Hw 25: Responding to Riverbend

Baghdad Burning is a collection of blogs written by an Iraqi girl living in Iraq today who goes by the name of "Riverbend." This collection of blogs is first forwarded by Adhaf Souief. Souief explains how Riverbend's blogs, that are all English, are written to show the voice of an "ordinary" Iraqi resident, and to show the people the perspective of a family who is living through these traumatic invasions going on today in Iraq. Riverbend wanted to blog in order to reach out to the people to show her account of war. She also has some help from her brother "E" who shares his thoughts on their situation. The forward also explains how Riverbend is not anti-America just because of the war that is going on, and she speaks for many of her people as well. "In fact, far from being anti anything, this book is firmly on the side of humanity and the side of life"(Soueif viii). I think this is a good perspective for a book like this to be at, and I think it makes it more of an acurate view point. The introduction, written by James Ridgeway, briefly overviews Riverbend's day-by-day living experience of war as well as the background history of Iraq since the beginning of the twentieth century when the issues with natural resources began. It backgrounds many brief wars that happened in the 1900's and explains the change relation with the U.S and Iraq after they invaded Kuwait in 1990. After that, in 1991, the Persian Gulf War took place which greatly effected the economy in Iraq as well as the people for the next twelve years. The war to follow this,was the 2003 war. The way that both of the authors explained the war in Iraq are pretty accurate to the memories that I know and have heard throughout the years from hearing it from people and in the news, but it will be interesting to hear what Riverbend has to go though.