'What have you done to us, George Bush?'

Parents are frightened to send their children to school. Women rush to the market and back home again without socialising with friends, many cafes close at sundown, where once they opened until midnight. Men are listless, unemployed and frustrated.

The living conditions in the city are appalling.

Almost a year and a half since the invasion and there’s still no reliable power. The electricity cuts are a constant frustration as families now deal with 45-degree heat without refrigeration or air-conditioning.

The water is still unclean, causing widespread disease and deaths in many country areas. Rubbish lies in the street uncollected. People wait as long as eight hours to buy petrol, and military road blocks cause traffic chaos that makes doing business in Baghdad impossible.

Welcome to the free Iraq – the one you don’t see reported on CNN.

“Saddam was bad, but at least he could keep the lights on!” is one of many comparisons made between the new and old regime.

For many Iraqis it has become as basic as that. That’s because they used to have the basics: jobs, security, power, clean water etc. Now they don’t.

They were promised freedom and liberation, but they don’t have that either. Airing your political views in the "free" Iraq can mean imprisonment and torture.

There are other similarities between the new and the old regime – the coalition bureaucrats live in Saddam’s palaces behind heavy razor-wire bombardments and don’t come out to talk to Iraqis or experience the chaos the invasion has created. They send out terror squads who cruise the streets in black Mercedes Benz with smoked windows. Soldiers raid houses in the middle of the night, trash everything and take away a prisoner without charge or trial, just because he "spoke badly" about Americans, despite the fact he doesn’t own a weapon. He is not heard of for a year, no family visits are allowed. There are stories of torture.

Remind you of something?

Understandably the Iraqis now feel betrayed and humiliated.

The chaos, the challenges of surviving everyday life in the new Iraq and the oppression of the violence have left Iraqis exhausted – physically, spiritually, emotionally.