The closer war is, the more the Iraqi people tell me it won't happen. "I think there will be no war. Our government will not allow it," said a young woman who studies English translation at the university.
"I do not like to watch television or talk about making preparations for war," said another, giggling anxiously. "It makes me nervous."
"Most Iraqis don't believe there's going to be a war. They don't believe what Bush says, because he has no credibility," said a shopkeeper down the road from our hotel.
I wonder if this is what they really think, or what they're told to think, or what they want to think. The Iraqi government has done everything it can to keep life as normal as possible.
Even now, we see very few preparations in the streets. A few sandbags, the odd trench. The television and newspapers are full of how the world supports Iraq, how George Bush is isolated and - by implication - impotent.
The reports are all true - they're not making up the demonstrations from Indonesia to Ipswich - but the effect is to make Iraqis believe protests are having more impact on the American and British governments than is in fact the case. Iraq is in official, collective denial.
When I first arrived here more than a month ago the line was fatalistic: war is inevitable, whatever Iraq does the Americans are determined to punish us.
Even today, a young man at the university - after making me line up for a mug shot with his mates - came out with automatic bravado: "We will fight! We're not afraid. We've lived through war before."
People here survived the Gulf War in 1991, and the bombing of Baghdad in 1998, so many believe any war in 2003 will be much the same.
But I wonder if any of us have lived through a war like this before. I was in Belgrade while NATO bombed nightly, but everything we hear from Washington suggests that the coming bombardment will be immeasurably more intense.
The phrase we hear is "shock and awe" - the idea is to recreate using conventional weapons the "shock and awe" produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
People we meet often ask us what we think will happen. "Will there be war? When? Should I send my family to the village?" Some wonder if America will use a nuclear weapon.
Such fears are not far beneath the surface of normality and denial.
There are more than 200 journalists in Baghdad now, and most of us hope the Iraqi government will let us stay here.
Our families (and editors!) worry, but most of us want to witness what happens. I feel it's important to be here and chronicle what happens to the Iraqi people in the first American colonial war of the 21st century.
And I want to find out what happens to the people I've met - the giggling girls at the university who think it's not going to happen, the shopkeeper, even the staff at the Ministry of Information.
The story is much bigger than Iraq. It's about American power, and splits between Europe and America which I believe have already changed forever the diplomatic order established after World War ll.
By accident of history, or fate, Iraq is where this story will play out. I think we need to be here.
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