BuzzFlash Reviews

April 2005

Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (Paperback)
by Anonymous (Riverbend), with an introduction by James Ridgeway

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Through Riverbend's online journal, the blog attains its highest value as a unique voice that reveals to us the thoughts, reflections, personal life, politics and history of Iraq. Because of the U.S. government manipulation and intimidation of the Western media in Iraq, we know very little about what is really going on in that nation. Riverbend fills in an important gap. She is an Iraqi computer programmer who is fluent in English, serving as her own able translator, in a book that moves from the telling personal details to on-the-ground information on the terrible toll that the American invasion has inflicted on Iraqis.

"We have 9/11's on a monthly basis. Each and every Iraqi person who dies with a bullet, a missile, a grenade, under torture, accidentally -- they all have families and friends who cares."

She then goes on to juxtapose the devastation caused by the American destruction of Fallujah to 9/11 in New York. How can lives be traded off? Whose lives are worth more? Or are all deaths equal among innocents?

In a recent posting on the blog, Riverbend lamented the shallow naivete' of American newscasts, which are now being imposed -- basically as propaganda -- upon the people of Iraq (when their electricity is working, which is not often). She describes American television news this way:

"I've been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so... clean. It's like hospital food. It's all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women's rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once."

It took an apparently upper middle class Iraqi, in the midst of a devastated country, to impale the vacuosness of American news.

Riverbend is not a person wallowing in politics. She is an individual who has come to formulate political thoughts about the failure of the American occupation as an Iraqi who was also none too fond of Saddam Hussein. What you get are her candid, but cogently written, thoughts that come from her experience. She is not a theorist; she is a person trapped in a country that became a pawn in a geo-political power grab. Like most of us, she is an individual who is powerless to change the course of history, but she can trenchantly observe its passage.

But, what is perhaps intriguing about Riverbend is that she combines the personal journal blog and political commentary blog into a seamless record. In fact, it is her observations on her extended family that make her blog such a compellingly personal account of what it is like to live in Baghdad.

Here Riverbend recounts searching out school supplies for her cousin's daughters for their first day of school:

"The erasers were all in a big, clear fishbowl. S. wanted to go with some generic pink ones that looked like pieces of gum and smelled like tires, but I argued that kids don't take care of their school supplies if they're ugly and she should just let me choose -- they all cost the same anyway. I rummaged around the fishbowl, pulled one colored eraser out after the other and tried to decide which ones would look the best with the copybooks I had chosen."

Her previous post was about riots in Baghdad:

"They say two people were killed -- one was shot by the troops in the head and another was beaten on the head with a nightstick and was unconscious for several hours before he died. The riots were near Al-Muthana airport near Mansur -- an upscale area in the center of Baghdad."

These are the extremes Riverbend's life navigates, as they are for all Iraqis.

For the Bush Cartel, the Iraqis are just dispensable pawns, whose plight is wallpapered over with Disneyesque propaganda.

Fortunately for us, Riverbend is a witness to the truth. Like all bloggers, she has a story to tell and opinions -- sometimes she even plays the role of teacher about Iraq's flora, fauna, and religious rivalries, among other insights.

In a war that most Iraqis see as an occupying destructive force replacing an internal tyrant, Riverbend is a gift to us. For through her eyes, we see the real Iraq, not the Disneyworld version put together by the White House's PR firms and the Pentagon Psy-Ops operatives.

This is a book of her collected blog entries for one year.

You should buy it, because she deserves our support and our gratitude.

Not many of us would summon her courage.

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