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COMMENTARY
May 14, 2003
Salam Pax
"Salam Pax" is rising as one of the media stars in post-war 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-up in the New Yorker magazine and elsewhere and his jottings copied into the Guardian in U.K. Not bad for a person whose very existence has been sceptically 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 nomenklatura. 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 with most Western fashions and things. This is what gives him his plausibility to Western readers. He drops many hints that he is an 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 Saddam Hussein'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 cr?me de la cr?me. 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 incidentally 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.) Now Salam would never have known any "ordinary" Iraqis unless he was interrogating one privately. He does know that Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya the politicians coming down from free Kurdish territory and the other exiles returning to Iraq are the class that are trying to replace his class. They were the people who were fighting the good fight against Saddam abroad and committed their lives irretrievably to a democratic future for the country -- when people like Salam's were making their profitable accommodations with the regime. And Salam's resentment for them is visceral sometimes spilling into the blog. ("The last couple of days I have been having the vilest thoughts about Chalabi Zubaidi et al. I can't stop myself muttering filthybad things about them whenever one of these names gets mentioned. Oh and the hideous flag they have.") One of his constantly-repeated warnings is that the U.S. occupiers are fools if they do not take all those talented former-Baathist officials in from the cold and put them back in business; that "al-Chalabi's de-Baathification plans don't solve any problems". Salam refers to the Americans slickly as the "puppet-masters". He speaks approvingly of old Iraqi Communists organizing their poster (and subversion) campaigns; and is suddenly sympathetic when they happen to appropriate some office space. He mentions in passing linking up with a Western leftist group called "CIVIC" (Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict) to document civilian casualties from the U.S. invasion that liberated the country. And this from a person who shows no guilt whatever at his own family membership in a Baathist regime that killed some hundreds of thousands of civilians -- entirely on purpose. He dismisses all that as "a few bad apples" without thinking to volunteer any sort of information on where such bad apples might now be hiding. The good news in the last week is that the U.S. authorities seem to be on to this kind of imposture. They have grasped that the main immediate challenge to democratization in Iraq is indeed from old Baathist elements -- who they now know are behind almost all of the "random" violence that has been distracting them in parts of Baghdad and other cities that never had crime problems before. They have grasped that this represents a better-organized and more serious challenge to public order than even the Shia religious fanatics coming in from Iran. They are on to the game that is being played on them in which this very violence is being used to support propaganda through Al-Jazeera and other Arab and Western media in which the U.S. is being "held to account" for Iraq's "slide into anarchy". My own information is that the sudden U.S. staff changes and arrival of Paul Bremen (a former counter-terrorism official) as the new civilian chief administrator reflect an important policy change. The U.S. through its characteristically lateral methods of trial-and-error has discovered that playing a low profile was a mistake; and that actual "ordinary" Iraqis want to see more rather than less of them providing more rather than less security. This they will get. I believe the new policy will be to link the security issue directly with the issue of de-Baathification. "Salam Pax" to the contrary you can't do one without the other. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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