Dear Friends,

Greetings from Iraq! After a week in the country, I can say that the attitude here is pretty fatalistic. People are not too worried about the U.S. expanding the “war” to Iraq anytime soon. They’re celebrating Ramadan and going about their lives as usual. They say that the future is out of their hands, so why bother worrying about it? Everyone agrees that after Afghanistan, America will bomb Iraq next. But - as one man put it to me the Iraqi people are “used to the voice of American bombs.” In fact, this is something people have said to me again and again - that if America thinks they’re going to fall apart like the Taliban, they should think again. People say that Iraq has been bombed repeatedly by the U.S. for 11 years - almost every day in the North and South - and they’re still here. They don’t like it. It really, and justifiably, angers them, but, well – one woman compared U.S. bombings to the weather, saying it was just a fact of Iraqi life. I don’t know myself. This time it seems different. This time it seems much more serious. And much more frightening.