You missed my point, Tom. It's not the spectrum of opinion you'd find reading the words of a spectrum of individuals I'm curious about; it's the spectrum of opinion to be found inside the mind of one Iraqi individual.

Life under Saddam Hussein must have seriously warped the psyche of individual Iraqis and the society as a whole. Mary Anne's correct about the exact correspondence to the pattern of psychological consequences of abuse. Abused people develop elaborate coping mechanisms for dealing, from a position of weakness, with a powerful and dangerous authority. Accounts of life under the Nazis and the Soviets, under Saddam, inside authoritarian cults, and so on, consistently show people developing a comprehensive and--this is key--automatic ability to compartmentalize their thoughts, to self-censor and speak only what authority wants to hear...to essentially be one person in private and quite another when dealing with authority. People who can't do it, who are prone to occasionally blurting out what they're thinking, are weeded out early. The survivors become such gifted chameleons they don't have to think about doing it.

So here's my point, Tom: Interpreting what Iraqis say without taking into account the background against which it's said is sure to lead to error. Saddam taught his people to fear their government, and that lesson won't be unlearned overnight. Virulently anti-American blogs may be powered by automatic fear and hatred of the government (whatever it is), suddenly unleashed when it sinks in that at least this government won't kill people for criticizing it; and some people are going to go hog-wild under those circumstances. Conversely, given that the public persona that Iraqis learned to adopt was Appeaser of Authority, we should also be careful that in pro-American blogs we aren't seeing people making automatic obeisance to the new authority.

You're automatically assuming that I'm taking a partisan position and arguing that pro-American blogs are valueless, but I hope I've gotten across my real thesis, which is that raw data derived from Iraqi blogs of any persuasion should be considered low-reliability until vetted against an understanding of the people who wrote them. The words we hear (especially the words we want to hear) may not necessarily be the words the Iraqis meant; or they themselves may not know what they mean--people can't usually perceive the kinks in their own psyches.

Iraqis aren't Americans, and it's a mistake to read their words as if they'd been written by Americans. Different lives, different societies, different worlds.