November 19, 2003

The death toll on both sides is rising and George Bush's push to withdraw troops threatens to tear the country apart.

Even as more Americans die and their Black Hawks are picked off like sparrows, Washington is hatching an exit strategy - an instant plan to cut US troop numbers in Iraq and to have Iraqis run their own country.

Lately, US President George Bush, who arrives in Britain this morning Sydney time for a state visit, has been spinning his wheels. He has slid from asking Americans to "support our troops", a cover for the questionable means by which he landed an army in Iraq, to talking about thousands of troops coming home in the northern spring, a foil for the realisation that Iraq is not an easy land to tame.

Last weekend Bush humiliated his proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, when he dumped the "seven steps to sovereignty" plan, where the combat-booted Bremer controlled Iraq for as long as it took to teach Iraqis about democracy, after which they would be allowed to elect their own government.

But there is a risk that Bush's plans for a quick getaway ahead of next year's US presidential election may set the scene for civil war in post-Saddam Iraq.

The Pentagon says it must be allowed to control Iraq's security forces, even with a provisional government in place. But fresh from the victory of Washington's cave-in, some members of the existing Iraqi Governing Council want a significantly reduced security brief for the US.

Council members believe the proposed provisional government, to be appointed by June next year, should control counter-insurgency. Some of its members argue that Iraqi Kurdish forces in the north and the Shiite militias in the south could be used to undermine the Sunni fighters from the centre.

Others insist the Americans be confined to guard duty on Iraq's border and at oil facilities.

All that sounds like the civil war Washington said would never happen during the fierce international debate that preceded its invasion of Iraq in March this year.

The Sunnis are already stirring the pot, claiming the Shiites want to impose an Iranian-style theocracy, and the Kurds are wary they might be caught by these two in a pincer grip.

The question now is to what the extent the US will be able to control the process if it surrenders power to a provisional government, changing its own status from that of all-powerful occupation force to mere invited guest.

The US may find itself confronted by a daunting prospect it has always been able to brush aside with Bremer's power to veto any decision the governing council makes he does not like - having to sit back as competing religious and ethnic groups tear each otherapart. The US will have the power of persuasion - massive firepower and billions to dole out for reconstruction. But it may find that the priorities of a new provisional government are inconsistent with its plans for Iraq to become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

The US is now listening to France, Germany and Russia, which want it to adopt the post-war model used in Afghanistan, where a provisional government is appointed to run the country while a new constitution is drafted ahead of elections in 2005-06.

Sadly, Afghanistan inspires little confidence. Despite all the Bush rhetoric, the US performance in Afghanistan suggests it is less interested in installing an enduring democracy than in defeating terrorists and bringing its troops home.

Just a couple of weeks ago Bremer was sticking to his seven steps, telling reporters in Baghdad: "Shortcutting the process would be dangerous."

But with more Americans dying in eight months in Iraq than in the first three years in Vietnam, Washington was becoming desperate.

As the insurgency ran amok, Bremer last week realised he had crashed into the brick wall of Iraqi politicking. Try as he might, he could not get the Iraqi Governing Council, hand-picked by Washington, to complete the simple task of appointing a panel to draft a national constitution.

The Shiites, a 60-plus per cent majority in Iraq, had dug in their heels, insisting that membership of the panel should be by election. Needless to say, they knew they had the numbers.

The American collapse was a staggering win for the Shiites, whose most revered leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has remained aloof from the political squabbling - with the powerful exception of a fatwah in which he decreed that the membership of any constitutional convention must be by popular election.

It seems that many of us who rated the exile-dominated council as ineffectual misjudged it - what was seen as an inability to transact any business now seems to have been a stubborn refusal, which has forced Bush and Bremer deeper into the dangerous "don't know" territory that has bedevilled their Iraq adventure.

Nothing happening in Iraq at present could inspire any sensible discussion about pulling US troops out - the CIA reports that the insurgency is bolder and more effective, but the Pentagon says that US troops could be reduced by about 30,000 to 100,000 by May next year.

Clearly Bush wants the imagery of thousands of troops coming home as a backdrop for his election campaign. But that would be a dangerous collision of his foreign and domestic agendas because in truth, the US is likely to be stuck in its Iraq quagmire - we can now call it that - for years to come.

For all that, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told reporters at the weekend that "it's got nothing to do with domestic politics". That's absurd.

The US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, insisted that "nothing has changed". That's absurd, too.

But now the word from Europe, reportedly from the lips of Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, is that after months of insisting on US control of the occupation forces in Iraq, the US now accepts that if it is to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it will have to allow international control of the forces.

Solana was quoted in the The Independent in London: "Everybody has moved, including the US, because the US has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help. We'll see in the coming days decisions along these lines."

That's not so absurd.

There are great cultural, political and physical differences between Vietnam and Iraq that cannot be minimised, and the geopolitical situation is entirely different. But the US has ignored many of the lessons of the traumatic Vietnam experience and is repeating many of the errors that produced defeat.

In both places, successive American administrations slighted the advice of their most knowledgeable intelligence experts. In Vietnam they told Washington's decision-makers not to tread where France had failed and to endorse the 1955 Geneva Accords provisos on reunification.

They also warned against underestimating the communists' numbers, motivation, or their independent relationship to China and the Soviet Union. But America's leaders have time and again believed what they wanted, not what their intelligence told them.

The Pentagon in the 1960s had an uncritical faith in its overwhelming firepower, its modern equipment, mobility, and mastery of the skies. It still does, and Donald Rumsfeld believes the military has the technology to "shock and awe" all adversaries. But war in Vietnam, as in Iraq, was highly decentralised and the number of troops required only increased, even as the firepower became greater. When they reached half-a-million Americans in Vietnam, the public turned against the president and defeated his party.

Wars are ultimately won politically or not at all. Leaders in Washington thought this interpretation of events in Vietnam was bizarre, and they ignored their experts whenever they frequently reminded them of the limits of military power.

In both Vietnam and Iraq the public was mobilised on the basis of cynical falsehoods that ultimately backfired, causing a "credibility gap".

The Tonkin Gulf crisis of August 1964 was manufactured, as the CIA's leading analyst later admitted in his memoir, because "the administration was seeking a pretext for a major escalation". Countless lies were told during the Vietnam War but eventually many of the men who counted most were themselves unable to separate truth from fiction.

Many US leaders really believed that if the communists won in Vietnam, the "dominoes" would fall and all South-East Asia would fall under Chinese and Soviet domination. The Iraq War was justified because Saddam was alleged to have weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda, but no evidence for either allegation has been found.

There are 130,000 American troops in Iraq now - twice the number Bush predicted would remain by this month - but, as in Vietnam, their morale is already low and sinking. Bush's poll ratings have fallen dramatically. He needs more soldiers in Iraq desperately and foreign nations will not provide them.

In Vietnam, president Nixon tried to "Vietnamise" the land war and transfer the burdens of soldiering to Nguyen Van Thieu's huge army. But it was demoralised and organised to maintain Thieu in power, not win the victory that had eluded American forces.

"Iraqisation" of the military force required to put down dissidents will not accomplish what has eluded the Americans, and in both Vietnam and Iraq the US underestimated the length of time it would have to remain and cultivated illusions about the strength of its friends.

The Iraqi army was disbanded but now is being partially reconstituted by utilising Saddam's officers and enlisted men. As in Vietnam, where the Buddhists opposed the Catholics who comprised the leaders America endorsed, Iraq is a divided nation regionally and religiously, and Washington has the unenviable choice between the risks of disorder, which its own lack of troops make likely, and civil war if it arms Iraqis.

Despite plenty of expert opinion to warn it, the Bush Administration has scant perception of the complexity of the political problems it confronts in Iraq. Afghanistan is a reminder of how military success depends ultimately on politics, and how things go wrong.

Rumsfeld's admission in his confidential memo of October 16 that "we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror" was an indication that key members of the Bush Administration are far less confident of what they are doing than they were early in 2003.

But as in Vietnam, when defence secretary Robert McNamara ceased to believe that victory was inevitable, it is too late to reverse course and now the credibility of America's military power is at stake.

Eventually, domestic politics takes precedence over everything else. It did in Vietnam and it will in Iraq. By 1968, the polls were turning against the Democrats and the Tet offensive in February caught President Lyndon Johnson by surprise because he and his generals refused to believe the CIA's estimates that there were really 600,000 rather than 300,000 people in the communist forces. Nixon won because he promised a war-weary public he would bring peace with honour.

Bush declared on October 28 that "we're not leaving" Iraq soon, but his party and political advisers are likely to have the last word as US casualties mount and his poll ratings continue to decline.

Vietnam proved that the American public has limited patience. That is still true.

The real lessons of Vietnam have yet to be learned.

The bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad exposes yet again the absurdity of attempts to portray the wave of violence in Iraq as other than a vicious and calculated campaign of terror. The International Committee of the Red Cross is one of the world's most respected international aid agencies. It is not a foreign occupation force, much less an extension of American power. It is a humanitarian agency - one of the few left in Baghdad - attempting in difficult circumstances to provide needy Iraqis with food, water and emergency medical care.

The only conceivable aim of those involved in the suicide bombing of the ICRC's Baghdad offices was to disrupt, if not devastate, the humanitarian relief effort in Iraq: to maximise the death and suffering of Iraqis; to maximise the intimidation of those involved in rebuilding Iraq; and to maximise the chaos.

In anyone's language, this was an unconscionable act of terror.

So why are some of the world's media still walking on eggshells, groping for euphemisms such as "organised resistance" as if attempting somehow to legitimise these bleakest of atrocities?

Sadly, the media is really only reflecting the failure of the international system over many years to settle on a universal standard to define the crime of terrorism.

Asymmetric warfare against the power and symbols of the West appears to have become the strategy of choice in these early years of the 21st century. This imposes a new range of tests for all stakeholders in the international system.

However, the system is struggling to respond. We see, for example, the world go to all the trouble of setting up a new International Criminal Court without giving it jurisdiction over the crime of terrorism per se. Why not?

The way through the dilemma is to focus on the nature of the target. By this criterion, terrorism pretty much defines itself.
The reason is the lack of a consensus on what exactly constitutes an act of terror. As last month's report of the International Bar Association's Task Force on Terrorism acknowledged, all attempts to agree on a definition under international law have failed. The UN has been on the case for many years, with little progress.

The terms of the debate are by now familiar: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." In the Middle East, this has become code language for extending a blanket exemption to Palestinian extremists who target Israeli civilians on school buses, at seaside cafes, shopping malls or nightclubs.

This is the conflict at the heart of the definitional dispute. But for how much longer can these semantics go on?

More than any other event, September 11 brought the global security debate - and, specifically, the phenomenon of mega-terror - into the day-to-day preoccupations of hundreds of millions of citizens in the developed world. In Australia, this was doubly reinforced by the Bali bombings. Many of the 88 Australians killed were young adults, and all were innocents in any meaningful sense of the word.

The post-September 11 obligation imposed by the Security Council requires that all member states "refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts". Under the mandate of Security Council resolution 1373, they must shut down terrorist financing and training, as well as arrest or exclude the actors who seek to maim and kill civilians as a political stratagem.

It sounds straightforward enough. Not so.

It is worth noting a letter from Syria, a current member of the UN counter-terrorism committee, to the president of the Security Council in response to these attempts to frame a concerted international response: "Inasmuch as Security Council resolution 1373 (2001) lacks any clear definition of the concept of terrorism or of the terrorist acts or entities to be combated, the Syrian Arab Republic has based itself, in the present reply, on its commitments under the 1998 Arab Convention for the suppression of terrorism, which distinguishes between terrorism and the legitimate struggle against foreign occupation."

In effect, Syria, a serving member of the Security Council, elevates the Arab League Convention, adopted in Cairo three years ago, above its obligations to the UN. Syria is not alone.

In her recently published book attacking the Howard Government's controversial attempts to strengthen Australia's counter-terrorism laws, Jenny Hocking provides a summation of what might be called the relativist approach to this debate.

In Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-Terrorism and the Threat to Democracy, Hocking says terrorism is a term mired in ambiguity, its meaning culturally and politically defined. She cites approvingly an opinion published in the Alternative Law Journal last year, which insists that "terrorism exists only in the eye of the Western beholder; it has no independent reality".

Hocking goes on to complain that the use of the term by Western governments "abstracts specific instances of political violence from their political and social contexts" and "averts consideration of complex questions of causation".

In the spirit of Noam Chomsky, she argues there is a sense in which the war on terror "is all about language".

All this may pass for a worthy debate in some legal and academic circles but, in appraising events such as the bombing of the Red Cross offices, and in searching for consistent and coherent responses, this approach becomes not only circular but surreal.

The unwillingness to accept the application of a universal standard - or even to acknowledge the possibility of a universal standard - is long-standing, and unlikely to change.

But, surely, the way through the dilemma is to focus not on the nature of the cause, but the nature of the target. By this criterion, terrorism pretty much defines itself.

Any and all attempts either by state or non-state actors to plan or perpetrate the deliberate mass murder of innocent civilians with the calculated aim of advancing an ideological or political cause must be deemed terrorism, and a crime against humanity.

Anything less than a universal standard cast in these terms is almost certainly a double standard. And it is a double standard that has paralysed this debate for far too long.

The death of Saddam Hussein's two eldest sons in the northern city of Mosul is the best news Washington and its allies have had out of Iraq since the war formally ended three months ago.

But given the resistance the United States is meeting as it ploughs towards its professed goal of a democratic, federal, multiethnic Iraq, it may be the last good news for some time.

The departure of the Hussein brothers is a good thing because of their atrocious records and because, it's hoped, it may reduce attacks on the occupation forces and hence US casualties. Because of their potential impact on domestic opinion, American casualties have the capacity to sap US determination to stay the course in Iraq for what may be the four or five years necessary to establish a democracy.

But even if the deaths of Qusay and Uday do dampen Ba'athist Party resistance, the fact that their father remains at large means the last stand in Mosul is only one more step in the campaign to destroy Saddam Hussein's power - which wasn't even expected to survive the end of the war proper.

And while an imperative, the de-Ba'athification of Iraq is still only preparation for the far more ambitious project, the construction of a new Iraqi polity.

Last week the occupying authorities took a first step by unveiling the somewhat misleadingly titled Iraqi Governing Council.

Given Saddam Hussein's poisonous legacy of ethnic conflict between Arabs and Kurds and sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, hopes that social and economic structures could be rapidly erected have proved optimistic.

The hand-picked IGC - which includes a significant number of Shiites - is realistically the most representative body Iraqis are likely to get in the near future.

But, the fact that hardline Shiite clerics have rejected the IGC is an indication of the difficulties ahead.

Meanwhile although George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are doubtless jubilant at the unexpected news from Iraq, the death of the brothers does nothing to clear the air over the role of the intelligence services in the rush to war.

The Bush administration has found a partial solution in the acceptance of responsibility by a mid-level official for use of the discredited Niger uranium information, and Mr Blair is flying home to face the Hutton inquiry.

But until the question of accountability over the use of dubious material is resolved in what was essentially an information campaign against Baghdad, efforts by Washington, London and Canberra to convince the international community of their bona fides will remain under a cloud.

So they haven’t found weapons of mass destruction but in the light of those mass graves, how is it now possible to say this war should not have been fought?
Following the fall of Baghdad two months ago, there was some unseemly gloating from the pro-war lobby. I deliberately didn't join in this, in print or in private, even though I had supported the war, because while (in my opinion) war is sometimes necessary it is always horrible, and always represents a failure of the human race.
Having seen the pictures of suffering and destruction as a result of the war, I didn't feel like gloating. What I could feel was relief that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was accomplished without the predicted 100,000 dead, without the predicted millions of refugees and without the predicted massive environmental damage. Relief, too, because - notwithstanding the chaos they are now enduring and the resentment many feel towards the occupying Americans and British - the vast majority of Iraqis were and are glad to have been freed. Seeing how badly the war coalition has underestimated the difficulties of the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Iraq, I find it still very hard to feel like gloating. But not so hard, apparently, for some on the anti-war side, who have seized on the fact that, so far, no significant evidence of weapons of mass destruction has been found. Does not this prove what they always knew, that they were right? Throughout this debate, protesters against the war have claimed the high moral ground. The casual, automatic assumption has been that all right-thinking (meaning left-leaning) people would oppose the war, and if you didn't oppose it you were simply not on the side of right (not one of us).
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Yes, much has gone wrong in Iraq. But what's gone right is that Iraqi people are no longer being killed and tortured, Iraqi children are not being thrown in jail and people are free. What's gone right is that the world's cruellest tyrant has gone, apparently from the face of the earth. Of course, if intelligence about Iraq's ability to use weapons of mass destruction was exaggerated to provide legal justification for war, if governments lied, they should be held to account. But even if it turns out that the legal basis for the war was flawed, there was always a strong moral justification. The humanitarian reason was the one on which the war coalition should have relied. Indeed, in not relying on it they probably underestimated their publics. Many people who initially opposed the war simply did not know the extent of the atrocities carried out by Saddam's regime. Now, as the stories of torture and disappearances are told, as the graves of thousands of executed Iraqi people are found, everyone does know. It was always possible, before the war, to argue for or against it in good faith. Those who believe the absence of weapons of mass destruction proves the war on Iraq was wrong may have a more proper appreciation of the legality of things than I have. But I do not see, in the light of those mass graves, how it is now possible to say this war should not have been fought. It is time the idea that dictators can use the shield of national sovereignty in order to commit atrocities against their own people was overturned. (Isn't this what the left used to lobby for?) And now that there is one less dictator in the world, the United Nations, which failed to find the will to take effective international action against Saddam Hussein, should think very hard on what might be done - hopefully short of war - about assorted tyrants in Zimbabwe and Burma.

You don't have to be a particularly good person to think that war is bad. Nearly everyone would agree that it is. But as the founder of Medicins Sans Frontieres, Bernard Kouchner (a socialist), said of the action in Iraq, what is worse than war is for the international community to leave in place a dictator who massacres his people.

No one in Baghdad knew who he was or the risks he was taking. Apart from a select group of trusted friends, they still don't. The telephones and the internet haven't worked here since the collapse of the regime, so the Iraqis never had a chance to read the diaries of the Baghdad Blogger.

Outside the country, many didn't even believe that the man who wrote only under the sobriquet Salam Pax truly existed. It was the great irony of the war. While the world's leading newspapers and television networks poured millions of pounds into their coverage of the war in Iraq, it was the internet musings of a witty young Iraqi living in a two-storey house in a Baghdad suburb that scooped them all to deliver the most compelling description of life during the war.

As with so much in Iraq, it was never meant to be like this. In June last year, Salam (this much of his name, at least, is real) was a recently graduated architect, aged 29, living at home with his parents and brother in Baghdad. His best friend was Raed, 25, a Palestinian-Jordanian he had met while studying architecture, who was taking a masters degree in Jordan. Raed was at best an infrequent email correspondent and so Salam started writing up his news from home on a weblog, a site on the internet where he could post his scribblings as often as he liked for his friend to read. He called it: Where is Raed?

No one else bothered to look at it. "The first two months were just: that girl got married, I had the flu, he had I don't know what. Stupid stuff," says Salam. "I never thought there would be this much of a fuss about the whole thing."

Soon, however, he began to search out other "bloggers" posting on the internet. Few were writing in English from the Arab world, and those that did wrote in heavily religious overtones. That was enough to encourage Salam to put his head above the parapet and one day he identified himself on a bloggers' website as an Iraqi. "I was saying, 'Come on, look, the Arabs here: sex, alcohol, belly dancers, TV shows, where are they?' All you saw was people talking about God and Allah. There was nothing about what was happening here."

As he wrote in more detail, he began to touch more often on the unspoken hardships of life in Iraq under the paranoid regime of Saddam Hussein. He could hardly have taken a greater risk if he had tried. More than 200,000 people went missing under Saddam, many for far lesser crimes than the open criticism of the regime that Salam voiced in his writings. Now that the regime has fallen, human rights workers are tripping over mass graves in Iraq every few days as they trawl through the legacy of 23 years of unimaginable brutality and persecution.

Like all Iraqis, Salam was familiar with the dangers. At least four of his relatives had gone missing. In the past year, for no apparent reason, one of his friends was summarily executed, shot in the head as he sat in his car, and two others were arrested; one was later freed and another, a close friend, has never returned.

Not only had Salam criticised the regime, he had written openly about the fact that he is gay. It was a frank admission in a repressive dictatorship and one that, even in the new, postwar Iraq, which at heart is still a conservative, Islamic society, represents a significant risk. And so he continues to guard his identity. "I am not going to be the first one to carry the flag. I hide behind computer screens," he says.

Despite the risks, Salam soon became hooked on his daily diary. He gave simple but honest descriptions of life at Hotel Pax, as he called his family home, which was fast filling up with anxious relatives. He talked equally freely about the soaring price of tomatoes and the sudden arrival of the feared Ba'ath party militia, who, to the neighbours' horror, set up a gun position in an empty house on his street. He wrote either in the office of the architectural firm he was representing in Baghdad, or at home, in his chaotically untidy bedroom.

Screens cover the windows to keep the midday sun away from his three computers, each of which has been opened up into a sprawling tangle of wires and circuit boards. A poster from the film The Matrix hangs on the wall, looking down on a jumble of computer books and CDs strewn over the floor. Pages of website addresses and computer commands are tacked to the wall above his screen. It was here that Salam would sit and talk endlessly about the impending war with Raed, who returned to Baghdad before the war, and the friend he describes only as G - Ghaith, another young, intelligent, eloquent architectural graduate who spent much of his adult life dodging military service. They talked eagerly about the demise of Saddam, but they were scared too. Scared of being called up for military service because all young men were reservists, and scared of being obliterated by an American bomb.

But Salam's writing is remarkably free of sentimentality even as the approaching war becomes inevitable. "I helped my mother pack things today," he wrote in a posting on February 16, a month before the invasion. "We have not decided to leave Baghdad if 'it' happens, but just in case we absolutely have to. We are very efficient packers, me and my mom. The worst packers are the emotional ones. The 'Oh-let's-remember-when-I-bought-this-thing' packers, we just do it in cold blood. We have done this quite often; we are serial packers."

Salam is shy, but he has a quick and sometimes cynical humour that flows easily through his writing. Yet occasionally his wit choked on the images of death and war that appeared on the family television screen, beamed into the Hotel Pax from an illegal satellite dish on the roof. "On BBC we are watching scenes of Iraqis surrendering," he wrote on March 21, in the first week of combat. "My youngest cousin was muttering, 'What shame' to himself. Yes, it is better for them to do that, but still, seeing them carrying that white flag makes something deep inside you cringe."

By now his weblog had blossomed in confidence from idle chat to startling reportage that seems to have been driven by an underlying urge to resist the regime and to document its fall. He is almost offended when I ask later why he risked staying in Baghdad during the war, rather than escaping abroad which, as a well-off, educated Iraqi, would not have been hard. "I absolutely had to stay. This is your country, this is your place. I had to see what was going to happen."

Yet in the final weeks before the impending conflict, he became increasingly anxious that the men of the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence agency, were on to him. "They were not only paranoid, they were going crazy," he says. At one point the regime blocked access to the website on which he was posting his writing, blogspot.com. "There was the possibility that they knew. I spent a couple of days thinking this is the end. And then you wait for a couple of days and nothing happens and you say, 'OK, let's do it again.' Stupid risks, one after another."

Reports of his writing began to filter into the newspapers in Britain and the US. At one point during the war, while he was still able to access the internet and send his writing, the Arabic radio services of the BBC and the Voice of America ran stories on him. His father heard the reports and for the first time guessed that that it was his son they were referring to. "When he heard this, he was sure that something bad would happen." By now 20,000 people were regularly reading Salam's words and his writing became the most linked-to diary on the internet.

Then suddenly, around ten days into the war, the ever paranoid Iraqis closed down all internet access. Unable to post his diaries, Salam continued to write: "After eight months, it became a habit." Sometimes, when the generator was running, he used his computer. Mostly he wrote in a notebook, describing the bombings across Baghdad and the increasingly frenetic Iraqi army and fedayeen.

"There will be excellent, amazing, very important stories to be told by lots of people. We, sitting in Baghdad in our protected four walls, were never going to be these stories. There are people who went through much more," he says.

Two weeks ago he collected his writings together and sent them by email to Diana Moon, a trusted fellow blogger from New York, who posted them on the site. Salam is modest about what he has written, but furious, too, with those who doubted his authenticity. At one point he changed the name of the weblog to simply Dear Raed. Many thought the palindrome hinted that Salam Pax didn't exist, but was an agent of Iraqi or US intelligence. His allusions to David Bowie and Hollywood movies seemed unusually familiar and so his identity was questioned.

In fact, his experience of the west dates back to two long periods of his childhood spent living in Vienna, where his father worked as a businessman. He lived there alone for eight years as a student, returning reluctantly to Baghdad in 1996 because his parents called him back. He regarded the doubters as culturally arrogant, unable to accept that an Iraqi in Baghdad could share their interests and write on them eloquently and with humour. "I am this little no one who actually is a kind of a foreigner in his own culture. I don't listen to Arabic music a lot, I don't read that much, I think every single Arabic newspaper is a tool to whatever government. It was making me angry, it was annoying me, I didn't see why I had to take all this shit."

Much of the criticism came from Americans who favoured the war and were riled by Salam's dismissive criticism of US ambitions in Iraq. He argued endlessly with Raed and Ghaith about whether the war was justified. He was reluctant to cheer the US invasion in his writings but, like most Iraqis, says only a foreign invasion could have overthrown Saddam and so accomplished what most of the population longed for.

But, again like most, he is bitter about the looting and lawlessness which for the past six weeks have gripped Baghdad. "The Americans are not taking control of the situation and stopping it. There is no way they could wash their hands clean of it," he says. "Two months like this is too much, three months is a disaster."

Electricity is still intermittent at best, government is a long way from restored. Most ministries are gutted, some of them are still smoking. What message does it send to frustrated Iraqis that only the oil ministry has been protected by US troops? Already some are talking of Saddam's era as the good days, Salam says.

The former dictator and his two loathed sons are still on the run. The weapons of mass destruction, the fragile premise on which the war was based, have been not been found. Now some hardline Shia clerics are becoming increasingly fractious, taking advantage of the power vacuum and threatening to ban alcohol, cinema and prostitution on pain of execution. The Baghdad blogger may still have the most important chapters of his diary left to write