FREE SPEECH...SORT OF

GI's enforcing a delicate balance.

Like their post-World War II predecessors, American forces in Iraq wrestle to uphold two conflicting mandates: encouraging free speech in a newly open society, while at the same time enforcing strict bans on speech promoting violence or the ousted political order.

Is free speech with exceptions free? Then again, those who would promote religious violence against infidels or a return of the Saddam days would likely gag or shoot anyone who disagrees. Free speech would be out the window.

It’s a delicate blueprint America follows as it tries to construct a popularly chosen — but definitely not fundamentalist, definitely not Baathist — order in Iraq...

“There is a rough parallel between the de-Nazification program after World War II and the curbing of anti-U.S. speech in Iraq today,” said Thomas Allen, a historian and author of several books, including “World War II: The Encyclopedia of the War Years 1941-1945.”...

While the parallel may be true of Baathists, it applies less to Islamists.

“The Nazi Party was a political organization and could be dissolved,” Allen said. “Religions, as we are learning, are not as easily dealt with.”

Germany had ample experience with democracy prior to Hitler. Even so, the postwar transition wasn’t instant. A peace treaty wasn’t signed until 1952; West Germany didn’t enjoy full sovereignty until 1955.

“Don’t forget,” Allen said, “that this took a while.”