The Poland of Islam?

AFTER POWERFUL POLITICAL and media voices in America began expressing doubts about the war on terror, disaffection with U.S. intervention soon came to seem as if it were a permanent feature of our political landscape. Even as it is widely admitted that "the surge" has worked in Iraq, commentators remain wedded to the trope of Iraq as Vietnam. But that comparison is weak. Without a military draft, there has been no disorderly mass opposition to the Iraq war in this country. More important, Iraq itself has nothing in common with Vietnam. The latter country was a marginal element in the Communist world, with a language and culture limited to its own people, used as an anti-American proxy by China, and then by Russia. Iraq is neither marginal nor culturally isolated.

Iraq is, rather, a central Islamic country; a keystone with the potential for influencing its powerful neighbors, Saudi Arabia and Iran. It shares a common Arab language and tribal traditions with the former, and the Shia interpretation of Islam with the latter.

Defenders of the intervention, concerned that proponents of retreat would abandon Iraq, have drawn more appropriate parallels. Senator Joe Lieberman warned in 2006 that fecklessness in Iraq could reproduce the failure of the Western democracies to defend the Spanish Republic in that country's 1936-39 civil war, an abdication that encouraged the totalitarian dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin on their paths of aggression.

Others have cautioned that newly-prolific proposals for negotiation with Islamist extremists--especially with the crazy Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--could result in Iraq, while increasingly succumbing to Iranian intrigues, becoming a Czechoslovakia. That country was sacrificed like Spain to the appetites of the dictators at Munich in 1938 and, let us not forget, left to bleed again when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague 30 years later. And finally, some have seen in Iraq a potential Yugoslavia--collapsing into bloody partition--or even a Romania, with its leadership, like Nicolae Ceausescu and his feral wife Elena, massacred.

There is, however, a more relevant and positive historical example evoked by the new Iraq, and it is that of Poland. Lest the metaphor be misunderstood, we must certainly guard against Iraq being divided between Saudi Wahhabis and Iranian radicals as the Polish Republic in 1939 was invaded and split by Hitler and Stalin.

But I have in mind the modern Poland of the last three decades. The new Iraq can play a role in the Muslim world similar to that seen when, at the end of the 1970s, the Polish nation, inspired by Pope John Paul II and the Solidarity labor movement, rose to challenge a Soviet power then viewed as invulnerable. Poland inaugurated an affirmation of popular sovereignty and intellectual freedom that spread first to countries like Hungary with which it shared a Catholic heritage, then to the rest of the Communist zone, and finally to the former Soviet Union itself, which then finally crumbled.

Iraq's achievements, rather than its recent failures, encourage transformation in its key neighbors. Particularly in Saudi Arabia, a growing discontent is visible with the Wahhabi cult that, allied to the monarchy, drove so many young people to abandon their homes and cross their country's northern border to die as terrorists in Mesopotamia. Since his accession to power in 2005, Saudi king Abdullah has set the kingdom on a course of undeniable reform. His position is difficult because of his isolation within his own family, most of whom deserve Talleyrand's contemptuous description of the French Bourbons after their post-Napoleonic restoration: "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

Abdullah's steps forward include a serious effort to curb the power of Saudi Arabia's so-called religious police, the mutawiyin, and the lifting of strict censorship in media and book publishing. He has also encouraged new business and professional opportunities for women, including work without wearing full body covering, as well as measures pointing towards a female right to drive (which is banned, alone in the world, by the Saudi kingdom). In a series of declarations culminating at the end of May with an invitation to the World Jewish Congress, King Abdullah has called for an interfaith summit to be held in his country. Recent reporting indicates that Buddhists and adherents of the Chinese religions would be included, besides the world's monotheists.