[The liberation of the Iraqi people is a point of propaganda for the
Bush administration, who laud this as the secondary objective of
regime change in Iraq. It is also a point of some confusion for
people who believe Hussein's despotic and cruel rule should end; some
cite it as their primary reason for supporting a UN-led or even
US-led assault on Iraq.
In his new "Letter to an Unknown Iraqi" published yesterday in the
Washington Post's Outlook section, playwrite and Pinochet-exiled
Chilean Ariel Dorfman explains in great moral detail why, in spite of
Iraqis' dire need for democratic change, he cannot support a war. He
discusses the terror Iraqis have experienced by Saddam's hand and
asks, "What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis
that liberation from tyranny?" Yet through a discussion of the aims
and likely effects of foreign intervention as both an outside
observer and as a survivor of tyranny himself, Dorfman determines
that this war is wrong and he cannot support it. About Iraq now and
Chile then, he says "if I had been given a chance years ago to spare
the lives of so many of my dearest friends, given the chance to end
my exile and alleviate the grief of millions of my fellow citizens, I
would have rejected it if the price we would have had to pay was
clusters of bombs killing the innocent, if the price was years of
foreign occupation, if the price was the loss of control over our own
destiny."
To the multitude of voices opposing a war in Iraq, Dorfman offers
his: moral, pained, compromised, and all-too-experienced. His essay
brings new light to this corner of the ongoing discussions about the
war.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45508-2003Feb21.html
Letter to an Unknown Iraqi
The Urge to Help, The Obligation Not To
By Ariel Dorfman
Sunday, February 23, 2003; Page B02
DURHAM, N.C.
I do not know your name, and that is already significant. Are you one of
the thousands upon thousands who survived Saddam Hussein's chambers of
torture, did you see the genitals of one of your sons crushed to punish
you, to make you cooperate? Are you a member of a family that has to live
with the father who returned, silent and broken, from that inferno, the
mother who must remember each morning the daughter taken one night by
security forces, and who may or may not still be alive? Are you one of the
Kurds gassed in the north of Iraq, an Arab from the south displaced from
his home, a Shiite clergyman ruthlessly persecuted by the Baath Party, a
communist who has been fighting the dictatorship for long decades?
Whoever you are, faceless and suffering, you have been waiting many years
for the reign of terror to end. And now, at last, you can see fast
approaching the moment you have been praying for, even if you oppose and
fear the American invasion that will inevitably kill so many Iraqis and
devastate your land: the moment when the dictator who has built himself
lavish palaces, the man who praises Hitler and Stalin and promises to
emulate them, may well be forced out of power.
What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that
liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United
States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in
the ouster of Saddam Hussein? Can those countless human rights activists
who, a few years ago, celebrated the trial in London of Chilean Gen.
Augusto Pinochet as a victory for all the victims on this Earth, now deny
the world the joy of seeing the strongman of Iraq indicted and tried for
crimes against humanity?
It is not fortuitous that I have brought the redoubtable Pinochet into the
picture.
As a Chilean who fought against the general's pervasive terror for 17
years, I can understand the needs, the anguish, the urgency, of those
Iraqis inside and outside their homeland who cannot wait, cannot accept any
further delay, silently howl for deliverance. I have seen how Chile still
suffers from Pinochet's legacy, 13 years after he left power, and can
therefore comprehend how every week that passes with the despot in power
poisons your collective fate.
Such sympathy for your cause does not exempt me, however, from asking a
crucial question: Is that suffering sufficient to justify intervention from
an outside power, a suffering that has been cited as a secondary but
compelling reason for an invasion?
Despite having spent most of my life as a firm anti-interventionist,
protesting American aggression in Latin America and Asia, and Soviet
invasions of Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, during the 1990s I gradually
came to believe that there might be occasions when incursions by a foreign
power could indeed be warranted. I reluctantly agreed with the 1994
American expedition to Haiti to return to power the legally elected
president of that republic; I was appalled at the lack of response from the
international community to the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda; I applauded
the Australian intervention to stop the massacres in East Timor; and,
regarding Kosovo, though I would have preferred the military action to have
taken place under the auspices of the United Nations, I eventually came to
the agonizing conclusion that ethnic cleansing on such a massive scale
could not be tolerated.
I am afraid that none of these cases applies to Iraq. For starters, there
is no guarantee that this military adventure will, in fact, lead to a
"regime change," or peace and stability for your region.
Unfortunately, also, the present affliction of your men and women and
children must be horribly, perversely, weighed against the impending
casualties and enormous losses that the American campaign will surely
cause. In the balance are not only the dead and mutilated of Iraq (and who
knows how many from the invading force), but the very real possibility that
such an act of preemptive, world-destabilizing aggression could spin out of
control and lead to other despots preemptively arming themselves with all
manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to Armageddon. Not to mention
how such an action seems destined to recruit even more fanatics for the
terrorist groups who are salivating at the prospect of an American
invasion. And if we add to this that I am unconvinced that your dictator
has sufficient weapons of mass destruction to truly pose a threat to other
countries (or ties to criminal groups who could use them for terror), I
have to say no to war.
It is not easy for me to write these words.
I write, after all, from the comfort and safety of my own life. I write to
you in the knowledge that I never did very much for the Iraqi resistance,
hardly registered you and your needs, sent a couple of free books to
libraries and academics in Baghdad who asked for them, answered one, maybe
two, letters from Iraqi women who had been tortured and had found some
solace in my plays. I write to you harboring the suspicion that if I had
cared more, if we all had, there might not be a tyrant today in Iraq. I
write to you knowing that there is no chance that the American government
might redirect to a flood of people like you the $200 billion, $300 billion
this war would initially cost, no real interest from those who would
supposedly liberate you to instead spend that enormous amount of money
helping to build a democratic alternative inside your country.
But I also write to you knowing this: If I had been approached, say in the
year 1975, when Pinochet was at the height of his murderous spree in Chile,
by an emissary of the American government proposing that the United States,
the very country which had put our strongman in power, use military force
to overthrow the dictatorship, I believe that my answer would have been, I
hope it would have been: No, thank you. We must deal with this monster by
ourselves.
I was never given that chance, of course: The Americans would never have
wanted to rid themselves, in the midst of the Cold War, of such an
obsequious client, just as they did not try to eject Saddam Hussein 20
years ago, when he was even more repressive. Rather, they supported him as
a bulwark against militant Iran.
But this exercise in political science fiction (invade Chile to depose
Pinochet?) at least allows me to share in the agony created by my own
opposition to this war, forces me to recognize the pain that is being
endured at this very moment in some house in Basra, some basement in
Baghdad, some school in Tarmiyah. Even if I can do nothing to stop those
government thugs in Iraq coming to arrest you again today, coming for you
tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, knocking once more at
your door.
Heaven help me, I am saying that if I had been given a chance years ago to
spare the lives of so many of my dearest friends, given the chance to end
my exile and alleviate the grief of millions of my fellow citizens, I would
have rejected it if the price we would have had to pay was clusters of
bombs killing the innocent, if the price was years of foreign occupation,
if the price was the loss of control over our own destiny.
Heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad
world than about the future of your unprotected children.
Ariel Dorfman, a native of Chile, teaches at Duke University. His latest
books are "Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General
Augusto Pinochet" (Seven Stories Press) and "In Case of Fire in a Foreign
Land: New and Collected Poems From Two Languages" (Duke University Press).
c 2003 The Washington Post Company