Baghdad ? The wedding party was streaming out of the Al-Hamra Hotel last night in Baghdad, with the bride’s white train trailed by a line of ululating women in sparkling dresses and a cake bearer balancing a huge coconut-frosted sphere.

A sign of normality returning to Iraq, one might say. And, indeed, Thursday nights (the evening before the Muslim day of prayer) witness a stream of jubilant hotel weddings these days. But, as the wedding party pulls away, shots ring out not far away from the hotel; unlike the celebratory gunfire common in the Arab world, these are short bursts with return fire. And all around the Al-Hamra, where many foreign journalists stay, there are a zigzag series of concrete barricades designed to stop car bombers before they reach the hotel.

Welcome to Baghdad, six months since the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square. For a visitor returning after a three-month absence, the city is a dizzying study in contradictions. As a merchant selling color television sets on Karada Street told me, “Some things are much, much better and some things are much worse.”

Signs of positive change start before one even reaches Baghdad. At Heathrow airport, waiting for the flight to Amman that is the gateway to Baghdad, a group of Iraqi refugees is being escorted back from Sweden by officials of the International Organization for Migration. When we start to discuss the current situation in Iraq, an IOM official warns them that “these are very sensitive matters” and they shouldn’t talk with a journalist. “We are free men now. We can say what we want,” one of the Iraqis snaps back.

From Amman airport, Royal Jordanian now runs a daily charter to Baghdad, the only regular airline that braves the danger of a shoulder-fired rocket being fired from Baghdad’s airport environs. Few Iraqis can afford the $600 tab, but the plane is crowded with varied types trying to build, or profit from, a new Baghdad. Baghdad International has a new coat of paint — and a newly minted cast of passport officials, who scan documents, very slowly, then peer at new laptops and snap photos of visitors with new, tiny high-tech cameras.

And, indeed, it is this counterpoint between change, with promise of better and more, and the omnipresent security threat, that makes it so hard to assess where Iraq is headed.

The airport road seems less menacing than three months ago, and U.S. patrols are less visible on Baghdad streets, while Iraqi police checkpoints are more frequent. But every Iraqi I meet dismisses the Iraqi police as unable or unwilling to confront the armed gangs that frighten Baghdad, or the terror bombers. Every Iraqi I meet also has a tale of a carjacking or a kidnapping for ransom.

The fear of violence haunts the new, transitional Iraqi governing institutions, including an Iraqi Governing Council, which sits in a handsome marble building that once was a military industry ministry run by Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel. Staff of the council are sobered by the car bombing of U.N. headquarters and the recent assassination of a female governing council member.

As a result the council is quarantined within the “green zone,” an area including Saddam’s presidential palace. It houses the civilian ruling authority run by the Americans and British and the offices of major U.S. consulting companies. The heavy U.S. military security keeps council members cut off from the Iraqi public. But there is little choice: A Spanish diplomat was assassinated, and a car bomb was driven into an Iraqi police station.

Nowhere is this counterpoint more visible than on Karada Out, Baghdad’s premier shopping street. The good news is that the number of stores there has mushroomed in the last three months.

With the cooler weather (100-degree days, almost cool nights) tempers are cooling, too, demand on electricity is lower, and more is being produced. Gasoline lines are shorter. Restaurants stay open later at night.

But the merchants keep Kalashnikov rifles behind their desks. Haidar Ali, a salesman in the Al Amir television shop, sums everything up. He’s a Shiite who hated Saddam, but he can’t stand the current insecurity. Afraid to hope for the future, he suspects the Americans are keeping security bad so they have an excuse to stay on.

Yet, in a refrain I hear everywhere, he doesn’t want the Americans to leave. He fears that, if they left now, the country would descend into chaos.

“There is no question that if the Americans leave tomorrow, there would be a civil war here,” Ali says. “The Americans must stay put until they achieve stability and put a new Iraqi government in place.”

So here is the ultimate contradiction. Iraqis, despite fear and mistrust, want the Americans to stay on and finish what they started — and then leave. That creates an opportunity if the U.S. occupiers can meet the challenge. The verdict is still out.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.