Regards, Ivan
Posted on 09/17/2002 11:02:30 PM PDT by MadIvan
George Galloway is in Baghdad again, his second trip within a month. In August, he flew out to interview President Saddam Hussein, a man of “courage”, “strength” and “indefatigability”, as he put it on one of his previous grovelling visits. His rigorous questioning last month led to the devastating revelations that Saddam likes Quality Street chocolates and admires Routemaster buses.
Shows Saddam has no taste, Cadbury's Roses are much better - Ivan
This week the MP for Glasgow Kelvin flew black to Iraq as part of his mission in life: to show us that Saddam is human. As Mr Galloway put it in an interview on Monday: “I could have said he had a brutish handshake, but he didn’t. I could have said that he was bombastic and loved the sound of his own voice, but that was not true. I believe in telling the truth as I find it.”
For God’s sake, Mr Galloway: do you think the rest of us are as craven as you? George Galloway stands in a long and dishonourable line of willing dupes. Similar fools have told us that Hitler had a lovely smile, Milosevic supported his local football team and Mengistu adored his children. So what? They were dangerous, evil men, however comforting the quality of their handshake.
There is a tendency to treat Mr Galloway as a rather comic figure — “Gorgeous George” — who adds colour to an otherwise monochrome political world. With his designer suits, his perma-tan and his amorous adventures, he is not, as he has put it, “like a traditional politician. I never dressed in the way your traditional politician dressed and I don’t live a sackcloth and ashes life. So I think I was always slightly unusual.”
Sounds like he is trying to convince a psychiatrist not to commit him on the basis that he's "usual" rather than barking mad - Ivan
But Mr Galloway is not a comic figure. He is a politician, and a particularly contemptible one. The succour his visits, and his PR campaign, give to Saddam are doused in the blood of the Iraqi dictator’s victims: the 182,000 Kurds murdered in the late 1980s, the further 300,000 Iraqis who have been killed so far by Saddam, and the 600,000 who died during the war with Iran.
Still, given Mr Galloway’s political heroes, such numbers are trivial. As he has put it: “Did I support the Soviet Union? Yes, I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.” Between 10 and 20 million people lost their lives in the gulags.
That is a conservative estimate of those who died in the gulag - Ivan
To hell with them: the collapse of the USSR was a personal tragedy for Mr Galloway. To him, such an unimaginable scale of murder was not evil but a lodestar — the ultimate expression of his politics.
It is no wonder that he is so keen to show us the “human side” of Saddam — a lightweight in comparison with his friends in the Soviet Union, responsible for barely a million deaths.
As he told Saddam in 1994: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” Five years later, he was condemning those who wanted to oust Saddam for plotting to impose an Anglo-American “slave government” in Baghdad: “Iraq has millions of friends all over the world who are doing everything they can to come to your rescue, and who ask you to keep your unity and the dignity you have shown, for it is an inspiration to the world.”
Saddam, as he informed us in another speech that year, is one of the most popular political leaders in the world: “His pictures are being held aloft in demonstrations in all manner of places . . . If you look at the uprising in Palestine for example, you will not see a single demonstration or funeral procession in the intifada which is not bearing aloft Iraqi flags and pictures of the Iraqi President.” To most observers, that is a further mark of Saddam’s shame. To Mr Galloway, it is a badge of honour.
In May, the actor John Malkovich told the Cambridge Union that Mr Galloway was one of two people he would most like to kill. I am a more pacific man than Mr Malkovich. I would be happy just tearing up Mr Galloway’s ticket from Baghdad. Saddam is welcome to him.
Regards, Ivan
If you don't mind... Please add me to your ping list
Regards, Ivan
Regards,
MJY
Does that count all the people starved in the Ukraine?
Oh sure .. Saddam is just a warm fuzzy kind of guy. he didn't really mean to murder all those people ..
Geez Ivan .. this Galloway is so off his rocker
Regards, Ivan
I don't think so. If he means that, then his estimate is seriously off.
Regards, Ivan
Well not that colourful. I doubt Donahue would get him over there; contrary to what Mr. Donahue may believe, he's not that well known over here.
Regards, Ivan
Thankfully, I was at a stage musical last night with my grandchildren, so I missed the entire thing.
Then I found that you had posted a great mamny excellent articles this morning, so I am in quite a good mood!
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