From blogger Jim Henley regarding post-Saddam Iraq:

..Some one foreigner has to be in charge of all this for a time. It would be a fine thing if it were not an American military officer for political reasons. It should be someone friendly to the United States, fierce in devotion to freedom and individual rights, renowned for conscience and, not incidentally, currently underemployed.

Ladies and gentlemen, the sane, logical and inspired choice: Vaclav Havel. Pass it on.

What a wonderful, inspired suggestion! Who else would better understand how to administer a post-totalitarian morass than this playwright, poet, essayist, dissident, and former President of the Czech Republic?

I am in the middle of Open Letters, a collection of Havel's (mostly political) writings edited by Paul Wilson. In the introduction, Wilson crafts a prescient tribute to Havel:

...did not Havel warn that the damage to individuals and societies left behind by totalitarianism would be worse than even its victims could imagine, and take a long time to repair? Did he not point out that the root cause of war does not lie in the weaponry that each side deploys against each other, but in the political realities of a divided world, and the greatest danger–one that should be clearly foreseeable–comes from willful indifference to regimes that humiliate and oppress and silence their own citizens in the name of some expediency, or grand, utopian scheme?

One can only pray Bush would tap a man of this calibre for administering a postwar Iraq. My deepest thanks to Mortimer Sneed for giving me this book so many years ago.




(hat tip: Glenn Reynold's Instapundit)