The View From Prague

Only on my last day in this hilly, river-spliced city, with such beguiling old world charm and art nouveau elegance that unless you're Kafka a strenuous effort is required to maintain fury or gloom, did I understand why Czechs who disagree with American foreign policy are in sympathy with some of its goals and can muster sadness but not Western European indignation over the war in Iraq.

It was a gray morning as I walked around the city beneath the spires, steeples, cupolas and turrets, walked through history, really, with intermittent rain and fog as conduits to the past. Prague is a lesson. My attention turned from the great kings and queens, courtiers and ladies-in-waiting decked in their finery, and from the suffering, patient peasantry that supported them for so long, to the sieges, wars, brutality, boiling in oil, quartering--the manifold violence that Prague has endured.

Czechs shake their heads, not their fists, at us. "You don't understand the progression," a 65-year-old teacher named Benes said to me. "Iraq had a monster in Saddam, and you removed him. Liberators. The trouble is, what then? We had our monster in Hitler. I remember the Russians entering Prague in '45. Liberators. I cheered their tanks. But liberators who stay become oppressors. The next time Russian tanks came, in '68, I did not cheer."

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