Humanizing Iraq

In an attempt to keep my loyalty to my calorie-burning cause on my stationary bike Monday night, I grabbed the May 2008 issue of The American Prospect that was sitting on the coffee table and started reading to take my mind off both my pedaling and the clock that was staring at me from the other end of the living room. An article by Ann Friedman (whose brilliance and major contributions to the progressive community I am just getting myself acquainted to) called “Listening to Iraq” immediately caught my attention.

We know, of course, from reading and listening to sources outside of the mainstream media that we do not get sufficient coverage in America of how life really is, in the midst of the war, for the Iraqi people living in Iraq today, which, as Friedman argues, makes it difficult for people in America to have a vision of how the war is actually affecting human lives: “We don’t see what it’s like for Iraqis to walk home from the scene of violence, then make dinner, then put their kids to bed. We lack the humanizing power of detail.”

Friedman, sharing this bit of info she actually gathered from novelist and prisoner during the Saddam Hussein era, Haifa Zangana, mentions A Star from Mosul, one of the now fewer blogs providing real day-to-day accounts of life in the war-stricken country. The blogger calls herself “Namja” and is a twenty-year-old college student living in Mosul. I read several of her entries today, and she definitely gives the war a human face — a genuine human face struggling in needless coexistence with a war being waged against her country — that many of us do not visualize beyond the common suicide bombing reports and bringing-democracy-to-Iraq canto they run in the news.

Click here to read about Namja’s everyday life and see what our MSM friends are missing.