Freedom isn’t free.N…

Freedom isn’t free.

No, it’s not just ad copy for “Rainbow Six 3”. It’s not just the title of an excellent blog post by a teenager on the Fallujah killings. It’s a fact of life. John Adams said, “Posterity–you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.” That is the opportunity we have given the people of Iraq; the chance for freedom.

But is this sort of freedom ready to go in Iraq? Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta Force was just interviewed on Fox News, and his observation is spot on. “Jeffersonian democracy wasn’t ready to just spring up from the ground. It’s going to take some time.” A generation or more has grown up in Iraq afraid of the government and perhaps even distrustful of law enforcement in general. This is not going away overnight, in spite of a transfer of sovereignty scheduled for June 30. It doesn’t take a political scientist to realize that democracy will grow in fits and starts in Iraq, quite possibly for another generation. People who will (and make no mistake about it, they will) point out that, later on in the year, things will be going rough and that violence hasn’t abated in Iraq will only be doing that to score political points. Our own country had it’s problems deciding how it would be governed, both at its inception and later on during the Civil War. Iraq has a few strikes against it that perhaps we didn’t back then; a foreign country had to liberate them from their oppression (which doesn’t do much for national pride), supporters of the overthrown government are fighting back (we had a Tea Party, but they blow up hotels), and even those who were released from the Hussein–religious sects mostly–want to simply replace the old oppression with their style of oppression. Their freedom is coming at a high cost, with much of it being paid by foreign countries.

We’ve given them a republic, if they can keep it. It will take some care & feeding, but if the people of Iraq will remember that their freedom wasn’t free, as I think some in our country have forgotten, they’ll keep it, and it will keep them.

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