David Warren: 'Salam Pax' Plays Americans for Fools in Iraq

The Ottawa Citizen ^ | May 14, 2003 | David Warren

[quidnunc]

The star of the blog 'Where is Raed?' is part of an anti-Western conspiracy

"Salam Pax" is rising as one of the media stars in postwar Iraq. He began blogging from Baghdad well before the war, and has come back sporadically since. (He calls his blog "Where is Raed?") He is the darling of fellow bloggers in the West, who light up with links whenever he appears on the Web. He has been written about in the New Yorker magazine and elsewhere, and his jottings copied into the Guardian in the Britain. Not bad for a person whose very existence has been skeptically queried. And who does a superb job of covering his traces, creating fresh firewalls around himself in the very moments when he appears to be giving his identity away.

I am quite certain he exists. That isn't the scandal. He has a family and a history and even a real-life name. But without compromising sources, and thus endangering lives, including Salam's own, one may discover a great deal about him from carefully reading his blog, and following obvious leads from there.

Salam is the scion of a senior figure from Iraq's Baathist nomenclature. He was brought up at least partly in Vienna, which is the OPEC headquarters; his father was therefore an oilman, and possibly a former head of Iraq's OPEC mission. Another clue is a hint that his grandfather was an Iraqi tribal chief, from which I infer that his father was one of the Iraqi tribal chiefs that Saddam Hussein rewarded for loyalty, outside the Tikrit clan.

Salam has an easy familiarity not only with the upscale Baghdad in which he has been living, and which he selectively describes through the jaded eyes of a true insider, but also with most Western fashions and things. This is what gives him his plausibility to Western readers. He drops many hints that he is a homosexual, suggesting reckless candour. (I'm inclined to doubt these.) His English is superb and colloquial. He has those Tariq Aziz qualities. There are nightmares in his background, but the foreground is smooth, charming, self-confident, man of the world — tending involuntarily to smugness. He can tell you anything, and seems to enjoy putting on the show.

He refers casually to pseudonymous friends, who are also children of the deposed Baathist elect. They all know their way around but, unlike their parents, have never carried the weight of responsibility. They were of a class, but not yet fully in it — products of a very luxurious bubble. Or perhaps Salam himself or any one of them was directly employed by Mr. Saddam's very extensive, and in places quite sophisticated, network of Soviet-modelled spy and disinformation networks — we cannot know yet.

What we can know, just by reading his blog, is that this Salam is up to no good. He is spreading "inside views" of the new Iraq, not only to the blogosphere, but directly among the journalists still encamped at the Meridian (formerly Palestine, formerly Meridian) hotel. Not the "embeds" who've gone home after remarkable learning experiences, but those "hacks" not yet transferred to the next breaking news story, and so still kicking around this mysterious city of Baghdad, trying to figure out what's happening without exposing themselves overmuch to danger.

And they lap it up. They depend on translators and guides to show them around, and seem only partially aware that the people who've come forward to provide them with these services are almost all unemployed former Baath regime officials. (They trust them because they speak English so well.)

Hence our media fixation on a series of stories — starting with the entirely false account that was given of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum — that show the American occupation in the worst possible light, and blame each lapse in public order on American oversight, instead of on the perpetrators.

"Salam Pax" is the crème de la crème. He drops brilliantly casual asides. For instance, one of his insightful tips to the Western journalists was that "ordinary" Iraqis despise all these exiles who have parachuted in with the U.S. military, and who have "appropriated" such private property as the old Mansour Social Club, and Iraqi Hunting Club — which were Baathist social preserves (clubs in which Salam would likely have had memberships). He falsely suggests that these properties were obtained through "looting." (They were assigned to the exiles by the U.S. military.)

-snip-

[quidnunc]

Damn clever, those Iraqi Baathists.

[westmex]

I've read some of his blog...It's hard to read on a small laptop though...Or maybe it's my old eyes...lol

[McGavin999]

I've read a few of his posts. I was thinking it was some bored western journalist putting it on for his own amusement.

[RippleFire]

bump

[Tamzee]

I grew quite tired of Salam's spoiled brat complaints ... one of his recent rants included his bitterness at his pool club being unavailable because of the war and where in the world was he supposed to swim now??????