I have managed to get my hands on an advance copy of Salam Pax, The Baghdad Blog, which is coming out in paperback on September 5th. During the war, I have to confess that I found Dear Raed essentially unreadable. The weight of irrational rhetoric from all directions around the blogosphere had become totally overwhelming – the whipping up of fervent belief (on all sides) was creating this weird hybrid mood of blood-lust, puritanism, evangelism and nationalism. The weblog world was full of hyperbole to the extent that it seemed to me quite plausible that any opinion could have been espoused by someone, and seized upon and used as some kind of flag to stand behind – although, to be fair, it was no more full than the opinion columns of the national and international press. At the time the thought of reading another opinion on the war – and trying to scrabble the truth from the mix of prejudice, vested interest, nationalism, accidental misinformation and context – was a far from compelling proposition…
With the benefit of hindsight, of course, things start to look a little clearer. When the red tide started to recede, the shapes of opinions and reportage of intelligence and integrity seemed to me gradually to emerge. And I think, now the initial hysteria has passed it’s become clear that Dear Raed constitutes an abiding – albeit small – artefact of life on the ground during the second war in Iraq.
I have one caveat. I think it’s important to remember that – as human beings – we have a tendency to group people into those who are similar to us and those who are not. We find it much easier to identify with people who share some of our cultural baggage, values and preoccupations. Our sensitivity towards Salam’s words and our sense of identification when we read his experiences – whether we agree with his politics or not – are as a direct result of the fact that he speaks with a vocabulary and in a sensibility that are immediately comprehensible to Westerners. It’s important to remember both that there are many other voices – more representative voices – that perhaps we’re either not so willing to hear or comprehend. Perhaps Salam’s most important achievement, then, should be that he simply started giving us the tools to help us listen…