The Wrong Way To Honor A Hero

Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was a true hero: a valiant officer of the law who devoted his life first to the fight against organized crime and then to international counterterrorist operations. He had negotiated the release of two Italian aid workers held hostage in Iraq last year. He died bringing yet another hostage to safety, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.

A hero's death should inspire those who live on. Let us hope that in time this will be true in Calipari's case as well. For the present, however, the accidental shooting of Nicola Calipari seems to have revealed something of the worst in both Italy and the United States.

Calipari was killed at an American checkpoint near Baghdad airport. Many Iraq-based reporters suggest that these checkpoints may have done more than anything to alienate ordinary Iraqis.

"You're driving along and you see a couple of soldiers standing by the side of the road--but that's a pretty ubiquitous sight in Baghdad, so you don't think anything of it. Next thing you know, soldiers are screaming at you, pointing their rifles and swiveling tank guns in your direction, and you didn't even know it was a checkpoint." So reports Annia Ciezadlo of the Christian Science Monitor.

It's understandable that soldiers on the receiving end of car bombs and improvised explosive devices would take every conceivable precaution to protect themselves. But the checkpoints are designed to protect soldiers and only soldiers: Iraqi safety is very much a secondary concern.

Calipari's death will no doubt spark self-examination and change by the U.S. military. One has to wonder, however, why the uncounted number of Iraqi civilian casualties did not do the same.

But it is not only Americans who should search their consciences.

It seems that the reason Calipari's car was fired upon was that the Italian authorities had not kept U.S. authorities informed about Calipari's mission. And the reason for that strange omission was that Calipari's mission involved the negotiation of a ransom for the kidnapped journalist.

The Italians know that the U.S. authorities fiercely oppose ransom payments, and so they thought it best just to keep things quiet until Sgrena and Calipari were safely out of Iraq.

These Italian actions put Sgrena's and Calipari's lives at risk. They also endangered the lives of many thousands of other Western civilians in Iraq. Ransom payment encourages more kidnappings--and Italy is allowing ransom payment to become a bad habit.

As if guiltily aware of how wrong the practice is, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi provided the funds himself out of his own enormous fortune to free the two kidnapped aid workers in 2004. This time, the money seems to have come from the public treasury.

As with the American checkpoints, Italy's motives are understandable: The Iraq war is not popular in Italy, which has about 3,000 troops in the country. And prolonged hostage dramas weaken support for the war even more. The Berlusconi government is naturally tempted to do whatever it can to bring these dramas to a rapid close.

But to understand is not to excuse. The Berlusconi government's attempt to shore up support for the war by furtively paying for Sgrena's return got a brave and widely admired man unnecessarily killed--and has created an effective platform for the extremist views of an anti-American journalist.

Since her liberation, Sgrena has accused the United States of deliberately targeting her vehicle. "Everyone knows that the Americans don't want hostages to be freed by negotiations, and for that reason, I don't see why I should rule out that I was their target," she implausibly claimed in a television interview on Sunday.

Before her kidnapping, in articles for her left-wing Italian paper Il Manifesto and for the German Die Zeit, Sgrena had made clear her opposition to the coalition mission in Iraq. But in captivity, Sgrena seems to have progressed to outright sympathy for the insurgents and endorsement of their cause.

In her articles and interviews since the kidnapping, Sgrena has done her utmost to humanize the kidnappers, describing one as a fan of an Italian soccer team and praising the cheerfulness of another. She reveals nothing about them that would in any way damage their image among her Italian listeners. She repeats their slogans about "ending the occupation"--without acknowledging in any way that for them, "ending the occupation" is a euphemism for the restoration of a murderous tyranny over the unwilling people of Iraq.

Are these the same insurgents who detonated bombs at Shiite religious ceremonies, killing hundreds? Who killed children as they received candy from U.S. soldiers? Who attack hospitals, water treatment plants, electrical generating stations? Who cut off the heads of other captives?

These questions do not interest her. Nor does she seem to have noticed that while she was held captive, Iraq held an election in which millions of Iraqis voted freely for the first time in their nation's history--and that those voters massively repudiated the terror and violence of her "cheerful" kidnappers.

The old Italian Communist party may have expired. But as Giulana Sgrena reminds us, communism has left its mark on the political culture of the Italian left. The readiness to support any anti-American group, no matter how vile; the credulity in the face of Third World brutality; the willingness to bend the truth in the service of "the revolution": The aftermath of the killing of Nicola Calipari has opened an opportunity for all this to come out in the Italian media and Italian politics. It is no way to honor the sacrifice of a brave and good man.