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Published in the Spring 2009 Middle East Quarterly, pp. 96.
Amid growing conservatism and ethnic and sectarian populism in Iraq, parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi, a Sunni Arab, has become the country's chief advocate for liberal values including a free market, free press, religious pluralism, cooperation among democracies in fighting terror, and human - including women's - rights.
Alusi was born on May 23, 1953, in Alus, a small village near Haditha, in Iraq's western Anbar province. In 1976, while studying aeronautical engineering in Cairo, Egypt, he was sentenced to death in absentia by Iraq for allegedly trying to undermine Saddam Hussein by circulating anti-Baathist flyers. He fled Cairo for Syria and then Germany, arriving on August 23, 1977. During his German exile, he became active in the Iraqi opposition coalition led by Ahmed Chalabi. In December 2002, to protest the gravity of Saddam's abuses, he staged a takeover of the Iraqi embassy in Berlin. It was his record of staunch activism in exile, he believes, that prompted Iraqis on the governing council to choose him, after the liberation, as leader of the de-Baathification commission.1 He returned to Iraq in November 2003 and was appointed by the Iraqi Governing Council to head the...