Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi
Posted on February 16, 2004
Salam Pax is the pseudonym/handle of an Iraqi guy in his late 20′s – early 30′s who started writing on a blog to keep up with his friend, Raed, who was living elsewhere at the time. Salam is his real first name, but Pax is latin for “peace”, while Salam means the same thing in Arabic. Salam’s blog gained international fame for posting the view of the war from the point-of-view of a more-or-less ordinary Iraqi living in Bagdhad. The book Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi is a digest of his blog from September 2002 to June 2003.
I actually went to the bookstore looking for something else, but when I saw this book, I remembered hearing about the blog and thought the book might be an interesting read. I don’t know of many other blogs that spawn books, with the exception of Wil Wheaton’s. Going through the book, there seems to be a recurring theme about people wondering whether Salam Pax is real. Some people think he is a CIA operative, while other seem to think he is one of Saddam’s people. After reading the book, I can tell he has no love for either George W Bush or Saddam Hussein.
While he seems to think that the world (or at least Iraq) is better off without Saddam, he disagrees with the way it was done, and points out that the reasons for removing Saddam aren’t new. The US supplied him with arms for many years, and was even personally visited by current Donald Rumsfeld (now US Secretary of Defense), who more or less gave Saddam all the arms he wanted. Salam Pax also pointed out the world did nothing while Saddam had thousands of Kurds gassed, but all of a sudden we are using reasons such as these to go to war. Salam Pax even wonders why we picked now, when Saddam has been committing atrocities such as these for the past 30 years.
After Iraq was “liberated” he points out many of problems created by or overlooked by the US. He says that the US didn’t care about getting the number of civilian casualties, so the Iraqis had to set up an organization on their own to do that. One thing that he mentioned was that the US administration seems to have lacked an accurate plan on what to do after the invasion, because it seemed like their policies were a matter of trial-and-error.
Overall, the book seems pretty good. It gives a sense of what it is like to live in Iraq before the war, and his writing is good enough to make you feel tense when he describes the bombs going off nearby. He has a good sense of sarcasm and irony, so the writing is light and witty at times. However there are also times when he describes in near graphic detail about the casualties.
The book did have some surprises though. One of them is Arablish. Since most computers have the typical QWERTY English keyboard, and the English letters can’t get the idea of another alphabet across, Arablish was developed as a sort of 1337-$�33]< of the online Arabic world. Pretty interesting stuff.
One interesting side note: As I noted earlier, there was a recurring theme about whether Salam Pax was real or not. In fact, his blog has a near cult-like following, and people follow his posts and talk about his blog on their own blogs (like I’m doing now, I guess). One of the blurbs on the cover is by noted sci-fi/cyberpunk author William Gibson. William Gibson recently released a book about an Internet based semi-cult-following in his recent book Pattern Recognition.
