Quote:

We went again for a drive thru Baghdad?s main streets. Too depressing. 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. And the most shocking thing was the number of kids. They couldn?t be older than 20, sitting in trenches sipping Miranda fizzy drinks and eating chocolate (that was at the end of our street) other places you would see them sitting bored in the sun. more cars with guns and loads of Kalashnikovs everywhere.
The worst is seeing and feeling the city come to a halt. Nothing. No buying, no selling, no people running after buses. We drove home quickly. At least inside it did not feel so sad.
-----------------------
A couple of hours earlier we were at a shop and a woman said as she was leaving, and this is a very common sentence, ?we?ll see you tomorrow if good keeps us alive? ? itha allah khalana taibeen ? and the whole place just freezes. She laughed nervously and said she didn?t mean that, and we all laughed but these things start having a meaning beyond being figures of speech.
-----------------------
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.
----------------------
A BBC reporter walking thru the Mutanabi Friday book market (again) ends his report with :
?It looks like Iraqis are putting on an air of normality?
Look, what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! Besides, this ?normality? doesn?t go very deep. Almost everything is more expensive than it was a couple of months ago, people are digging wells in their gardens, on the radio yesterday after playing a million songs from the time of the war with Iran (these are like cartoon theme songs for people my age, we know them all by heart) they read out instructions on how to make a trench and prepare for war, that is after president saddam advised Iraqis to make these trenches in their gardens.

---

Quote:

air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.

---

Quote:

Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:
The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is.not found by retrying the URL. (DNS_HOST_NOT_FOUND) 

---

Dunno why it's doing that.  If you want any updates, etc. I could always copy and paste   Current update:

there is still nothing happening im baghdad we can only hear distant expolsions and there still is no all clear siren. someone in the BBC said that the state radio has been overtaken by US broadcast, that didn't happen the 3 state broadcasters still operate.
:: salam 6:40 AM [+] ::