October 2006: Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq (Anonymous)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 8:49:13 PM

A good-sized group made it up the long and winding road to Patricia Ditton's house in the Oakland hills on October 23rd to discuss Baghdad Burning, a young Iraqi woman's blog about life in Bagdhad after the US invasion.

The writer's remarkable ease with the English language was widely admired, and we spent some time discussing our overall reactions to her writings as well as the blogging phenomenon. Those who had read the print version were more likely to have read in a linear start-to-finish fashion, although some skipped around. Those who read online were much more likely to jump around chronologically.

Many of us expressed concern and frustration about the ongoing problems with the US involvement there, and the astounding amounts of money that have been spent for rebuilding projects that have not been completed, or in some cases even started. Monica offered up the idea that if the US focused our security efforts on protecting specific, targeted, rebuilding projects, perhaps some practical results could be achieved on the ground, which could improve the lives of Iraqis in a specific area or neighborhood and undermine support for insurgent activity there.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you know that I discovered that the book we read recently, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, has a part 2 with her more recent blog entries. Here is where you can find info from Amazon.com. Also at that discussion we talked about various blogs, so I wanted to send out the websites for the ones I mentioned. One progressive political blog is Fire Dog Lake (www.firedoglake.com), and one of the leaders is a Smithie. I also mentioned Daily Kos, which is at www.dailykos.com. Two common places where people start and maintain their own blogs are: www.blogger.com and www.livejournal.com. Happy blogging!

Katherine D'Amato ('03)