New Iraqi Bloggers Give Cause for Hope

The first blog written by an Iraqi, Where is Raed?, written by the pseudonymous "Salam Pax", became a major blogosphere sensation and even a minor Big Media Sensation, resulting in a column in The Guardian and even a book deal for the blogger. Most of the interest stemmed, naturally, from the fact that he was for a long time the only Iraqi blogging from inside Iraq. Though I recognized the inherent value in having his perspective, I was never really taken with "Salam"'s writing or the personality that it revealed. Because he was unique, however, many people seemed to consider it to be unkind, jingoistic, or perhaps even racist to raise any criticism of him or of his weblog, or even to raise very obvious questions about him; such as: What exactly are the extent of his connections to the old regime?Or,why does he still insist on using a pseudonym even after the fall of the old regime if he wants to be taken seriously as a reporter on the scene in Iraq, as he seems to? Since he was the only Iraqi in Iraq whose day to day writing and reporting we had access to, he functioned as a sort of stand-in for all Iraqis, and to criticize him at all seemed churlish. Also, given his generally negative tone, his blogging was an important piece of propaganda for those who had been against the war all along, thought the aftermath was going badly etc.

"Salam" improved the situation somewhat by encouraging two of his friends to start blogs: the fanatically anti-American "riverbend", and the more amiable, more optimistic Gaith. Though these blogs presented interesting and valuable perspectives I thought all along that they could not possibly be the only perspectives, and that many were giving too much weight to them. It was clear that those Iraqis who caught this first wave of blogging were highly educated, given that they wrote in English with a native-speaker-like fluency, and were technically savvy, given that they were hip to blogging, had internet connections etc. This meant also that they were most likely well-connected in the old regime and that they lived in Baghdad or the "Sunni Triangle" surrounding it. They presented life in Iraq from the perspective of one who as skeptical about the American liberation project to begin with, and had much to lose because of it. They also were in the heart of the area that was seeing the most violence so naturally were more pessimistic about the pace of reconstruction.

All along, I had the feeling that were was a different Iraq, and a different type of Iraqi. I remembered all the mentions of Iraq having an educated, intellectual populace. I think these were meant to somehow make it seem that Iraq would be too difficult to reconstruct, that these people would be too proud to be "occupied" by the Americans, and that they would have complicated internal divisions that would make Iraq impossible to put back together whole. I saw it differently though. I thought that having these educated people, who would probably be politically engaged, would be an enormous asset in building democracy. While this first wave of Iraqi bloggers, creating the impression of chaos and disorder, were well-received by those who were against Iraq's liberation from the get-go, I hoped that there would be other educated, fluent-in-English Iraqis who might provide another perspecitve. Well, now they're here, and they are the absolute best way of learning about the situation in Iraq, and the most hopeful development I have seen coming out of the Middle East, well, ever. They are uniformly better writers than the first group of Iraqi bloggers. Some of them are actually quite skillful English prose stylists. They are also uniformly more optimistic. They make me feel like, as some have said, Baghdad in 2003 really is like Prague in 1990.

The first to get the ball rolling was the Zeyad, of the wonderful Healing in Iraq . He is an Iraqi dentist in his 20's and writes in English with the same fluidity and passion as "Salam Pax", but also with cogency and logic, qualities which "Pax"'s writing too often lacked. He performed two invaluable services: being the first Iraqi to open a comments section on his blog, and encouraging other Iraqis to blog. At first I thought starting the comments was a bad idea. It caused the site not to "scale" well and besides, one reads these kinds of sites for the voice of the blogger, not for the same political and religious debates one can get at a million other places on the internet. However, I've since seen that the comments section was an incredibly important innovation, as it allowed other Iraqis, some of whom became bloggers, to air these debates which had been suppressed for too long within Iraq, and it allowed Americans and other Westerners direct, unfettered access to an Iraqi blogger. The other great thing was that Zeyad encouraged by far the best of all the Iraqi bloggers to start blogging, Alaa, of the brilliant The Mesopotamian.

The Mesopotamian is written in a beautiful prose style that borders on the poetic at times and the blogger has an inspiring, ebullient personality. The other amazing thing is that he speaks often of being a Moslem, but he is perhaps the first ever truly moderate Moslem voice I have heard. Here is part of an inspiring and righteous response he gave to an Islamofascist in his comments, who was telling him he should resist the infidel occupier etc. (The strange looking bits are Arabic characters that blogger messed up)

These people that you have today, such as Al Qaida, the Jihadi Salafis etc. are but the modern equivalent of the old Khawarij. The model of their perfect Islamic State is the miserable “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan�, of the Taliban. Need we describe this entity so that the perfection of the utopia is properly appreciated?

Yes, come my “brother� Layth, let us wash our dirty linen in public, for that is the scandal that you and your like have brought on our head. The shame is not on us, but on you who have covered all of us and the name of our great and humanitarian religion with shame from head to toe. Shame on you who have made our name, our creed, and our existence even anathema to the whole of humanity. Shame on you murderers of children, women and welfare workers. You think you are on the side of God, but in reality you are nothing but the demented misguided lost tools of Satan. I pray to God for your salvation.

Just one of the examples of the exploits of the “valiant resistance� amongst many, which was reported in the news and can be easily checked out. A group of young American soldiers guarding a children’s hospital in Baquba, were attacked and three killed, nay I say martyred. Guarding a children’s hospital from what? From the looters, who loot the medicine of children. Just one typical incident. You cover us with shame from head to toe.

We declare before the whole world, your God is not our God, your religion is not our religion. You are the enemies of God, Humanity, Sanity & Decency. You are totally obsessed, unredeemable and hopeless. We have but to follow the decree of our Great Imam Ali ( PBU ) and you will be exterminated to the last man.

Salaam to all who deserve peace.

To paraphrase someone in the comments, I have been waiting for two years and two months for a Moslem to say something like this.

Zeyad also encouraged "AYS" to start his blog, Iraq at a Glance. He does not have the command of English or prose composition that Zeyad and Alaa do, but he has the same sort of inner enthusiasm and sincerity that makes Alaa so appealing. This comes through in his posts, which have a sort of poetry of their own, like this one:

Today I heard that there are hundreds of the brave Iraqis joined the IP to protect us .. and the Ministry of Interior gave them 400 cars (Maxima) to enforce the police and control the crimes. And many dangerous thieves were caught and imprisoned . Yes ..go on courageous men.

When Bush spoke of the press forcing people to view events in Iraq through "a filter" Big Media laughed, and they may have a point. The implication would be that we should get information directly from the government, which might not be that much better, though these days I'd probably prefer it. However, there is no way anyone could argue with the idea of getting information on Iraq from these blog sources, which amounts to conversing directly with Iraqis. Participating in that conversation, I can't help but fell that we're going to win this thing.

Comments

[Miss Neuman]

Everybody... Ya gotta read
'Iraq the Model' by: Omar
www.iraqthemodel.blogspot.com

[Eric Deamer]

Thanks for the comment. You're right. I forgot to mention that one in my post, but I've since really gotten into reading it as well. It's on my sidebar now.