Most of all I feel we owe it to communicate the reality of Iraq on behalf of a nation whose ordinary people have no access to the international media. We may get it wrong -- my e-mail correspondence is full of those who insist we do -- but to try is better than to give up.
But in the end, as Carroll himself has said, it is a calculation. It is about risk measured against what we can achieve. And at the back of all our minds is the existence of places such as Chechnya that have become too difficult to report.
This is a period of assessment of a new risk. It has made the space smaller in which we can effectively work. Will I be back? I don"t know.
One thing that I am certain of, however, is that there is still good journalism to be done in Iraq.
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