So who has the right to free speech? Not Iraqis, evidently. And maybe that's a good thing, considering the bloody circumstances in that wartorn country.

      But in the past week, it's become obvious Isaac Newton was right in 1686 when he wrote in Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite re-action." Or actually, in the world of politics, maybe an unequal reaction.

      Such an unequal--and violent--reaction has erupted in Iraq in the last ten days. On March 28, American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al Hawza, controlled by the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr. As The New York Times reported, "Al Hawza is known for printing wild rumors, especially anti-American ones." The paper printed, for example, a story claiming that a February explosion that killed 50 Iraqi police recruits was caused not by car bomb, as occupation officials say, but by an American missile.

      As James P. Pinkerton, a columnist for Newsday, observed on the Fox News Channel's "News Watch" over the weekend, the First Amendment and martial law don't go well together." It's hard to disagree with Pinkerton. That is, if I were Paul Bremer, the American administrator in Iraq today, I would not be able, in good conscience, to allow a newspaper to print items that might cause the death of Americans.

      But on the other hand, now we have a full-blown insurrection on our hands in Iraq--and Americans are dying by the dozen. Indeed, now it appears that America faces a full-blown war; the Bush administration expected that, maybe, in the Sunni Triangle. But now we're getting a war among the Shi'i, too.

      So maybe it was a mistake to shut down Al Hawza, after all. Maybe it would have been better to let the paper keep publishing, on the theory that such venting might be cathartic, and also on the theory that the image of American "liberators" padlocking a newspaper was the wrong image to send to Iraqis, to Arabs, and to the world. Indeed, it's hard to see how conditions in Iraq would be worse if we had left it open.

      To be sure, the situation in Iraq is too intense for outsiders to fully understand what's going on over in Iraq. Come to think of it, the situation there is probably too intesen for insiders to understand what's going on over there, either.

      So let's withhold final judgment on Bremer's action. But in the meantime let's hold open the possibility that the backlash against the shutdown did more damage than the paper did when it was being published. We might call it the media corollary to Newton: sometimes the reaction is way out of proportion to the action. Now we know.

      The truth of the matter is that freedom is not only good for all the usual reasons--it's a basic human right, it's the best disinfectant to corruption--but it's also a way of blowing off steam. So maybe the Bremer Administration would have been much better off encouraging more speech in Iraq--say, by a "democracy wall" in each city--than by stifling such speech.

      Tragically, we'll never know the answer to that question.


###

Contact TG@ivote2004.com