Many third world cities look better at night than during the day. Darkness hides shabbiness. You have to imagine what the city actually looks like. If you live in a first world city yourself, you might fill in the blanks with what you're familiar with. It's only during the day that you can see just how run-down the place really is.

Baghdad isn't like that. Baghdad looks worse at night because you can barely see anything. When your mind fills in the blanks, real and imagined roadside bombs, militiamen, booby traps, and snipers lurk in the shadows.

The city can be spooky at night. Millions of people live in Baghdad, but it's dark after hours. Few lights illuminate the mostly empty sidewalks and streets. The city's electrical grid is still offline half the time and must be replaced. Homes without generator power are dark more often than not, and almost everyone who owns a generator turns it off when they go to sleep. Baghdad after sundown is as poorly lit as a remote mountain village...

...Many of the streets in the neighborhood were unpaved. Raw sewage ran in rivulets down the center of many.

"Local contractors were hired to fix these problems," he said, "but they took the money and ran."..

...I was happy to get a look at Baghdad without having to worry overly much about my own safety. Many reporters who stayed away from Iraq during the surge in 2007 and 2008 but went back at the end said they could hardly recognize Baghdad any more, that it was a different city. Those reports raised my expectations too high. It didn't look all that different to me. There were more people out on the street. The security situation had been completely transformed. But the city was otherwise as run-down and corrupt and generally dysfunctional as it was before.

We passed beneath a rat's nest of electrical wires. A transformer sizzled and popped over my head and blue smoke curled upward...