SALAM PAX, REDUX
James Lileks slams Salam Pax for becoming al Snarqa. You know what? I saw this coming. Months ago. Here's Lileks ranting at Salam, in exceptionally fine form.
Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. You would have spent the rest of your life under Ba�athist rule. You might have gotten some nice architectural commissions to do a house for someone whose aroma was temporarily acceptable to the Tikriti mob. You might have worked your international connections, made it back to Vienna, lived a comfy exile�s life. What�s certain is that none of your pals would ever have gotten rid of that �scary guy without the hideous moustache� (as if his greatest sin was somehow a fashion faux pas) and the Saddam regime would have prospered into the next generation precisely because of people like you.
It's those last three words that make all the difference...people like you. What kind of person is Salam Pax? He's a Baathist, or at least the son of a Baathist. In another of those many pieces I've written over the past year that hardly anyone read, I said as much and more. Salam Pax, everybody's golden boy before and during the war, had deep connections to the Saddamites. His daddy's one of 'em:
His Baathist connection is through his grandfather, a tribal chief, and therefore through his father and uncle, both of who seem to have had some weight in the old regime. His uncle is a banker of some authority in Baghdad, possibly a Baathist financier. His father's career led to opportunities outside Iraq, rare enough in a dictatorship, and to Salam's trilingual education in Vienna (in addition to Arabic and English, Salam speaks German). The Vienna route suggests but doesn't necessarily demand a connection to the Iraqi oil industry � Vienna is OPEC's headquarters. It's just as likely that Salam's father was an oilman as he was just an Iraqi bureaucrat either attending OPEC meetings or keeping tabs on Iraq's representatives. Salam once maintained his own flat in Vienna, suggesting a freedom to travel that has long been rare in Iraq.
Is it poor form to quote yourself in a blog post? Ah, heck, I wrote this six months ago--by Clinton standards, I was so much younger then that I'm a different person now.
Anyhow, Salam was certainly no sycophant of Saddam...but:
Since Salam resurfaced after the war, his posts have generated even more speculation and intrigue. In one of the entries he angrily denounced the Iraqi National Congress for appropriating the elite Iraqi Hunting Club and Mansour Social Club, wondering where he and other members would go for indoor swimming.
He doesn't like what the war has done to his lifestyle. Pity the poor boy; he went from scion of a murderous regime to just another Abdul trying to make a buck. My conclusion about Salam, six months ago:
As a supposed insider, his opinions carry weight with his numerous readers in a way that official Pentagon briefings or U.S. press reports do not. They shouldn't, because those opinions still flow from his old elite ways, and from a lifetime of steep indoctrination in party thinking. He is interested in reworking the truth about the Baath party both to assuage his own guilt and to get himself a leg up in the chaotic new Iraq. But that doesn't make him an official agent of influence. It just makes him a quirky, iconoclastic Iraqi whose life of irresponsible leisure has come to an abrupt end. His anti-American spin reflects an unconscionable irresponsibility and an effort to save himself, and truth just gets in the way of that. Thus, he is an untrustworthy witness to history.
I think that last sentence has been proven right--Salam is completely untrustworthy. Yet the Guardian hired him anyway, and they're getting from him exactly what I expected and predicted--garbage designed to lessen the Baathists' brutality while undermining our war to free his people--from people like him.