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May 8, 2003

Salam Pax is back! Hurray! Hurray!

By Robert Rosenberg

On March 28 I wrote about Where is Raed, a weblog by a relatively young Iraqi with a very Western outlook in the heart of Baghdad, writing about the buildup to the American war against his country's government.

His last file at the time was five days old, from March 23, and at first I wasn't worried because there were no updates; it was after all Saddam-era Baghdad, which meant it might not be easy to get online, as the Baghdadi calling himself Salam Pax (meaning Peace Peace) looking for his friend Raed, himself admitted. For one thing, he had to remain anonymous because he was living in Saddam's Iraq, for another, writing an online diary is very difficult to maintain on a daily (as the gap between the date on the last update at Ariga, below this artice, and today, proves). And as the days passed, the war deepened, and Raed didn't reappear, I began thinking that perhaps he was one of the casualties of a war that had very few casualties, considering the amount of explosions that took place to destroy some very specific targets. Maybe Saddam's people found him. Maybe he lived too near a military target; maybe ... well, you get the idea.

He's back, thank goodness, and worth reading, for his happiness and sadness, joy and anger, hope and pain -- all reported in a natural narrative about, for example, how the air-raid sirens were ineffective, how he needed antacids -- where do you find antacids in Baghdad on the 13th day of the war? Here's an excerpt from Salam pax's weblog, to give you a sense of what's happening there:

Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don't let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don't think about your 'imminent liberation' anymore.

But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one.

Besides asking for outrageous fares (you can't blame them gas prices have gone up 10 times, if you can get it) but they start grumbling and mumbling and at a point they would say something like 'well it wasn't like the mess it is now when we had saddam'. This is usually my cue for going into rage-mode. We Iraqis seem to have very short memories, or we simply block the bad times out. I ask them how long it took for us to get the electricity back again after he last war? 2 years until things got to what they are now, after 2 months of war. I ask them how was the water? Bad. Gas for car? None existent. Work? Lots of sitting in street tea shops. And how did everything get back? Hussain Kamel used to literally beat and whip people to do the impossible task of rebuilding. Then the question that would shut them up, so, dear Mr. Taxi driver would you like to have your saddam back? Aren't we just really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq? Or are we Iraqis just a bunch of impatient fools who do nothing better than grumble and whine? Patience, you have waited for 35 years for days like these so get to working instead of whining. End of conversation.

The truth is, if it weren't for intervention this would never have happened. When we were watching the Saddam statue being pulled down, one of my aunts was saying that she never thought she would see this day during her lifetime.

But,

War. No matter what the outcome is. These things leave a trail of destruction behind them. There were days when the Red Crescent was begging for volunteers to help in taking the bodies of dead people off the city street and bury them properly. The hospital grounds have been turned to burial grounds when the electricity went out and there was no way the bodies can be kept until someone comes and identifies.

I confess to the sin of being an escapist. When reality hurts I block it out, unless it comes right up to me and knocks me cold. My mother, after going out once after Baghdad was taken by the US Army, decided she is not going out again, not until I promise it looks kind of normal and OK. So I guess the Ostrich maneuver runs in the family.

Things are looking kind of OK, these days. Life has a way of moving on. Your senses are numbed, things stop shocking you. If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally.

and I also confess that I am going thru massive internet withdrawal symptoms. So here are what should have been 15 entries to the blog, for whatever it is worth.

After moving back in the mid-1980s to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, I sold my car. I prefered a bicycle for this relatively flat city on the sea, and parking was a bitch, especially for a Citroen DS2000, which I renamed Pompidou. And ever since I have been carless in Tel Aviv, vowing that I will only renew my driver's license and get my hands on a car when I can drive from Tel Aviv to Europe.

For a few short years, before Rabin was assassinated by someone from the Jewish forces who wanted to break the Oslo accords, I thought it would be a matter of a few more years and I'd be able to get in a car and drive north, along the coast, to Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, on my way to Athens, Berlin, Paris and London. But now, Salam Pax, I can be hopeful that the trip might be slightly more circutous, through Jordan and Iraq, into Kurdistan (Free Kurdistan!) and then Turkey to Europe.

One of the biggest problems in the Israeli psyche is that even when the Israelis and Palestinians are counted together, there are at many cities around the world with many more people, and the physical size of the country isn't much greater in kilometrage than a very large metropolitan area (though in this tiny area we have everything from snowcapped mountains to deserts and swamps). In short, you can't drive for more than 4 hours in any given direction here, and that's only north to south. East to west it's less than an hour, and if you only go as far as the Green Line (which I try to do, as a proud Jew in my own state not wanting to deny anyone else a state) it can be as short as fifteen minutes (near Netanya).

That might be one of the reasons Israelis are such early adopters, ready to try anything that comes from around the world, because while Jewish history gives us a history almost anywhere in the world, as Israelis we're only 55 years old, a bit more than 100 if you want to count the gestation of the state from the time of Theodor Herzl and modern Zionism, through the Caeserean section birth called the Holocaust.

So? What's my point? Maybe it's that life is too complicated for their to be a point all the time. The facts are confusing enough. Salam Pax has it right: 'If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally.'

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