Paul Berman Respons... :: Dissent Spring 2007 Issue

The disaster in Iraq has consisted of many elements, but the persisting and even growing influence of fascistlike ideologies among the Iraqis has proved to be a main one. In the past and even today, the intellectuals of the democratic world have made very little effort to study, interpret and intellectually demolish the doctrines of Baathism and radical Islamism. It is rare to meet anyone, apart from regional experts, who has even bothered to study the main texts of these doctrines—though it is not at all rare to read apologies for the doctrines in question, and altogether common to read outright fantasies about what those doctrines actually say. We should address these ideologies, then. We should engage in a labor of criticism.

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THE INTELLECTUALS and the liberal left should defend and promote the liberals and freethinkers of the Arab and Muslim world, the outright liberals and not just the people who are described, not always accurately, as “moderates.” We should do this in the same fashion that some of us used to do during the cold war, when it was common for intellectuals in the West to defend the dissidents of the East bloc. This, too, doesn’t happen much today.

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Our role should be to clarify the ideas that influence the region. To demystify the demagogueries of mad ideologies. To explain the principles of liberal thought and, in this way, to help lay an intellectual basis for a democratic future. Our role should be to offer solidarity to the authentic liberals of the Arab and Muslim world, who have been horribly betrayed by American and other Western governments and even by the left-wing and liberal intellectuals of the West.

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