And more than peaceful ? the revolution came very close to being legal, too, given that, in the face of popular demonstrations, the Communist leaders basically decided, after a while, to shrug their shoulders in melancholy resignation and hand over power in a fairly orderly and parliamentary fashion to V?clav Havel and his fellow liberals. The anti-totalitarian revolution that took place in Prague in 1989 was altogether peaceful. Now, when you ran this post, I should have written to you right away to explain that never in a million years, not even in a noisy bar at two in the morning, have I imagined that Baghdad in 2003 resembled Prague in 1989. But Prague during the Velvet Revolution? No. Kosovo, for instance ? among other examples that you cited. And you went on to observe that, if historical analogies between Iraq and some other place needed to be made, many another choice would have seemed much more plausible. You took note of this passage in your blog and you pasted the word “insane” over it in order to show that liberal interventionists were out of their minds. The paragraph recounts a barroom chat between George and me in Brooklyn from those long-ago times, in which I am said to have likened Baghdad in the period after the 2003 invasion to Prague in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution. Your purpose was to argue that, back in the early days of 2003 and the start of the Iraq war, liberal interventionists were in the grip of fantastical delusions, and, to illustrate this contention, you quoted a paragraph from George Packer’s book The Assassins’ Gate. Last December you ran a short item that mentioned me, and, in retrospect, I’m sorry I didn’t respond. Well, it turns out that Paul Berman thinks it’s nuts too, and today he writes to say that he never said it. I thought this was nuts and said so in a blog post. I kept insisting that Iraq was vastly different: under military occupation, far more violent, its people more traumatized, living in a much worse neighborhood. He kept comparing the situation in post-totalitarian Baghdad to Prague in 1989. A LETTER FROM PAUL BERMAN….In his book The Assassins’ Gate, George Packer wrote:īefore leaving for Iraq, I’d had dinner at the usual Brooklyn bistro with Paul Berman.
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