We don't know who they are, what their backgrounds are and what motivates them. Their english is certainly good, and they write better than many on this thread. This indicates tome that they may have been educated in the US or Europe.
The guys who write Iraq the Model are not anonymous, and lots of people know them and their backgrounds. They are named Omar and Mohammed Fadhil. One of them is a dentist (I forget which), and was started into blogging by his friend Zeyad (also a dentist, a Sunni from Baghdad) of Healing Iraq. Omar and Mohammed visited the US a few months ago. They also ran for office in the Jan 31 elections (they didn't win) The publicity alarmed their brother Ali, who moved to his own blog, Free Iraqi.
These men are not anonymous and have published their names at some risk to themselves. If you had been reading them for the past two years as I have you would also know that they are not uncritical of US mistakes (Zeyad had a cousin killed by US soldiers and he's quite bitter about the light sentence they got). But they are modern people, who want their country of Iraq to become a decent place to live and they know that the Iraqis could not have done it by themselves. The criminal mob that was the Saddam regime was too strong and too ruthless.
This impulse to say, well if they don't hate the Americans they must be plants, is a kind of non-response, a refusal to believe anything that conflicts with your worldview.
It seems common on the left. Prof. Juan Cole noticed that Iraq the Model had been registered by a Houston firm called "CIATech" and jumped to all kinds of conclusions about their being CIA plants, never noting that the name a) stood for "Complex Internet Applications", or that the same firm had registered Riverbend's Baghdad Burning blog - a blog Cole never doubts because its author is violently anti-American, although she does remain anonymous.
There are Americans who have tried to be helpful to the Iraqi bloggers, and have tried to get them set up, given them bandwidth and a digital camera. They don't censor the blogs.
I suggest you leave the echo-chamber of lefties who agree with you and do more reading of Iraqi sites, including the blogs. Many American soliders are also blogging, they have useful information too. Then maybe events in Iraq won't come as such a surprise to you. The success of the elections, for example, did not surprise the soldiers who were on the ground, though they seemed to completely flabbergast the main stream reporters who were in Iraq. |
