The Baghdad Blogger

Script by Mark Hertsgaard
LinkTV, Sep 1, 2005

INTRO:

Welcome to Spotlight. I'm Mark Hertsgaard in San Francisco, and this is Link TV's investigative news program, presenting documentaries from filmmakers and reporters around the world, telling stories usually missed by American television.

This week our spotlight is on the Baghdad Blogger.

No one knows his real name, but he calls himself Salam Pax-peace, in Arabic and Latin. Born and raised in the Iraqi capital, he speaks perfect, idiomatic English. As an affluent, western-educated architect, the Baghdad Blogger is not a typical Iraqi. But he straddles both worlds - he can travel among and speak freely with his fellow countrymen and women, and then share their views, along with his own, with the outside world.

Like his blog entries, the film you're about to see focuses on the daily life of ordinary Iraqis in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, you'll see the violence, suffering and frustration but also the hopes, culture and basic humanity.

We'll be back afterwards with an update. For now, from The Guardian Films in Britain, here is "The Baghdad Blogger," on Link TV, your connection to the world.

OUTRO:

Welcome back. You're watching "Spotlight" on Link TV. I'm Mark Hertsgaard.

If you watch much American television, you know that local Iraqi perspectives on the war and other developments in the region are virtually absent from our television screens, except for the occasional sound bite.

Like the war itself, Iraq's people remain an abstraction to most Americans, including our political leaders. The film you've just seen attempts to redress that imbalance.

So does the recent book Night Draws Near by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid. Like the Baghdad Blogger, Shadid is bi- cultural. Born and raised in Oklahoma to Lebanese immigrants, he now covers Iraq for the Washington Post. In his book he observes that, "Time and again, we Americans envisioned, or were given, a simple, two dimensional portrait of Iraq," and our ignorance led to consequences we never foresaw.

Iraqis take their history seriously-it stretches back eleven thousand years. So when President Bush assured them, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, "We come as liberators, not occupiers," he unwittingly struck a chord. Every Iraqi, writes Shadid, recognized Bush's statement as a virtual word-for-word repetition of what British Major General Stanley Maude had promised in 1917, when British troops entered Baghdad to end Ottoman empire rule. Instead, the British stayed for fifteen years, until increasingly violent Iraqi rebellions forced them out.

It remains to be seen whether the U.S. occupation will end the same way.

If you want to find out more about these issues, check out the resources listed at the end of this program. You can also find those resources at our website, www.linktv.org.

Following those listings you'll see a clip from next week's program. Until then, this is Mark Hertsgaard in San Francisco for "Spotlight." Thanks for joining us.

Resources:
• Salam Pax's weblog: Where is Raed? www.dear_raed.blogspot.com/