Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Tired of the daily dose of "quagmirism" from Iraq? I am. Want information that's delivered by someone other than the expense-account correspondents who see nothing except Vietnam outside their Baghdad hotel windows? I do. And that's why I read Iraq Today and Healing Iraq.

Iraq Today is owned by Mina Corp, a London-based private investment group, and Hussain Sinjari, owner of the Al-Ahali Media Group, who fought Saddam's oppression for more than 25 years. Why is it written in English? "Publishing in English was mainly a business decision," say the owners. "Approximately, 150-180 new Arabic newspapers have gone on sale in Baghdad since the end of the war. There are, by contrast, only three English newspapers. In addition, Iraq is ruled by a largely English-speaking occupying force, and an English-language newspaper is one of the few means for Iraqi people to communicate effectively with the coalition."

Staffers include Hassan Fattah, a young Iraqi-American journalist who has returned to Baghdad after a stint as a reporter in the West Bank. "Iraqis know Saddam was a fake," he told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in an interview in August: "His Arabism came at their expense. For Iraqis it was not Arabism, it was torture and subjugation. (Now) there is this feeling that the Arab world has lashed out at us because we did not 'resist' the Americans. It was because Iraqis have learned the lessons of phony Arabism — that Saddam could send $35,000 to the families of (Palestinian) suicide bombers, while leaving his own people starving and living on two dollars a day."

Healing Iraq is a blog that should endear itself to all by virtue of the Jonathan Swift quote that adorns its masthead: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." The blogger, Zeyad, writes very much in the literate Salam Pax style:

"I truly hope that living under 50 years of tyranny hasn't turned us all into potential tyrants. I worry constantly when I see some of the newly appointed Iraqi officials and controversial politico-religious figures just too eager to rule and assume power in the country. They are desperately trying to push it and speed up things for themselves. I see Saddam's face under the masks they're wearing. They are tyrants in disguise. I would rather have President Bremer (Allah preserve him) ruling us than any of them. I wonder if we EVER have someone qualified yet enough to be leading us. Friederich Nietzsche once wrote: 'Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.' "

Of course, both Iraq Today and Healing Iraq don't ignore the terror directed against those who are helping move Iraq from the mess left by Saddam and his henchmen, but they do so without resorting to the vocabulary of 1950's Nasserite political correctness or 21st-century drop-the-marmalade neo-Marxism, and that's something we should give thanks for.

Diarist of the day: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 23 October 1927

"To the oculist. Small child sat opposite me, with enormous glasses on. Lenses magnified many times. She looked with these large pensive eyes — unnaturally large like cow's eyes — all over the room, and me (feeling very uncomfortable). I felt as if the cow had licked me all over with her large tongue. "