Berlin to Baghdad
Building democracy isn't easy, but there's ample reason for hope.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, April 11, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
"It was really only with the astonishing televised events from China's Tiananmen Square, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Eastern Europe, that the world's people began to see that they were no longer operating as political and economic islands. Politics, currencies, trade, and yes, basic political values are all being drawn together into an evolving consensus of what constitutes a world order. The Saddam Husseins of the world would wreck this. Their piracy would constantly shatter and retard the aspirations of workers at all levels of the world's economic system."
--Review & Outlook, Aug. 15, 1990
At the time those words were written, Saddam's storm troopers had invaded Kuwait's oil fields. Nearly 13 years later, the world watched its TV screens as a small Iraqi boy chased after the bloated, scuffed head of Saddam Hussein's iron idol to himself, slapping it with a shoe.
In the days, weeks and months ahead you will read much punditry and learned scholarly commentary on how difficult it will be for the Arab people, now cheering through Iraq's streets, to conduct themselves in an orderly political manner. That is to say, as the civilized people of, say, France and Germany conduct their politics. And that is surely true. It will be very difficult.
It always is.
Iraq's Arabs, after all, are mere humans and when humans are tossed together in a context of free politics, they tend, as we learned in our contested presidential election of 2000, to want to deny the moral and political legitimacy of their opposition. As a free-speech advocate in the U.S. said only recently in front of several million people, George Bush is a "fictitious" President. Politics, like all swamps, breeds odd creatures.
So when we start reading and hearing every day that this or that Iraqi opposition group is undermining the process and "raising questions" about America's intentions for Iraqi self-governance, let us try to recall some of the still-fresh lessons of history.
Around 1950, after some 50 million people had died in World War II to escape another psychopathic nut, the whole population of Eastern Europe ended up in a prison called communism. They didn't let you leave. Some tried to escape twice, in 1956 and 1968, but failed. The men who governed Eastern Europe in this manner were of a seamless piece with the man who, since 1979, governed Iraq. They had all the guns, which gives the misimpression of a quiet people.
All of Eastern Europe is now free, and many of its newly free nations were part of the willing coalition that just freed Iraq. But before we conclude by year's end that the fractious Iraqi Arabs are beyond the civilizing bath of multiparty politics, let us recall how Eastern Europe became what it is today.
It wasn't easy. Despite the deserved euphoria in the wake of hammers knocking down the symbolic wall of repression, the political attribute common to all these nations was systemic instability and dealing with the devil.
Berlin 1989 and Baghdad 2003 (AP photos)
In 1989, mere months before he was to become the president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was in prison. Lech Walesa that year, attempting to form a coalition government in Poland (after 10 years of effort by Solidarity), conceded the defense and interior ministries to the communists. In 1990, after Romania's freest election in 40 years, prominent newspaper editor Florica Ichim was hiding for her life in a Bucharest apartment, pursued by members of Ceausescu's old Securitate police, who with the newly elected government's assent smashed the offices of opposition parties. New, freer media will soon appear in Iraq, and it too will come under pressure from old political factions.
On Wednesday, a commentator for Al Jazeera said prophetically, "It is an earthquake, not just for Iraq but for the whole region." The only things we should predict now for the Middle East are events no one can foresee. We can't possibly predict which personalities may emerge to gain the assent and support of the Iraqi people. We know the names Chalabi, Talabani and Barzani. We don't yet know who may have emerged this week from Saddam's dungeons.
When in 1989 Hungary eased its police-state restrictions on border passage, and 10,000 East Germans flooded into Hungary, we editorialized on this page: "It is no longer appropriate to speak simply of 'Eastern Europe'. That monolithic phrase described an artificial political geography of sputtering economies, false politics and sad people." That seemed an apt description of the Middle East as well--before someone took a hammer to Saddam's statue.
Perhaps the heavy sands of Araby will smother this achievement in time. But some of us recall having no expectation of seeing the Berlin Wall fall in our lifetime. Why is it not as possible that 14 years after this particular liberation, we will look differently at the adjoining governments--and economies--of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia?
Hungary, incidentally, came under great counter-pressure back then from the still-communist governments of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania; Iraq likely will as well, including sabotage and violence, such as the mob murder of two clerics in Najaf yesterday. The politics of East Europe were beset for years by thugs who formerly belonged to the secret police; Iraq's fedayeen may do the same. Its striving democrats will need support, rather than carping, from the new coalition of democratic nations.
This is not an attempt to play Pollyanna in thrall to stirring images of freedom. It is an attempt to be hopeful. The last big year of political hope for the world was 1989. It didn't work out in Tiananmen Square in June. The statue then, of liberty, was made of papier-mache; state power won and smashed the statue. The year got better for the cause of individual freedom, reaching its apotheosis with the fall in November of the wall across Berlin.
Was it grandiose for Donald Rumsfeld this week to liken the toppling of Saddam's giant statue to that famous, enduring leap forward for freedom? Maybe someone should find that big fellow who was swinging the hammer at Saddam's pedestal. Ask him.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110003328 |
