THE SAND WALL

  Artículo de THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN en  “The New York Times” del 13.04.2003

UMM QASR, Iraq

As Berlin Walls go, the 20-foot-high dirt berm around Iraq's southern port of Umm Qasr — the first wall to fall in the liberation of Iraq — isn't much to look at, but it's a fitting symbol for this war. It is a sand wall, easily breached by American power, exposing a rotten dictatorship with little popular support on the other side. This area is full of regimes protected by such sand walls.

But unlike the Berlin Wall, whose fall unleashed a flowering of freedom all across Eastern Europe, the fall of the Sand Wall alone will not do that. There are still two other walls holding back the explosion of freedom in the Arab East — much harder walls — that will also have to fall.

The first is the wall in the Arab mind. I hit my head against that wall two weeks ago in Cairo, while discussing the war with Egyptian opposition journalists in Feshawi's teahouse, the writing hangout of Naguib Mahfouz. These journalists could see nothing good coming from the U.S. "occupation" of Iraq, which they insisted was being done only to put Arabs down, strengthen Israel and extract oil.

Such encounters made clear to me that America was not just at war with Saddam, but with Saddamism: an entrenched Arab mind-set, born of years of colonialism and humiliation, that insists that upholding Arab dignity and nationalism by defying the West is more important than freedom, democracy and modernization.

Throughout this war, Saddamism was peddled by Al Jazeera television, Arab intellectuals and the Arab League. You cannot imagine how much distress there is among certain Arab elites that the people of Iraq preferred liberation by America to more defiance under Saddam. The morning after Baghdad was liberated, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, editor of The Gulf News, wrote, like so many of his colleagues: "This is a heartbreaking moment for any Arab, seeing marines roaming the streets of Baghdad."

The wall of Saddamism, which helped bad leaders stay in power and young Arabs remain backward and angry, was as dangerous as Saddam. "The social, political, cultural and economic malaise in this part of the world had become a threat to American security — it produced 9/11," said Shafeeq Ghabra, president of the American University of Kuwait. "This war was a challenge to the entire Arab system, which is why so many Arabs opposed it. The war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq [in 1991] was outpatient surgery. This war was open-heart surgery."

But this open-heart surgery will succeed in toppling both Saddam and Saddamism only if we are successful in creating a healthy Iraq — an Arab state where people can find dignity, not just by saying no to the West, but by building a decent, tolerant, modernizing society that they can be proud of, an Arab state where people can speak the truth and that other Arabs would want to emulate. The widespread looting that has followed the fall of Saddam tells me just how hard that will be. So far, all that we have unleashed in Iraq is chaos, not freedom. There is no civil society here. We are starting from scratch.

And then we must also take down the third wall — the wall of cement, fear and barbed wire being erected between Israelis and Palestinians. We must defuse this conflict. If we let this Israeli-Palestinian wall stand, it will reinforce the wall of Saddamism. Arab dictators will hide behind this conflict as an excuse not to change, Arab intellectuals will use it to delegitimize U.S. power out here, and the enemies of the new leaders in Iraq will use it to embarrass them for working with us.

When one of the Egyptian journalists at Feshawi's insisted that we were out to "occupy Iraq," I quoted to him a line from Colin Powell: America is as powerful as any empire in history, but when it has invaded other countries the only piece of land it has ever asked for was a tiny plot to bury its soldiers who would not be returning home. He actually smiled at that.

The moment reminded me of something the Arab columnist Rami Khouri liked to say, that Arabs for too long have seen the strength of America, but not the "goodness" of America. Partly that's because their media willfully distorted what we did, and partly it's because America has used its power out here more to defend oil and Israel than democracy. This war in Iraq was meant to bring the idealistic side of U.S. power into the Arab world.

Our task now is to apply that idealism to rebuilding Iraq and resolving the Palestine question. If we do it right, I am certain the other walls in this region will be taken down by the people themselves — and never again will we have to ask for even the tiniest plot of land to bury our soldiers here.