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Не им бери грижа на поляците, Дмитрий Иванович.


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Редактирано от - Devil на 01/2/2005 г/ 22:19:28

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February 1, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Stepping Out of the Tar Pit
By DAVID BROOKS

As I watched the images of Iraqis lining up to vote, even in the face of terrorists who threatened to wash the streets with blood, I couldn't help thinking of Whittaker Chambers.

Chambers broke with the Communist Party in 1938, testified against Alger Hiss in 1948, and then emerged as a melancholy but profound champion of freedom. Chambers once wrote a letter to William F. Buckley in which he explained that a former Communist has certain advantages in understanding the truly evil nature of his foe.

"I sometimes feel," he wrote, "that it takes a tainted mind to understand - to really understand - the threat of Communism. To really understand Communism is to have touched pitch: one's view of man is forever defiled. To understand Communism means to understand the terrible capacity of man for violence and treachery, an apprehension of which leaves one forever tainted."

André Malraux read Chambers's work and wrote to him, "You are one of those who did not return from hell with empty hands."

I thought of Chambers when I heard reporters in Iraq observe that beneath the joy and exhilaration that came with voting last Sunday, Iraqis showed something grimmer: a stern determination to not let evil triumph.

These Iraqis are people who, like Chambers, have spent their lives in hell and cannot have been unaffected by it. They have touched pitch and witnessed or participated in man's capacity for violence and treachery. They must be both damaged and toughened.

They lived most of their lives under the dense evil of Saddam's regime - the mass graves, the rape rooms, the chemical attacks, the wars against Iran. Totalitarian cruelty on that scale was bound to get into their heads.

As the U.S. toppled the Baath regime, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya wrote about one of his countrymen who had lost his brother and been imprisoned by Saddam. "Try to imagine the worst and still you will not come close to the physical pain this man has suffered. ... This is the human raw material you want to build democracy for."

And from the dense evil of Saddam, these people were thrust into the haphazard evil of the terrorists and the occupation. The Zarqawi terrorists commit murder in a mood of spiritual ecstasy, while the old Baathists feed their addiction to sadism and domination. These new monsters brought beheadings to the country, bombs in crowds of children and people with Down syndrome sent off to become unwitting suicide bombers.

And yet what we've witnessed in Iraq is a people's zigzag efforts to climb back from nihilism toward normalcy, from a universe in which the ballot is already filled out for you to a universe in which you make your own mark. This is not a small step.

When Saddam was first toppled, liberty turned immediately into anarchy. But as Michael Rubin, who has spent much of the past two years in Iraq, observed yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, gradually the habits of moderation have begun to develop - the habits of self-regulating liberty, compromise, tolerance and power-sharing.

And then came Sunday's act of mass heroism. On the Internet and in interviews, Iraqis tried to convey the tactile feel of their new migration to normalcy.

"Every person has realized that he's not fighting alone in this battle," one voter wrote. "I moved to mark my finger with ink. I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants."

They proudly described liberating themselves, finally making themselves the initiators of their own lives.

The journey back from where these people have been is not a straight shot, which we can readily understand. In Washington, senators make facile arguments about improving the training of Iraqi troops, trying to reduce problems of motivation to problems of technique. Ted Kennedy gave a speech last week blithely insisting that the terrorists are winning the war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Brent Scowcroft warned of incipient civil war, denigrating the Iraqis' ability to manage their own tensions.

In fact, these are a people who voted at higher rates in the face of death than we do in the face of inconvenience. These are a people who have used the campaign as a process of therapy and self-education. These people have just built the most democratic government in the Arab world.

They will surely face more war and tension and corruption. But they did not return from hell with empty hands. They came back with their fingers stained with ink.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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