What the Left Got Wrong About Iraq (Pacifica radio correspondent)

[Barrett808]

What the Left Got Wrong About Iraq
Anti-war activists ignored Saddam Hussein's horrendous crimes against ordinary Iraqis. Do they have anything -- beyond anti-Bush demonstrations -- to offer the oppressed in Iran and Syria?
By Aaron Glantz
Published: Wednesday, May 25, 2005

On May 15, 2003, in the early days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I took a trip to al-Mufwrakiyya, a village on the banks of the Tigris River two hours south of Baghdad. A U.S. military crane had just toppled Saddam's statue in Baghdad, and I was hard at work documenting the human costs of the U.S. invasion.

Hospital officials in nearby Kuwt had already briefed me on the situation in al-Mufwrakiyya. U.S. airplanes and tanks had destroyed houses and killed innocent women and children there. At least four women had been killed in that village, they told me -- all of them while hiding in their homes.

A reporter for staunchly anti-war Pacifica Radio, I expected to find the villagers angry at the Americans because of their suffering as a result of the war. But that's not what I found.

It's not that the war had been easy. A few feet away from the green reeds on the banks of the Tigris lay the rubble of 11 houses destroyed by American tanks. As I approached, one villager gave me the list of the services absent in his town since the fall of Saddam. There was no electricity, no security, no telephone service, and no running water. An American tank destroyed his cousins' house, he told me, but he was being forced to pay for the reconstruction.

(more)

http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2005-05-25/news/feature.html

Aaron Glantz is a Pacifica radio correspondent who covered Sacramento for KPFA-FM (94.1) and who spent five months in Iraq. His book, How America Lost Iraq, was published earlier this month.

[deutsey]

1. I take exception to the basic premise that anti-war activists

"ignored" Saddam's horrendous crimes. I know that, as a human rights activist in the '80s, I was doing what I could to get the US to pressure Hussein (who was then our ally) to stop brutalizing his people.

[Sick_of_Rethuggery]

7. And you could add that the criminal Right was coddling and arming

Saddam, while you were working against it. Thank you for your work.

The idiocy and inability of even some people on the left to see how neatly the Right maneuvers everyone else into circular firing squads is quite amazing.

[Kurovski]

8. It couldn't be ignored.

remember "Saddam gassed his own people"? We heard and read it over and over and over in a near-to-endless loop.

What we didn't hear too often--and some heard not at all--was how America sold the gas to Hussein and how the gassing was allowed to go forward prior to the fact. This was a cynical, criminal "set-up" to war, IMO.

Likewise with the mass graves that were filled in part to Bush the first's maneuvering.

If the author of the article wants to come up with an alternative to either Bombing or a dictatorship, he should come up with one if he thinks someone can.

With many dictators in the world, American's looked to Hussein's dictatorship and decided it wasn't worth the blood and treasure to enter. The oil-besotted members of the war-party thought otherwise.

American's who thought about it at all, realized the horror it would trigger beyond Iraq. It would make the situation worse in the ME and the world.

Here's an alternative: get military bases out of the middle-east, stop supporting repressive ME regimes ( as was done in Iraq when it served), apologize, make material amends, and let the people of the middle east fight their oppressors instead of fighting America along with their own home-grown oppressors.

[pocket]

2. what a bunch of horseshit

Great, now the sfweekly and Pacifica employees are poodling for the neocons.

[Goldmund]

3. That's simply not true. Did you read the article?

[Barrett808]

4. I think this story is in the direction of Naomi Klein's thinking

Essentially: End the occupation, yes; but pay reparations. We have to offer some positive alternative to a decade or more of grinding counterinsurgency war.

[Goldmund]

5. That's a really good article.

But, what I think that HE is missing is the fact that the anti-war left always knew the character of the Bush cabal, and that their motives had nothing to do with freeing Iraqi people -- and that the anti-war left is by no means surprised by the way that the post-invasion Iraq has been handled. The Iraqis he talks about in the article, are. He overlooks that whole part of the story; the Sunni guy who was telling the pre-war demonstrators to "shut up" is now siding with the resistance. 58 times more Iraqis died in the first year of the occupation than in the last year of Saddam's rule, as he says; the anti-war left is not surprised.

Now, if there was some kind of a trustworthy force with no nefarious agendas going around targeting dictators, I don't think there would be much of an anti-war movement; it would be restricted to ideological pacifists.

Just like you let a plumber into your house if he works for a real plumbing company; not the local burglar in a plumber outfit, and then act surprised when the reason he's there isn't to fix your plumbing but steal your teevee. Before he came in, you were telling people who were warning you to "shut up" because water's all over your basement, but now you're trying to get him arrested and kicked out of your house.

Well, the anti-war left knew that the plumber was a criminal, not a real plumber. That's the difference.

[Larkspur]

6. This guy also forgets that the Old Left betrayed the democratic principles

of this country by supporting the immoral Vietnam War, a war also based upon lies. That was one main reason the New Left rose up. The Old Left -- Humphrey, Lyndon Johsonson, etc. -- betrayed the democratic ideals over Cold War ideology. The New Left unfortunately saw the defeat or death of their promising leaders -- Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George McGovern -- so it became difficult for the New Left to stay united, but the Old Left continued to decline.

[Vladimir]

9. Its actually not an unfair criticism of sections of the left

but I do have a number of quibbles:

1) Before the war, I saw a number of communiques from the Iraqi communist party (well, ostensibly the student union) saying they were opposed to the attack. Now they are in government. So there has probably been movement in both ways - people who wanted an attack but are angry America stayed, and people who opposed the invasion but are now happy to collaborate.

2) It is true that some of the left have made far too much of the "legality" or "justification" or "cost" (in terms of US troops killed) of the conflict. But that neglects the fact that we wanted the invasion stopped at all costs, because we knew full well what would follow, and any propaganda was good propaganda. It didn't take a genius to figure out what the 'liberation' would turn into.

3) Coherent sections on the left did have an alternative - lift sanctions, pay reparations for the years under sanctions, and let the Iraqis overthrow Saddam themselves. But even if you reject that, it does not follow that the invasion was OK. Its one thing for an Iraqi to wish for someone to remove Saddam, its another for us to agree to an imperial conquest of Iraq on the grounds that we are a better overlord than Saddam.

4) If we do pull out now, and I think we should pull out completely tomorrow if not sooner, reparations must be the next demand. What Libya paid for each of the Lockerbie victims per person killed in Iraq since the start of the occupation, plus more for infrastructure, would be a good starting point.

[eridani]

10. What bullshit!

I sent plenty of letters to my congresscritters in the 80s demanding that the US cut off military aid and loans to Iraq on humanitarian grounds. Congress cooperated but Ronny and Bush the First vetoed the legislation. And now people like me get called Saddam lovers by ignorant human vegetables who couldn't be bothered to put down their remotes long enough to do the same.