Left Wing Imperialism: An Infantile Disorder... posted by Richard Seymour

Nick Cohen in the New Statesman

Another post unscrupulously pinched from MEDIA LIES .

The antiwar movement just won’t stop it with the Bush-bashing. According to Nick Cohen, in a comedy piece for this week’s New Statesman, Iraqis are struggling for democracy, and freedom, and human rights – and the antiwar movement is still banging on about the war, and how dangerous that man in the Whitehouse is! Why, he wonders, can’t they get over it already and just support Iraqi democrats? Why is the far left supporting “fascist uprisings”? How were 150,000 people persuaded to march against Bush carrying banners demanding the withdrawal of occupation forces, when even the Iraqi Communist Party has learned by “chastening experience” that “capitalism is preferable to fascism”?

Leaving aside the problematic opposition between fascism and capitalism (surely by capitalism he means ‘liberal democracy’, unless somehow Iraq had not been awash with money and profiteers for some forty years), the ICP has learned many lessons through “chastening experience”. They once learned, for instance, that Ba’athism was preferable to resistance. So did Jalal Talabani, the leader of Cohen’s beloved PUK, when he kissed Saddam’s cheek during the first Gulf War, then went on to collaborate with Iranian theocracy. Massoud Barzani, of the KDP, was not averse to inviting Saddam in to wipe out his PUK opponents either. Unsurprisingly, those forces most willing to collaborate with the occupation have been the most opportunistic backers of Saddam in the past.

So when Cohen complains that the antiwar movement is still banging on about Bush and the war when Iraq is in such a terrible mess, he could consider that the two might just be connected. Not just in terms of the war itself, but in terms of the total prior engagement of the West with Iraq. Suppose the present imbroglio has something to do with that. Most people would notice a correlation like that, just in terms of cause, effect, the apparent proximity of events, etc., but not our eagle-eyed extirpator of heresy.

“There were half a dozen good reasons for being against the war,” Nick Cohen admits a year too late, only to add, “there wasn’t one for the left turning its back on its comrades in the war’s aftermath.” The reasoning is approximately as follows: the resistance to the occupation is composed of the political supporters of Osama bin Laden, and the Ba’athists. They are ultra-rightists, homophobes and bigots seeking to crush the left. The reaction of the international left was that “they shrugged” rather than rally in defense of their comrades. This gesture is “so shocking” that “a year later they cannot admit to themselves what they have done”. Imagine – just say – that the United States government does not really intend democracy for Iraq. Suppose that Shi’ites demanding elections are right to be hostile to the occupation and cynical about its goals. And suppose that among the anti-occupation forces were democrats, civil society forces, opponents of Saddam? Would it then be enough to convince the war-liberals that not everyone who called for the occupation to end was somehow covering up for Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda or other past allies of US capitalism?

Examples? How about the man whose premature death is recorded in the same issue of the New Statesman, Professor Abdullatif Ali Al-Mayah, a “prominent human rights campaigner” and also a dedicated opponent of the British-American occupation of Iraq? How about the Mahdi Army, a Shi’ite force with no particular reverence for the Ba’ath ‘fascist’ machine? How about the Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation, an exile group whose opposition to US imperialism is in no way mitigated by their opposition to the Hussein regime that they had to flee.

At any rate, Nick Cohen is wrong to suggest that the left has simply ‘shrugged’ when faced with the atrocious actions of bigots in Iraq. Since he mentions Tariq Ali, I’ll just mention that I attended a packed public meeting in which Tariq Ali denounced the mysognistic violence of Muqtadr’s boys and supported Iraqi comrades in the audience who called for them to be defeated. He has repeated the same things in speeches in Lahore and Los Angeles. That is also the position of Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation, whom Cohen has never to my knowledge even mentioned in any of his articles. It is not that the left has neglected this terrain – it has just stubbornly insisted on appending to this opposition the demand to resist what the US is doing in Iraq. Far from abandoning Iraq, the Left has simply persisted in casting the net of critique somewhat wider than the myopic neo-imperialists of the liberal press.

Cohen’s prose is impressionistic, a layering of details rather than a structured argument. Crucial facts are elided, fictitious positions are imputed to his opponents, and once again Barham Salih is evoked as the symbolic figure of resistance. Not having met Salih, I find it difficult to evaluate his own political integrity, although he is quite willing to impugn that of leftists who disagreed with the US invasion. But I do know that he is a member of the PUK, and that this organisation has been opportunistic, mercenary, utterly unprincipled in its attitude to dealing with Saddam and with Iranian theocrats. They would rather have allowed the Iranian government to enter their territory, murdering Kurdish dissidents who were hiding out from the Mullahs, than lose their pathetic feud with the KDP. Cohen is happy to accuse the left of covering up crimes, but oddly omits to mention this salient bit of history. He rarely has a bad word to say about the occupation, although it has so far generated more corpses than the so-called “fascist uprisings”. He has spent more time discussing the alleged crimes of the Stop the War Coalition than the actual crimes of troops in Iraq, and would rather be having his debate with Saddam Hussein than the left (hence the constant need to imply guilt by association).

But since Cohen stupidly claims that Tariq Ali’s support for the Iraqi resistance to the occupation represents a nuanced version of the standard shift from 1968 radicalism to the right, (because anyone who resists the foreign occupation of their country is, let us never forget, a fascist) let me play his game. If he is willing to condemn antiwar activists for working with the Muslim Association of Britain because they are a branch of the Muslim Brothers, he is obliged to condemn in even more vigorous terms the US occupiers for appointing a member of the Muslim Brothers to the Iraq, who has been responsible for trying to equip the new Iraqi regime with the accoutrements of theocratic power. He might also have a word or two to say about whether the Iraqi Governing Council is murdering its opponents. Particularly the aforementioned Al-Mayah of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights, who was gaining in popularity as he excoriated the corruption of the IGC, and “making some of the politicians here quite jealous”. Al-Mayah is just one of seven university professors to be assassinated recently, as liberal forces opposing both the occupation and the “Ba’athist remnants”. Where is all this liberal crap about solidarity when the US or its quislings may be the villains? And it is hard to believe Nick Cohen is ignorant of the intentions of the US government. Anyone with their ears and eyes open will have caught a glimpse of what Rumsfeld and company have in store for the world – US domination through both military and market forces. So, shall we rejoice while they slaughter thousands in pursuit of this goal?

Cohen complains that the Left only opposes murderous regimes that are backed by the West – but that argument, aside from being untrue, cuts both ways. Liberal imperialists rarely have anything to say about the crimes of their own states, and never judge these by the same standards they would apply to any other government. He complains that the Left elevates Israel into a matchless demon, which blots out all the abhorrent Muslim forces in the Middle East. Aside from the obvious disparity in privilege and power, this again is untrue. The left has consistently argued that the corrupt regimes in the Arab world are Israel’s greatest asset. They have crushed their own left, and crippled pan-Arab solidarity. Egypt has taken America’s money, used the radical Islamists to crush its Nasserists and Leftists, and provided Israel with a crucial comfort zone while it decimates the Palestinians.

There is, finally, the standard dig at political-correctness. Cohen cites Paul Berman of Dissent magazine (a witless misnomer if ever one was coined), who pretends that the antiwar Left was convinced, out of its own liberal multiculturalism, that Arabs somehow choose to live under grotesque dictatorships, and should be free to enjoy their squalour. This smokescreen is doubly ironic, since it is precisely our warmongering Prime Minister Tony Blair who loves to invoke cultural relativism where it suits him. (In an otherwise inert interview for Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman asked the PM why Britain continued to sell arms to the disgusting Saudi oligarchy if it was so enamoured of democracy and human rights all of a sudden. Blair’s response, reflexively, was “well… they have their culture…”!) Of course Arabs do not choose to live under tyranny – they have been forced to do so, courtesy of the West. That being the case, who but the most naïve liberals would trust the US government with dispensation of the vital task of liberating the oppressed of that region?

Cohen even complains when BBC journalists like John Humphreys do their job by pointing out to lachrymose, insinuating politicians that ‘liberation’ is not the reason we went to war (it isn’t, is it?). Fortunately, the international Left has been proven right in almost every essential. It has allies in Iraq, (and not the ones Cohen thinks it has), who should be encouraged to continue their resistance against both the corrupt occupation and the vile merchants of bigotry exploiting discontent with the occupation. Cohen’s infantile lashing out reflects his failure to win the argument on the Left and his desire to cover up and compensate for his immense loyalty and service to power.