The Web in Times of War

During the previous war in Iraq, the WWW was just a cool experiment on Tim Berners Lee's desk. If you wanted to know about the Gulf War, you were pretty much limited to whatever the mass media was saying about it. Today, as I browse websites like CostOfWar.com and IraqBodyCount.net I began to wonder: has the WWW made any difference to the way people form their opinions about major conflicts? Is propaganda reduced because of the Web's ability to spread information at a grassroots level? Is the Web really a force for peace and democracy, or were we all kidding ourselves?