While many Iraqis are selling their belongings and buying a ticket to Syria or Jordan, Jane Stillwater moved in the opposite direction.

The self-confessed hippy grandmother from California spent a year living off peanut-butter sandwiches so that she could afford a ticket to Iraq.

Frustrated at railing against the war in a blog written from her Berkeley kitchen, the rail-thin 64-year-old decided to go where the story was.

She saved her income as a teacher at a centre for juvenile delinquents, bought a ticket to Kuwait and begged the US military to embed her.

This they did — reluctantly. But as the first left-wing blogger to receive such access, Ms Stillwater is a symbol of the lure of a war zone and the efforts of the Pentagon to meet the demands of the internet age. Faced with a surge in the number of blogs — websites where anyone with a computer can write their view on world events — the military is cautiously opening its doors to these self-proclaimed “citizen journalists”.Having arrived in a deadly war zone without any clear plan or independent means of transport, Ms Stillwater found herself stuck inside the US base in the green zone in Baghdad. That did not stop her making a surprise attack on Senator John McCain at a press conference during his recent trip to promote the US troop escalation. Without identifying herself, Ms Stillwater witheringly compared the soldiers in Iraq with the doomed cavalry charge of the Light Brigade.

“They’re, you know, the cannons to the left of them, as Alfred Lord Tennyson said, cannons to the right of them, and somebody had blundered.

“They’re here, but the original premise of this war was a blunder, and what I want to know is, if you guys are planning on attacking Iran . . . what do you have to say to that? Would that be another? That sounds like another blunder.”

Clearly flummoxed, Mr McCain muttered, “I have no response to that.” He did not know that he had just been ambushed not by a journalist but by a blogging 64-year-old.

Even in the traditional media there have been unlikely Iraq war correspondents, including a journalist from Glamour magazine and a Hollywood agent-turned right-wing film-maker who, according to Vanity Fair, shaved the word “Die” into his chest hair and used a borrowed soldier’s pistol to hold up an Iraqi pharmacy to steal liquid Valium.

Ms Stillwater, like many bloggers, regards her lack of professional writing experience as an advantage, freeing her from the constraints of factual reporting. The US military has been reluctant to welcome such people, describing Ms Stillwater in a leaked e-mail as “opinion-based, rather than factual reporting”. She managed to embed only after enlisting her senator’s backing and flying to the region at her own expense.

“I’m an average person and I write on the level of an average person, and I can explain it to my fellow average people,” she said, struggling with the flak jacket and helmet that she had borrowed from the Army.

After a week in Baghdad, Ms Stillwater, whose embedding was sponsored by The Lone Star Iconoclast, a Texas newspaper, had yet to escape the confines of the green zone, the sprawling Baghdad fortress where US soldiers protect the Iraqi Government. She longed to see the real city — what the military calls “the red zone”.

“I’m happily here in Baghdad, embedded in the green zone, but — I have yet to set foot in the red zone, the real Iraq,” she blogged. “I can’t believe that I have come all this way to Iraq and will soon leave — but will have never set foot in the red zone!”

Not so Pat Dollard, a Hollywood agent whose clients included Steven Soderbergh, the director and producer. He embedded with US forces in the “Triangle of Death”, south of Baghdad, and in the al-Qaeda stronghold of Ramadi.

During that time he claimed to have wandered off a US army base to hold up an Iraqi chemist and steal drugs to share with the troops, and to have encouraged young soldiers to snort cocaine off an armoured vehicle. He was later wounded when the Humvee that he was riding in was blown up, killing two soldiers who were with him. He is working on a film, Young Americans, that he shot while embedded.

Despite the erratic behaviour of some “embeds”, the military says that the system is open to all comers if they are sponsored by a media outlet.

Ms Stillwater still believes that she has something to tell the world about the war. “I tell the truth,” she said, before elaborating on how the US military should spend “$200 billion” on developing lightweight body armour for its troops, or how single women in Iraq should use American online dating services to find partners.

Top blogs

jpstillwater.blogspot.com
Jane Stillwater’s blog of her experiences in Baghdad

riverbendblog.blogspot. com/
A young Iraqi woman writes about daily life in Baghdad

www.juancole.com/
Professor of Middle Eastern History at Michigan University offers comment, analysis and transcriptions

www.iraqslogger.com/
News and analysis, including Arabic news sources in English and local reporting

acutepolitics.blogspot. com/
A US Marine’s diary from the Sunni Triangle

timesonline.typepad.com/inside_iraq_weblog/
The view from inside Iraq by the Baghdad staff of The Times, the only British newspaper to maintain a full-time Baghdad bureau

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