Nothing left to protest? Make stuff

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J.J. McCullough,
OP Columnist

 

oes it get annoying to be wrong
all the time? That’s the question
I'd like to ask to every left-
winger who predicted the Iraq war would
be a hopeless bloody quagmire. We were
told the Iraq war was an imperialist plun-
der. We were told Bush had no interest in
promoting democracy. We were told the
violent terrorists who attacked US troops
and Iraqi civilians represented legitimate
voices of “resistance,’ and should be
respected and not denounced. This is
what we were told, but what has actually
happened?
Last week, the leaders of the Iraqi par-
first-ever
democratically chosen head of govern-

liament appointed their
ment, Prime Minister [brahim al-Jaafari.
Last month 59 percent of Iraq’s populace
went to the polls for the first time in
decades, and elected the Arab world’s first
and only democratic legislature. The new
members of parliament are overwhelm-
ingly moderates and reformists who ran
opposed to the violent tactics of Islamic
extremists, and it is similarly worth noting
that at least 25 percent of them are
female. The country’s Shiite religious
majority finally hold the political power
they’ve been denied for so long, and the
northern Kurds finally have their own leg-
islative independence.

I think most Iraqis would agree this is
a substantial improvement from the
gassings and torture of the last few
decades, but apparently some folks in the
western left beg to disagree. You knov, it’s
ironic. At one time the left was solidly in
favour of democracy, and actually wanted
American foreign policy to aggressively
pursue undemocratic regimes and human-
tights abusers around the world. But of
course 9/11 changed all that, and when
the battle lines were being drawn, the far-
left decided they hated George W. Bush
more than they hated terrorism.

A good spokeswoman for the move-

March 2/2005

ment was in town recently, and if you’ve
been reading your issues of the Other
Press, you may have heard about it. A few
weeks ago, famed neo-Marxist author
Naomi Klein stopped by Vancouver to
bitch about the Iraq situation and engage
in that favourite leftist pastime—tre-writ-
ing history. It really takes skill of the
highest order to spin the Iraqi people’s
inspiring show of democracy into a
weapon against the United States, but Ms.
Klein found a way. The Iraqi elections
were “a sham,’ she said. There was no
democracy in Iraq. Bush hates democracy.
The sky is orange and hamburgers eat
people. Blah-de-freaking-blah.

Citing as “proof” her shocking obser-
that
immediately
touched Iraqi soil in 2003, Klein brazenly

vation elections were not held

once American boots
declared that the Americans had proceed-
ed to fight Iraqi democracy “every step of
the way.” Iraqi self-determination would
have “nullified the reasons for the war
itself,’ she said, because as we all know
the “ve “reason” for the war was to give

Haliburton free reign to suck up all of

Iraq’s oil with giant straws so it could be
transported back to Washington where
Paul Wolfowitz could bathe in it while
laughing maniacally.

Of course, according to Klein, the
American-appointed interim govern-
ment’s greatest sin of all was lowering
corporate taxes and allowing foreign
investment to flow into the country. As a
woman who has made her living preach-
ing against the “evils” of globalization, it
naturally follows that Iraq’s integration
into the world of global capitalism should
be akin to a second Holocaust. To people
like Klein, it’s considered preferable for
Iraq to be a poor socialist rathole, rather
than risk compliance in creating one red
cent of profit for the hated “corpora-
tions,” even if said corporations employ
Iraqis and help rebuild their shattered
nation.

Klein also denounced the Iraqi interim
constitution as being an illegitimate docu-
ment imposed by the US to make Iraq
“serve outside interests,’ and argued it
should be scrapped at once and re-written
by the Iraqis. It’s great that she feels that

  

way since that was the friggin’ plan from the very
beginning. Hence the word “interim.” The
current Iraqi constitution was simply a
charter that allowed for the creation of an
elected Iraqi parliament, which would in
turn form an interim government, which
would in turn be responsible for drafting
a new constitution, which would in turn
be ratified by the Iraqi people in a referen-
dum. Sorry, Naomi, it looks like the
imperialist neo-cons stole your idea!

Though I disagreed strongly with their
arguments, I can at least theory under-
stand why people would have wanted to
protest the Iraq war in 2003. War is a ter-
tible thing, and showing public distaste
for it is not in itself a crime. That being
said, the year is now 2005, and Iraqis are
now freed from the clutches of a
psychopathic dictator, have a democrati-
cally elected government, and enjoy more
enshrined civil rights than any other Arab
nation on earth. The fact that some left-
ists still see a need to protest all this is
beyond incomprehensible—it’s downright
pathetic.

 

Editorial Cartoon

 

 

 

 

www.theotherpress.ca