President Bush has described today&'s Iraq as a "young democracy." He even boasted at one point that the advance of democratic institutions in Iraq is "setting an example" that others in the area would be "wise to follow." But when it comes to one of the most basic tenets of democracy — freedom of speech and the press — Iraq is not setting an example that even the youngest of democracies would be wise to follow.

New laws in Iraq criminalize speech that ridicules the government or its officials, and any journalist who "publicly insults" the government or public officials can be subject to up to seven years in prison. Some of the language is resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein's own penal code. It is hard enough for journalists to operate on the ever-expanding battlefields of Iraq. That is true for foreign journalists, who often have all the gear and protections of powerful outside media. But it is even harder for Iraqi journalists, who now face not only the dangers on the street but the threat of defamation laws as well.

More than 130 journalists or other employees of news outlets have been killed in this war, most of them Iraqis. Some died accidentally, of course. But too many working journalists have clearly been targeted, some even brutally tortured to death, precisely because of what they were publishing. On one day last August, a newspaper editor and a prominent columnist were both shot to death by gunmen in different sections of Baghdad.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has been tracking an increasing number of journalists whose critical voices are being muted or silenced in other ways. In the last year, about a dozen Iraqi journalists have been formally accused of offending public officials — a charge that can bring a fine or prison term or both. In one case, a high school teacher was arrested after he wrote in a small paper that the two party leaders in his area were acting like pharaohs.

Other journalists were arrested for writing about a top official's dispute over a telephone bill. A woman reporter was charged with defamation when she quoted a protester comparing today's police with those of Saddam Hussein.

Three journalists for a small newspaper in the southern city of Kut could go to prison for 10 years and pay heavy fines for a number of articles on local corruption. One article compared Iraqi's present judicial system with that of the Hussein regime; another reprinted Washington Post charges of corruption in the Iraqi police force.

After suffering under grinding repression, Iraqi journalists began enjoying more freedom to report after Saddam Hussein was ousted. Now the country is moving backward with efforts to shut down television offices and jail journalists who criticize public officials. Surely any crackdown on freedom of speech and the press is not what the American people had in mind when the Iraq invasion began.

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