Salam Pax is a pseudonym that is composed of the Arabic and Latin for the word ‘peace’, and it is an interesting name for an author whose subject is so heavily concerned with war. This book provides an insight into a group of modern, non-Establishment intellectuals who share a belief in human rights that have been partly created by the Internet itself, and depend on it for their continuing identity.

A repeated theme of the book is Salam’s struggle to stay “online” while his home city is bombed. The book reveals Salam’s awareness of his growing celebrity, but he is very critical of it, continually reminding his readers that he is no expert.

No one knew who he was or the risks he was taking. Outside the country, there were many who did not believe that the man who wrote under the sobriquet Salam Pax truly existed.

While the world's media put all its financial resources into their coverage of the war in Iraq, it was ironically the Internet musings of a young unknown living in a house in a Baghdad suburb that got the scoop to deliver the most compelling description of life during the occupation of Iraq.

Salam started writing up his news from home on a weblog, a site on the Internet where he could post his thoughts for his friend to read. He called it: Where is Raed? Along with the friend he describes only as G - Ghaith, another young, intelligent, eloquent architectural graduate, they talked earnestly about the end of Saddam’s reign of terror. They were scared of being called up for military service because all young men were reservists, and scared of being bombed by America.

Diana Moon, a trusted fellow blogger from New York, posted Salam’s collected postings and put them on her site. There were many who doubted his authenticity; some thinking unrealistically that he was an agent of Iraqi or US intelligence. His allusions to contemporary Western popular culture seemed unusually familiar for an Iraqi, and so his identity was questioned. This says much about how little most of us in the West actually knew about Iraqis.

The Baghdad Blog forces the reader to recognise that perceptions and experience of an event are utterly dependant on where one stands in relation to that event. For many in the West, the Iraq war was not really a war – at least in terms of not having to experience the bombs dropping around us.

The book forces a reader to recognise how outrageous it is to have an opinion about kicking Saddam out of power when that opinion is based on such little understanding of that regime or how that regime came about. It is easy to be an armchair warrior forming decisions based on a mere smattering of knowledge.

The greatest disruption during the conflict for most of us in Australia was a rise in petrol prices – how does that compare to living within Baghdad itself. Look at the coverage of the bombs in Bali and London, or the attacks on September 11 2001, and think what that means in translation to the devastation left in Iraq.

Whatever one’s politics about the validity of the US invasion of Iraq, one cannot ignore the enormity of the disruption – who would wish to exchange places for even a few hours?

The Baghdad Blog forces the reader to reconsider what we really know about the people that most of us have rounded up under the banner Iraqi, as though the people classified there were a homogenous identical bunch as indistinguishable as a machine made product.

The text forces us to reconsider what it is we think we know and become more critical of the sources from which we get this knowledge – indeed, misinformation is not always about intentional manipulation of the truth, it often comes from the innocence of being ignorant – which is why it is often so difficult to combat.

The study map for The Baghdad Blog is a visual representation of all key aspects of the text including:

• Genre
• Structure
• Historical Issues
• Style
• Background Notes
• Summary
• Character Profiles
• Themes and Issues
• Sample Examination Questions
  
  
  

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