Regards, Ivan
Posted on 01/13/2003 4:20:47 PM PST by MadIvan
As Tony Blair yesterday reaffirmed his determination to confront Saddam, the Stop The War coalition was able to present an impressive list of celebrities to add glamour to the fight to save Iraq from Anglo-American terror.
Gemma Redgrave, Anita Roddick, Rosie Boycott and Bianca Jagger are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with rough train drivers from Aslef and Marxist-Leninists from the Socialist Workers Party. Everyone who is anyone from the soft-headed centre to the anti-democratic Left is there. All are welcome - except the people in whose name the party is being thrown: the Iraqis.
Tens of thousands might have been invited. London remains a great exile city, and for more than 20 years Kurds and Arabs have fled from Saddam's persecution to sanctuary in Britain. Yet not one of the 50 Iraqi dissident groups that met in the capital last month to organise the struggle for national liberation has been asked to join the coalition. Nor would they be thanked if they tried to gatecrash.
The anti-war movement is a private party. It has proved to be a remarkably fastidious friend of suffering peoples of the Middle East, and its doors are always open to non-Iraqi Muslims - but it's not at home to Muslims from Iraq.
As far as I can work out from the coalition's membership list, only two Iraqi organisations - one calling itself the Iraqi Network for Human Rights and a second called the Federation of Kurdish Community Organisations - have signed its manifesto. No Iraqi exile I have interviewed has heard of either.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi dissidents are an embarrassment to the Left. After enduring misery few of us can imagine, they have discovered that, without foreign intervention, their country won't be freed from a tyrant who matches Stalin in his success in liquidating domestic opponents. Only America can intervene. Therefore an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation.
There's a damnable logic to this that no amount of wriggling can escape. If you say to the Iraqi opposition that America is very selective in its condemnation of dictatorships, they shrug and ask why Iraqis should care. If you say that Iraq shouldn't be liberated from Saddam until Palestinians are liberated from Israeli occupation, they ask if the converse also applies. (It never does, incidentally.) They confront the anti-war movement with the disconcerting thought that there are worse things in the world than George W Bush and American imperialism, and Saddam Hussein and his prison state are among them.
To right-thinking, Left-leaning people, such thoughts are not merely disconcerting but unthinkable. Oppressed peoples are meant to confirm the prejudices of their (usually white) betters, not raise awkward dilemmas. The honest course would be to say that the price of peace is a continuation of Saddam's oppression. But rather than make a brutal argument that would lose it the moral high ground, the anti-war movement prefers to deal with the Iraqi opposition by ignoring it.
The absence of honourable engagement is allowing the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to get away with murder. Journalists demanded yesterday that Tony Blair tell us if Britain would go to war without UN authorisation. There's a tougher question: what kind of Iraq would British troops be risking their lives for if there is a war?
In Washington, the future of Iraq is ferociously contested. The names of the competitors on either side of the argument prove that you should never believe easy political labels. To the surprise of the simple-minded, Donald Rumsfeld and his supposedly "far-Right" friends in the Pentagon support democracy, while the CIA and the supposedly "moderate" Colin Powell at the State Department hint that they want to replace Saddam with a more compliant dictator.
Mr Blair seems to be with Gen Powell. Ever since Britain created Iraq in the 1920s, the Foreign Office has wanted a kind of apartheid rule by a monarch or dictator from the Arab Sunni minority. The majority of Iraqis, the Shia, have been kept down, along with the Kurdish ethnic minority in the north.
At no point has Mr Blair said he wants dictatorship to end if Saddam is overthrown. The organisers of last month's conference of exiles in London asked the Foreign Office if Mr Blair or Jack Straw would address the assembled delegates. Zaab Sethna, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), told me the men at the FO "laughed in our faces". Our leaders didn't want to waste their time on Iraqi democrats.
The moral disgrace of the liberal-Left wing of the anti-war movement lies in its failure to put pressure on the Prime Minister to uphold the values it pretends to believe in. The Iraqi opposition had a right to expect support. The alternative it offers to Saddam's secular tyranny is not Islamic theocracy. The INC and the London conference of exiles both want a democratic Iraq that gives a voice to the suppressed Shia; a federal Iraq that allows autonomy for the Kurdish minority; and a secular Iraq that can contain the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam.
When I put this programme to my democratic and secular comrades, they turn nasty. I hear that the peoples of Iraq will slaughter each other if Saddam goes; that any US-sponsored replacement will be worse. They may be right, although the second prediction will be hard to meet. What is repulsive is the sneaking feeling that they want the war to be long and a post-Saddam Iraq to be a bloody disaster. They would rather see millions suffer than be forced to reconsider their prejudices.
I expect that some Telegraph readers regard the British Left as good for nothing. In mitigation, I would say that we are world-class nags. If we had taken up the cause of Arab democracy, we would have nagged away until Mr Blair was forced to commit himself for or against liberty.
As it is, the only people who won't be welcome in Baghdad if a free Iraq comes against the odds are the Iraqis' immensely condescending friends in the Stop the War coalition.
Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer
Regards, Ivan
It's just that simple.
When three to five thousand people walk down a large street locked arm in arm all the way across, it doesn't leave much room for opponents numbering in the low tens to counter them. Engulfed by the masses, I'm not sure our message gets out. And get out it must if we are to counter these brain damaged leftists.
I have given this lots of thought. It perplexes me that their side can get 5000 people, our side can't muster 100. How do they do it? What funding is behind this? Who does the books for these non-profit orgs? Are they acting as non-profits? Is funding coming in from outside the United States? Is it coming from Russia? Is it coming from some still remaining communist state? Does the IRS oversee or validate the status of these orgs? These are all questions that come to mind as I consider this situation.
I find it interesting that in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and in Central and South America, the same signs show up. The same orgainizations are present for these protests. Like the anti-capitalist campaigns to stir the pot regarding world capitalism, these organizations appear to be backed by some government. We do know they are backed by the Unions. We do know they are backed by the Democrat party, in so much as they damn all things Republican. The massive coordinated appearances of these leftists can't be by happenstance. A good study of the money trail would leave these orgs bare. In my opinion there's something more to these orgs than meets the eye here. I think revealing that paper trail would do thousands of times more damage to these leftist's efforts, than our meager protests do.
Where we are unopposed, our group makes a nice showing. Where we bang up against these marxists, I'm not sure our message comes through. We can put 500 people on the streets and the media will ognore it. The other side can put five people on the street with drums and the media will give them a three minute spot.
From experience I can say that the media will enhance the leftists numbers by ten times, and deminish our protesters by 100 times. We have had as many as 300 protesters on the street to counter about twenty of the other side. The media focused their cameras on the other side in such a way as to make them look huge, with our people in the background to bolster that effect, then showed only a small contingent of our people to make it look like less than ten of us were there.
Perhaps what we need to consider is picketing the studios themselves whenever these large marxist marches take place. The studios might not put us on camera (Who am I kidding, they definately will not!), but the truth is they weren't going to anyway if we did show up near the large leftist protest. At least the neighbors of the studios would see that the studios themselves are the problem. We could carry signs that made a point of the fact that we were tired of showing up at protests in these numbers only to be ignored. If we could get 5000 on our side to show up a few times like this at the studios themselves, I think we'd jar them into better coverage for our efforts.
It is frustrating to contact local conservative organizations only to have them weasle out of joining us. Until we can put the same numbers on the streets as the Marxists, we have nobody to blame but ourselves for not getting the coverage our policies deserve.
Sunday then, we flew our American flag. This morning the sign had at least been moved onto their porch, where it was harder to see.
The left cares for the people of Iraq in exactly the same terms in which it cared for the people of Vietnam - not a whit, except inasmuch as it serves their political stance. Else why the screams over the mythical "500,000 Iraqi children" supposedly dead by sanction and the utter silence over the real 10,000 Kurdish dead of a poison gas that they aver there is "no proof" that Saddam has? Else why the concerns over a war that is yet to start and the utter silence over the 500,000 dead after the real war Saddam began by attacking Iran? Else why the agonizing over luxurious cells in Guantanamo Bay and the utter silence over Saddam's Gulag? Else why the insistence that Bush is a "threat to world peace" in opposing a guy who has invaded two of his neighbors with no warning? Else why the insistence that this is diverting resources away from the fight against terrorism and the simultaneous jeering that Osama's body was never found?
I could go on, but it would do no good. Hypocrisy, to the left, is only something to accuse your opponents of.
No the United states is not the "nursemaid in the world". We are however, the only nation with the cajones and the weapons to kick ass on these you know whats...
Btw, thank you for bringing up Zimbabwe. It's on my "what to do next list".
Aw shucks, this is not about the suffering people of the Middle East, but about power and control…. of the little people.
Whew...and not Zimbabwee too! This is going to be expensive! We will have to raise taxes to accomplish your Wilsonian goals with our blood and treasure.
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