A war of values

As a companion piece to Yasmin A-B immediately below, read Tony Parkinson in tomorrow morning's Melbourne Age (and be sure not to miss the John Spooner cartoon):

The handover of power to the interim administration led by Ayad Allawi provides an opportunity for reappraisal.

This is especially true for leftist liberals, who have allowed hostility towards the Bush Administration and its allies to clutter their understanding of what the conflict in Iraq is about, and cloud their vision of who are the real villains of the piece.

These next few months represent the critical make-or-break opportunity for Iraq. A tyrant who ruined his country and defied the free world is in custody. Self-rule has been reinstated, and Iraq's infrastructure is recovering, albeit slowly.

The new provisional Government draws its membership from across Iraq's ethnic, religious and cultural mosaic, bringing together lawyers, politicians, academics, engineers and businessmen. It includes six women. Meanwhile, a surprisingly resilient, urban-educated, secular middle class is striving to build civil society. This is very much a fresh start.

However, as the nation moves towards the promise of free elections in January, the prospect of a more liberal and inclusive new order remains under daily siege from a motley crew of suicide bombers, saboteurs and mass murderers.

The majority of Iraqis will want and expect the broadest possible international support as they confront this vicious, blood-soaked challenge to reconstruction and renewal, and a failure to withstand and repel the insurgency in Iraq would have ramifications that go far beyond its borders.
.....
Having murdered Iraqis by the hundreds over the past year, they [loyalists of the old regime and foreign jihadists] have more recently sought to dramatise their capacity for atrocity and depravity by beheading on camera two Americans and a South Korean. They use TV and the internet to display their helpless victims before a world audience, engage in the artifice of "negotiation" to heighten anxiety, and then hack heads off.

The goal is to persuade the Iraqi populace, along with Western opinion, that they will stop at nothing to force the US-led coalition out of Iraq. At the battlefield level, this has become a test of nerve and endurance.

More fundamentally, it is a war of values: between those who respect human life and liberty, and want to build an orderly and open society; and those who turn human beings into bombs, hide explosives in ambulances, and celebrate death as victory. As the father of the jihadist movement, Sayyed Qutb, wrote in 1952: "The death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood."

(Hat tip: Jim Nolan.)