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5763: Articles posted from September 2002-September 2003 Get the real situation in Israel every day. March 28, 2003 Salam Pax's web in Baghdad An Ariga Update By Robert Rosenberg The best web site for what's really going on in Baghdad is a blog being written by someone who calls himself Salam Pax, whose web site is called Where's Raed. If it's difficult to get through, try Dear Raed, where Google and blogspot.com are mirroring it. Salam's blog is a long letter to his friend Raed, missing in the world of being an Iraqi educated as a Westerner whether in Baghdad, Europe or America, telling him about life in their home town. I visited the site today, March 28, and the last item was from March 22. That leads to the question by now, has he been arrested? Killed? Managed to get out? Maybe he's getting some much needed sleep. He only has a 28.8 modem, but he does have images, including a satellite image of Baghdad, which Salam Pax has color coded for people who don't know the city and want to see exactly where the buildings where the Americans are bombing.
The site is a sometimes hourly, sometimes daily report going back to last September, by an enormously sympathetic Baghdadi who writes about daily life in the city in up-to-date American English, blogging his way to an extraordinary enormous fame. The CIA reads him, so probably, does Bashar Assad, at least he should if he learned anything those years in London. What makes it so good is that he clearly would like to be liberated from the regime (or at least have access to ADSL) but he's not very happy about how the precision bombing, which he admits is indeed precisely targeting centers of regime power in Iraq, is resulting in collateral damage. The best thing about the site is it narrative reporting about what Salam Pax says he sees and feels in the city. it is not propagandistic, which makes it neither the journalism in bed (sorry, embedded) with the coalition, nor Al Jezeera's self-proclaimed 'indepedent' reporting. True, Al Jezeera is not being told what to report, but it seems to be focused on trying to prove the western reporters wrong, rather than reporting on what actually is happening. Al Jezeera and much of the Arabic press seems to believe that it is a Western-Judeo-Christian cultural war against an Arab-Islamic culture, sort of the opposite of Fox, which is the most fun to watch because of the silliness and ignorance of its anchors (not its reporters, who are generally professional about their jobs). The mere fact that Fox's people are still calling Qatar 'Gutter,' makes their gung-ho jingoism for the war almost as satirical as John Stweart's pretty excellent Daily Show -- with one difference: Stewart, at least, knows he's presenting satire. The homey 'folks' at Fox atually claim to be serious. The media is the fifth column of the war, because the truth of war is that the first victim is the truth; deception is half the planning for a battle, and the offense always starts with an advantage, even if it is no surprise when it comes. Timing is also part of strategy. A well-planned military stategy is about layering in elements that are needed when they are needed. So far, the american campaign does appear to be going on time. It was always planned as a 'rolling' campaign and it did face a deadline to start -- before the season of sandstorms was over. It should be no surprise that after a week, the coalition needs 100,000 more men inside Iraq, their mission is to use as much force is neccessary, measuring out that force to remove the regime and at the same time keep the inevitable civilian casualties to a minimum. It's the media that ropogated the myth that this war would be the secnd Six Day War in Middle East history. Sure the Pentagon contrinued to that view: Awe and Shock as Sun Tze taught, is a great way to intimidate the enemy in one great swoop. But the media, operating on the 24 hour news cycle ever since the teletype machine began to automate news distribuition, insist on something new every minute, has no patience for anything complex because it only has a few minutes at most at a time to say what it knows. The media loves the Galahad supply ship, the first sign of the humanitarian aid arriving at the end of the first week of fighting; it was the knight in pale blue armor, judging from the pictures appearing right now on CNN over my shoulder. Christian Amanpour sidled along with it for the camera as it was pulled into place at the Umm Qasar docks. The aid is important because it's about feeding hungry people who are scared shitless of Saddam and dont't trust the Americans. Remember, not only did the U.S. betray the Shiites a decade ago, but generations of Iraqis have been educated in schools that taught the main point of the American war in Vietnam was to 'destroy the village to save it.' And victims make good copy, especially civilian casualties of war. Right now, the press is only able to second guess the coalition, and because the media wants clarity, its reporting of the war has been so poor, precisely because it got into bed, sorry, was embedded in the forces, so it provides at best a kind of surrealistically cubist view of the events. And more than that, the media wants events to prove it right -- and hates the fog of war, when it can't say anything more than it isn't really sure of what's happening on the battlefield and doesn't have the intelligence sources the military controls. A freely reporting newsperson is nearly impossible to find in Iraq. There are a lot of differences between the Iraqi watchers and the American watchers, but the basic difference is the Americans won't shoot the reporter -- and it's more likely the American spokesman will tell the truth as he knows it rather than deliberately lie. Some do, of course. But remember, deception is part of war and as far as America is concerned, it has been at war since 9/11/2001 Now that the war has begun in earnest, it should not be made to cease until Saddam Hussein resigns.
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