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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Salam replies… indirectly Last week we had a rather stiff debate on the downsides of Coalition policing in Iraq here, here and here.
In this post Salam Pax responded to a recent email. He could just as well have been reading and responding to the comments of many of our readers. Go read it.
As for me, the more I read, the more I like the guy. I hope someday we will either have the honour of his presence at a Samizdata London Blogger Bash, or an opportunity to sit an afternoon in a Baghdad cafe with him… sipping only culturally allowable beverages of course!
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What a coincidence. The more I read, the less I like the guy.
Shooting you in the neck and rolling you into a mass grave, taking ages to process your paperwork…plus ça change, eh?
Mr. Weasel writes, “…plus ça change, eh?”
As it happens, this had me thinking the same thing. Only I wasn’t being sarcastic.
So, why refer to him as Salman when he goes by Salam Pax?
I’m with S. Weasel. I was hoping we were coming to the end of the “Salam Pax” cult but it just continues to grow. I’m not sure who “Salman” is but “Salam Pax” is a pseudonym, which for some reason someone is allowed to use in opining and reporting for a major newspaper on the major news story of our day. I thought perhaps that the Western intelligentsia would end their crush on this anonymous blogger who writes like a petulant, whiny teenage girl given the most recent outrages: 1) His absurd jumping to conclusions and acceptance of hearsay after whatever happened to his friend “Gaith”. He admitted that he didn’t know “the whole story” but that didn’t stop him from simply making it up and extraploating that his friend’s only crime was “that he looked Iraqi and had a beard”.
2) This most recent unsupported assertion that US forces routinely “disappear” people like the Mukhbarat before them. This is quite a serious allegation so it seems like it would behoove him to get the details right. How often does this happen? What are the victim’s names? Perhaps this is too much to ask for when he won’t even tell us his name.
I cannot imagine, and I am endlessly thankful for that, what it must be like to live under a dictator like Saddam, nor what it must be like to have one’s entire social structure thrown into the air. The most common image that comes to mind is of one of the cities that had serious rioting, like Los Angeles, and all the mayhem that ensued.
I don’t know enough about Salam to be a fan or a critic, but I will take some hope in the fact that he doesn’t seem to reflect any all out hatred for our forces. I’m sure it’s very painful for him and his friends to see so much of everything they have known in shambles all around. Any illusions that this situation was going to be resolved quickly or easily must certainly have been dispelled for everyone involved by now.
Salman == Salam. A typo for chrissake. I’ll fix it already.
As to other responses… I find it very sad that people have to have everything black and white. The slightest critic of “our” guys by those ingrateful furners just has to be yelled down. Why, we walk on water, God takes lessons in perfection from us and our crap don’t stink.
I’ve got news. We are not perfect; people in the middle of this don’t know us from Adam and have incomplete knowledge; our guys fuck up royally quite often; and I have no problem understanding the push-pull people there feel between the fear that we’ll leave and the fear that we won’t leave.
It has eff all to do with whether we did the right thing going in. It has everything to do with the ability to open your eyes and ears and see and listen to what people who live there have to say.
Salam now has more freedom of speech than he’s ever had in his life. He fears his country may yet have to go through its’ own crucible before it becomes a true civil society. I am listening to those thoughts and understanding them.
Most of you are not. You’re so caught up in your own particular world that you refuse to look at it from the eyes of someone who is of a different culture and background and who has no real enmity towards us. I want to make people like that into friends; I want to help them bring the blessings of Liberty to their home. Liberty is messy; freedom of speech is messy. People can say things you don’t want to hear.
And if they do… well, you’re all adults. Deal with it.
Yep, everything Dale said in the above comment.
Dale, alcohol is culturally acceptable to Salam — he does drink.
Just FYI: His first name is Salam, a fairly common name, his last name is a play on the meaning of his first. He does have some excellent reasons for remaining anonymous.
I am not a fan of Salam (as those with photographic memories will recall), but I think that much of Dale’s last comment is spot-on, even if I am picking some shrapnel out of my ass.
He comes from a different culture? He was educated in Western Europe, speaks English fluently, and apprently lived most of this days at a standard of air-conditioned comfort equivalent to being at least middle class in a Western country while his fellow countrymen were dying. Its strange that a cosmpolitan, open-minded liberal like you would just assume that because he’s Arab he must have some inscrutably different mindset. Thank God we have people like you with “open eyes” and “open ears” to show us ignorant, jingoistic rubes who refuse to lionize your favorite sons of highly connected Baathists.
If you bother to read my original comment you’ll notice I took no issue with Mr. “Pax” expounding whatver views he wishes. I gather the situation is tough over there (though again, I can’t claim your level of omniscience). My issue was one of journalistic ethics, i. e. shoddy reporting and hiding behind pseudonyms.
Dismissing Salam because he doesn’t agree with every single thing we consider good is just plain stupid. There aren’t any other notable Baghdadi bloggers. Salam’s writing has unique value.
And it’s not anti-American evil bullshit, either. It actually contains some unique good insights which people outside Iraq can’t possibly have. If they’re too subtle for Westerners to be interested in, I think that’s very sad.
Only being interested in people who agree with everything you say already is a great way to make sure your ideas decay into pointless rubbish. Thank goodness not everyone in the West takes this attitude towards the Middle East, or we’d *really* be in the shit.
Nobody ever helped a country by writing off its people as idiots. If we can’t even respect Salam, who is surely one of the best of his country, then god help Iraq and god help the victims of the terrorists the Middle East will continue to produce and nurture until such time as the West manages effectively to spread its better ideas in a spirit of genuine, respectful friendship.
Oh, please. The huffy “you have to like him, or you’re some kind of simple-minded, jingoistic boob” vibe coming off Salam’s fanclub isn’t helping.
He’s one middle class city kid educated abroad. To make him the Voice of Iraq because he’s the only one you’ve got is itself pretty narrow-minded, and surely insulting to what must be a range of Iraqi experience and opinion.
Or, to put it another way, if there were only only blog coming out of the US, and it was written by a twenty-something Columbia University student in New York City, you’d learn next to nothing. Even if he took field trips.
What I’ve gathered from reading this is that there is apparently precisely two answers to the conundrum of Salam Pax. Either he has something to say and his supporters are truly open minded or his opinions are so narrow in perspective as to be rendered worthless and you are a “rube”. This is as they say, a false dichotomy. I would hazard that there are not two outcomes, not “for” or “against”, but distinctly gray. I would say he makes some useful insights and offers a different perspective on life in Iraq. It does not mean that everything he says is holy writ but neither does it mean that it is irrelevent prattle.
It is equally a logical fallacy to assert that, whenever presented with two strong and opposed opinions, the truth always lies halfway between them. Medium gray is not intrinsically righter and more true than black or white.
What I take issue with is his amazing ability to jump to conclusions without considering that there may be another side of the story.
I recently posted a critique of Salam on my blog, and his response seemed like an almost exact response to it I called him a whiner and a baby.
Interestingly, I received a message from someone who had grown up in communist Poland. She said that the immaturity shown by Salam was characteristic of those who live in a totalitarian society. She also commented that he appeared to be a member of a family which was at the least collaborationist, based on her experience with totalitarianism and her reading of his blog.
In any case, I always read Salam Pax. He writes well and he is interesting, if annoying. Furthermore, his last post indicated that he was starting to realize that his impatience and whining was illogical. Finally, he is less annoying than what our own leftists are doing, and far more interesting.
Reading his blog gives an idea of why we are getting so much flack from ordinary Iraqis… they have been infantilized by living under Saddam. This is not to excuse their more extreme behavior, but at least to explain some of what is going on. Salam inadvertently provides us that information.
“he appeared to be a member of a family which was at the least collaborationist”… and the alternative would be what, pray?
The “infantilisation” point is a good one, though. Though I wouldn’t put it quite like that: dependency and infantilisation are not the same thing.
Dependency is not unique to Iraq and other totalitarian systems. You can see the habit of dependency causing problems in Britain and even in the US. But almost all these people have lived all their lives being told what to do and how to do it on threat of death and/or torture. Most have never before this year read an uncensored newspaper. They have no experience of living independently, and have an internalised model of social order that is authoritarian at best.
Perhaps part of the explanation of the unpreparedness of the occupation is a cultural mismatch, with the US forces and public failing to realise what this means. Somehow Americans imagined that if you destroy the tyranny everything would quickly settle down to a “normal” way of life with elected officials, town meetings, mutual trust, and free market corporations and entrepreneurial businesses taking advantage of the new opportunities… As if some suburb of Cincinnati were having to recover from disaster like a big flood. Except that none of the US-normal institutions exist there, and some have never done.
De-Nazification of Germany was easy by comparison. Hitler had been in charge for half the time Saddam was, and had actually had less control. And there were pre-existing liberal institutions that many people could remember.
The Iraqi’s are not idiots or crybabies. They’ve the same range of brilliant and stupid, brave and cowardly as in any large human population. They just have next to nothing in common with Americans. (What they do have in common with the troops on the ground is that on average they are younger and less educated than metropolitan Americans or Europeans.)
It is not true that everyone in the world understands English if you shout loud enough.
Well, Salam’s friend ISN”T dead or disappeared, and most of those that he thinks HAVE disappeared are going to pop up again just fine. That’s how we run things, and as they come to experience that more and more, I think that trust will build.
Just saw a dear friend of mine, she’s right back from 6 months on the ground in Iraq as a Communications Specialist in the US Army in the Baathist area to the immediate north of Baghdad. She says that yes, that IS the only part of the country with serious troubles (she wouldn’t have been shot at every day in ‘Kurdistan’ or the Shiite areas…but those aren’t the places that they constantly need to re-do comms in, no? 🙂
Immediately before that, she was on the DMZ in Korea, where she got shot at 3 times…and things there aren’t getting any ‘cooler’, either.
But I digress…and the Japanese didn’t have much in common with Americans either, but they learned to trust us. Hell they were the most foreign of the nations America has ever occupied, and they became the MOST like us (while staying the most different…interesting, that).
Guy, that is the sort of discussion which is helpful. We are dealing with a brutalized population. People past a certain age may well never recover. The thought patterns are too ingrained. Deception is survival for them. I have heard, and would have predicted that many, many people will simply tell us what they think we want to hear. That was a life saving skill for the last 35 years.
The very fact Salam and some others will publicly criticize the new rulers and voice their doubts is a hopeful sign. Salam and people like him will be the leaders of that country in 20 years. We should be hoping they can escape the programming.
Two Samizdacistas grew up under Communism. Perhaps one of them can comment first hand on life under life-destroying rulers.
I might also add that a number of our writers are pseudonymous like Salam. Note there is a difference between anonymous and pseudonymous; one is an unknown with unknown history that pops up and disappears; the other is an entity in its’ own right which may join a trust network based on history. I was involved in some work with Jim Bennett on exactly this kind of thinking. Pseudonymity is a good thing, a very libertarian thing. We are going to see more of it as people discover how much their privacy is compromised in a totally connected world.
Also, an argument at one point seemed to indicate that living for a time in another culture somehow makes one no longer a valid member of the culture they came from.
if that were a legal test, I would no longer be considered an American as I have lived in Belfast for 15 years. Every thing I write about the US would be considered untrustworthy.
No one is saying you should accept everything Salam says. He gets things wrong as often as any of us. But the *way* in which he gets things wrong (at least in our perspective) is educational because it will often not be unique to him. It’s a window into the whole strata of Baghdad he comes from. It’s a strata which most likely will provide a lot of the future leadership and bureaucracy.
That is a very useful strata to understand. I look forward to more of them going on line so we have more opinions to weigh. I look forward to them arguing with each other over what Iraq should become. And either accepting our comments when they like or telling us to blog off when they dont.
PS: I am not a pseudonym btw. If you want to find out how appallingly much you can find out about someone, try a google and a bit of digging and you will probably get my life history.
Of course it helps that I have for a very long time (I’ve not checked lately) been the only Dale Amon on the entire global internet. 🙂
I like Salman.He’s intelligent and seems to have an open mind, some whining doesnt change that.
I dont expect him or anyone for that mather to tell the TRUE. Just another pixel in the whole picture.
“an opportunity to sit an afternoon in a Baghdad cafe with him… sipping only culturally allowable beverages of course”
That will be the worst sign for Iraq.
Theres Christians and other faiths in Iraq, theres agnostics too! many muslims drink alchool, muslim world has many shades …
That seems to me the usual western colonial guilt that produced the tolerance to intolerance.
That time is over.
Dale:
Your last comment was a far more astute appreciation of the value in “Salam Pax”‘s writing then your condescending multi-culti sermon before.
I think he writes vividly, even movingly at times, and the perspective he provides on day to day details of life in Iraq is valuable. I also don’t find him to be parituclarly anti-American. His politics are quite an interesting mish-mash actually.
What is not helpful is to hold him to a lower standard by attempting to insulate him from any criticism or analysis of his writing or his place in Iraq by tallying up any failings on his part to the fact that he “comes from a different culture.” This is condescending, politically correct multiculturalism at its worst.
In your own admission he and people like him will be running the country in the future. If that’s the case then is it not fair that he be put up to the same level of analysis of his past and his biases as figures like his despised Ahmed Chalabi are? But, of course that’s impossible because of the pseudonym issue.
Perhaps the most important question facing the Americans as they try to reconstruct Iraq will be to what extent they will collaborate with former Baathists. Will all party members be barred from important positions or just high-level ones? I see nothing wrong with having a similar debate about our friend the Baghdad blogger. Would we afford him the same amount of good will, respect, newspaper gigs, and book deals if we knew the full extent of his and his family’s complicity in the old regime? Do you think that in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq you get to sit at home in air-conditioning while others dig in positions to prepare to defend against an invading army by being a dissident? How exactly did one go about getting a rarely-issued visa for foreign travel in the old regime? Questions like these are the reason the pseudonym question is relevant.
It would be one thing if his blog was treated as just another perspective which was taken with a grain of salt, but the vehemence with which those who dare speak ill of him are written of as jingoistic right-wingers suggests that his opinions and reporting are leant a huge deal of credence. For many people he is their pre-eminent source of news in Iraq, despite the many English language papers which are now being produced, which to his credit he links to. Given that he’s treated as a serious news source the sloppiness of his reporting I think is also a fair subject for discussion.
” Given that he’s treated as a serious news source the sloppiness of his reporting I think is also a fair subject for discussion. ”
Thats true Eric too many people extrapolates the Salman stories to the whole country and thats enough for them.
Even when i said a pixel in my post i must have said a couple of pixels. But he has the facts wrong? he twisted a story for some propose? he presents a viewpoint.
maybe i am just tired of journalism with an agenda
but his writing seems refreshing.
( i must stress i cant claim i have read all he wrote so iam not tired of him)
I remember a posting by Salam about 15 weeks ago in which he lamented his inability to have lunch with his friends at the Hunt Club because “that S.O.B. Chalabi” had been ensconced in the club by the Coalition. Isn’t he being a wee bit disingenuous when, in his reply to Rachel, he mocks the idea of
helping the Americans to round up Baathists, “as if they walk around the streets carrying signs.” Is it too much to ask that he gently hint to his former friends that they might consider the consequences for the Iraqi people of blowing up transmission towers and power stations, not to mention oil pipelines and water mains? I’m not in his shoes, so I don’t know. Just asking.
Yes, John, terrorist do not walk around with signs saying who they are. I can verify this for a fact from personal experience. Although I’m sure there were active IRA men drinking in some of the same pubs I drank in a decade ago, I could not possibly identify a single one or even be sure they were or were not amongst the people I knew.
Calling these people “his friends” shows a total lack of understanding of both terrorists and (others here are better qualified than I to comment) on contacts with members of a murderous dictatorship. Such people are never anyone’s friend.
Saying you disagree with what he says is one thing (and btw, if you read the Iraq Daily it has pretty much the same tone as Salam) but accusing a young guy of being a willing member of a murderous regime would (if I were the target of the accusation) be taken as a near mortal insult.