CHAPTER THREE Leftists Without a Left
I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
William Morris, 1888
ON 2 AUGUST 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Kanan Makiya awoke to find himself famous – and infamous. Republic of Fear sold out within days. The publishers ordered second editions, but this time with print runs in the tens of thousands. Senators, MPs, diplomats and journalists belatedly realized that they needed to know about the new menace. They had looked the other way because they worried the demented Ayatollah Khomeini would invade Iraq and be in a position to move into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and control most of the world’s oil. Now the demented Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and could move into Saudi Arabia and control most of the world’s oil.
In 1984, George Orwell’s Winston Smith says:
At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.
It was like that with Saddam. You could hear the screech as the world’s leaders stamped on the brakes and wrenched the gear stick into reverse.
Makiya knew he had to speak plainly. News anchors wanted his face on their shows; editors wanted his words in their comment pages. He threw away his wig and pseudonym and used his celebrity to help his country. Much of what he said pleased leftish audiences. He lacerated the United Nations forces for bombing civilian targets, and tore into the refusal of George Bush senior’s State Department to meet Saddam’s opponents. So far so good, governments in general and America in particular were killing the innocent and betraying democrats. What hypocrites.
Then Makiya went too far by saying the war had not gone far enough. Instead of stopping at the border when they had defeated the Iraqi armies and thrown them out of Kuwait, the UN forces should help the Iraqi Kurds and Shia Arabs who had taken their chance to rise up. The world must know by now that Saddam wasn’t another tin-pot dictator. Baathism was a rolling programme of war and genocide – first Iran, then the Kurds, then Kuwait, while all the time the mutilation of Iraq continued. Saddam had to be stopped and the only way to stop him was to march on to Baghdad.
Iraqi exiles cheered Makiya, but Britain, America, the European Union, China, the Soviet Union and, predictably, the Arab dictatorships were adamant that Iraq had to stay a dictatorship. When Hajiz al-khwaf inksier – the barrier of fear – was broken and Iraqi intifada began, Brent Scowcroft, Bush senior’s National Security Adviser, bluntly told ABC News: ‘We clearly would have preferred a coup. There’s no question of that.’
In the ceasefire negotiations, the United States forces specifically allowed Saddam Hussein to keep helicopter gunships, which he duly used to slaughter the revolutionaries. The great powers wanted a palace revolution that would bring a reliable autocrat to the fore, not a popular uprising. After the humiliating defeat in Kuwait, they assumed the Iraqi army would seize the radio stations and install a sensible general. They waited, and kept on waiting because once a totalitarian regime is secure its totalitarian methods prevent its overthrow.
With Saddam clearly going nowhere, the US, UK and France tried other remedies. No-fly zones were established. They helped the Kurds in the north escape Baathist rule, but brought no good to the rest of the country. Sanctions were imposed which wiped out legitimate businesses while allowing black marketeers to flourish. The United Nations tried to relieve the suffering by establishing an ‘oil-for-food’ programme. This lavishly corrupt affair allowed the Baath to engage in smuggling on a gargantuan scale and bribe foreign supporters with money meant for the destitute. As General Tommy Franks said when the US Army finally invaded Iraq in 2003, it was more ‘oil for palaces’ than ‘oil for food’. The United Nations secured Saddam’s position because he decided who could and could not receive international aid.
The Nineties in Iraq were strange beyond measure. The Baathists had committed one of the last genocides of the twentieth century. They had started the longest conventional war of the whole twentieth century. They had invaded Kuwait and been defeated in battle. They had harboured international terrorists and organized terrorism themselves. They had developed weapons of mass destruction and used them against domestic and foreign opponents alike. Yet while George Bush senior, Margaret Thatcher, the Ayatollah Khomeini and all his other enemies lost power or died, Saddam Hussein stayed on, a victor of sorts.
Nothing, though, was stranger and less discussed than the behaviour of the Left. The initial reaction of Makiya’s friends to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was to allow him to keep it. ‘Everyone I respected – anyone who was a friend, it seemed, immediately gravitated towards the peace position. And with almost every fibre of my being I longed to be there with them. Only, in this instance, it couldn’t be. It was an incredibly painful time.’
When he insisted on harping on about the Baathists’ crimes after Saddam became America’s enemy, Makiya’s friends turned on him. Writing of his former comrade in the New Statesman, Alexander Cockburn, an American leftist, said, ‘out of despair comes mental pandemonium’. Tariq Ali was like a teacher patting a little boy on the head. There were aspects of his former friend’s work which he ‘respected enormously, but I’m afraid he’s an innocent, a complete babe’. The Americans ‘were never going to support democracy in Iraq’, he concluded somewhat rashly. Edward Said, a New Left Review contributor and the most fluent defender of the Palestinian cause in the Western universities, was almost lost for words, and spluttered: ‘He suddenly discovers he’s got to do something, and what does he do? He appeals to the United States to come to rescue him! It’s astonishing.’
It wasn’t only Makiya who was being excommunicated from the church of the Left. The bell was being tolled and the book closed on the peoples of Iraq. In leftish circles and among the Arab intelligentsia, an instantaneous change took place. The screeching of brakes and the crunching gears weren’t only heard in the foreign ministries of the great powers. A tyrant the Left had happily characterized as a ‘fascist’ poured fire on a rebellious population from helicopter gunships. To punish the Marsh Arabs he unleashed an ecological catastrophe by blocking the flow of water into the Tigris-Euphrates flood plain. The angry condemnations that had once flowed as freely as the rivers of Mesopotamia dried up. From then on, the loudest voices on the Left were raised in favour of the causes of Saddam Hussein, not necessarily in favour of Saddam Hussein, although we were to hear that eventually, but in support of his demands. As the mood shifted, the liberal-left began to make novel arguments.
From the emergence of the pacifist movement in the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal-left had generally preferred the peaceful coercion of sanctions to war. As the Nineties wore on, however, sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq fell out of favour. At a meeting chaired by the Labour MP George Galloway in 1998, Harold Pinter said the deaths that resulted in Iraq were ‘Tony Blair’s legacy of corpses’. Labour MPs and Green Party activists agreed. The demands for a change of policy weren’t confined to the far left. In 2000 Sir Menzies Campbell – the then foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats who was to go on to be the party’s leader – demanded that all sanctions except the ban on the sale of military equipment be lifted because they were being ‘