Posted on 04/23/2003 4:12:31 PM PDT by MadIvan
Another day, another astonishing revelation in the Galloway story. Though an alleged request for more money, over and above the £375,000 per annum that George Galloway appears to have been receiving from the oil-for-food programme, was rejected by Saddam Hussein, the welfare of the Labour MP seems to have remained a high priority for the Iraqi regime.
According to the latest document to be published by our correspondent David Blair, Mr Galloway's interests were looked after by a committee that included four of Saddam's chief henchmen: his vice-president, his cousin (the late and unlamented "Chemical Ali"), the deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, and the then foreign minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, better known for his role as information minister in the recent war, where he won the name "Comical Ali''.
A memorandum from this committee advises Saddam that Mr Galloway should continue to benefit from oil and other revenues, but that further contacts with Iraqi intelligence might damage him. This document provides an ironical gloss on Mr Galloway's repeated protestation that he never knowingly met an Iraqi intelligence officer, but dealt only with Iraq's "political leadership".
The evidence is stacking up against Mr Galloway, who now admits that he did spend Christmas 1999 with Tariq Aziz in Baghdad, the date when he apparently met an Iraqi spy to demand more money. The former head of Saddam's protocol says that the documents are genuine.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Ever since David Blair discovered the paper trail that led from Baghdad to Glasgow, the mind of George Galloway has increasingly retreated into fantasy. As more documents found in the Iraqi foreign ministry are published and the possibility that they could have been forged becomes more remote, so Mr Galloway's conspiracy theory becomes wilder.
He fulminates that this newspaper is "the sewer of choice for whoever is involved in these black arts of espionage", but his reputation is now such that he forfeits even the tribal loyalty that Left-wing mavericks normally enjoy. The Guardian yesterday praised David Blair's scoop as "a fine piece of enterprising reporting". The Labour Party is ominously silent. Even Mr Galloway's erstwhile patrons in Iraq have deserted him.
There are two groups who may be disposed to believe in Mr Galloway's innocence. The first is the paranoid Left. Mark Seddon, the editor of Tribune and a member of Labour's National Executive, was given space in the columns of The Times yesterday to hint at dark plots: "When the Telegraph publishes the 'Galloway files', I am reminded of the Zinoviev letter."
To draw parallels between the documents found in Baghdad and the notorious forgery that helped to lose Labour the 1924 election, would be infamous if it were not so absurd. Mr Galloway may also be counting on the Islamist fundamentalists, who are apt to blame literally anything on an American-British-Zionist conspiracy.
There is method in Mr Galloway's madness. He hopes to preserve a constituency of the faithful, on whose gullibility can be built a vast superstructure of myth. Incredible as it may seem, George Galloway - who toadied to tyrants from Bucharest to Baghdad, who devoted money intended for sick Iraqi children to his own globetrotting - now depicts himself as a martyr.
Once the papers on the French Connection have been made public, I imagine they will be too busy to notice.
So9
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