Jim lots of words but you've managed not to say anything of substance.

On the contrary, it is a devastating critique on the failure of the left.

Right Jim. What the problem here is that the Kurds had an autonomous control in the north of Iraq before the invasion that is now gone. The invasion let the Kurds come back to the region but they kicked out the arabs and dispossessed the 80,000 Palestinians that Saddam had protected.

There is a demented disconnect from reality with these evangelists who just want to kick the life out of the western left while forgetting that we have been fighting for the rights of the Iraqis for decades without the use of bombs. It is the right that have outlawed and demonised the Kurdish freedom party, it is the right that have demolished Iraq without a plan of what to do next, it is the right that are in power in the US, UK and here (and don't try the spin that Blair is of the left).

It is the AWB who paid Saddam for the bunkers "to bury the Kurds". I am sick to death of the whining of those who advocated the invasion and demolition of Iraq who then blame the rest of us who opposed it because it has gone pear shaped.

We had no right Jim. Full stop. Iraq was not and is not our toy and Iraq was not doing anything to hurt anyone, anywhere.

no Jeremy, this article is an exercise in self affirmation which you obviously find comforting as it offers you an easy way out of the failures of the position you support.

it seems strange for the 'right' to be accusing the 'left' of inaction while generally gloating about holding the balance of power, the support of the 'silent majority' and the general conservatives of the populations of the coalition of the willing, etc. as we keep being told, the 'left' isn't in government.

so what have the right done with all this 'democratic' power? well the easy answer is 'liberation', although I don't remember that being really high on the agenda until after the wmd's failed to show, but then I could be wrong, by its own admission the us government 'makes its own reality', so perhaps they can manipulate what was true in the past.

An independent Kurdistan, including the Turkish provinces would provide a nice diversion for Iran. If we play our cards it right might even be a "friend" to the west. As a bonus a smaller more western Turkey could be more easily absorbed in the EU.

But wait we live in an age of nationalism and this is about as likely to happen as the US granting statehood to central american countries upon meeting certain judicial and economic standards. If our record in Afgahnistan and Iraq are anything to go by they wouldn't be our friends for long.

In the 1990s, William Waldegrave, who was in charge of Prime Minister John Major’s Open Government initiative, ordered the removal from the Public Records Office of files detailing how British troops had used poison gas against Iraqi dissidents including Kurds in 1919.

Churchill bombed them with an early version of napalm. They had an independant kingdom for a few years, until oil was discovered.

This article is a disgraceful piece of crud.

Typical response by the left to any criticism- roll off a list of all the bad things the right has ever done. But don't you guys get the whole point of the argument? He's already acknowledged that the right has 'screwed' over the kurds in the past. He's saying that the western left are the latest to do so, because on the whole they're not supporting democratic parties in Iraq. In predicting a response to this post, I would assume that I'd just get the next typical response- the supposed democratic parties in Iraq are just puppets of the oil hungry imperialists la-de-da. Of course in doing so, they'll prove Nolan's whole point- that democratic parties in Iraq aren't getting any help from the Western left.

Oh, and regarding WMD's, check out the final report of the Iraq Survey Group.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/index.html

Read the whole thing. It's amazing how different the actual report is from how the media reported it. It basically says that Saddam had latent WMD capabilities and fully intended to ramp up the program if ever sanctions were lifted.

There's the bait. Let's see if they bite.

Dozer, dozer, dozer - still dozing. The senate report that was released last month says a couple of little things.

1. the assessment that Iraq had WMD was known by the US in 1995 to be utterly false - he had destroyed everything in 1991.
2. by March 2001 the US knew that Curveball was a liar and a fraud and so were the other people in Chalabi's group.

3. Unless it would have been possible for Saddam to commit mass murder by paper cut he simply had no documents. The republican lead senate said clearly "at some point it just has to be admitted that an absence of evidence is really an abscence".

Iraq never had weapons and at the time they used them on the Kurds in 1988 the entire western world sat and watched. And the AWB built the bunkers to "bury them in".

Give it a rest now dozer - I am sick to death of these blatant attempts to pretend an absence of evidence means there was evidence.

Dozy

"Saddam had latent WMD capabilities and fully intended to ramp up the program if ever sanctions were lifted."

OK if I accept this is true (which I don't) why invade? Why not keep the sanctions in place?

Better to slowly starve the population than to bomb the crap out of them?

Why invade?

OK I took the bait, will you have the balls to answer my questions?

Well said. And another case in point closer to home. What has the Left been saying about Burma recently? Close to nothing. The greatest supporter of the democracy cause in Burma and opponent of the junta is none other than the Bush Administration. What is the position of the Left on this issue? Are they too scared to be seen agreeing with Bush and Condy?

Regarding the lack of documents on Iraqi WMD:

from http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/isg-final-report_vol1_rsi-05.htm,

"Saddam's personalized and intricate administrative methods meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch. His chain of command for WMD was optimized for his control rather than to ensure the participation of Iraq’s normal political, administrative or military structures."

"(In the 1990's) Saddam spoke often in one-to-one sessions with first Husayn Kamil and later ‘Abd-al-Tawab ‘Abdallah Al Mullah Huwaysh on research and industrial issues supporting WMD. There are no indications that Saddam issued detailed written instructions to either individual to direct WMD work."

So, Saddam didn't want to leave a paper trail. Furthermore, while Saddam did not have a WMD capability, he wanted to create doubt in his opponents' (both internal and external) minds, to maintain a level of deterrence.

"While it appears that Iraq, by the mid-1990s, was essentially free of militarily significant WMD stocks, Saddam’s perceived requirement to bluff about WMD capabilities made it too dangerous to clearly reveal this to the international community, especially Iran."

There was a wealth of information on the Iraqi WMD program, some suggesting that Saddam had WMD capabilities, others that he didn't. Even the respective heads of UNSCOM couldn't agree- Scott Ritter didn't believe they had anything left, while Richard Butler, was convinced that the continual obfuscating behaviour, specific comments made to him by Tariq Aziz, and constant lies upon lies meant that the regime had something to hide. In short, evidence of whether or not Iraq had WMD was ambiguous. But Saddam had form, so he couldn't be given the benefit of the doubt.

And Saddam always intended to reconstitute his WMD capability after sanctions were lifted.

from http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/isg-final-report_vol1_rsi-06.htm,

"The Regime made a token effort to comply with the disarmament process, but the Iraqis never intended to meet the spirit of the UNSC’s resolutions. Outward acts of compliance belied a covert desire to resume WMD activities. Several senior officials also either inferred or heard Saddam say that he reserved the right to resume WMD research after sanctions."

cont...

This leaves us with the legal and moral problem: If we had known this, should we still have invaded? It would have been very difficult to get agreement for such a war. However, Iraq was a problem that would not have gone away. I'm sure Steve Madden is aware of the irony of the conundrum- do we bomb them or do we starve them? It was quite clear, (despite the fact that Saddam was actively diverting funds which were supposed to go the Iraqi people,) that the sanctions were immoral.

But if the sanctions had been lifted, Iraq would probably have acquired a WMD capacity. And there is a pattern throughout history of states which acquire WMD behaving in a more aggressive and risky way (including the US) because they think that the deterrent value of WMD will let them get away with it. (Unfortunately, Iran has learned this the hard way during its war with Iraq. We should never have let Iraq get away with using WMD against the Kurds or Iran.)

The AWB's association with the Iraqi government is a national disgrace. Unfortunately the Baath party seemed able to corrupt many:

"In 1988, Iraq paid 1 million dollars to the French Socialist Party, according to a captured IIS report dated 9 September 1992. ‘Abd-al-Razzaq Al Hashimi, former Iraqi ambassador to France, handed the money to French Defense Minister Pierre Joxe, according the report. The IIS instructed Hashimi to “utilize it to remind French Defense Minister, Pierre Joxe, indirectly about Iraq’s previous positions toward France, in general, and the French Socialist party, in particular”.

"Aziz says he personally awarded several French individuals substantial oil allotments. Both parties understood that resale of the oil was to be reciprocated through efforts to lift UN sanctions, or through opposition to American initiatives within the Security Council.

"As of June 2000, Iraq had awarded short term contracts under the OFF program to France totalling $1.78 billion, equalling approximately 15 percent of the oil contracts allocated under the OFF program."

what's that about my balls...

Trying to find an argument of substance in this article is quite difficult. Perhaps there isn't any. Nevertheless I'll try.

The implication seems to be that the "Western Left" supports "Islamofascists". However the Left has no truck with fundamentalists of any religion, and has a long history of supporting democratic self-determination for the people who live in Iraq - especially the Kurds.

The reality is the "Western Left" supports those who seek to remove occupying forces who engaged in an illegal invasion under false pretences. The "Western Left" supports the establishment of secular, democratic governments. The "Western Left" supports self-determination for the people of Iraq; including regional self-determination i.e., an independent nation for the Kurds - if that's what they want.

For years, the Left were condemned for supporting Kurdish "terrorists" who wanted their own country, whilst the right-wing media praised the "progressive" regime of Saddam Hussein. Examples of this can be found in the praise accorded to Hussein's regime in "The Australian" (see, 31 March 1984, p8) and their denial that the regime was using chemical weapons, quoting Harvard University biologist Professor Matthew Meselson's claims that the "yellow rain" was actually the result of swarms of South-East Asian honey bees engaging in a massive defecation flight (seriously! page 7, The Australian, 30 March, 1984)

It seems the assumption the rigid-minded author seems to make is that all insurgents are "Islamofascists".

Whilst on topic we may recall the extensive support that the right-wing governments of "the West" provided the Baathist regime, all of which was under strong condemnation by the left at the time.

(cf., http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/040.html)

Some interesting points Lev. Regarding your Hartford link, you left out a couple of details, choosing to focus on the West's interaction with Saddam. For example, "Politics of Revenge" also notes that Iraq also bought a (less advanced) mobile telephone network from the USSR. This was part of Saddam's obsessive doubling up of everything to ensure that if one avenue dried up he would still have another. Hundreds of Arab and Iraqi ex-patriots were recruited from all over the world to work on the Iraqi WMD program. And it is curious that you include Jacques Chirac of France as an example of right-wing western government assistance to the Baathist regime.

Iraq obtained weapons from both sides of the iron curtain. A key reason western governments pursued weapons sales to Iraq was to diminish Soviet influence in the region. It is important to understand this in the context of the Cold War, despite the dodgy moral compass. (Unfortunately we're still dealing with the legacies of the amoral policies pursued during the Cold War.)

But when it came time to make amends for these policies and remove Saddam Hussein, France and Russia put their own national interests and economic interests over the plight of the Iraqi people. We should be under no illusion that they had humanitarian interests in mind when they opposed the US in the UNSC. I've already shown that Iraq had bought France's vote. Furthermore, Russia was very keen to be repaid $8 billion owed by Iraq for military equipment, and the Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov was receiving bribes from the Iraqi government to get the sanctions lifted.

It seems odd that you argue that the Left has no truck with fundamentalists of any kind. Consider that Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at U of Colorado at Boulder, questioned the innocence of the 9/11 victims, referring them to 'little Eichmans." Do you think the 9/11 attacks were a legitimate act in defence of oppressed peoples?

Peter Singer has boasted that he hopes the "Bush Gang" is defeated in Iraq so that they lose their appetite for further aggressive action.

And don't get started on Chomsky. The left dominates the Humanities disciplines in both Australian and US universities, producing a steady stream of pro-jihadi propaganda.

Those who oppose the occupation in Iraq seem to assume that if the US leaves, the situation in Iraq will get better, with the assumption that the main reason for all the violence is the occupying forces. But most attacks are now by one Muslim group against another. There is already effectively a civil war going on in Iraq. Withdrawal would mean abandoning Iraq to Civil War.

Futhermore, (regardless of tenuous links to terrorism before the invasion,) the power vacuum created after the fall of Saddam means that Islamo-fascists will see it as a perfect opportunity to regain ground after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The fight in Iraq is so intense because the stakes are so high. It could mean the difference between a democratic Middle East or another Taliban in the heart of the Middle East. It may be difficult for many of you to believe, but GWB cares as much about democracy in the Middle East as you do.

So we return to the question. What are you on the left doing to help the democratic parties in Iraq. If you are, can I help, or do you only accept people with strong left-wing credentials.

P.S. What happened to Marilyn and Steve. They were so confident, so condescending, but they appear to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

@dozer

Ward Churchill's comments are certainly within the caveat of Hannah Arendt's remarks on Adolf Eichmann; that many American people who engage (indirectly) in the oppression of Arabs in the middle east take a disinterested moral perspective on the matter. It in no way indicates that he supports terrorist attacks.

Lev, before I respond, I must apologise to the distinguished Peter Singer, lover of animals, defender of Zoophilians, for besmirching his good name in my haste to sully the reputation of the left. Nothing so vile has left his mouth. It was John Pilger who stated:

“We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the “Bush gang” will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.”

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/568/568p10b.htm

In recompense for my sins against the modern-day St. Francis, I will henceforth only buy free-range. In the words of JFK, “I am a sausage.”

Regarding the W.C. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wc), have a read of a speech he gave justifying his “little Eichmann” statement http://www.counterpunch.org/churchill02212005.html. You really get the impression that deep down, he (and his audience) feels that a lot of the people who died that day really did deserve what they got. He exonerates “the food service workers, janitors, children, fire-fighters and random passers by,” and presumably those in the aircraft, but the rest are condemned as those who perpetuate, either consciously or unconsciously, the faceless machine which has killed the babies of the third world for as long as the West has been colonising it.

In this respect he represents the crux of the problem with respect to the Western Left. Through inability to deal with the overwhelming guilt over the sins the West has committed throughout the centuries, the left has rejected the good it has achieved. No good motive can be ascribed to anything our leaders do. Even an act of self-defence is seen as further oppression. Everything must be torn down. The most bizarre manifestation of this pathological self-hate is that the only truth, the only virtue, is perceived to lie outside the West. It is as though the civilizations outside the West never knew hunger, poverty, war or suffering until they came into contact with the West.

Churchill makes it quite clear what he thinks of the current political system and all who represent it. He clearly shares with the 9/11 hijackers the same view of the West. Although he does not explicitly say ‘I support what the 9/11 hijackers did,’ he makes it quite clear that he felt it was deserved. He certainly does not condemn the actions of the 9/11 hijackers.

The scary thing is that in applying Hannah Arendt’s remarks on Adolf Eichmann to those in the WTC and the Pentagon, he endorses the ideology of the Islamo-fascists. The idea that the democratic process imbues us with a generalised complicity with, and thus collective guilt for, the sins of our governments past and present, and thus makes us legitimate targets, reflects the ideology of genocidal regimes such as those of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol-Pot.

@dover

Your suggestion that applying Arendt's comments on Eichmann means endorsement of Islamo-facism is utterly unsubstantiated and indicates a lack of familiarity with her comments. Ditto for your comments of "generalised complicity".

lev,

You must be right. Your ability to make funny alterations to my username proves this beyond all doubt...