HW 25: Responding to Riverbend

The foreward is a very short description written by Ahdaf Soueif explainining the blog of Riverbend. It is written before the introduction which gives some background information. He focuses on the blog, "Baghdad Burning" written by Riverbend. It allows the reader to associate more on the emotional level than the physical with the war in Iraq. Her blog is also important because she incorporates the reader in to her daily life and throught the posts is able to share some of her family history as well. He then goes on to explain the purpose of the book and how there is a fair amount of politics when it comes to the issue of war and this book. The book is meant to change the minds of those people who do not know or understand the Arab and Muslim people living in the world around us. The introduction on the other hand, is written by a man named James Ridgeway. He goes in to much further detail about the young women, "Riverbend" who calls her blog "Baghdad Burning." His main point was to emphasis her background and culture which is what makes her so unique and what captivates others to read her blog. He describes the reasons for our American troops going overseas and fighting in the war for oil, and other such things. He then does a flashback to the Gulf War and after to show how over the years our country has continued to fight violently with others, and how the results are devastating. More importantly, the 1991 Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in power, which we all know, ultimately led him to punish the Iraqis and commite further attacks and damage. Finally, what he almost talks the most about is the 2003 War. He states that the Bush administration determined the war to be a "mission that was accomplished." However, this is not the case at all. "The United States never gained enough control to restore any sort of order" Ridgeway 16) What shocked me the most was the facts and details that he listed. The maximum number of civillian deaths was 17,000 by late October of 2004. I remember that when we first went in to Iraq there was a lot of confusion and fear because as a country we did not know what we were up against facing. In the text most of things that describe the war are very factual and descriptive. What was very interesting for me to read was about Saddam and how he was a Sunni Muslem. Ridgeway states, "Saddam is a Sunni Muslem, and his political apparatus was largely managed by a middle class of educated Sunnis, most of whom lived in an area around Baghdad referred to as the "Sunni Triange" (Ridgewater 22) Personally, not knowing that much about the war, my own opinions of it are very different than what I read because I gained so much more knowledge about it than I had ever known before.