BAGHDAD — Out the window to the left, a young man reaches into a barrel and splashes water over his head, momentary relief from the 105-degree heat of midday. It might seem like a nice idea, except that the barrel is filled by a tube stuck in the bright green water of a nearby canal, which looks and smells exactly like what it is: an open sewer.

When Sgt. 1st Class John Hipolito’s unit arrived in eastern Baghdad in December, a lot of the focus went toward trying to fix the woeful situation with the water and sewer, and the electricity.

"But then we got to March and everything went crazy," he says. "Now we have to start over."

Fighting between U.S.-Iraqi forces and Shiite militiamen has largely receded here in the past week or two, though commanders remain focused on a few pockets of resistance. Attention is only beginning to shift back toward that earlier battle against sewage, dirty water and spotty power.

But even as U.S. units are intent to push their Iraqi counterparts to the front of the fight against the militiamen, they are increasingly inclined toward the view that problems with basic infrastructure are also best handled by the Iraqis.

"At this point in the war, we’re trying to let the government of Iraq establish itself," said 1st Sgt. James Kates, of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment. "One of the easiest ways for a government to establish itself is to provide those essential services."

The historic poverty and disenfranchisement of Shiite eastern Baghdad has been widely seen as key to the appeal of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia. U.S. commanders now believe that appeal has waned — in part because of the militia’s failure to improve conditions here — creating an opening for the government to establish its legitimacy and further erode the militia’s base.

But military officials acknowledge that the effectiveness of local government here lagged well behind that of the Iraqi security forces even before the fighting resumed in March. Once the fighting started, they say, local politicians largely melted away.

"They’re still around," Kates said, "but they believe that if they come to work they’re going to be killed by the militias."

Even if security holds, getting the government working will require both confronting a legacy of crippling corruption and the notion that American forces are a "panacea," said Lt. Col. Gregory Baine, 2nd Battalion’s commander.

"It must start with the local government," he said. "We can guarantee security so that the government can do what it needs to do to establish that foundation, but we can’t do everything for them."

Still, American units in eastern Baghdad are beginning to put renewed focus on a program of infrastructure improvements and humanitarian relief. Kates’ company continued delivering clean water to surrounding neighborhoods during much of the fighting, and is working to establish a water delivery point just outside the gates of is outpost.

To the southeast, a multimillion-dollar sewer project has been near completion for months. But three workers fell into a hole and drowned late last year and the contractor on the project was unable to retrieve their bodies. Since then, the contractor has refused to continue working, claiming that family members of the dead workers are threatening reprisals, said Lt. Mike Rutecki, an officer with the 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, which oversees the project.

Civil affairs officers in the unit say the story about threatened reprisals appears to have been an excuse.

"Meanwhile, people are still [defecating] in their yards," Rutecki said.

During their patrol along Baghdad’s northeastern edges, soldiers from Hipolito’s platoon carefully avoid the bright green canals. Their focus this day is not on infrastructure; they are searching for weapons in an area where the Iraqi government has suspended rules that generally allow every family one rifle.

Few resident, too, seem fixated on the canals that criss-cross their battered neighborhood like veins of befouled anti-freeze. One man points to a pair of burnt-out cars outside his house and the bullet holes in the walls, which he says were caused by fighting between U.S. troops and militiamen.

"He wants to know if he can get some money for the cars," an interpreter tells Lt. Matyas Kovach, the platoon’s leader.

"Probably not," Kovach said.

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