Salam Pax Back in Iraq

At the beginning of the war, an anonymous Iraqi calling himself "Salam Pax" was weblogging from Baghdad. The postings stopped for several weeks, but now he is back online, with a backlog of street-level stories about the war and its aftermath. "War sucks big time," he says. "Don't let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don't think about your 'imminent liberation' anymore." On the other hand, he is "really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq. ... The truth is, if it weren't for intervention this would never have happened. When we were watching the Saddam statue being pulled down, one of my aunts was saying that she never thought she would see this day during her lifetime."