There is already a rush to condemn the five brave Iraqi freedom fighters who took action yesterday by briefly seizing the Iraqi embassy in Berlin. It includes, unfortunately, the Bush administration. “Actions like this takeover are unacceptable. They undermine legitimate efforts by Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq to bring regime change to Iraq,” press secretary Ari Fleischer said. But the facts of the situation make it clear that if anyone is to be condemned here, it is not those who seized the embassy, but the Iraqi government and the Germans.

It’s not, for starters, as if the first method that the Iraqi freedom fighters resorted to was seizing the embassy. In fact, they had been pleading for weeks with the German government to take action against the mission, which was a hub for Saddam Hussein’s mukhaberat, or secret police. The Iraqi “diplomats” had been harassing and intimidating members of the exile community. The exile community had written letters to the German government documenting this situation, but the German government took no action.

One of the Iraqi “diplomats” in Berlin is Shamel Abdul-Aziz Muhammed. Press accounts have been referring to him as the acting ambassador, but he is an Iraqi intelligence officer. He is in fact married to one of Saddam Hussein’s cousins; his wife is the daughter of an Iraqi army officer, Lieutenant-General Hussein Abdel-Rashid. The brother-in-law of this “diplomat” is Ali Hussein Abdel-Rashid, a close associate of Saddam’s son Qusay.

The demands of those who seized the embassy in Berlin were essentially threefold. First, that Germany honor the Iraqi flag by removing it from the “embassy” — that, is the mukhaberat station — in Berlin and turning it over to the leaders of the Iraqi opposition, the legitimate representatives of the Iraqi people. Second, that Germany act to curtail the activities of the mukhaberat in Germany and elsewhere at Europe. Third, that Germany take steps under international law toward the protection of the Iraqi people.

The five freedom fighters were all Arab Iraqis. Four of the five had university degrees. They ranged in age from 32 to 43. Two of them were from Basra and three from Baghdad. Three were single and two were married. The father and uncle of one of them were killed by Saddam in the early 1980s. All of them had been in Germany for less than a year. Armed yesterday only with pepper spray, they took on a gun-wielding “diplomat” at the embassy gate.

The Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella opposition group that played a constructive role in trying to mediate a peaceful end to yesterday’s incident, says its position is that struggle should be conducted inside Iraq. We’d defer to the INC on such tactical questions. But as the spontaneous popular resistance to Saddam Hussein rises among the Iraqi people, there is going to come a time when America, if it is to remain true to its own revolutionary ideals, is going to have to respond with actions of military support, rather than with rushed words of condemnation.