blog of an Iraqi in Baghdad!

This is well worth reading. An Iraqi in Baghdad is actually blogging his daily experience (whenever his Internet Service is not out) at http://dear_raed.blogspot.com or http://dearraed.blogspot.com(google's mirror). He goes by the pen name of Salam Pax, a combination of the Arabic and Latin words for "peace." He does not like Saddam Hussein and the Baathists, and he makes this clear on the blog:

I have never seen Baghdad like this. Today the Ba’ath party people started taking their places in the trenches and main squares and intersections, fully armed and freshly shaven. They looked too clean and well groomed to defend anything.

But more important than a regime change, to him, is peace:

No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying “come on bomb us” it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case.

And finally, an interesting tidbit on how the shock and awe is working:

Today before noon I went out with my cousin to take a look at the city. Two things. 1) the attacks are precise. 2) they are attacking targets which are just too close to civilian areas in Baghdad.

I've blockquoted so much from Salam that I might as well link to his site. So I'm going to add his link to the right side of this site soon.