Civil society in Iraq - Dead or Alive?

Violence Changes Fortunes Of Storied Baghdad Street - washingtonpost.com

Lately I've been noticing a conservative and/or liberal hawk commentators trumpeting the free press of Iraq as a piece of evidence that all the bloodshed in Iraq is worthwhile. I'd really like someone like Juan Cole to weigh in on just how free and vibrant the Iraqi press is. Perhaps the reader might take in the Iraqi Press Monitor, a project of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting to get a sense of it.

But it's hard to imagine how a free press can survive under the conditions outline in this heartbreaking Washington Post article about the decline of a street of booksellers in the heart of Bahgdad. Where will the writers of the future Iraq come from, when their teachers, their mentors, their peers, have all fled for their lives? How can the apologists for this war refute this ?