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The urge to help, the obligation not to

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When it comes to Iraq, there are some questions with which any antiwar movement must grapple. The first and most pressing has to do with the Iraqi people themselves, who certainly deserve liberation from decades of repressive rule by a brutal dictator who hasn’t hesitated to employ any means to ensure his rule. The Iraqis have been promised “liberation” by the hawks of the Bush administration — liberation and democracy, in fact. Based on the administration’s recent negotiations with the Turks and the latest leaked plans for a postwar occupation, we already have a strong sense of what forms liberation and democracy might take. But wouldn’t any liberation, even into semi-colonial status, be better than rule by Saddam’s regime?

Below author and former exile from Pinochet’s Chile, Ariel Dorfman, considers these questions in his own always heartfelt fashion in an important piece that appeared in the Washington Post‘s Sunday Outlook section. Tomorrow, I’ll focus on another question that must be faced. Tom

The Urge to Help, The Obligation Not To
By Ariel Dorfman
The Washington Post
February 23, 2003

I do not know your name, and that is already significant. Are you one of the thousands upon thousands who survived Saddam Hussein’s chambers of torture, did you see the genitals of one of your sons crushed to punish you, to make you cooperate? Are you a member of a family that has to live with the father who returned, silent and broken, from that inferno, the mother who must remember each morning the daughter taken one night by security forces, and who may or may not still be alive? Are you one of the Kurds gassed in the north of Iraq, an Arab from the south displaced from his home, a Shiite clergyman ruthlessly persecuted by the Baath Party, a communist who has been fighting the dictatorship for long decades?

Whoever you are, faceless and suffering, you have been waiting many years for the reign of terror to end.

Ariel Dorfman, a native of Chile, teaches at Duke University. His latest books are Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories Press) and “In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems From Two Languages” (Duke University Press).

To read more Dorfman click here

I do not know your name, and that is already significant. Are you one of the thousands upon thousands who survived Saddam Hussein’s chambers of torture, did you see the genitals of one of your sons crushed to punish you, to make you cooperate? Are you a member of a family that has to live with the father who returned, silent and broken, from that inferno, the mother who must remember each morning the daughter taken one night by security forces, and who may or may not still be alive? Are you one of the Kurds gassed in the north of Iraq, an Arab from the south displaced from his home, a Shiite clergyman ruthlessly persecuted by the Baath Party, a communist who has been fighting the dictatorship for long decades?

Whoever you are, faceless and suffering, you have been waiting many years for the reign of terror to end.

Ariel Dorfman, a native of Chile, teaches at Duke University. His latest books are Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories Press) and “In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems From Two Languages” (Duke University Press).

To read more Dorfman click here