BAGHDAD  The sounds echoed Tuesday through Investigations Square, mundane in their familiarity and poignant in their anguish. Glass shattered by a suicide bombing sounded like tinny chimes as vendors swept their sidewalks. Condolences in Arabic were murmured in the numbed aftermath of chaos. Down the street, dominoes clacked as Ali Hassan played on a table, perched before a store shorn of its facade.  “What else can I do?” he asked. “Where else should I go?”  For a second day, Baghdad was hit by a bombing, this time at a forensics office of the Interior Ministry. Officials put the toll at 17 dead, although no one really knows how many died. The attack followed a devastating series of bombings on Monday that wrecked landmark hotels catering to foreigners, killing dozens and demonstrating the tenacity of insurgents in striking when and where they have wanted for the past six months.  These days, as Iraq prepares for elections on March 7 and the United States readies for a withdrawal of tens of thousands of combat troops by the end of August, people here brace for more of the same.  And so in a city where anxiety has long been the state of mind, Baghdad seems especially anxious now, sometimes with a hint of the surreal. The bombings have intersected with crises that themselves have converged across a kinetic landscape, propelled by suspicion, conspiracy and fear. “Min waraha?” the question often goes in Baghdad.  It means, “Who’s behind it?”  “Complicated,” explained Ali Jamal, as he walked to work at a car dealership, past the checkpoints that blocked the road and past the detritus of the bomb that carved a crater 10 feet across, leaving a tattered Investigations Square even more disheveled.  Behind him, police officers inspected the crumpled chassis of incinerated cars and pulled at the rubble that piled like a snowdrift at the office’s demolished entrance. Before him, traffic was sparse in streets that are usually snarled at any hour of the day.  He listed the suspects, as if answering by rote. Perhaps it was revenge for the execution on Monday of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the lieutenant of former President Saddam Hussein known as Chemical Ali. The insurgents who carried out Monday’s bombings, killing 41 people, might have been responsible, too. Then again, he added, the attacks could have been the work of political parties contesting the elections, foreigners or shadowy religious zealots.  “People can blame anyone,” he said. “There are going to be hard days ahead.”  To the rest of the world, Iraq is sometimes defined as a linear procession of events. In that narrative, the country prepares for elections, which will underscore the resilience of Iraq’s democracy. That resilience will permit the American military to withdraw, making way for Iraq’s security forces to vanquish the remnants of the insurgency.  Missing, though, is a sense of how unpredictable and tenuous the place is, often defined less by progress and more by the gulf of perceptions between a version of events offered by a coterie of politicians, party leaders and security officials and a disenchanted, suspicious public that seems these days more inclined to question than to believe.  “Politicians have failed to deliver anything concrete to their people,” said Qassim Daoud, a lawmaker and candidate. “And no one knows what to expect from them anymore.”  Iraq’s political class is mired in a dispute over the disqualification of hundreds of candidates for promoting Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party. Sunni Muslims have cried foul, calling it score-settling before the voting. Religious Shiite parties have defended the ban as adherence to law, even if that law is sometimes maddeningly ambiguous. The Americans have insisted that the matter is for Iraqis to decide, even as they help shepherd the process.  “We’re on this like a rug,” an American official said.  Around Investigations Square, none of those statements seemed to be taken at face value. While distrust is nothing new here, the cynicism was especially pronounced.  “As soon as the campaign started, the bombs began,” said Qassim Muhammad, sitting on the curb in front of his wrecked shop. “It’s between them  the parties and the seats of power. Does a carpenter set off a bomb? A plumber? The poor? No, it’s all them.”  A half-hour after Mr. Muhammad spoke, a policeman detained for letting the car bomb pass through his checkpoint tried to escape. He ran down a barricaded street a short distance from the bombing. Shouting police officers chased him, and he ran faster.  Saad al-Izzi, Duraid Adnan and Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting.
A day after bombs rocked three hotels, a suicide bomber detonated explosives Tuesday, killing at least 17 people.