Justin Raphael: Iraqi freedom depends on American order

Astride the Tigris and the Euphrates, where civilization began its evolution thousands of years ago, radical Iraqis are giving violent voice to the odd notion that democratic society can be created overnight. But as radical Shiites stage an uprising across Iraq, Americans should not wonder whether Iraq resembles Vietnam, but whether militia leader-cum-religious cleric Moktada al-Sadr resembles Saddam.

The latter directed his decades of totalitarian repression, arbitrary executions and political murder against the religious majority of Shiite Muslims, most violently during the long war with Shiite Iran. Only a few years ago, in 1999, al-Sadr's father and two brothers were murdered by suspected Saddam agents. Islamic radicals vividly recall the defeat of the Moors, the fall of the Ottomans and the creation of Israel. But how quickly these terrorists forget when it comes to the difference between a temporary American administration and a permanent Baathist regime.

The Shiite uprising is nominally a reaction to the closing of the al-Hawza newspaper and the arrest of an al-Sadr associate for the murder of a moderate, cooperative Shiite cleric. To call these grievances is to legitimize the illegitimate -- the cheered dragging of bodies through public squares, the anti-American vitriol of those who shelter their bodies and rhetoric at religious sites -- but in an odd way, they go further than any weapon of mass destruction to justify our actions in Iraq. If this is how the Arab world responds to freedom, we are in bigger trouble than we thought.

True, the sight of American troops padlocking a once-outlawed Shiite press does, at first glance, seem reminiscent of a Baathist past. However, if there is anything Iraqis must learn, it is that principles are more important than symbols. Free speech, even in America, is not absolute; there is no liberty of incitement. In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority shut down al-Sadr's newspaper for advocating precisely the kind of violence we have seen in the past week. This was not yelling fire in a theater, but burning civilian Americans on the al-Jazeera stage.

Some have argued that our crackdown was self-fulfilling. But that would justify the murder of our troops on the grounds that an American standard of free speech is insufficient for people whose more critical relatives had their tongues cut out. It makes an "oppressor" out of America, not because it denied Iraqis the freedom it would have for itself, but because that freedom was not enough.

It would also mean that Iraqis deserve liberty but not order, an implicit concession that they don't deserve true freedom at all. It is easy, in our desire, to get out of Iraq and to erase vestiges of the Baathist past of law without freedom, to forget that there is no freedom without the rule of law. The arrest of al-Sadr's aide may have been provocative, but so would any attempt at judicial sanity to those still haunted by uncles and sons murdered in the middle of the night.

And though al-Sadr seems intent on forgetting his nightmares by causing some for his liberators, there is a difference between ordered liberty and totalitarianism, between justice and wanton terror. Hence, our self-conception as Iraqi liberator misses the mark; as such, our duty is not so much to guarantee the freedom Iraqis can only win for themselves as it is to establish order.

As Woodrow Wilson wrote, "Liberty is not itself government," and as last week's events illustrate, neither are all those who want to govern interested in liberty. Moktada al-Sadr and his extremists don't want to end terror but merely to change its victims.

It is nothing short of hubris for the free to tell others that freedom can wait. But the issue is not when, but if, Iraqis will be free. America, which already had a strong British tradition of common law and political liberty, spent at least eight years winning its freedom and four more tinkering with its government. Al-Sadr thinks that the transition from dictatorship to democracy can be done in a year. He seems all too willing to sacrifice the future for the sake of two months, when Iraq will be governed by its own civil libertarian, religiously sensitive constitution.

This is the Yasser Arafat principle that time is more important than peace, but we know both that democratic peace takes time and that those who mouth demands for the former have little affinity for the latter. Like Thomas Friedman, I am still waiting for the Palestinian Ghandi, the March on Baghdad or Damascus for Peace.

I do believe, however, that a silent majority of moderate Iraqis would join that march if they could, that they want to redeem their future from those who promise merely an inversion of the past. If they wish to ever truly forget Saddam, Iraqis should remember the words of Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Order is in our hands, freedom is in theirs.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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