Iraq has a strong social system, with vibrant art, music, dance, and theater. We attended an energetic ensemble theater piece that kept the audience, ranging from tiny children to senior citizens, in stitches. We were invited to the homes of several families for conversation and meals, which were quite lavish and certainly cost way more than these people could afford on their meager ($3 to $5 a month) salaries. We attended a concert of traditional Iraqi music and visited the studio of one of the greatest Iraqi painters, who lamented that he could rarely get oil paints, but it didn't matter much because, he said, "Who can afford to buy art anyway?"

The country is filled with scholarly riches, including some 10,000 incom parable archaeological sites. For we are talking about Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization -- the home of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Fertile Crescent, all those names we remember from high school history. In Baghdad we visited the site of the first known university in the world, lovingly restored and carefully tended. At the ancient city of Babylon, also beautifully re-created, we could almost feel the spirits of our ancestors gliding amidst the bricks forged from the yellow sand of the Euphrates River.

But every day some 500,000 tons of raw sewage are dumped into the Euphrates and other primary sources of drinking water. We were careful not to drink anything but sealed, bottled water or water that had been boiled for at least three minutes.

Not everyone in Iraq can take such precautions. According to a report released in January by the International Study Team, only 60 percent of Iraqis have access to potable water. The result has been that the average Iraqi child under the age of five has diarrhea 14 days per month, and 500,000 children are acutely malnourished or underweight and particularly vulnerable to disease.