IT'S MORNING IN IRAQ:

Schroeder writes off the Iraqi people (David Frum, September 25 2002, National Post)

By coincidence, I happened to spend the evening of the German election in the apartment of Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, and the likely leader of a democratic post-Saddam Iraq. Does it seem ridiculous to think of a democratic Iraq? Not more ridiculous than it would have, 60 years ago, to talk about a democratic Germany.

Chalabi showed me a photograph taken in Baghdad at that darkest year of Hitler's tyranny, 1942. Eight Middle Eastern men stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Western pin-striped suits: Three of them were Sunni Muslims, three were Shi'ites, one was Christian, and the last was Jewish. They were the directors of the Iraq Vegetable Oil Company -- a major exporter of farm products and the largest firm then listed on the Baghdad stock exchange. One of them was Chalabi's own father. That was what Iraq used to be: not a perfect democracy by any means -- but a society that might have evolved toward a better and freer future.

That evolution was brutally interrupted. Iraq's relatively benign monarchy was overthrown in 1958 -- since then, Iraq no longer grows enough grain to export. The men in the photo were driven into exile andtheir property confiscated. The stock exchange was closed. The Jews were robbed and expelled; the Christians oppressed; the Shi'ites massacred. Dictator followed dictator, each crueler and more dangerous than the last -- until we reach Saddam, the cruelest and most dangerous of them all.

Where would Germany be if the Western powers had not believed that it could be something different and better than it was in 1942? Why are we so determined to believe that Iraq can never be different and better than it is today?

For all the terror and horror of modern Iraq, it has produced an exile leadership that is more humane and decent than that of any any other Arab country. When the United States (and its friends and allies) fights Saddam, it will not be fighting against Iraq - it will be fighting for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. America and its allies will be fighting against the Iraqi dictatorship. They will be fighting for the Iraqi people. That's a fight that the confident new united Germany ought to understand and support.

Though no fan of either Henry Kissinger or Madeleine Albright, both of whom served the cause of democracy poorly here and abroad, I did find it touching today when they began their Senate testimony by noting that each came from a nation (Germany & Czechoslovakia respectively) that had been freed from tyranny in large part by the efforts of the United States and that each became Secretary of State of the United States. I honestly don't know the answer to this, but I wonder if post-War Germany has ever had a foreign-born foreign minister, or anyone foreign-born in any other position of genuine power?
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 26, 2002 3:57 PM