Terror war destiny

“I was disturbed,” a friend e-mails, “to read that Paul Bremer signed an order closing down a newspaper in Iraq.”

My friend’s concern is understandable. As he points out, “One of the foundations of democracy and freedom is freedom of expression, manifested in part by freedom of the press, and to be curtailing this is counter to what we are trying to accomplish in Iraq.”

I was disturbed, too — by how long it took the American authorities to shut the paper down. The weekly Al Hawza has become notorious for its publication of false rumors and general incitement against the American occupation.

The last straw was its reporting a bomb that killed 50 Iraqi police recruits was an American missile fired by an Apache helicopter, not a car bomb.

You can imagine the results of such reports. You needn’t imagine. Just look at the hate-filled faces of young Iraqis who are steadily fed such propaganda, whether they’re pulling ambushes in Baghdad or crowing over the mutilated bodies of American civilians in Fallujah.

Words can be deadly weapons in war. We’re at war in Iraq and a constant barrage of inflammatory stories about how the infidels are wiping out innocent Iraqis can do more damage than enemy mortars. To quote Napoleon, “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

Would we have allowed Nazi newspapers to flourish as our occupation of Germany entered its second year? No — because we were serious about remaking Germany. Are we serious about remaking Iraq?

It was an American general, Douglas MacArthur, who said that in war there is no substitute for victory. But we have forgotten his warning before with dreadful results, Vietnam being the most prominent example. Will we forget it again in Iraq?

At various times in our own civil war, and that’s what this struggle in Iraq is fast becoming, Mr. Lincoln suppressed or suspended various newspapers that spread false rumors or published inflammatory stories, including the New York World and the Journal of Commerce.

Mr. Lincoln’s policy toward the press was remarkably similar to Paul Bremer’s. His administration did not censor the news nor force papers to print stories favorable to the Union. Even newspapers that continued to abuse the president personally throughout the war went unmolested. But he drew the line at stories that might incite violence or interfere with military operations.

To quote a letter the commander in chief wrote to one of his officers in the field, General John Schofield: “You will only arrest individuals and suppress assemblies or newspapers when they may be working palpable injury to the military in your charge, and in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form or allow it to be interfered with violently by others.”

That pretty well sums up the American policy in Iraq, too. The authorities have allowed peaceable assembly, however loud or raucous, and a wide variety of editorial viewpoints, including many highly critical of the occupation.

But when Al Hawza printed a phony story about an American missile killing innocent Iraqis — just the kind of canard most likely to incite violence — Paul Bremer suspended its publication for 60 days. He finally got serious.

“That paper might have been anti-American,” an Iraqi newspaperman said in defense of Al Hawza, “but it should be free to express its opinion.”

But Al Hawza wasn’t shut down because of its opinions, but because it was passing off fiction as fact. Fiction that was sure to stir the mob. Mistaken opinions may be debated; false information may be impossible to counter.

As the late senator and sage Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it, everybody is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

The line between fact and opinion isn’t always easy to establish, as many an American periodical has discovered in court, but in this case Al Hawza was clearly on the far side of it, printing rumors sure to incite.

The Iraqi weekly is a mouthpiece for a feisty young Shi’ite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who is making his bid for power by outshouting the community’s older, more responsible leader, the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani.

Well known as a disturber of the peace, the wily young agitator increased the volume this past, violent weekend in his Baghdad bailiwick. (“Terrorize your enemy, God will reward you well for what pleases him.”) This disturber of the peace might benefit from a 60-day cooling-off period, too. The chances for peace in Iraq certainly would.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.