War Journals

Three writers tackle the Iraq problem from the frontlines.

by Joel Tannenbaum

First the bombs, then the books. Post-game analysis of U.S. and European military actions is big business, hence the thousands of pages devoted to Bosnia, Kosovo and, more recently, Afghanistan. Now, six months after the current U.S. president optimistically declared "victory" in Iraq, the books have begun to land upon the shelves like unexploded cluster bombs. Two of them have the advantage of having been written, diary-style, by people who happened to be in Iraq during the war. Both deliberately risked their lives. The "Baghdad Blogger" did so by publishing an Internet journal that was openly critical of the Ba'athist regime in its last, most desperate days. The other, NPR correspondent Anne Garrels, did so by remaining in Baghdad's Palestine Hotel after it had been shelled by coalition forces, while the majority of her colleagues headed for safer environs, or simply waited in Jordan until the fighting stopped.

In order to understand the Salam Pax phenomena, it is important to understand blogging, the practice of maintaining an online journal. Although blogging is an overwhelmingly middle-class affair, it is also a global one, thus ensuring some diversity of opinions. The uneasy period before the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom was no exception, and in September 2002, a 29-year-old Iraqi architect, using the pseudonym Salam Pax, began a weblog titled Dear Raed. He quickly became an electronic media cult figure. The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi is yet more proof of his celebrity. A word of warning, though: If you are looking to see the war through the eyes of an ordinary Iraqi, look elsewhere. Pax studied in Vienna and loves Squarepusher. He has more in common with readers of City Paper than he does with Baghdad's impoverished Shi'a majority.

Weblogs are tangential by nature, but Pax writes consistently disciplined prose. He also has a gift for black humor: Working as an emergency volunteer in the latter part of the book, he laments the inadequacy of humanitarian aid efforts, describing a critically undersupplied hospital in Nasiriyah that received an aid shipment containing six boxes of shampoo. Need a blood transfusion? he asks. Have shampoo. It smells nice.

In the events chronicled in Naked in Baghdad, Anne Garrels went to considerable trouble to exceed the boundaries set for her by the Iraqi Information Ministry. Often successful, she encountered a wide swath of the population, all of whom have been brutalized, in different ways, by the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf War and the U.N. sanctions. If the book has a fault, it is that it routinely defaults into florid descriptions of the horrors of Ba'ath party bureaucracy. Given that this bureaucracy was weeks away from being bombed out of existence, one wonders what purpose this serves, other than confirming the stereotypes no doubt held by many readers.

Garrels has been around the block, having served as ABC News' Moscow correspondent in the 1980s, and subsequently reporting from Chechnya, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She likely has strong opinions on the wisdom of invading Iraq outside of the legal framework of the United Nations. Unfortunately, her profession requires her to offer those opinions up as a sacrifice to the god of journalistic objectivity.

Fortunately, the 1960s student radical turned polemicist and novelist, Tariq Ali, has no shortage of opinions to share. Bush in Babylon is an unapologetic tirade against the post-Cold War world order. It is also a strikingly erudite tour of Iraqi and Middle Eastern history and, at points, a survey of the work of secular-nationalist Arabic poets such as the Syrian Nizar Qabbani and the Iraqi exile Mudhaffar al-Nawab.

Ali is at his best in the chapters devoted to Iraqi history from the 1920s (when the area passed from Ottoman to British control) through the 1950s (he describes 1958 as the high noon of Arab nationalism, which indeed it was) through the U.S.-backed rise of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party in the 1960s. Drawing on the work of renowned Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu, Ali shows the depth and complexity of Iraq's struggles for political independence and democratic governance throughout the 20th century. This may prove disconcerting for those who subscribe to the fashionable view that democracy is a new and alien concept in the Middle East. A similar book about Iran might have the same effect.

Laugh if you will at the sophomoric cover art, or Ali's stuffy Oxbridge prose. But don't be so quick to dismiss his argument: When viewed in the context of Iraqi history, Operation Iraqi Freedom is a step by the United States toward unapologetic European-style colonialism, and may have similar results.

The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi
By Salam Pax Grove, 288 pp., $13

Naked in Baghdad
By Anne Garrels Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 222 pp., $22

Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq
By Tariq Ali Verso, 224 pp., $20

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there