now, there’s a thought

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the latest public intellectual to examine both the situation in Iraq and his conscience. Like the rest of us supporters of the overthrow of Saddam—”liberal hawks,” I suppose—he is torn about what we should do. He concludes that we should do anything and everything that might work.

But not before looking at the roots of the present problem. After finding fault with the neoconservatives whose ideas caught fire with Bush as they had with Cheney before him, and after damning the non-planning Unholy Trio (Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney), Wieseltier makes a brave and controversial statement:

It seems increasingly clear to me that the blame for the violence in Iraq, and for its frenzied recoil from what Fouad Ajami hopefully called “the foreigner’s gift,” belongs to the Iraqis. Gifts must not be only given, they must also be received. I say this without condescension. Quite the contrary: the denial of the historical agency of the people of Iraq is the real condescension. For three-and-a-half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. What have they done with their freedom?

As terrorized and intimidated as the Iraqi people are—and I want to make clear that I am sickened by the violence and by our seeming inability to stop it, and that the level of violence makes life in that country unacceptable by even the lowest standards that we would tolerate in the West—I have to agree that they are free—free of the totalitarian nightmare of Saddam and the Baath party. And this is not a matter of semantics. Nor are American “chickenhawks” the only ones talking about it.

In August, I quoted Mohammed at Iraq the Model, who wrote about his visit to Egypt (which we in the West consider “free,” if “authoritarian”) [emphasis mine]:

It may sound a bit odd but that’s really what I felt in Egypt that I don’t feel in my war-torn city; for the first time in 3 years I felt the restrains of government…I told one of my colleagues I feel safe in Baghdad despite the dangers, I may feel afraid of terrorists or random violence but I never fear the government and that’s not only how I feel, Iraqis are not afraid of expressing their differences with the authority because we in Iraq have more or les became part of that authority the day we elected our representatives while terrorists and militias are nothing more than temporary phenomenon that unlike constitution and elections have no solid foundations.

Mohammed paints a picture of Iraqis who are willing to fight for their freedom:

Of course our democratic foundations need a lot of work to meet our aspirations but we are walking this road and none of us is willing to go back and maybe the three thousands that were murdered last month tell that Iraqis are ready to pay the price and fight to preserve and improve our achievements. The magnitude of the change explains the confusion in some of our steps but we have not given up and we’re not ready to surrender, not yet.

In the absence of evidence about Iraqi freedom fighters such as Mohammed describes, people like me—who honor the freedom fighters we knew because we are the beneficiaries of their sacrifices—are left with grave doubts about Iraqis. Such as I expressed here.

This does not remove one iota of the responsibility we bear for our own terrible failures—of commission and omission—in Iraq. Nevertheless: Iraqis do have two of the freedoms—freedom of expression and freedom of the press—that constitute political freedom. And it is not only condescending but destructive to deprive them the dignity of human agency (and, yes, responsibility for their agency, or non-agency) which makes them responsible for the blood they spill, too, and for making a better life for their children.