BOMBING FREEDOM
By RALPH PETERS

February 3, 2004 -- THE bombings in northern Iraq on Sunday attacked more than the two main Kurdish political parties. The blasts, which killed more than 60 civilians and wounded hundreds, were targeted at tolerance, freedom and civilization.
A decade ago, a courageous thinker, Samuel P. Huntington, advanced the theory of a "clash of civilizations." While Professor Huntington provoked a useful debate, the all-pervasive struggle of our time isn't between races or religions. It's between civilization and barbarism, between freedom and tyranny.

Freedom doesn't have a skin color. It doesn't pray to one exclusive god. It's a universal treasure that must be won and defended down the centuries.

The suicide bombers and terrorists who strike in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Indonesia or Israel or Manhattan, do not represent Islamic civilization. They represent the rejection of all civilized values.

Terrorists who pervert their religion to justify atrocities aren't waging holy war. Islam doesn't permit the slaughter of the innocent. And the Koran certainly doesn't advocate murdering fellow Muslims.

Yet the bombers in Irbil attacked during celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid. Doubtless, they convinced themselves with a few twists of logic that they were doing a blessed deed - the human beast can rationalize anything.

But consider the act: The bombers used the generous traditions of the Eid holiday to penetrate celebrations open to all - and the killers reportedly entered dressed as mullahs.

Imagine if Christian extremists dressed as priests exploded suicide bombs on Easter Sunday - to drive us back to 13th-century intolerance.

These bombers didn't sacrifice their lives for their faith. They blasphemed horrendously against it. Even if their organization proves to have secular aims, the killers insulted not only the faith of the majority of Iraqis - Sunni or Shi'a - but the fundamental values of civilization.

Why strike the Kurdish parties, the PUK and KDP? Because they learned to cooperate. Because they made the long, terribly difficult journey to democratic values and tolerance. Because their leaders have done their best to build bridges to other Iraqi factions on the Governing Council and beyond. Because they cooperate with Americans.

And, above all, because they have not engaged in official pogroms and vengeful massacres of the Sunni Arabs who stole their homes, shattered their lives and denied them the most elementary human rights.

The Kurds have shamed their neighbors by proving that Middle Eastern societies don't need tyrants to control them, that the average man - and woman - can build a nation from the bottom up and that Islam is a religion that can look forward to a brighter future, instead of merely clinging to the past. Despite oppression, long-standing poverty and generations of factionalism of their own, the Kurds proved that the cradle of civilization can still provide a model of contemporary civilization.

It wasn't growing Kurdish power that inspired the bombings. It was the Kurdish willingness to share power, to observe human rights and to listen to the voices of the people instead of silencing them with terror and bullets.

Of course, the suicide bombers had more complex goals than simply punishing the Kurds. The attackers - who killed a number of promising Kurdish leaders - hoped to provoke the Kurds into retaliating against local Arabs and other minorities. The terrorists do not want an Iraq in which the force of reason and the power of ballots prove stronger than the fist and the bomb.

A range of terrorist groups, Iraqi and foreign, are trying frantically to keep Iraq divided between traditionally hostile factions. Above all, the terrorists hope to "prove" that Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds, Shi'a Arabs and minority Christians can't cooperate to build an equitable, prosperous democracy.

In a profound way, the Kurds are like Americans: They're being attacked for their successes, not their failures. Like America, the "Kurdistan" that soulless diplomats still insist doesn't exist provides a model of justice and fairness - of simple human decency - that enrages tyrants and religious fanatics.

The Kurds represent civilization. Their attackers are barbarians in the crudest sense. When those bombs went off in Kurdistan, they wounded men and women everywhere who believe that every human society should have a chance at freedom and that no religion condemns its faithful to oppression and mindless bigotry.

It was fashionable - briefly - after 9/11 for foreign leaders to say "We are all Americans today." On Sunday, when those bombs went off, we all became Kurds.

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."

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