I have to say I don't know what to believe about all this. I certainly
don't know enough about Galloway to judge whether or not he actually
'supported' Saddam. I don't think Hitchens can just say that well 'we'
aren't the 'they' who supported him (for the US) because most of the
new 'we' are the old 'they', so that argument falls. His insistence
that removing Saddam was better than getting rid of the sanctions is at
least open to question.
So, in terms of the larger questions (that is beyond attacking
Galloway), it's this paragraph that has me on edge:
The bad faith of a majority of the left is instanced by four things
(apart, that is, from mass demonstrations in favor of prolonging the
life of a fascist government). First, the antiwar forces never asked
the Iraqi left what it wanted, because they would have heard very
clearly that their comrades wanted the overthrow of Saddam. (President
Jalal Talabani's party, for example, is a member in good standing of
the Socialist International.) This is a betrayal of what used to be
called internationalism. Second, the left decided to scab and blackleg
on the Kurds, whose struggle is the oldest cause of the left in the
Middle East. Third, many leftists and liberals stressed the cost of the
Iraq intervention as against the cost of domestic expenditure, when if
they had been looking for zero-sum comparisons they might have been
expected to cite waste in certain military programs, or perhaps the
cost of the "war on drugs." This, then, was mere cynicism. Fourth, and
as mentioned, their humanitarian talk about the sanctions turned out to
be the most inexpensive hypocrisy.
First I wonder just who this 'left' comprises. Second Im not at all
sure that being anti-war means necessarily being for what he sees as
these hypocrisies, but rather for international rule of law, for saving
the lives of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children & others
whom we have no sense are that much better off since the invasion, &
also for stopping all those wars on abstractions because all they do is
serve the power grabs of the those, like the Bush gang, who might speak
out for 'democracy' but seem to be trying as hard as they can do
diminish it in their own country.
So Hitchens is, as always, fun to read, but the arguments slide around
at least as much as a Galloway's ones do....
Doug
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
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Words cling to other words
As we have seen, although even these are
Migratory and the forgotten shows through as correction.
This noun has been defunct for centuries.
Ann Lauterbach
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