Spring Break
Iraqi blogger opens window on wartime Baghdad
Online exclusive
Ryan Sholin
Issue date: 3/24/06 Section: News
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Around 200 students, faculty, staff and community members filled a second floor lecture hall as Pax spoke about the experience of posting his thoughts online as coalition troops advanced on Baghdad.
"I thought that the moment the bombs would drop, that would be the last time I was blogging," Pax said.
But Pax's intermittent Internet connection allowed him to continue posting to his blog, then titled "Where is Raed?" Raed Harrar, a friend of Pax's from school, was in Amman, Jordan, when the war started, and the pair used the blog to communicate with each other.
Pax, who is in his early 30s, said it was strange to watch Baghdad be torn apart by bombs on television.
"You feel the ground rumbling," Pax said, "and a couple of seconds later, you see the screen flare up and you see where the bombs are falling."
Pax and 15 members of his family waited out the initial days of the Iraq war in a "safe room" at his parents' house, he said.
Every morning after the nighttime bombings, Pax and some members of his family would venture out to see the damage firsthand. When Pax's Internet connection was working, he would blog about the destruction he saw.
"I avoid looking at those entries," he said.
Pax said the early days of the war were "bad and strange and weird."
Although it was hard for Pax, who studied architecture, to see some of his favorite buildings destroyed, he said there was a sort of "euphoria" in the air when the war started.
"I was one of the people that were convinced there was absolutely no way we could get rid of Saddam on our own," Pax said. "We had to basically make a deal with the devil."
Pax said accepting foreign intervention in Iraq meant accepting a violent conflict.
"All you can do is cross your fingers and hope you don't die during that war," he said.
Larry Roberts, who works in the San Francisco public defender's office, took the day off to hear Pax speak.
"I read the blog during the war," Roberts said. "When there were gaps, it was so worrisome."
Pax said he was "more than happy" to see Saddam's regime toppled, but that the aftermath of the invasion hasn't gone as he would have liked.
"I used to be stupidly optimistic," Pax said. "These days I find it more difficult."
According to Pax, Iraq was like "a big jail" under Saddam.
"There was no way to know what people thought of us outside, and no one outside Iraq could know how we lived our lives," Pax told the audience.
Andrew Reynolds, a senior majoring in English, said it was interesting to get an insider's point of view on the situation in Iraq.
"In most Western media reports, we don't get that perspective," Reynolds said.
Pax's blog began to garner media attention during the invasion of Iraq, as pundits speculated as to whether or not he was real, or a CIA plant, or an Israeli intelligence officer. Pax said he asked his readers to trust their instincts.
"People wanted me to prove it somehow," Pax said. His identity remained relatively secret, he said, but when his father heard a BBC radio report about an architect named Salam writing on the Internet, he told his parents the truth.
"They were kind enough to allow me to do it," he said.
Pax said he was thankful that his parents didn't voice their objections too loudly at the time, even though he might have been putting them in a dangerous situation.
"What I say and who I am isn't very popular in Iraq," Pax said.
Pax's popularity in the United States has only grown over time. After the initial flurry of speculation about his identity, his blog gained readers, Pax said. American bloggers writing about politics and the war in Iraq engaged him in conversation, Pax said, and he answered questions from his readers on his blog.
In 2003, entries from his blog were published as a book, "The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi."
Mitch Berman, the SJSU English department lecturer who moderated the discussion, said Pax offered "a window into something we can't see without his aid."
Berman, who also acts as the director for the SJSU Center for Literary Arts, said he would have invited Pax to speak even if he had never published a book.
"You can make (blogging) a literary form," Berman said.
In his introduction of Pax at the beginning of the program, Berman said this was the first publisher of a blog the Center for Literary Arts had ever invited to the university.
"We've had 28 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, but not one blogger," Berman said.
Pax said his original inspiration to start a blog came when he started reading online journals written by Americans in 2002. Pax said the "little window on someone's life" a blog offered its readers appealed to him.
Persis Karim, an assistant professor in the English department, said Pax's book was required reading for the English 1B class she's teaching this semester. Karim also asks her students to read a book by an American soldier who published a blog during the Iraq war.
Karim said she thinks her students benefit from reading different perspectives on the war.
"I think they find it very enlightening," Karim said.
It's important for students to understand "the impact of everyday violence," she said.
Before taking questions from the audience, a September 2004 entry about arts and leisure in post-invasion Iraq from Pax's video blog was shown.
In the video blog, which Pax produced for the BBC, he interviewed an Iraqi sculptor and took viewers on a quick tour of public art in Baghdad.
In the video, Pax wondered why dictators always think everyone likes their taste in art.
"This is how we ended up with all those hideous monuments," Pax said in the video.
Hugo Teixeira, a senior majoring in linguistics, said the video blog entry showed a side of Iraq he hadn't seen in the American media.
"For a second, things almost seemed normal," Teixeira said.
When asked to name some of the positive changes the war has brought to Iraq, Pax said that freedom of expression was the biggest gain.
"If you are brave enough you can say what you want to say," he said.
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