IT'S AMAZING WHAT TWO ASPIRINS AND A STIFF SHOT OF OBJECTIVE MORALITY CAN DO

A new Iraq, a new Middle East (Christopher Hitchens, National Post, November 28th, 2005)

I was once asked why I wanted to become a journalist. I replied that it was because I didn't want to rely on the press for information. And to personally meet people like ambassador Ziad; or Jalal Talabani, the first elected President of Iraq; or the men who led the guerrilla war against Saddam in Iraq's southern marshes for 18 years -- to speak with such people is to feel very humble.

Also, in my case, very angry: Because when I read The New York Times or the Washington Post, or, indeed, some of the Canadian press, it's as if these people did not exist. You would not know that Iraq were now governed by its own people, with a parliament and six television channels and 21 newspapers.

One must remember that just three years ago, possessing a satellite dish in Iraq would invite death -- not just for you, but for your whole family. Remember, too, that the country's ancient marshes, home to a civilization that's remembered from Biblical times, were drained and burned by Saddam Hussein to destroy a Shiite people he loathed. The fire from that atrocity, considered by UNESCO to be the greatest environmental crime ever committed, was so intense that it could be seen from an orbiting space shuttle.

But the larger question must be this: Are we witnessing the beginning of something larger in the region? I want to give a few examples that I think will help answer this question.

First, consider the recent UN investigative report on the killing of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri. The report shines a light on the sinister role of Syria, where the Baath party, not unlike its former counterpart in Baghdad, is based on an ethnic minority that has repressed the country for two generations. That regime now appears to be in the process of implosion thanks to its death-squad policies and support for mobster rule in Lebanon.

Lebanon itself, on the other hand, is experiencing a mass movement among Lebanese of all confessions -- Sunni, Shiite, Mennonite, Christian, Greek Orthodox and Druze -- to recover the sovereignty of their country after decades of occupation and cruelty. It has been accomplished peacefully by civil society, by people simply folding their arms and expressing defiance until the Syrian army grudgingly withdrew.

Kamal Jumblatt, a friend of mine, is the leader of the Lebanese Socialist Party and the country's Druze community. Though a frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy in the past, he says openly that he doesn't believe this moment could have arrived in Lebanon if the keystone state of tyranny in the region -- Saddam's Baathist Iraq -- had not been defeated. He believes this is the key event that inaugurated this Lebanese renaissance.

Am I willing to take his word for it? No. I'm not willing to take anybody's word for it. But it is an impressive bit of testimony against Jumblatt's previously declared interests.

Another example comes by way of Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the heroic Egyptian social scientist who was sent to solitary confinement for criticizing his country's one-party political system. This led to an international movement that successfully campaigned for his release. And he is now a man toasted from one end of Egypt to the other as the model of the brave, independent intellectual.

I had a long discussion with him at a conference of Arab democrats in Qatar a few months ago, and his basic message was that without the intervention in Iraq, the logjam would never have been broken. The tundra would never have unfrozen. The wall would never have come down [...]

At the time, people thought it would never happen. The Soviet glacier would never melt. The Berlin Wall would never fall. That's what the foreign-policy "realists" all believed. That's why Henry Kissinger wouldn't have Solzhenitsyn --the real Solzhenitsyn -- invited to the White House.

Now, it seems that the Arab Middle East, the world's most benighted region, the region that has been sunk in the most oppression, the most ignorance, the most backwardness and the most cruelty, may not be immune to the historical force that swept the Philippines in the early 1980s, that led to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and which has recently taken hold in Ukraine.

And yet some people look at these inspiring developments and they don't see progress. They see only one thing: instability. We're used to Syria's Assad dynasty. What's going to happen if it goes?

This is the querulous voice of the natural conservative, the one who fears change. And so, increasingly in Washington, you hear those who say: Regime change is imprudent. What happens if the Saudi Arabian government is challenged? How will we know who's boss? How will we know what proxies we should be ruling through? How will the CIA know which bit of the military to use for its next coup?"[...]

Often the most naive are the most cynical. Such "realists" as Scowcroft believe themselves to be hard-boiled. In fact, they're very soggy. They make unreliable moral and political guides.

As for me, I've picked different guides -- my liberal-minded comrades in Iraq, Kurdistan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. And I'm going to be with them, win or lose.

This was the speech he made just a few hours after he lay "bleary" in a Toronto hotel fulminating against religion.