Today wasn't only a holiday (the 82nd anniversary of the Iraqi Armed Forces) but the sunniest day we had for a while. And what do I spend it doing? Ordering and arranging the "emergency supplies" in the storeroom upstairs. Now that the Iraqi trade minister has advised us to stock up no one is afraid of being accused of being screwy and paranoid. After spending a couple hours organizing the mess I think we have too much sugar and too little detergents. Back to the store. Boy is that shopkeeper making a fortune from the orders he is getting. I wonder if the Trade minister only gave that warning to empty their full storehouses, because if the war doesn't happen I am dumping all the stuff I bought in front of his house and demand he buys the lot. Pronto.
And in another unprecedented display of care towards the population the government started digging water wells in various residential areas in case of water shortages. In schools, near Party quarters and other controllable places. I am pushing for our own well at the house of Pax, but my father thinks I've gone mad. It's not expensive and they only drill a hole the size of a CD, 30 meters deep and disco! You've got water. Not for drinking of course, but still it's water. I mean it's my back they'll break dragging water back from the nearest well. (Actually I see his point this is paranoid and crazy, forget the well).
They have also called on the Ration Distribution centers to come and collect the rations for May which means we're getting three months' rations in February. Now I am sure they just want to empty the storehouses.

At around 11am I took a break to watch the speech. The first broadcast is always at eleven and they repeat it every couple of hours afterwards. If you are really interested in the content go read it here. It's the usual saddam-ese.

If anyone attempts to intimidate you, the people of Iraq, repel him and tell him that he is a small midget while we belong to a nation of glorious Faith, a great nation and an ancient people who have, through their civilization, taught the human race as a whole what man was yet to know.

The president was never a great orator, if you're looking for great then you have to listen to Mubarak, but this time saddam didn't even shout at us the scary bits. Just the "Da da da" school of oration. No fire. It makes you wonder. How come we didn't get a dictator who just burns you with the heat of his words? At least make me believe in what you say for the 20 minutes you're on TV. Not even that *sigh*
And boy was it heavily edited. Not bad camera transition stuff, but the "wait let's do that again" variety. Mid-sentence cuts. It probably doesn't mean anything but it is distracting.
There was one single inspired moment near the end of the speech. He looks straight at the camera (the rest of the speech he is looking up and down from paper to camera) and says:

The enemy ought to remember the terrible end of all empires that committed aggression against our people and nation in the past.

with long pauses between words, pure drama. Loved it. "al maseer.... al mashu'um..... li kul.... al imbiratoriat...... alti aatadat ala umatina"
OK so it doesn't make sense and I have no idea what he is talking about. What terrible end? All "aggressors" have come and gone with plenty of bounty, from Hulagu Khan to the British. But he scared the shit out of me.

I alway wondered what those leaflets the americans are dropping in the south of Iraq looked like, a friend of mine told me that the one he saw looked in color and size like a $100 bill (I did read somewhere that they dropped leafletrs "printed in green") pretty neat, I can imagine people runing around snatching them from the sky. Pennies from heaven. I wish I knew someone who lives there well enough to ask him to bring me one.
The latest, umm, droppings (sorry that was cheap) were not that good apparently. CNN.com has one on its site. here, take a look. I demand better graphic design. this looks like an ad for kids radio. I would love if they would have The Designers Republic as graphic consultants, that would make these leaflets true collector items. Come on, are you starting an Axis of Bad Taste now ?.

[salam]

Dear Raed
I know you probably won't be able to read this today, I hope by the time you will your aunt will be out of the icu and in good health. don't fall apart. your mom told me you had a fight with H earlier. don't do that over the phone. I am sure she loves you and whatever you or she said was because you both are under so much stress considering the circumstances.
I also want to thank you for being so unpredictable and showing up in baghdad on the 31st, who knows, this might be the last time we see each other for a while. I am very happy you came. you know, checking around I found out that quite a number of our friends and relatives are having guests from abroad spending their christmas week off here in baghdad. ziad is specially happy with his friend's visit (you know the one he keeps telling us is his only real friend ever, I guess we were chopped liver). what? is everybody saying goodbye? It feels like being on the titanic and knowing what will happen to it, so everybody just stop hugging and kissing, I won't die dammit.

[salam]

from this article in the NY Times
If this wasn't so sad it would be beautiful, the electricity went out at the Christmas week concert performed by the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. The last time I went was when they were still playing once a month at the Rasheed Theater, now they play at the Ribat Hall, everybody was sad when they were moved out of the Rasheed the Ribat is just an abandoned ruin with bad accoustics. They sounded depressing then and I stopped going. The Rasheed Theater, after the French Cultural Center stopped using it for perfomances of french artists and movies, is rented now for a "commercial" theater group prefering silly slapstick comedies.

salam .. how can i control the ****** font size? tell me some html ""secrits"" (plz) damn it ...

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Santa claus!!

The Iraqi trade minister Mouhamad Mahdi Saleh announced yedterday that Iraq has signed contracts with french Peugeot and german Volkswagen to buy 10,000 cars for distribution amongst the Iraqi population

my suggestion is that we add 2500 Russian Lada cars. 500,000 Chinese kids watches. 2500 Ssangyung cars [salam: Korean??]. 10 tons of spices from India and 10 from Pakistan....so who else needs a christmas present??? and 10 tons of coffee from Brazil, we don't want to repeat the fiasco with cars.

[salam]: Non-Iraqi readers will not get the Brazilian car reference. In the early eigties the Iraqi State Company for cars imported thousands and thousands of a VW Passat made in Brazil (rumor was that this was part of a clause in an arms deal or something, who knows?). this car was very cheap, it was everybody's second or third car in the house. your bratty kid wants a car? buy him a Brazili (which means brazilian). the problem was it was the worst car you can imagine. not suited for the heat of Iraqi summer it broke down spectacularly, the next batch was a bit better but still rubbish. until this day it is the most common and affordable car in iraq. It is so part of Iraqiness in the eighties there are songs about it. but it is still rubbish. Here is a picture of it and here is someone who thinks its so cool he devoted a page to his pix with it.

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[salam] la2 I tell you what, you write whatever you want in arabic, I will append a translation. ahaln ahlan, made my day.

well .. i would like to announce .. with pleasure ya3ni .. the launch of our arabic ""beta version"" release thank u ladies and gentelman and salams ~

Readying itself for full-scale war, the Iraqi trade minister, Mohammed Mehdi Saleh, said yesterday that everyone in Iraq should have a stockpile of food to last three months.

Panic attack? Well not really. We have been stockpiling long before the trade minister advised us to do so. Prices of everything storable or used for storage have gone up because of that. Powdered milk doubled, bottled water practically disappeared and the price of a 40 liter plastic barrel has gone up from 5,000 ID to 12,000 ID (that I regret not buying a month ago). It is the fact that he said it which is scary; they are not that frank usually.

A convoy of anti-war activists, likely to include dozens of British volunteers, will leave London next month to act as human shields protecting strategic sites in Iraq.

Oh please not again.

"These people will be distributed to vital and strategic installations in all Iraqi regions." said Saad Qasim Hammoudi, an official of the ruling Ba'ath party.

you’re just playing into their hands. I would have understood if they were getting humanitarian aid ready. Medicine, food transportable medical care units, anything but being human shields.

"Nobody is naive enough to believe that a superpower like the US is not going to bomb Iraq because there are peace people there," said Mary Trotochaud

so why are they coming, getting yourself killed won’t help anyone. If you want to help, be there at the border where a big number of refugees is expected, they will be scared, maybe injured and in need of help. Sitting in a power station hoping that it won’t get bombed is silly; we don’t have enough power now. I don’t care if an already defunct power plant gets bombed. Wait at the border with a small power generator and water treatment equipment. that is real help. Their hearts are in the right place and their support is much appreciated, but their efforts should not be abused. We do need you ALIVE.

A week ago Jonathan [The Head Heeb] posted a comment on my letter to raed (somewhere down there) specifically about me saying that I feel like I have betrayed my culture. I didn’t want to write a response at the time because I didn’t want to start another who/where/what thing going on. Been there, done that (hi Al *wink*, hope you are having great holidays). Hoping that everybody is too busy getting themselves into gear for New Year parties I thought I could sneak in a response and hope no one notices until it’s too late.
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You say : “It's easier to talk to people who share one's background and assumptions, but it's more rewarding to understand the rest of the world and to be understood in turn.”
Believe me I know this, I have been rewarded immensely. My life was not only enriched by all that I have been exposed to, but very much transformed. In the comments you wrote “I want to know about the Egyptian soap operas too. It's selfish of me, but I want to be a guest at the party” I don’t think that’s selfish, this is also the reason I read weblogs, even the ones which are very personal. It’s a glimpse into a world which I might have not seen before and usually is, as you said, very rewarding. The feeling of betrayal comes from somewhere else. There was a time when I thought that one of the best things that have happened to me is that I have not been “rooted” anywhere. I felt that I will manage to feel at home wherever I go. Culture, as in my cultural heritage, was not something I could betray because it was not part of how I saw myself.
But this has changed, in this day I am forced to identify myself with something I don’t fully believe in. They see a name, a passport and I am lumped with people and things I don’t think I belong with. Actually when I think about it things haven’t just changed over night, I was probably fooling my self or was a good chameleon. So instead of arguing with whoever I decided to stop fighting it. It is who I am after all, well sort of. The problem was that I found out my brain needed some serious re-wiring; I have major blank gaps and disagree with so much. Which leaves me in limbo. This is where the feeling of betrayal comes from. I can’t fully connect as much as I try. So if I do understand the lyrics Um Kalthum sings (I see you have used the Egyptian pronunciation ‘Kolsoum’) I can’t quote the classical poets whose poems she sings like my cousins do.

One more thing: thank you Ikram for your kind words and understanding. To use an Americanism: you just, like, totally get it. Thanks.
The bit about farsi-blogs is spot on.

Word of the day:
de-Saddamization

as seen on page 34 in the "Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq" report published by the Council on Foreign Relations [CFR]
if you don't feel like reading the whole report just take a look at the last 3 pages, "the three phased approach" the paper suggests is outlined in a chart.
there is another interesting article on that site:
Reconstruction: A Checklist for Would-be Nation-builders in Baghdad After the Fall of Saddam
It is the gist of that 35 pages paper. Some of it sounds like the list my mother would have given my baby-sitter.

Go slow, but steady, on democracy.
Strengthen Ties that Bind.
Mind the neighbors.

no no no wallahi I'm not ignoring you. aslan bil3akis. I called you on thursday around 11:30am, three times. I kept ringing but you didn't pick up. I know you know it's a call from baghdad so why didn't you pick up? I had nothing to do and thought we might chat a bit. I called your brother and talked with him instead.

mmm,, is he ignoring me?

Chena tova you hot pink minx.

The good news first. We are going to celebrate New Year's at my parents place, they are throwing a party and since the house will be a mess anyway I am occupying the upper floor for my partying purposes. Everyone is invited bring a friend, a bottle of whatever you drink and a candle. Make that lots of candles. The electricity situation is getting out of hand.
The last couple of days you were lucky if you live in an area where the blackout is for 5 hours a day only. We have been de-electrified for 7 hours today; the day is not over yet. Some areas in Baghdad have had 10 hours of darkness. And it is not improving. Other governorates are getting half an hour of electricity if at all.
There is an official explanation. They say maintenance. I say Bull. They are probably packing those generators away.
You learn to deal with the scheduled blackouts, you know when they are and for how many hours. But the last couple of days have been really bad. Very erratic, they turn it on and off whenever they like. We just freeze and thaw then freeze again. It has been very cold for the season and it is expected to get colder. The prices of kerosene heaters have gone thru the roof. There is a local factory, state owned, which manufactures these heaters, 130,000 Iraqi Dinars a pop. But buying one requires approval from the general manager. Don't ask. I can't figure why. It wouldn't be called bureaucracy otherwise.
Now take your newly acquired heater and stand in front of the company's building, someone will offer you 200,000 Iraqi Dinars for it within a minute. Look for it in the shops you will find it for 260,000 ID. That's free market economy isn't it? I decided it was cheaper to bring down an extra blanket.

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Because of these sudden electricity blackouts, this is the third time I write this post. I keep forgetting the save button. Not anymore, autosave came to the rescue, every 5 minutes.
A couple of days ago the NY Times published another article by John F. Burns. Does anyone know if there is a photo of him somewhere, because if I see him on the street I really want to tell him how off the mark he can get when he gets carried away. More on that later.

The Iraqi currency, the dinar, had gone into free fall, losing 25 percent of its value against the dollar.

It has been very weird with the dinar the last couple of weeks, it is floating between 2200 and 2300. yesterday at night when I went to exchange my hard earned dinars to $$ it was 2285, and the dealer expected it to go up a bit. Many of the wholesale shops at alshorja and kifah streets stop buying and selling the moment the dinar starts going crazy, which happens often enough. I went to buy a new monitor for my computer (my old one blew a fuse when the electricity came back with a surge, it made a zzzzttt-ppfffttt sound and died) and the dealer had to check for the price of the dollar before selling me the equivalent of $140, it is getting to be that silly.
Burns does suggest a reason:

somebody high in the government had dumped dinars on the market to buy tens of millions of dollars in a few hours.

very probable. But there is another reason; no one wants to hold on to eventually worthless Iraqi dinars. Prices of real estate and cars have gone up very quickly, almost doubling in very short periods, specially unbuilt land within Baghdad city limits. Investment loans with lower than low interest rates are being ignored. No one wants to have money floating around. And get all your gold out of the safe deposits as well. Some of you know the meaning of Farhud in Arabic. If a bomb will hit a bank it will be ‘farhud’ed. I am straying away from the subject. The point is not only high government officials buying dollars like crazy off the market, everybody else is also doing it.
Talking of money, there is a very pressing question. What are we going to do with all the notes; they all have saddam’s face on them. From the worthless 25 ID bill to the newly issued 10,000 ID note?
More from he srticle:

Last month, Uday's wings were clipped when the government suspended his newspaper after it published articles that seemed intended to expose incompetence and corruption in the government.

It is back in print, two days ago I walked into the office and found it on my desk, still being printed with the same smudgy cheap ink. You would think saddam’s son would use good materials.

If anybody but Saddam Hussein himself seems like the perfect totem for all that is past, it is Uday. Yet his posture now is to present himself as the one Iraqis can turn to, should they want a more modern man to lead them out of the dead end his father has led them to.

sorry what posture? Everyone except his closest “friends” know that he is a sick monster. He has already driven himself into a dead end before his father did. Families walk out quietly when he enters a restaurant, he is known to send one of his boys to bring him the women sitting at the closest tables to “join” him. People hate him, as much as they fear his father. So no one is looking for him to lead them anywhere. What a pointless thing to write.

Anyway since it is the season to be merry, here is a funny little story about him: In the early eighties the Iraqi Hunting Club had a new indoor swimming pool built. Quite big and state of the art. They decided to have some sort of a party to announce it’s opening. A nice classy affair. at around eleven Uday comes in with his entourage wearing a white tuxedo and top hat, there is still a photo of him in that tux being printed on calendars but without the top hat, has a couple of drinks, decides that the party is boring and to liven things up a bit commands everyone to jump into the swimming pool, and unleashes his dogs = bodyguards to push people into the pool. Has a good laugh and leaves, A fun guy eh?

Where_is_Salam?

ãÑÍÈÇ

can i kick u out of here salam?

OooOOoooOomAa sAaaLL !!!! one .. two .. three one .. two one .. here comes THE Raed :*)