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07 May 2003: "Salam resurfaces, sort of"

You may be happy to hear Salam Pax, our man in Baghdad, has resurfaced! Admittedly by proxy, since connectivity in Iraq is evidently touch-and-go, but he's sent his collected observations to Diana Moon (formerly of "Letter from Gotham"), and she's posted them into his blog on his behalf.

Incidentally, I don't buy into theories that Salam is a phony. I've corresponded with Diana a fair bit by now, and if Salam were fake, she would have to be as well. And if she were, she'd be going to an amount of trouble to convince me of her bona fides which, considering I'm a minor player in Blogoslavia at best, just wouldn't be worth the payoff.

Additional, 1915Z-7: Salam's stuff is compelling reading. In any given war, in any given push into a large city, how often have you ever gotten a perspective of your average inhabitant of the city in question so soon? I just finished reading The Fall of Berlin 1945 (which includes excerpts from diaries written by inhabitants of the city) 58 years after the fact; now I'm reading The Fall of Baghdad 2003 a month after the fact. It almost gives me a sense of historic occasion.

I say "almost" because I subscribe to the notion that most people tend to (severely) overestimate the historical importance of the time they live in; personally, I think that a hundred years from now this war will merit a brief mention at most in the history books, just a short flash in the much larger process of western involvement in the Middle East (though in fairness I should add that the significance to military historians will likely be much higher). But that doesn't alter the fact that it is of supreme interest of those of us living right now. So what are you waiting for? Go read Salam.

(Oops; I just realised that when I redecorated this page, I forgot to stick up that "Support Democracy in Iraq" pic. Oversight corrected.)

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