BAGHDAD, BLOGS, AND BEYOND: Diana of Letter from Gotham writes, “I alternate between wanting to scream at Riverbend [of Baghdad Burning] and saying to myself, ‘Whoa. You haven’t been thru what she’s been thru. You haven’t walked a mile in her moccasins. Nobody’s bombed you. You haven’t lived under a foreign occupation. Albany doesn’t count. And remember — she’s 24. Even if you cannot remember being 24.’

“…Whatever the case, I am positive we are hearing a very Upper East Side version of the occupation.”

That may well be. As Salam Pax has pointed out, the various Iraqi bloggers aren’t representative of the entire Iraqi people. I mean, American bloggers aren’t a representative sampling, so it would be truly bizarre if Iraqi bloggers were. Baghdad, in particular, is the seat of government, so you’d expect that the fall of the dictatorship would cause (even) more turmoil and unemployment there than elsewhere.

Baghdad’s also a big city. What happens there is crucial. And the perceptions and opinions of educated, tech-savvy people are likely to have disproportionate influence in Iraq, just as they do here. So that’s one reason to be really interested in what Iraqi bloggers have to say. That’s one reason I link to these bloggers. (That, and several of them write really well.)

And another reason is that I want to bring publicity and encouragement to the tiny, growing Iraqi blogosphere. The Iranian blogosphere is one of the forces helping to slowly, slowly pry that country open. Presumably, though I don’t know the history here, Iranian blogging started in a tiny and unrepresentative pocket of the population. Now it’s spread to a… well, to a larger and slightly more representative pocket, anyway. I want the same thing to happen in Iraq, and I think that becomes more likely as more people know that Iraqi bloggers are out there.

This isn’t a rebuttal of Diana’s post, by the way. It’s just something prompted by her post: an examination of the lens through which I view the lens through which Riverbend views her city.

Speaking of, this is eminently believable, and disheartening. Gah. Your tax dollars at work.