Riverbend describes the effect this daily assault has on her, her family, and her friends. Some of the most powerful anecdotes are about the effect the occupation has had on children. She describes watching an old black and white movie with her family on one of the few nights with electricity. It is a romance, and the two lovers on screen are sharing a kiss in a candle-lit room. Riverbend’s youngest niece can’t understand why they would use candles. “The difficulty of explaining romance to a 7-year-old,” writes Riverbend, “is nothing compared to the difficulty of explaining the ‘romance’ of a darkened room and candles—especially if the 7-year-old has associated candles to explosions and blackouts her whole life.”

Children grow up fast in a war zone. “No, no one is 13 anymore. No one is 24 anymore…everyone is 85 and I think I might be 105.” The war and occupation have robbed an entire generation of their youth, and tens of thousands of them of their lives.

If Baghdad Burning were simply a collection of anecdotes about daily life under occupation, it would make for a fascinating read, but what sets Riverbend’s writing apart is her ability to weave together descriptions of the life of her family with discussion of political, social, and cultural issues. She is brilliant at exposing the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s claims that this is a war of democracy against fundamentalism, a war of liberation against those who wish to impose tyranny. Riverbend describes how under the provisional government appointed by the Americans, women (including herself) are pressured to leave their jobs, how prominent women school principals are pressured into resigning and murdered when they refuse. The American occupation has not weakened fundamentalism, it has sanctioned it, bringing fundamentalist parties like the Da’awa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)—who had little support in Iraq prior to the war—into the government and giving them immense power.

After realizing the folly of dismantling the Iraqi Army, the government even went so far as to turn over security to newly deputized members of the Badr Brigade, SCIRI’s paramilitary fundamentalist militia. The division here is not between democracy and fundamentalism, but between those who are willing to serve as puppets for the American occupation and those who are resisting it.

Riverbend also shows how both the Americans and the Iraqi government are using ethnic rivalries to sow division within Iraqi society. “People believe that the ancient ‘divide and conquer’ is being employed. Instead of having Iraqis, Shia and Sunnis and Christians, united in a struggle (peaceful or otherwise) against occupation, it’s easier to have Iraqis fighting each other.”

Finally, Riverbend is remarkable in her ability to understand the common interests between Iraqis and the soldiers occupying her city. Of course, there are days when she hates them. She spends an entire blog describing the exact days when she hated the American troops: the day during the invasion she spent listening to bombs drop, waiting for the one that would end her life; the day an American tank collided with the car of a family friend, killing the husband and two young children, but sparing the mother; the day American troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of school children in Fallujah, killing more than a dozen. But other days are different:

It always saddens me to see that the majority of them are so young. Just as it isn’t fair that I have to spend my 24th year suffering this whole situation, it doesn’t seem fair that they have to spend their 19th, 20th, etc. suffering it either. In the end, we have something in common—we’re all the victims of decisions made by the Bush administration.