Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq in Around the World in 80 Books

Jul 22, 2010 Madeleine rated it really liked it

Shelves: swana, nonfiction, bio-memoir

I was an Iraq war protester months before the war even started. I remember getting into some particularly acrimonious arguments in fall 2002 in NYC and then Seattle, back when more than a few of your average liberals thought Saddam Hussein was coming to get them with weapons of mass destruction. I cared (and care), I argued, I spoke up, I went to protests...but I never connected with the people living the violence of my government's war and occupation on that deep level that means you can't ever I was an Iraq war protester months before the war even started. I remember getting into some particularly acrimonious arguments in fall 2002 in NYC and then Seattle, back when more than a few of your average liberals thought Saddam Hussein was coming to get them with weapons of mass destruction. I cared (and care), I argued, I spoke up, I went to protests...but I never connected with the people living the violence of my government's war and occupation on that deep level that means you can't ever look away or forget.

For those of us who don't personally know anyone in Iraq, who don't have to think about the horrors of the occupation every day whether we want to or not, Riverbend's book is a must-read. Baghdad Burning is a word-for-word publication of her blog by the same name (I really wish I'd known about the blog at the time she was writing it). Riverbend (pseudonym) mixes tales of her "ordinary" life under the occupation with on-the-ground reporting with cultural/history lessons about Iraq and Islam from her perspective. She's heartbreaking and hilarious, often in the same post. The blog picked up readers all around the world in the mid-2000s, when she was blogging from Iraq (her family left for Jordan several years ago). This collection of posts covers 2003 through September 2004.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with my dad about Iraq (right after reading City of Widows an Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance), and he expressed a view I often hear: that Iraq is so "fragmented" and "tribal" that the removal of US troops would mean instant civil war and a situation far worse than any occupation could ever be. That Iraq today is what inevitably happens after the British "put together" a colony and then country that "never existed," out of people who'd hated each other since the dawn of time. That's a very neat and easy (and inaccurate) view that takes the responsibility for today's sectarian violence off the US occupation and puts it on British colonialism. Now, British colonialism was plenty awful too, but this line of reasoning has sort of become the liberal-ish American way of justifying the continued occupation, and I'm quite sick of it.

I wish I could give Baghdad Burning to everyone who thinks Iraq is a made-up country of people who've been locked in sectarian conflict for centuries, so that they could consider Riverbend's perspective. She views her family and community as fairly typical for her country. Her family is about half Sunni and half Shi'a. She has friends in both religious communities, as well as Christian and Kurdish friends. Again and again, she remarks on her country's long history of tolerance, equality, and fellowship. Seeing that break down because of a foreign occupation often seems more painful for her than the actual physical violence of the occupation.

When people are desperate--when their country is being occupied by the most powerful army in the world, when the electricity is on 3 hours a day in the scorching summer heat, when bombs rain down on civilians who've done nothing--some people will turn to extremism. They'll latch onto sectarian loyalties that never mattered before. Occupation and war and violence try their hardest to warp people and warp communities. And the architects of those atrocities often know this and use the resulting violence to justify their course of action.

Yes, Riverbend's story is only one story. She does not purport to speak for anyone other than herself, and I would be doing a great disservice to the Iraqi people and to Riverbend if I assumed she spoke for her entire country. However, we need to be listening to as many authentic Iraqi voices as possible, and basing our opinions of the occupation and our activism on those voices, rather than on the comforting stories and excuses that we pass around the US media. ...more

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