in August. Only the forceful intervention of Iraq's highest religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, prevented an all-out confrontation between Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army and US troops in Najaf, site of the sacred shrine of Imam Ali, the founder of Shi'ite Islam.
In the autumn, the security situation deteriorated. Criminal gangs roamed the street, hunting for foreigners as well as the scions of wealthy Iraqi families.
The world watched in horror as Margaret Hassan, the Irish-born leader of an Iraqi relief group, was kidnapped and paraded before television cameras, weeping for her life.
November's 'pacification' of Fallujah - which had become a haven for foreign extremists and Iraqi resistance groups - also raised ghosts of the Vietnam war, and a remark attributed to an American officer in that conflict: 'Sometimes, in order to save a village, you have to destroy it.'
Fallujah joined Samarra, Tal Afar and Najaf as a recipient of US 'clearing' operations meant to establish security for next month's elections.
Now, Iraq's third-largest city, Mosul, seethes with insurgency, raising the prospect of a major battle during the election campaign.
Despite all this, American commanders remain publicly optimistic about Iraq's future.
'I feel that we're broadly on track in helping the Iraqi people complete their transition to a constitutionally elected government at the end of next year,' General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, said this month.
'We also believe that this objective is both realistic and achievable.'
