HW 25: Summary of the Foreword and Introduction to Baghdad Burning

In the beginning of the book Baghdad Burning, by Riverbend, there is a foreword and introduction to the actual book itself. These two parts of the writing are a summary of the authors background and a brief background about when and where the events in the book take place. In the foreword to the book, written by Ahdaf Soueif, it mentions that Riverbend is a young Iraqi woman in her mid-twenties who is writing about what its like to just live day-to-day in a city ravaged by war and foreign occupation. The introduction is written by James Ridgeway. He breaks it up into 5 different sections; Background, The Gulf War and After, the 2003 War, The Puppet Show, and Liberated Iraq. Ridgeway talks about how the U.S. has placed "puppets" in charge of governing Iraq and how they are going to set up fake elections in which one of these puppets magically wins the chance to lead the country under its new forced American style of government. He also goes on to explain how the power struggle to control the major oil dumps in the middle east has developed over time dating back to the break up of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. He talks about how the Bush administration used faulty claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to declare war against Saddam Husein. Ridgeway ends the intro by saying that it appears the U.S. occupation is pushing the country to a civil war and may lead to a break up of the country in the long term because the U.S. cannot maintain control of security in the country with all the different political groups fighting for control of it.