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　　在奥巴马谈及让伊拉克战争有一个负责任结局的那个早上，伊拉克武装分子在占领的一个检查站竖起了他们的黑旗，检查站的五名警察被打死，这已是一周内发生的第二起检查站被占领事件。

　　警方当天接下来的案件记录看起来像是这样的：3枚迫击炮弹落在巴格达居民区内，5枚路边炸弹在居民区被引爆，两辆汽车被装了诱饵炸弹。2枚迫击炮弹落在绿区。绿区是四周都是路障的巴格达的权力中心，它仍是武装分子的袭击目标，武装分子看起来想证明他们从未被击败过。在黄昏之前，一炸弹在巴格达东部的库特镇爆炸。20岁的面包师傅穆尔塔达-穆罕默德称：“没有什么不寻常的事情，我们听这个长大的。”

　　“断开”这个词绝对没有抓住两个国家民众观点之间的巨大差异，美国和伊拉克的命运被不太情愿地交织在一起，两个国家看起来都对对方感到精疲力竭。重大时刻来了又走了：过渡政府、宣布主权、签署协议。奥巴马8月2日的声明是另一重要时刻。

　　卡塔恩-斯威德用讥讽的言词对奥巴马的声明作出反应。美国在伊拉克所作的任何声明几乎都遭到嘲讽，其本身就是七年入侵、占领所留下的普遍、有时候是无形的遗产，现在对其进行定义已更为困难。斯威德坚持称，不管奥巴马作出什么承诺，“美国人不会离开，他们一百万年后也不会离开伊拉克。即使世界翻了天，他们也不会撤出。”

　　As Obama Talks Peace, Many Iraqis Are Unsure

　　BAGHDAD — The morning after President Obama spoke of bringing the war in Iraq to “a responsible end,” insurgents planted their black flag on Tuesday at a checkpoint they overran by killing the five policemen who staffed it. It was the second time in a week。

　　The rest of the day, the police blotter looked like this: Three mortars crashed in Baghdad neighborhoods, where five roadside bombs were detonated and two cars were booby-trapped. Two other mortars fell in the Green Zone, still the citadel of power in a barricaded capital and still a target of insurgents who seem bent on proving they were never defeated。

　　By dusk, a car bomb tore through Kut, an eastern town long spared strife。

　　“Nothing unusual,” said Murtadha Mohammed, a 20-year-old baker, as he shoveled rolls into bags a short walk from one of the bombs. “We’ve been raised on this。”

　　The word “disconnect” never quite captures the gulf in perceptions between two countries whose fate remains reluctantly intertwined, however exhausted each seems of the other. Moments have come and gone: transitional governments, declarations of sovereignty, the signing of agreements. Mr. Obama’s announcement Monday was another。

　　On Tuesday, Qahtan Sweid greeted it with the cynicism that colors virtually any pronouncement the United States makes here, itself a somewhat intangible but pervasive legacy of seven years of invasion, occupation, war and, now, something harder to define。

　　“The Americans aren’t leaving,” Mr. Sweid insisted, whatever Mr. Obama had promised. “For one million years, they won’t leave. Even if the world was turned upside down, they still wouldn’t withdraw。”

　　From the first days after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, America and Iraq seemed divided by more than language; they never shared the same vocabulary. Perhaps they never could, defined as occupier and occupied, where promises of aid and assistance often had the inflection of condescension. These days, though, they do not even seem to try to listen to each other — too tired to hear the other, too chastised by experience to offer the benefit of doubt。

　　In a speech that was admittedly modest, Mr. Obama declared Monday that violence continued to be at the lowest it had been in years. Iraq is indeed a safer country than it was 2006 and 2007, when carnage threatened to shred the very fabric of its traumatized society. But security, still elusive here, is an absolute; you either feel safe or you do not。

　　The toll Tuesday — 26 dead in 8 attacks — was not spectacular for Iraq, where hundreds of people still die each month. But it came amid growing fears that insurgents are regrouping in Baghdad, Diyala, Falluja and elsewhere, eager to capitalize on the prospect of American troops leaving and the dysfunction of a political class that has yet to agree on an Iraqi government, nearly five months after the election。

　　In an attack in the Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad, insurgents in at least two cars assaulted a checkpoint at dawn with pistols fitted with silencers, killing five policemen, then planted their flag before fleeing. In the car bombing in Kut, the death toll rose to 20 by nightfall。

　　“Wherever the Americans go, the situation is going to stay the same as it was,” said Abdel-Karim Abdel-Jabbar, a 51-year-old resident of the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, where insurgents overran another checkpoint last week, burning the bodies of their victims and planting the same black banner. “If anything, it’s going to deteriorate。

　　“The peace Obama’s talking about is the peace of the Green Zone,” he added。

　　Across town, in Sadr City, a sprawling district once a battlefield between American troops and followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a populist Shiite cleric, puddles of sewage gathered near a bomb’s debris。

　　Mr. Sweid nodded。

　　“If it’s in your hands, then you can go ahead and be scared,” he said over the drone of a generator. “If it’s in God’s hands, then you have no right to fear。”

　　In his speech on Monday, Mr. Obama called the Aug. 31 deadline for the military to bring the number of troops down to 50,000 the closing of a chapter。

　　To an American audience, it might resonate that way. Less so to Iraqis. Unlike last year, Iraqi officials, mired in disputes often more personal than political, are not trumpeting the withdrawal as an assertion of an Iraqi authority. Neither Mr. Sweid nor Mr. Abdel-Jabbar knew about the August deadline. The same went for several others interviewed Tuesday。

　　“I don’t know exactly when the withdrawal is supposed to happen,” said Abdel-Hamid Majid, a 52-year-old engineer. “All I know is it’s not far away。”

　　Saud al-Saadi, an eloquent and informed teacher in Sadr City, was aware. But, he said, he had heard such pronouncements before, declarations of turning points in America’s experience here that seemed to hew to the logic of American politics. The American occupation was declared over before the 2004 presidential election. The two countries signed strategic agreements weeks before the Bush administration ended。

　　“But until now, to tell you the truth, we haven’t grasped our sovereignty,” Mr. Saadi said. “There are still American troops here, they still raid houses, we don’t have a government that makes its own decisions and the American ambassador still interferes。”

　　Mr. Saadi was neither angry nor disillusioned. And in his matter-of-fact appraisal, there was a hint of common ground between a teacher and a president. Mr. Obama did not trumpet democracy or victory. There was no reference to a mission accomplished. In a sober appraisal, he acknowledged that there would be more American sacrifice here。

　　Mr. Saadi was no less modest。

　　Interests, he called it. And the United States, he said, would try to secure its own。

　　“America is not a charity organization,” he said. “It’s not a humanitarian group. There are words and there is reality, and actions don’t always match those words。”

　　(纽约时报)

　　(解雨)