HP Sauce. posted by Richard Seymour

Is the bottle half-empty or half-full? Well, today's incisive post from Marcus at Harry's Place suggests that we'll be hammering out the last residue from the bottom soon.

Marcus has been lurking about the Tomb, malingering around Dead Men Left and generally sniffing around for truffles to munch on. He investigates the comments boxes. He smells the blood of a Trotskyist. He hunts. And he comes up with this:

What is worth highlighting [from a post at Dead Men Left] though is this passage about a 'slander' on the STWC:

Following the murder of Hadi Salih, international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), Nick Cohen and Johann Hari (aided and abetted by their blogging sidekicks) penned disgraceful attacks on the Coalition for the national press. Both were based on the lie - the absolute, flat-out lie - that the Coalition supports civilian deaths and urges the resistance on by "any means necessary". I dealt with the slander here; Lenin adds more to the story here and here.

The Coalition doesn't support civilian deaths. No one ever mentioned the words "by any means neccessary". It's a slander. Got that ? Good.

Nothing eludes gumboots Marcus. He continues:

[Dead Men Left appears] in someone else's comments box [mine] making things a little less clear about what those in the STWC actually think about acceptable tactics:

It's been said before, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the "by any means necessary" formulation: "necessary means" clearly does not include the murder of trade unionists; this will do nothing to liberate Iraq.

I say that as one member of the Stop the War Coalition. Clearly, others in the Coalition will disagree with that, for all sorts of reasons. That's fine by me. For the Coalition to work at all, as Robin says, all kinds of compromises have to be made.

I misunderstood Marcus' point for a moment. I thought he meant to imply that the author of Dead Men Left was quietly conceding that such a statement had appeared and was defending its use on those grounds. I grumbled. He replied:

'Lenin', haven't you missed the most important point made by 'Meaders' in your comments box ?

Is it "fine by you" that some in the STWC apparantly think the systematic targeting of Trades Unionists for murder is an acceptable tactic ? Is that fact an acceptable "compromise" to put up with in order to make the STWC "work"?

The willingness to locate the most sinister possible meaning in Meaders' statement is characteristic of the hysteria and hyperbole that runs through the pro-war left's campaign against the StWC. Point of logic:

Dear me. He says that some in the coalition "may disagree with that". With what? Well, what he has just said in the previous paragraph, which is:

"It's been said before, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the "by any means necessary" formulation: "necessary means" clearly does not include the murder of trade unionists; this will do nothing to liberate Iraq."

That is to say, *some* may disagree with Meaders on how those words could be interpreted, hence the need - if they ever existed - to edit them out before release.

I know, I know. Inter-blogging rivalry sucks big fat fucking melons. Its boring your pants off (yeah, that's why my hit counter goes up every time I have a feud with some dyspeptic sociopath on the pro-war left).

However, this has some importance. It is my view that there is an effort underway to split the StWC before the elections, and that this is led by elements within the Labour Party. It isn't even a big secret. The early-day motion tabled by Harry Barnes MP and supported by pro-war backbenchers calumniated the StWC with precisely the false charges issued by Hari, Cohen and their friends at Harry's Place. In fact, HP Sauce even ran a campaign to get Labour MPs to back the motion. Meanwhile, Labour Friends of Iraq runs petty, stupid and spiteful stories making wild claims against the StWC which mimic and even go further than the falsehoods propagated by the HP club.

Just bear that in mind next time you read of some terrible thing the antiwar Left are up to now...