Salam Pax - that sharp-penned, artfully cynical Baghdad-based Iraqi blogger who has been something of a minor celebrity in the weblogging community - did not take long to wear on my nerves. John Stryker found himself rubbed the wrong way from the start; I had my doubts about Salam but was at least put to some faith about the fellow's sincerity in both sentiment and persona.

I generally took Salam's story of being a middle-class Iraqi living life wedged between an evil dictatorship and an uncertain future with a genuine interest and an enormous amount of patience. Miraculously, he somehow e-mailed a stash of commentaries to a New York-based blogger after Baghdad's entrance into the war zone apparently cut him off March 24th; he's since been making piquant observations about life under occupation by very good-natured and very human military personnel.

But observation leads to conclusions. I've come to dislike him for his inexplicable aversion to understanding the events changing his life even as he embraces them with sarcastic commentary. His admittedly agile English writing moves from arrogant ingratitude to downright rejection of the very forces sparing him from almost certain capture and torture for the crime of operating a weblog at least humorously critical of the Ba'athist regime, a fate he almost certainly would have eventually met from the microscopic scrutiny of Saddam's secret police.

Or was he ever in danger after all?

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen doesn't believe so. Though I may have been dubious of Salam's identity - on Sgt. Stryker's, I wondered if his family may have been loyal to the Ba'athists - I never contemplated Salam as another guileful tentacle of the Ba'athists:

One of his constantly repeated warnings is that the U.S. occupiers are fools if they do not take all those talented former-Baathist officials in from the cold, and put them back in business; that "al-Chalabi's de-Baathification plans don't solve any problems."

Salam refers to the Americans slickly as the "puppet-masters." He speaks approvingly of old Iraqi Communists organizing their poster (and subversion) campaigns, and is suddenly sympathetic when they happen to appropriate some office space. He mentions in passing linking up with a Western leftist group called "CIVIC" (Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict) to document civilian casualties from the U.S. invasion that liberated the country.

And this from a person who shows no guilt whatever at his own family membership in a Baathist regime that killed some hundreds of thousands of civilians -- entirely on purpose. He dismisses all that as "a few bad apples," without thinking to volunteer any sort of information on where such bad apples might now be hiding.

The good news in the past week is that the U.S. authorities seem to be on to this kind of imposture. They have grasped that the main immediate challenge to democratization in Iraq is indeed from old Baathist elements -- who they now know are behind almost all of the "random" violence that has been distracting them in parts of Baghdad and other cities that never had crime problems before. They have grasped that this represents a better-organized and more serious challenge to public order than even the Shia religious fanatics coming in from Iran. They are on to the game that is being played on them, in which this very violence is being used to support propaganda through Al-Jazeera and other Arab and Western media, in which the U.S. is being "held to account" for Iraq's "slide into anarchy."

Damning, seeing as how a good deal of bloggers may have been taken completely for fools. And disturbing, as to the undying, nightmarish evil that is the Near East culture of death. But read Warren's article, for he holds quite a bit of faith in the American presence abroad: perhaps too trusting initially, as is our humble way, but clever enough to assess and destroy a threat that has taken advantage of our vulnerability once too often.