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| Iraq |
| Salam Pax a Ba’athist? |
| 2003-05-14 |
| A David Warren op-ed piece, edited for brevity. '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. I posted my own suspicions here last week when we learned Salam was back. I can't help but think that, if Internet blogs existed 60 years ago, Salam's equivalent would have been a young man with a name like Ribbentrop, or Speer, or Eichmann. Do we find Salam worrying about missing or jailed family members? Does Salam express anxiety about newly discovered mass graves possibly containing a loved one? Does Salam complain about poorly mended bone fractures, kidney damage, failing eyesight, or other lingering effects of torture? No. The only inconvenience in Salam's life currently is paying $5/hour for Internet access. Can you feel his pain? I can't. |
| Posted by:Dar |
| #5 The funny thing is that I have know of Leftists who claim he must be a CIA agent |
| Posted by: Paul Moloney 2003-05-14 22:50:56 |
| #4 From Roger Simon's website at http://rogerlsimon.com/archives/00000134.htm: "Warren was alleging something that Charles and I had discussed privately often -- that blogger SALAM PAX of "Where is Raed?" fame was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent, probably for the Mukhabarat or one of its sister organizations. Our reasoning was simple and instinctive: Who better to infect the American (and world) intelligentsia with anti-war views, especially since he was cool, hip, gay (supposedly) and superficially an anti-Saddam insider? Don't bomb us, he seemed to be saying, we're just like you. If David Warren (and Charles and I) is correct in this, SP is one of the most brilliant intelligence operatives of all time--no exaggeration! Read the entire article. Warren has great sources. |
| Posted by: ColoradoConservative 2003-05-14 15:50:38 |
| #3 His uncle is also a major player in a large Iraqi bank. |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2003-05-14 15:05:04 |
| #2 I forgot the big one. Read his entries for around April 10. It appears that the bomb attack, the second one, that tried to get Saddam happened one street over from his house. He lives in a Baathist neighborhood. |
| Posted by: Chuck 2003-05-14 13:48:49 |
| #1 Nice catch, Dar. I've been saying the same thing for a while. In his mass posting, when he first "returned", he talked about his uncle as the director of a bank. Plus, his family had a generator and fuel for it. Indeed, just having Internet access prior to the liberation was a clue for me as to his true situation. He's an obviously well-to-do young man in a nation where wealth was the province of the Thugocracy. Not a "made man" in the Thugocracy but a soldier on his way up in the mob. |
| Posted by: Chuck 2003-05-14 13:41:25 |