many risks and compromises associated with
cooperative behaviour. Sadly, thanks to the proliferation of
traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and
politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against
neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation. While such
strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of
exclusive salvation (we can't share, participate, or heaven forbid
collaborate with people whom we've been taught not to trust) they
imperil what is left of civil society. They threaten the last small
hope for averting millions of deaths in the next set of
faith-justified oil wars.

As the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the United States,
becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to
offer a multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance
is diminished. In America, broadcasting the Iraq war meant selling the
Iraq war. Each of the media conglomerates broadcast the American
regime's carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time
the war actually began a Knight Ridder poll found half of Americans
believed that Iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on 9
September 2001. The further embedded among coalition troops that
mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and
priorities of the Pentagon they became. Dispatches regularly referred
to the deaths of Iraqi soldiers as the 'softening of enemy positions',
bombing strikes as 'targets of opportunity', and civilian deaths as
the now-laughable 'collateral damage'. This was the propagandist
motive for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists'
lives are dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are
travelling, their coverage becomes skewed.

But this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own
weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share
their more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war.
Journalists' personal entries provided a much broader range of
opinions on both the strategies and motivations of all sides in the
conflict than were available, particularly to Americans, on broadcast
and cable television.

For an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free
to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog
called Dear Raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard
as a real person living in Baghdad, v