If you think about it, you can apply this to what ANYONE writes, and at some point, you're left in paralysis, unable to credit anything at all.

But I'm not talking about anyone, I'm talking about Iraqis, a people who have lived with extraordinary social stress.

The miserable part of all this is that we are actually winning in a lot of areas over there, but there are so damn many people in America who are literally horny for defeat that it's difficult to deal with.

Here we go aqain...nah, I don't have the energy to point out for the umpteenth time the absurdity of those blanket generalizations.

If I were a cynic, I might think you were simply constructing a mental filtering mechanism by which any pro-American sentiment from Iraq can be written off

You're not a cynic, you're projecting, Tom. As Mary Anne points out, you already have a powerful filter for selecting pro-American/pro-Bush Iraqi blogs (or pro-Bush anything) that say what you want to hear. To say that the quality of the entire genre is suspect is nothing like picking one side or the other to promote.

But to get back to the point, sampling blog opinions isn't a conversation, and without the ability to question and dig deeper, we're left to passively consume blogs just as as we used to passively consume broadcast media. In the case of the Iraqi blogs I'm saying that, because all we have is the text take it or leave it, we have to factor in whatever additional information we have. Certainly one of the most significant factors to take into account is the mental state of the writer. For example, knowing that the formulation "Saddam is harsh, but he loves the Iraqi people" was common under Saddam, we can better interpret statements like "things in Iraq are harsh, but the Americans mean well".

People can't erase their minds and reboot with a fresh slate, free of past experiences. Every Iraqi today carries the baggage of life under Saddam, and will be approaching the American authorities and their new government using the only mental framework they have: Saddam's dictatorship. I understand that many educated Iraqis understand democracy and freedom as intellectual concepts, and can write intelligently about them; but they have no firsthand experience, yet. You know that under those circumstances their minds and their guts are at war.

I can't give much weight to anecdotes harvested from blogs, but I'd give great weight to what an Iraqi I can actually talk to would have to say. Even better would be to talk to Iraqis of multiple opinions. With "Iranian student" fresh in our minds that doesn't seem so far-fetched. How about we invite a couple of Iraqi bloggers to come in out of the splendid isolation of the blogosphere (see Asimov's "Solaria") and actually talk here, to each other and to us?