On the contrary, with impeccable coherence you are sacrificing that political career to your convictions. Indeed, I apologise, sir. I also withdraw the ugly phrase which aggravated my injustice:
“If our culture has the same value as the one that imposes the burqa, why do you spend your summers in my Tuscany and not in Saudi Arabia?” Now I say: “Come when you want, sir. My Tuscany is your Tuscany. My home is your home.”
The final reason for my dilemma is the definition that Bush and Blair and their advisers give of this war: “A liberation war. A humanitarian war to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq.” Oh, no. Humanitarianism has nothing to do with wars. All wars, even just ones, even the legitimate ones, are death and destruction and atrocities and tears.
And this is not a liberation war, a war like the second world war. (By the way: neither is it an “oil war”, as the pacifists who never yell against Saddam or Bin Laden maintain in their rallies. Americans do not need Iraqi oil.) It is a political war. A war made in cold blood to respond to the holy war that the enemies of the West declared upon the West on September 11.
It is also a prophylactic war. A vaccine, a surgery that hits Saddam because, among the various focuses of cancer, Saddam is the most obvious and dangerous one.
He is also the obstacle (Bush and Blair and their advisers believe) that once removed will permit them to redesign the map of the Middle East as the British and the French did after the crash of the Ottoman empire.
To redesign it and to spread a Pax Romana, pardon, a Pax Americana, where freedom and democracy reign; where nobody bothers us any longer with attacks and massacres. Where everybody can prosper and live happily as in the fairy tales — nonsense. Freedom is not a gift, like a piece of chocolate, and democracy cannot be imposed with armies.
As my father said when he asked the anti-fascists to join the resistance and as I say when I talk to those who honestly believe in a Pax Americana, people must conquer freedom by themselves. Democracy comes from civilisation. And in both cases one must know what they consist in.
In Europe the second world war was a liberation war, not because it gave people those two pieces of chocolate — two novelties called liberty or freedom — but because it re-established them. And it did re-establish them because Europeans had lost them because of Hitler and Mussolini. Because they knew them and wanted them back.
The Japanese did not: true. In Japan, those two pieces of chocolate were somehow a gift, a refund for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Japan had already started its march towards progress and did not belong to the world that in my book I call “the mountain”. A mountain that for 1,400 years has not moved or changed, has not emerged from the abyss of its blindness. In other words, Islam.
The modern concepts of freedom and democracy are totally unrelated to the ideological texture of Islam, and totally opposed to the despotism and tyranny of theocratic states. In that ideological texture, it is God who commands, it is God who decides the destiny of man, and men are not the children of God: they are his subjects, his slaves. Inshallah — as God wants — inshallah.
Thus in the Koran there is no room for individual judgment, individual choice and freedom. There is no room for a regime that, at least in law, is based on equality and universal suffrage. In fact Muslims do not understand these modern concepts. They refuse them and hope to erase them from our lives by invading and conquering us.
Upheld by their stubborn optimism, the same optimism for which at Fort Alamo they fought so well and all died slaughtered by Santa Anna, Americans think that in Baghdad they will be welcomed as they were in Rome, Florence and Paris. “They’ll cheer us, throw us flowers,” a Washington egghead joyfully said to me.
Maybe. In Baghdad anything can happen. But after that? More than two-thirds of the Iraqis are Shi’ites who have always dreamt of establishing an Islamic republic of Iraq, and the Soviets too were once cheered in Kabul. They too imposed their pax. They even succeeded in convincing women to take off their burqas, remember? After a while, though, they had to leave. And the Taliban came.
Question: what if instead of learning freedom Iraq becomes a second Talibani Afghanistan? What if instead of becoming democratised by the Pax Americana the whole Middle East blows up and the cancer multiplies from country to country in a chain reaction? As a proud defender of the West’s civilisation, and decided to defend it to the last breath, without reservations I should join Mr Bush and Mr Blair barricaded in a new Fort Alamo.
Without reluctance I should fight and die with them. And this is the only thing about which I have no doubts at all.
Oriana Fallaci is the author, most recently, of The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli International, 2002). This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal