“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”
So wrote Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, her
heartrending memoir of life in Islamist Iran. Unyieldingly modest,
Steven Vincent would have questioned the pertinence of that insight
to his own circumstances. Yet it aptly captures the legacy of the
indomitable journalist who was brutally murdered in southern Iraq
this week.
By his own account, memorably conveyed in his 2004 book In
the Red Zone: A Journey into the Soul of Iraq, Vincent became
an early convert to the Bush Doctrine of abetting the cause of
democracy in the Middle East. From the roof of his lower Manhattan
residence, Vincent watched United Airlines Flight 175 missile into
the south tower of the World Trade Center. “At that moment,”
Vincent later remembered, “I realized my country was at war —
because of the 1993 attack on the Trade Center, I figured our enemy
was Islamic terrorism — and I wanted to do my part in the
conflict. I’m too old to enlist in the armed services, so I decided
to put my writing talents to use.”
Americans — especially supporters of the U.S. efforts in Iraq
— were the better for it. First arriving in Iraq in the fall of
2003, Vincent wrote feelingly of the halting steps from
decades-long tyranny to modernity and self-government. Any reading
of his work calls to mind the classic job description of a
journalist: to comfort the oppressed and oppress the
comfortable.
The oppressed, in this case, were the victims of Islamist
chauvinism, particularly women. Vincent was unsparing in assailing
the hard-line Islamic view of women’s roles. In his caustic
description, it amounted to treating women as “delivery systems for
male heirs.” Equally outrageous to Vincent was the failure of
Westerners — not least the scores of self-professed feminists and
liberals — to condemn unequivocally the deep-seated misogyny of
Muslim countries. His experiences in Iraq, Vincent said, “led me to
wonder why the civilized world doesn’t rise up en masse and say
enough! We will no longer tolerate the way that Muslim nations in
the Middle East treat women!”
The comfortable, conversely, were the Islamist radicals — the
reactionary dogmatists who sought to deed liberated Iraq (Vincent
insisted on the qualifier) to the rearguard of religious
fanaticism. Vincent’s writings bristle with allusions to
“Islamofascist hatred and resentment and grandiosity.” Fittingly,
his final dispatch, which appeared this weekend in the
New York Times and which may well have prompted his
murder, sounded one of his consistent themes: the dangerously broad
fealty of Basra’s police forces to the city’s Shiite religious
parties.
Most stirring of all, perhaps, was Vincent’s eye for the little
things — the unremarked though by no means unremarkable snapshots
of civilian life in free Iraq. An art critic in his former life,
Vincent had a painterly knack for detail. Savor this image, from a
report he filed during a January 2004 visit to
Baghdad:
Once a rare delicacy — Saddam prohibited many imported
foodstuffs — the fruits have flooded the country since liberation
and the Iraqis can’t get enough of them. Yesterday, while we were
stuck in a traffic jam, my cabbie purchased two from a vendor
walking between the immobilized cars. “Once bananas were just a
dream,” he laughed, handing me one. “Now, praise God, we can buy
them on the street!”
For all his optimism about the course of Iraqi politics, Vincent
never flinched from addressing the forces of barbarism wreaking
havoc in the country. In a 2004 interview, he described attending a Shiite
religious festival bloodily crashed by a squadron of al-Qaeda
suicide bombers.
The sight was terrible, as you might imagine — but the
thought that a festival commemorating a 1,400 year-old martyrdom
had created real martyrs — that the ritualistic blood had become
real blood shed by real people whose only crime was to pursue their
faith — was too much for me. Shaken and horrified, I cried nearly
all the way back to Baghdad.
Vincent harbored no illusions about the speed of democratic
progress. “The transition from slave to citizen usually takes
generations,” he cautioned. But neither did he doubt that with the
right mix of ingredients — the courage of American troops, the
determination of Iraqi democrats and reformers, and the
steadfastness and good faith of the American people — a free and
placid Iraq was well within the realm of possibility. “We didn’t
start this fight, but by the grace of God, the power of the U.S.
Constitution and the strength of the American people, we will
finish it,” he once remarked. Steven Vincent lived and died for
that noble cause.
