http://www.guardian.co.uk/antiwar/story/0,12809,896660,00.html

THE LEFT ISN'T LISTENING

The Stop the War coalition is the greatest threat to any hope for a
democratic Iraq

Nick Cohen
Sunday February 16, 2003
The Observer

When Saddam is sent to rendezvous with a judge in The Hague, or a rope on a
lamppost, the democratic opposition in Iraq will need help. It has many
enemies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the CIA and the Foreign Office want to
replace the old tyrant with a new, compliant dictator - a Saddam without a
moustache. As the moment of decision arrives, Iraqi democrats and socialists
have discovered that their natural allies in the European Left don't want to
know them. They must add the shameless Stop the War coalition to the enemies
list.
Iraq is the only country in the Arab world with a strong, democratic
movement. Yet I wonder how many who marched yesterday know of the
dissenters' existence. The demonstration's organisers have gone to great
lengths to censor and silence. How else could the self-righteous feel good
about themselves? The usual accusation when whites ignore brown-skinned
peoples is that of racism. It doesn't quite work in the Stop the War
coalition's case. The Socialist Workers Party, which dominates the alliance,
was happy to cohost the march with the reactionary British Association of
Muslims. The association had blotted its copybook by circulating a newspaper
which explained that apostasy from Islam is 'an offence punishable by
death'. But what the hell. In the interests of multi-culturalism, the SWP
ignored the protests of squeamish lefties and let that pass. The Trots
aren't Islamophobes, after all. The only Muslims they have a phobia about
are secular Iraqi Muslims who, shockingly, believe in human rights.

The Iraqis made a fruitless appeal for fraternal solidarity last month. The
Kurdish leader Barham Salih flew to a meeting of the Socialist International
in Rome to argue for 'the imperative of freedom and liberation from fascism
and dictatorship'. Those marchers who affect to believe in pluralism should
find his arguments attractive, if they can suppress their prejudices long
enough to hear him out. Salih explained that the no-fly zones enforced by
the RAF and USAF had allowed his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the
Kurdish Democratic Party to build a fair imitation of democratic state in
liberated northern Iraq. The Kurds promote the freedom of journalists, women
and religious and racial minorities. Naturally, the local supporters of
al-Qaeda agree with Baghdad that this intolerable liberal experiment must
end, and the Kurds are having to fight both Saddam and the fundamentalists.

Salih was prepared for that: what he wasn't prepared for was the enmity of
the anti-war movement. Foolishly, he tried to reason with it. He pointed out
that the choice wasn't between war or peace. Saddam 'has been waging war for
decades and he has inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.'
Indeed, he continued, the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds who are still under
Baghdad's control continues to this day. 'I do not want war and I do not
want civilian casualties, nor do those who are coming to our assistance,' he
said. 'But the war has already begun.'

What, he then asked, about the strange insistence of the anti-war movement
that Iraqis must not be liberated until Israel withdraws from the occupied
territories? Would the converse apply? If the Palestinians were on the verge
of seeing Israeli rule overthrown, would hundreds of thousands take to the
streets of London and bellow that Palestinians could not get rid of Sharon
until Iraqis got rid of Saddam? Salih doubted it and also had little time
for those who say war should be opposed because 'it's all about oil'.

So what? he asked. 'Iraqis know that their human rights have too often been
ignored because Iraqi oil was more important to the world than Iraqi lives.
It would be a good irony if at long last oil becomes a cause of our
liberation - if this is the case, then so be it. The oil will be a blessing
and not the curse that it has been for so long... So to those who say "No
War", I say, of course "yes", but we can only have "No War" if there is "No
Dictatorship" and "No Genocide".'

Readers with access to the internet can read the whole speech at
www.puk.org. I urge you to do so because you're never going to hear
democratic Iraqi voices if you rely on the anti-war movement. For most of
the time, the comrades pretend the Iraqi opposition doesn't exist.

Harold Pinter is the most striking member of a British Left with its hands
over its ears. In 1988 he staged Mountain Language, a play about the banning
of Kurdish in Turkey. The conceit was all too realistic: the world would
never know of the suffering of the Kurds because the Kurds would never be
allowed to speak. ('Your language is forbidden,' an officer bellows at
Kurdish women. 'It is dead. No one is allowed to speak your language. Your
language no longer exists. Any questions?')

In 2003 when Iraqi Kurds found the words to ask for aid in an anti-fascist
struggle, Pinter turned Pinteresque. He refused to hear the mountain tongue
he had once defended and became a noisy supporter of the Stop the War
coalition. The current issue of the left-wing magazine Red Pepper takes
evasion into outright falsehood. It condemns journalists - well, one
journalist, me - for being conned into believing the Iraqi opposition
supports war. Only American stooges in the Iraqi National Congress want war,
it announces with mendacious self-confidence. The main Iraqi parties - which
Red Pepper lists as the Kurdish Democratic Party, Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - are with the peace
protesters.

It's a convincing case, spoilt only by the fact that the Iraqi National
Congress is an umbrella organisation whose members include the Kurdish
Democratic Party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution and,
indeed, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose leader flew to Europe to beg
the Left to get its priorities right and support a war against tyranny.

If evasion and lies won't do, vilification is the last resort. The writings
of the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya have inspired the opposition and
brought him many enemies, not least Saddam Hussein, who wants him dead.
Edward Said has been only slightly less forgiving. Makiya, he wrote
recently, is a man 'devoid of either compassion or real understanding, he
prattles on for Anglo-American audiences who seem satisfied that here at
last is an Arab who exhibits the proper respect for their power and
civilisation... He represents the intellectual who serves power
unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has.'

I like a good polemic and used to have some time for Said. But he too has
fled into denial. Like the rest of anti-war movement he refuses to
acknowledge that Makiya, Salih and their comrades are fighting the political
battle of their lives against those 'Anglo-American audiences' in the
powerhouses of London and Washington who oppose a democratic settlement.
(See Makiya's article on page 20.) The democrats are struggling without the
support of Western liberals and socialists because they don't fit into a pat
world view.

Here's why. The conclusion the Iraqi opposition has reluctantly reached is
that there is no way other than war to remove a tyrant whose five secret
police forces make a palace coup or popular uprising impossible. As the only
military force on offer is provided by America, they will accept an American
invasion.

This is their first mistake. American and British power is always bad in the
eyes of muddle-headed Left, the recent liberations of East Timor, Sierra
Leone and Kosovo notwithstanding.

Then the uppity wogs compound their offence and tell their European betters
to think about the political complexities. The British and American
governments aren't monoliths, they argue. The State Department and the CIA
have always been the foes of Iraqi freedom. But they are countered by the
Pentagon and a US Congress which passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 - a
law which instructs the American government to support democracy. Not one
Iraqi I have met trusts the Foreign Office. However, they have had a
grudging admiration for Tony Blair ever since he met the Kurdish leaders and
gave them a fair hearing - a courteous gesture which hasn't been matched by
the Pinters, Trotskyists, bishops, actresses and chorus girls on yesterday's
march.

The Iraqis must now accept that they will have to fight for democracy
without the support of the British Left. Disgraceful though our failure to
hear them has been, I can't help thinking that they'll be better off without
us.






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