Free Republic

Last August a hotel maid in Basra who had popped in to clean a room found the dead body of guest who had been staying there for almost a week. The dead man was Steven Vincent, a free-lance American journalist who was doing research for a book on the situation in southern Iraq. When the police examined the body and the scene it concluded that Vincent had been murdered. But who killed Vincent? A few days before his tragic death, the journalist had published an op-ed column in The New York Times charging that Iraqi Shiite parties had infiltrated the...

The Soul of Iraq by J. R. Nyquist For those who want to understand the situation in Iraq there is Steven Vincent’s In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq. It is shameful that public discussion of the Iraq question so often devolves into name-calling, with the Bush haters on one side and the Bush defenders on the other. Vincent’s book offers a rational and informed basis for discussing the problem of Iraq’s democratization. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that democracy was attainable for many peoples, offering special encouragement to the French (whose first experiments in democracy included...