Blogs read in the halls of power
: For the second time (the first was in the NY Post, this is in the Wall Street Journal), Paul Wolfowitz is quoting Iraqi bloggers.
After a suicide car bombing killed Iraqi Interim Governing Council President Izzedine Salim and eight others on May 17, one Iraqi put that act of terror into a larger perspective for those who wonder if democracy can work in Iraq. His name is Omar, one of the new Iraqi “bloggers,” and he wrote on his Web log: “We cannot . . . protect every single person, including our leaders and the higher officials who make favorite targets for the terrorists–but we can make their attempts go in vain by making our leadership ‘replaceable.’ ”
Exercising his newfound freedom of speech via the Internet, Omar addressed what he sees as the terrorists’ fundamental misunderstanding about where Iraq is going. Terrorists–whether Saddamists or foreigners–“think in the same way their dictator-masters do,” failing to grasp that the idea of leadership by an indispensable strongman applies to totalitarian regimes–not democracies.
