The face of gallantry: what one Iraqi's case tells us about the struggle for the Middle East, and for freedom.

IN a recent "Diary" for National Review Online, I told the terrible story of Mithal al-Alusi, a gallant Iraqi politician and democrat whose two sons and bodyguard were gunned down in Baghdad on February 8. I invited NRO readers to send messages of condolence for Mithal, which I would forward to him in Baghdad. Within 48 hours, I had received almost 200 letters, many of them from the parents, relatives, and friends of active-duty U.S. soldiers and Marines.

The letter-writers were inspired by the gallantry of Mithal's response to his terrible loss. He told Radio Free Iraq that

   my children, three people [in all]--one of my bodyguards and two
   of my children--died as heroes, no differently from other people
   who find their heroic deaths. But we will not, by God, hand Iraq
   over to murderers and terrorists.

      We will pave the road for peace. If [the attackers] thought that
   by attempting to kill Mithal al-Alusi, the advocates of peace in
   Iraq will be stopped, then they have made a grave mistake. We will
   be calling for peace. We will be calling for peace with all
   neighboring countries. We will be calling for peace with all
   countries of the region. And we will be calling for fighting
   terrorism by any means.

Many letter-writers were impressed too by the apparent reason for the terrorists' targeting of Mithal: his support for peace with Israel.

After the overthrow of Saddam, Mithal was appointed the head of Iraq's De-Baathification Commission. In this capacity he attended a September 2004 conference on terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, thereby becoming the first and only Iraqi official ever to travel to the Jewish state. He opened his remarks with a stunning declaration: "I would like to thank the United States for liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein's terror."

Mithal explained his actions in an article now posted on NRO:

   Last month, I became the first Iraqi official ever to visit the
   State of Israel. My visit outraged my colleagues in the provisional
   Iraqi government. I was fired from my job as general director of the
   Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, expelled
   from my political party, and stripped of my personal security
   detail: a potentially deadly punishment for somebody in my position
   in today's Iraq. I was even threatened with criminal prosecution.

      Yet I have good news to report too. I have been surprised--and
   pleased--by the support I have received from Iraqi intellectuals and
   from a very large number of ordinary Iraqis. They recognize that I
   didn't go to Israel for the sake of Israel. I went to Israel for the
   sake of Iraq....

      In Iraq's own sovereign interest, we must have peace. Those
   Iraqis who talk of Israel as the enemy are in reality looking for
   justifications to inflict violence on their fellow Iraqis.

Something in these words--and in the price Mithal paid for uttering them--touched a profound chord in NRO readers. Let me quote from just one letter I received for Mithal, addressed directly to him:

   As I consider your courageous commitment to liberty in the face of
   such personal loss, as I consider the photos of brave Iraqis holding
   up their purple fingers, flaunting their votes in the face of evil,
   I find myself thinking that you are nothing like us. We do not have
   that kind of honor and courage. I am shamed by how weak and craven
   we Americans have become in our safety and wealth. We are not
   like you....

      I am sorry for your loss, and I pray God will comfort you and
   reward your country and your people for such sacrifice. I don't
   know that I could show such resolve in the face of such loss.

How should we understand this outpouring of sympathy for an Iraqi democrat from readers and supporters of the premier conservative periodical in the United States?

President Bush had made it clear well before the beginning of combat operations in Iraq that establishing free institutions there would be a major war aim of the United States. In a major speech at an American Enterprise Institute dinner on the eve of battle, he said, "The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life."

These ideas are not exactly unprecedented on the American right: Ronald Reagan often expressed similar beliefs. In his famous speech in Westminster in 1982, Reagan insisted on "man's instinctive desire for freedom and self-determination" and argued that "it would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy."

But it's also true that at least as many important conservatives--perhaps many more--rejected Reagan's view. Russell Kirk, the revered conservative thinker, warned at the end of the Cold War against the assumption "that the political structure and the economic patterns of the United States will be emulated in every continent, for evermore." Kirk argued that such an approach to foreign policy would lead to disaster: "An imposed or induced abstract democracy thrust upon peoples unprepared for it would produce at first anarchy, and then--as in nearly all of 'emergent' Africa, over the past four decades--rule by force and a master."

Many of those who opposed and still oppose the Iraq war do so for reasons quite similar to those advanced by Kirk. They say that American-style democracy is not for everyone, and predict that if the populations of the Arab and Islamic Middle East are ever allowed to govern themselves they will opt for ideological extremism, religious fanaticism, and external aggression. And high on the list of those peoples supposedly unprepared for democracy are the Iraqis.

But this time around, the people most vehemently advancing such views are not Republicans and conservatives but liberals and Democrats--including the Democrats' nominee for president in 2004, John Forbes Kerry.

"I have always said from day one that the goal here ...is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that's a full democracy," Kerry told reporters after a town meeting in Harlem last April. "I can't tell you what it's going to be, but a stable Iraq. And that stability can take several different forms." Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser, Rand Beers, followed up by explaining that the Kerry camp regarded George W. Bush's aspirations for democracy in Iraq as "too heroic."

In the months leading up to and following the election, Kerry's elegantly expressed skepticism has bumped its way down the intellectual hierarchy to become something close to the dominant point of view among American liberals. Which is how it happened that the very day before the violent attack on Mithal al-Alusi, Slate magazine featured a literary attack on the Syrian-American democrat Farid Ghadry by a writer named Elisabeth Eaves:

   So, you're an Arab exile. You've prospered in the United States.
   You've got lots of influential neocon friends. And now you want to
   overthrow the evil Baathist dictator back home. Here's the catch:
   Your name, fortunately--or perhaps unfortunately--is not Ahmad
   Chalabi. What are you supposed to do?

      This is the predicament in which a man named Farid Ghadry
   finds himself. (Remember that name: He could soon be cashing
   millions in U.S. government checks.)

The rest of the article continues to scorn both Ghadry and Chalabi in the same vein, as if nothing could be more gigglingly absurd or excruciatingly uncool than to devote oneself to the fight against tyranny in one's native land. I know this voice. I remember it from the days of the Cold War, when it was the fashion among a certain kind of elegant intellectual to mock the testimony of East Bloc emigres with their comical Slavic accents and cheap, ugly clothes. Older friends tell me it was much the same in the 1930s, when some brave souls tried to tell the truth about Hitler's Germany to the uninterested ears of the British elite.

Maybe the best response to this self-satisfied dismissal was delivered by Susan Sontag, a woman whose many mistakes were redeemed by, if nothing else, this speech she delivered in New York City in 1982:

   I have asked myself many times in the past six years or so how it
   was possible that I could have been so suspicious of what [Czeslaw]
   Milosz and other exiles from Communist countries--and those in
   the West known bitterly as 'premature anti-Communists'--were
   telling us. Why did we not have a place for, ears for, their truth?
   The answers are well known. We had identified the enemy as fascism.
   We heard the demonic language of fascism. We believed in, or
   at least applied a double standard to, the angelic language of
   Communism....

      The emigres from Communist countries we didn't listen to, who
   found it far easier to get published in the Reader's Digest than in
   The Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth. Now we
   hear them. Why didn't we hear them before, when they were telling
   us exactly what they tell us now? We thought we loved justice;
   many of us did. But we did not love the truth enough.

The skeptics are right up to a point: The culture and history of the Middle East do create grave difficulties for democracy--so much so that those who champion democracy are called on to show extraordinary courage and commitment. They must face terrible dangers, endure terrible suffering, mourn terrible losses--as Mithal did and is doing. And oh, just to add to their burdens, they must bear disdain from much of the Western press, and from radicalized professors of Middle Eastern studies who instruct Western publics that indeed the killers of Mithal al-Alusi's sons represent Islam and the Arab world more authentically than Mithal and those like him.

But precisely because it is so difficult to be a democrat in the Arab and Islamic Middle East, Arab and Islamic democrats like Mithal al-Alusi deserve all the more honor.

When people talk about the clash of civilizations, ask yourself: On which side of that fault line would you put Mithal al-Alusi? He has sacrificed more to uphold the values of our civilization than almost any of us on the Western side of that supposed line will ever be called upon to do. Which raises the possibility: Maybe this civilization of liberty we defend does not belong to us, but to all humanity.

When you hear it asked whether Iraqis will fight for their own freedom, ask yourself whether it is possible to fight harder than Mithal al-Alusi has fought. Is it really too much to ask Americans to recognize how much they share with a man like this? Is it too much to expect that those who describe themselves as "liberals" refrain from mocking individuals who risk so much for the sake of liberty?

Mr. Frum is the author, most recently, of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror(with Richard Perle) and of The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush.