Blogging Iraq

[ MUSIC ] I was born in Baghdad, and I lived there for 16 years until I moved to the United States. I was born around the Gulf War, which was a time that, you know, the US came and intervened, when Iraq occupied Kuwait. It was around the same time when there was an embargo being imposed on Iraq, so it was very tough times. A lot of families lost their wealth. The Iraqi currency dropped down a lot, so there was a lot of poverty. The tenants of the Ba'ath Party were very...included in the curriculum. After every victory of a certain Iraqi civilization, or a Muslim victory in a certain battle, a quote from Saddam Hussein would follow that sentence. When you're only receiving government propoganda, it's really easy to just go with the flow and, not necessarily believe what they say, but don't think too much of it. After school, there was always an hour-long show about the Iraqi-Iranian War, that included real footage of the battlegrounds and everything. So, you're always taught this sense of that we're in a war against somebody. If it's not the West or the United States, it's Iran. It's Kuwait. Well, everybody in Iraq talks about politics. Everybody had participated in a war, or been to prison because of the government, or had a relative that was persecuted by the government. And everybody would talk about it over dinner tables, or coffee shops, or just playing chess. Now, we have a lot of satellite channels. We have other media outlets. We have access to the Internet. See, before, we only had two channels, two radio stations. We had no cell phones, no access to the Internet and we had no access to foreign media. [ MUSIC ] I think we're still a misunderstood culture. From the media, you might think it's a very different place, but I lived in Baghdad. It was very developed and metropolitan. The polls said that there were 99 percent Iraqis voted for Sadam Hussein. I can tell you that my family did not go, and many others in my neighborhood did not. So, as far as mixing between the people and the government, unfortunately, I saw that very evident in the media. What you see on TV is crazy people, with turbans or holding an AK-47. The people that would be interviewed on TV would be the ones that are really extremists, the ones that were pro-government, pro-Saddam Hussein, and that was just not a good portrayal of the Iraqi society, in general. There are those kinds of people, but it definitely does not reflect the majority of Iraqis. I think the majority of people in Iraq are just really concerned about having a decent life where they don't have to worry about whether they're going to make it to work or not the next day. [ MUSIC ] I didn't plan on becoming a blogger. One day I just wrote a poem, and then I wrote just an essay about how I felt about politics in Iraq at the time, which was, it was around 2004. And one of my friends showed it to somebody who was running a blog forum, and that person invited me to write. I was writing about the elections and the kind of parties that I favored and why I favored them. I was writing in favor of a secular government, against Islamic extremism, against terrorists groups. I wrote about what people did not write about, or at least wrote about it in anonymous names. I start writing with famous Iraqi blogger in the United States, and my name got out there. And I still do it until today. It empowers ordinary people, as well as educated and experienced people, to express themselves about an issue that they're concerned about. And I think at the time, there were many Iraqis that took that route. In the Middle East, especially in Iraq after the war, where there wasn't that many, many media outlets, it was such a power to have. When people read what you write, they don't associate you with a party or a sect or an ideology, as they would with conventional journalism. Because in Iraq, unlike in the US, your name can really reflect what party you might support or what sect or what religion you are. They don't just think, "Oh, well, he's saying that because he's from that party, or his name is a ***-ite name is Sunni name." I think that has, definitely, made a difference in the blog world. [ MUSIC ] I'm studying government at UT. I've met a lot of people who are interested in the Middle East in general and in the Iraq issue, because I talk about Iraq every day, and I have definitely had interaction with students. I appreciate about the university that everybody listens, even if they don't agree with you. I don't have any reservations from talking in class or opposing my professor in a certain political view or on anything. I like that I can go to my professor's office and talk to them about what they think about a certain political event. Those kinds of things I might not necessarily be able to do in Iraq. I'm studying government at UT. Most of the classes I've taken have been revolving around democracies and how they function and electoral engineering. This has helped me really understand how the government in Iraq is being developed, because it's just been a couple of years when we wrote our constitution again. We had an electoral commission. We went from one party in the government to 180 parties. For many people, they see that it's going to be a long time before Iraq can become a functioning democracy. For me, through what I've studied at UT, I think I understand how it will and has the potential of becoming a functioning democracy. [ MUSIC ] I think my parents and their generation lived a very different life from the life I live right now and my generation lives in Iraq. I think they always felt trapped. Not a lot of people are allowed to travel out of Iraq. So they had to live with the fact that, you know, Sadam Hussein was going to be there forever, that there was going to be very limited opportunities. For me and my generation, having seen that a very, strong, oppressive government being removed, it definitely gives us a different sense of, you know, "We can do, we can do things that back to our society." I want to be a politcian when I graduate. You would never hear many Iraqis saying that at the time of Sadam Hussein's government. Even though Iraq is a much more dangerous country, I think the future has a lot more coming for my generation and the generations to come. [ MUSIC ]