Democracy Isn't For Our Friends Only by Robert Fisk

[kpete]

Published on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Democracy Isn't For Our Friends Only
by Robert Fisk

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How terrible to speak with those who have killed our sons. How unspeakable to converse with those who have our brothers' blood on their hands. No doubt that is how Americans who believed in independence felt about the Englishmen who fired upon them.

It will be for the Iraqis to deal with al-Qaida. This is their burden. Not ours. Yet throughout history, we have ended up talking to our enemies.

We talked to the representatives of the emperor of Japan. In the end, we had to accept the surrender of the German Reich from the successor to Adolf Hitler. And today, we trade happily with the Japanese, the Germans and the Italians.

The Middle East was never a successor to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, despite the rubbish talked by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. How long will it be before we can throw away the burden of this most titanic of wars and see our future, not as our past, but as a reality?

Surely, in an age when our governments no longer contain men or women who have experienced war, we must now lead a people with the understanding of what war means. Not Hollywood. Not documentary films. Democracy means real freedom, not just for the people we choose to have voted into power.

And that is the problem in the Middle East.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0131-20.htm