Questions about the Steven Vincent case

The motive for the murder of Steven Vincent may be more complex and obscure than was initially thought, reports the Telegraph. Investigators are expressing doubts that he was killed for publicizing the death squad-type killings of Baathists by Iraqi police, and suggest that his personal relationship with his female Iraqi interpreter and his open disrespect for local Shi’ite authorities may have given some parties a motive to harm him. However, since it is in part the Iraqi police who are doubting that Vincent was killed by Iraqi police, it seems to me that their doubts are also to be doubted.

Yet clearly there was more involved in this murder than tit-for-tat retaliation over Vincent’s New York Times story fingering the Iraqi police. A very interesting article in the Times of London, “Death of an Idealist,” gives a fuller portrait of Vincent’s life and character. He was not your usual brain-dead reporter of today but a genuine individualist, someone who combined a bohemian lifestyle with conservative values, who on 9/11 saw the second plane fly into the World Trade Center, was changed by that terrible event, and went as a freelance writer to Iraq out of idealism. Yet he also seemed to have that hopelessly naïve American notion that everyone is ultimately like us, the corollary of which is that we can reshape (while also ignoring or disrespecting) the age-old attitudes of alien peoples. Thus the Times writes:

At the same time, even Ramaci [Vincent’s wife] agrees that Vincent may have been courting disaster through his relationship with [his interpreter] Tuaiz, an unmarried Muslim. However strictly professional their contacts—and Ramaci is convinced the relationship was innocent—any presumption by local Shi’ite extremists of a sexual liaison would have been tantamount to a death sentence.

In an internet blog Vincent wrote from Basra, he repeatedly railed against what he regarded as the “shackles” on Iraqi women. “It astonishes me, the ways in which Iraqi men control their women with their obsessions on ‘reputation’, ‘honour’ and that all-purpose cudgel, ‘proper Muslim behaviour’,” he wrote.

Yet in many ways the relationship sums up the dilemma facing British troops as they attempt to patch together an exit strategy for Iraq. The passionate, principled but dangerously naive American journalist wanted more than anything else for women like Tuaiz to be free of what he saw as vicious Islamic prejudice.

Like the murder victim in an Agatha Christie novel, the headstrong Vincent seemed be set on giving any number of people reasons to kill him. Whatever the true reason for his death, however, my main point stands: when Westerners get deeply involved in the internal affairs of Muslims, they end up harming themselves. One should never be where one does not belong.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 06, 2005 09:24 PM | Send