Getting Back to Russia. posted by Richard Seymour

Well, oul' Harry Hatchet's swing is as errant as ever. Today, he's after Seumus Milne for something he wrote in The Guardian , which I'll quote:

Yesterday saw another handover that never was, when Saddam Hussein was transferred to Iraqi jurisdiction - while remaining in US custody. No doubt the occupation forces and their Iraqi frontmen hope that a show trial of the former dictator will provide a theatrical distraction for Iraqis from the misery around them. By recalling the crimes of the Saddam regime, perhaps they imagine they can retrieve some retrospective justification for last year's unprovoked invasion. It is surely too late for that.

And, Harry is shocked, shocked! Why? Well:

Retrospective justification? Show trial? Theatrical distraction? How patronising, no, how insulting, to the Iraqi victims of fascism can you get?

I get the feeling that Harry must be lexically challenged, because "insulting" cannot have been the word he was looking for. For such a charge to be convincing, it would have to be the case that a) the trial is likely to be conducted in an honest and serious way, b) it really was being conducted by "the Iraqi victims of fascism" and not by a puppet government whose leadership includes one of the former exponents of "fascism", and c) the coalition forces could not reasonably be charged with using the Saddam trial as a spectacle to distract from the disintegrating, terrifying situation in Iraq. Oddly, Harry makes no attempt to argue any of those points, although they are in fact crucial.

He continues:

His articles is sub-titled The resistance campaign is Iraq's real war of liberation and again, forgive me, but it really is tempting to wonder how the likes of Milne would feel about 'resistance' if they were a little closer to it - if they had to consider living under the rule of Islamist or Ba'athist thugs. Because, you know, some people do face that threat.

Harry surely cannot be referring to the famed chubster Muqtada al-Sadr, who has the support of 67% of Iraqis precisely because of his acts of resistance. 81% of Iraqis polled say that their opinion of Sadr has improved as a result of the last few months. (According to MSNBC/Newsweek ). Odd that the people who "do face that threat" are in diametric opposition to their erstwhile liberator, Harry 'Hatchet' Saunders. Anyway, Harry doesn't go far enough in his bluster. He ought to have also added some oafish commentary on this:

What is not in doubt is that the resistance has decisively changed the balance of power in Iraq and beyond. The anti-occupation guerrillas are routinely damned as terrorists, Ba'athist remnants, Islamist fanatics or mindless insurgents without a political programme. In a recantation of his support for the war this week, the liberal writer Michael Ignatieff called them "hateful". But it has become ever clearer that they are in fact a classic resistance movement with widespread support waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies. Their tactics are overwhelmingly in line with those of resistance campaigns throughout modern history, targeting both the occupiers themselves and the local police and military working for them. Where that has not been the case - for example, in atrocities against civilians, such as the Karbala bombing in March - the attacks have been associated with the al-Qaida-linked group around the Jordanian Zarqawi, whose real role is the subject of much speculation among Iraqis.

I have been arguing this distinction for months, and noone has yet undone it (because it just happens to be accurate). Harry does, however, ruminate for a bit on the possibilities of "victors' justice" in Iraq, in which he does his best to conflate the Iraqi people with the coalition and the Allawi regime. Not even worth commenting on. However, when he says, as he does in his tirade, that many in the European Left had once been blind to the horrors of Stalinism, a moment of historical awareness would mantle his cheeks with a blush of shame. During the 1980s, a militarily superpower launched a war on an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and was met with a resistance movement suffused with Islam but centred on evicting the occupiers. They denounced the resistance as "reactionary" and defended their mission in the same Capitalised Abstractions that America today uses to defend its actions in the world. Doubtless, hordes of Pravda serviles worked up the courage to denounce the resistance, and note their opposition to womens' liberation, their 'brutality' and their reactionary base. In Britain, however, we don't need Pravda. We just need a few liberals who are credulous in the face of power, but seething with contempt for its opponents.

The bad news for Harry is that, overall, Iraq is worse off than it was before the war.