Author: keza

Date : Dec 2, 2003 11:22 pm

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The discussion Moving Rightwards? on Harry's Place is worth reading.

I've just posted an article Nine red herrings:how the western left has misread Iraq (which I came across via the above discussion). This article was published last April but it remains an excellent refutation of the pseudo-left opposition to the war oin Iraq. It looks specifically at 9 pseudo-left arguments.

(1) The Ba’ath regime was in some sense “progressive”

(2) The suffering of the Iraqi people was mainly due to the effects of UN sanctions.

(3)Hostility to Saddam’s regime was “really” hostility to the “Arab world” and/or to Islam.

(4) The western powers kept Saddam in power, armed his troops and funded his foreign ventures, so they cannot be trusted now.

(5) The war against the Ba’ath regime was a violation of international law.

(6) The war was opposed by majorities of the populations of Britain, the United States, Australia, Arab countries, Muslim countries, the whole world, and, if the Pope can be trusted, Heaven as well.

(7) The war was “really” all about US control of the world’s oil supplies.

(8) Invading a country in order to remove its regime from power was an unprecedented violation of “state sovereignty.

(9)The coalition forces have met with stiff resistance from the Iraqi people.

A couple of excerpts:

*But how is it possible for us to call ourselves Marxists and support a war waged by a coalition of rich western liberal democracies against the government of a poor “Third World” country? We would turn the question round: how it is possible that Marxism has been so corrupted and distorted that “Marxists” prefer to see thousands more Iraqis die in the torture chambers of the Ba’ath, and millions more suffer under the iniquities excused (not caused) by the UN sanctions, rather than admit that socialists not only can but must support even the worst bourgeois democracy against even the least bad tyranny? For the beginnings of an answer, let us consider just some of the transparent and disgusting lies generated and spread by the western “left” before and during the war.*

*As for what happens next, we refuse even to engage in debate with, still less apply the just about honourable epithet of “socialist” or “Marxist” to, anyone who defended Saddam’s dictatorship, ignored the pleas of the Iraqi people or gave any other form of comfort to the Ba’ath regime. To aid such a regime’s campaign of lies and intimidation is to desert the cause of human progress altogether. In wartime every individual must necessarily, and regardless of intentions, end up helping one side or the other. In the centuries-long conflict between enlightenment and barbarism, the possibility of progress and the certainty of reaction, of which the war in Iraq was just one more skirmish, the western “left” has shown which side it is on.*

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