'Salam Pax" is rising as one of the media stars in postwar Iraq. He began blogging from Baghdad well before the war, and has come back sporadically since. (He calls his blog "Where is Raed?") He is the darling of fellow bloggers in the West, who light up with links whenever he appears on the Web. He has been written about in the New Yorker magazine and elsewhere, and his jottings copied into the Guardian in the Britain. Not bad for a person whose very existence has been skeptically queried. And who does a superb job of covering his traces, creating fresh firewalls around himself in the very moments when he appears to be giving his identity away.

I am quite certain he exists. That isn't the scandal. He has a family and a history and even a real-life name. But without compromising sources, and thus endangering lives, including Salam's own, one may discover a great deal about him from carefully reading his blog, and following obvious leads from there.

Salam is the scion of a senior figure from Iraq's Baathist nomenclature. He was brought up at least partly in Vienna, which is the OPEC headquarters; his father was therefore an oilman, and possibly a former head of Iraq's OPEC mission. Another clue is a hint that his grandfather was an Iraqi tribal chief, from which I infer that his father was one of the Iraqi tribal chiefs that Saddam Hussein rewarded for loyalty, outside the Tikrit clan.[...]