Tuesday, November 13, 2007

HW 31: Responding to Riverbend.

After reading through Riverbend's entries from August 31 to September 16, 2003 of "Baghdad Burning", I came across a post on September 7, that spoke more of Rumsfeld's accounts in Iraq. Rumsfeld spoke poorly of Iraqi's and the country of Iraq comparing Iraq to the city of Chicago, which bothered Riverbend. Riverbend spoke of the several attacks on the American forces and continued into her emails that she received from people who sympathize with her and her thoughts and views of Rumsfeld's actions. One email agreed with Rumsfeld's ways and spoke of him as a heroic character. It explained that the Iraqi's should be ashamed of themselves, like Riverbend, for their own actions. "It also claims that I must be a Ba'athist because, of course, who else *except* a Ba'athist would be against this noble war?!" (Riverbend 52). I had never heard of Ba'athist's, so I further looked into this to find out who they were, and why the email-er would make such a comment towards Riverbend. Also known as the Arab Socialist Ba'th Party, were founded in 1945 as a left-wing, secular Arab nationalist political party. They had various branches in Arab countries, yet the most prominent branches remained in Syria and Iraq. In 1966, the Syria and Iraqi branches split into two and became rivals. The Ba'athists gained control of Iraq and ran the country on two separate occasions. The Arabic word Ba'th which is connected to the term Ba'athist, means "resurrection". This largely connects to the accounts of the book as a hole, and comes to terms with a large part of Iraq's past history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba%27athist

1 comment:

Tracy Mendham said...

Good job on all parts of the assignment, except incomplete citations. Use a signal phrase before and in-text citation after the sourced material to show the reader where it comes from. In the works cited entry, you need more than the URL: also give the name of article, the name of the website, and the date you accessed the material