I woke up this morning, turned on the TV to get the traffic and weather report and watched in amazement as the Iraqis were trying to bring a statue of Hussein down. Very surreal!

I agree with the prez. I think it's too early to declare a victory yet, but it was nice to see the Iraqi people happy with us being there for once. On CNN, even Al Jazeera was being apologetic. Funny, how the appearance of a victory changes one's attitudes suddenly.

What's frightening is the stories of the Iraqi regime put children in jail because they wouldn't join the youth party. What about those scary torture chambers and torture tools. Some man on the radio said there were earlier videos of the Iraqi resistance shooting people especially women in the back for running up to the Coalition soldiers. He was so angry.

I wonder if there will still be anti-war demonstrations now. I don't think the war will be over until most of our troops come home, and they find the missing ones.

Someone should document all the media spin about the war. Didn't some journalist say early on that the coalition forces were in a "quagmire"? It's a reflection of our society that the journalist wanted an instant war with instant results. War used to take years not weeks, so how can can you call state of the war on just a few days of battles. Don't journalists take history courses where they talk about all the wars that have gone through the years?

It was fun for me being a "pro-war" person to be on the cruise. I thought for sure the cruise would be full of anti-war people because it was mostly full of California people. Suprisingly, most people were "pro-war".

As soon as I told people I was from San Francisco, I think they expected me to go on sam anti-war rant. When I told them my views, people seemed to open and up and relax and we could talk about how worried we were for our soldiers, how biased and anti-american the media was, and how bad Hussein is.

We did run into a few anti-war people from the Bay Area, but they had the same opinion of the anti-war protests that I did. The anti-war protests were mostly being run by anti-american socialists groups, they were violent, and they were focused on a city that's mostly anti-war. These people refused to attend the anti-war protests and they were very anti-war.

One woman was a former Vietnam war protestor who found out through her father, who used to work for the government, that the FBI kept files on all the Vietnam war protestors. Her father found out she was protesting the Vietnam war because the FBI told him about it, and showed him her file. Her father had no idea what she was doing. The woman laughed when she said this and told us her father was a "big time republican".

She told me that the FBI were probably doing the same with the anti-war protestors. This piece of information was scary. When I was taking russian language courses in college, my professors used to joke that just by taking the class we the students were now under FBI scrutiny and we had "files". I'm sure with the Patriot Act, all this kind of stuff is now in hyperdrive mode.

Like I said, it's been a very surreal day. I've got lots more to write about, but I'm tired now. I feel like a witness to history and it's a very strange feeling. It's like a 9/11 feeling only weirder. Events in the world seem to be happening at a dizzying rate.

And SARS is scaring the heck out of me, only because it looks like China is covering up how many death and illnesses they have. Once the war is over, it will SARS, SARS, SARS all day and all night long. If you think the war news was worse, wait till the media gets a hold of SARS. We'll have pictures and videos of sick people, quarantined people and people walking around with masks on their faces, not to mention interviews with grieving relatives, tired doctors and other healthcare people, plus probably a SARS death counter. I'm hoping SARS doesn't turn into a media circus, but I have my doubts.