From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun Apr 27 2003 - 21:15:31 MDT
Lies and the Left
Galloway and his supporters are foolish to believe that an enemy of
America is necessarily their friend
David Aaronovitch
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer
The writs are flying and George Galloway is suing again. For some the
sexy question is whether the MP for Glasgow Kelvin benefited
personally from money channelled to him by the late government of
Saddam Hussein. Oil for suntans, if you like. But though that may be
diverting, just as big an issue is that of Iraqi state funding for
supposedly independent campaigning organisations involving Mr
Galloway, and whether he colluded in this arrangement.
Immediately after the Daily Telegraph published the first of the
documents found in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, some on the Left were
crying 'forgery!' Tariq Ali, interviewed on television, stated
bluntly that it was an intelligence scam. The Guardian cartoonist,
Martin Rowson, depicted the Telegraph dog digging up bones in a
garden full of past security service frauds, with the caption,
'Weapons of Mass Distraction', the implication being that the
documents were a plant designed to divert attention from the truth
about the war. And the editor of Tribune , Mark Seddon, wrote in the
Times that 'the discovery is a gift for the Government which has
still not found a single shred of evidence for weapons of mass
destruction_ (it) comes at a convenient moment_ I am reminded of the
Zinoviev letter.'
In this version of events, the Telegraph journalist, David Blair, is
either an accomplice to a grand fraud, or else a preposterous dupe
who was guided, without his understanding it, towards one of the most
audacious and complex forgeries in British history. And all done to
wreak post-war revenge on one MP.
To me it just shows how deep in denial some on the Left are. And this
is, by the way, an argument with the Left, not with the anti-war
movement, some of whose leading figures were themselves suspicious of
Galloway. In the London Evening Standard on Friday the anti-war
writer Will Self revealed that he had refused to speak on a platform
with the MP. 'Anyone,' Self wrote, 'who had paid attention to
Galloway's pro-Saddam statements should have realised that his
motives for meddling in Iraqi politcs were far from humanitarian.'
Anyone except Mark Seddon, Tariq Ali, Martin Rowson and a whole lot
of others.
Galloway was once a genuine critic of Saddam's. In the mid-1980s
Hansard records him delivering a ferocious assault on the Baath
regime, and those in the West who traded with and encouraged it. By
1994, however, he was in Baghdad famously saluting Saddam's courage
and indefatigability. He was soon a frequent flyer to Baghdad, and a
reveller at Tariq Aziz's Yuletide festivities in 1999 (a fact which
Galloway seemed to have forgotten last week, despite my having
reminded him of it personally on a television programme in October
2001).
So why did George change? One of the reasons that I ended up
supporting this war was that I agreed with Galloway back in the
1980s, and Saddam never got any nicer, or less murderous. What
happened?
Leaving aside unproved accusations of personal gain, there are other
explanations that might cover George's sudden blindness on the road
to Baghdad. And the most obvious is that sin of the committed, the
belief that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Or, in the context of the
modern world, any anti-American will do. When Iraq stopped being a
friend of the West it became a friend of George's.
This is linked to a characteristic of much of the Left, which is a
strangely cavalier attitude towards freedom and democracy. What, for
example, should we make of this question from Tam Dalyell, asked in
Parliament in 1998: 'Is an alternative to Saddam Hussein,' queried
the man who has condemned Tony Blair as a war criminal, 'really
preferable? How can we be sure that post-Saddam Iraq will not descend
into civil war along religious and tribal lines - like the north of
Iraq?'
True, the same people will often shield themselves with one half
sentence about Saddam's 'appaling human rights record'. But this is a
phrase invoked as a defence against the reality of that record.
Constructed against the reality of what it actually means to be
living in such circumstances, afraid ever to speak. The constant
suggestion is that the 'human rights record' is bad, but whatever the
Americans do is far, far worse.
The classical exponent of this technique is John Pilger. In last
week's New Statesman one of his typical pieces about the corruption
of most journalists (ie people like me) versus the bravery of a few
(ie people like him), included an attack on my colleague, Andrew
Rawnsley. Rawnsley was portrayed as a vulgar Government mouthpiece
for having written that 'millions have died at the hands of Saddam'.
But, Pilger objected, 'Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's
killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions.
It is an appaling record that does not require the exaggeration of
state-inspired propaganda'.
In fact Pilger's own source said (unquoted by him) that, in addition
to the number of known executions Amnesty had also collected
information on around 17,000 cases of disappearances, over the last
20 years, and 'the real figure may be much higher'. Yes it may. Since
the liberation, 993 corpses of executed people have been found at one
cemetery alone, buried there over the last three years.
But even that was not the point Rawnsley was making - 7,000
communists were executed in the late 1970s. During the Anfal
anti-Kurdish campaign in 1987 as many as 180,000 Kurds disappeared.
At Halabja, in one incident alone, more people were killed than in
the whole of this latest Gulf war. The most conservative death toll
attached to the repression of the Shia uprising in 1991 was 30,000.
One million died in the Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam.
And this is reduced by Pilger to 'hundreds every year'. Not because
of an innate hatred of hyperbole, because he has also written that
'the current American elite is the Third Reich of our times'. Note,
not the Roman Empire, nor yet the Ottoman Empire, but the Third Reich.
All sins are American sins. Before the 1991 Gulf war, according to
Pilger, Iraq was a 'relatively open and pro-Western society'. The
health service was brill, education was fab, and - the 'appalling
human rights record' aside - things were tickety-boo. Then came the
war and sanctions and that led to repression and to economic misery.
'With most Iraqis now dependent on the state food rationing system,'
wrote Pilger, 'organised political dissent is all but unthinkable.'
Whereas before sanctions it was entirely thinkable, providing you
didn't mind being collected from the police station by your family
(with a nominal charge for the hangman's time).
And even this prelapsarian welfare paradise is a myth. The Iran-Iraq
war lasted nearly a decade, and crippled the Iraqi economy. Some $35
billion of reserves became a debt of $46bn. Kuwait was invaded
precisely because Iraq had gone bust, and the invasion made things
worse. So did sanctions, but when Oil for Food came in 1995, what did
Saddam spend the money on? You've seen the palaces on television, so
you know.
A year ago one of those international peace delegations went to
Baghdad. According to Agence France-Presse they had a march in the
city, holding banners saying, 'No to sanctions, no to war', and
'Palestine is Arab, down with Zionism'. Among them was a
white-bearded New Zealand Quaker called Tony Maturin. When he
returned from Iraq he gave an interview on a local radio station. One
part went like this:
Interviewer: 'And did the people you spoke with indicate they felt
free to tell you anything they wanted to?'
Maturin: 'I didn't ask them that. I didn't ask them that because I
know very well that that government has a horrendous human rights
record. What we don't know, they're also a very benevolent government
as far as the country goes. They've done tremendous things for that
country. And the people I spoke to, they all say, "If they bomb us
again we'll rebuild again. And we have a country that our government
is doing their best to make a strong country again."'
Stupid man.
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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