How can Tariq Ali justify an apologia for terrorists?

Thirty years ago the brilliant political satire of the late great Peter Cook – The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer – lampooned a rent-a-crowd student radical who by common consensus was deemed to be based on the young Tariq Ali. Ali’s recent strident apologia for the jihadists and Ba’athist remnants terrorising ordinary Iraqis reminds us that we would be grateful were he merely a gun for hire.  

He is deadly serious, however, and his message is poisonous – only the conceit of blind ideology can account for Ali’s idiosyncratic support for the reactionary forces in present day Iraq.

Somehow or other, an election in Iraq in around six months’ time is anathema to Ali, whereas, curiously, no election for 30 years under Saddam still doesn’t figure as a useful basis for comparison.

No matter that the UN Security Council, NATO, and the French (no less) have resolved to support the interim government and free elections for Iraq. Even the fat boy scowler Moqtada al Sadr has now – better late than never – decided that elections may not be such a bad idea after all.

For good measure, the Washington Post reported the weekend of June 26/27 that nearly 70 per cent of Iraqis support the new government and high levels of approval have been given to the new President and Prime Minister.

Whereas every social democrat in the world should wish for and support the transition in Iraq, as do the great majority of Iraqis, Ali continues to run interference on behalf of the laughably misdescribed “resistance” whose only beneficiaries are the Islamists. The only resistance they represent is resistance to civilization, democracy and any semblance of human rights.

A comprehensive report in the June 27th issue of Time magazine describes Ali’s “resistance” members out of their own mouths:

Their goal now, say the militants interviewed, is broader than simply forcing the U.S. to leave. They want to transform Iraq into what Afghanistan was in the 1980s: a training ground for young jihadists who will form the next wave of recruits for al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. Nearly all the new jihadist groups claim to be receiving inspiration, if not commands, from Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the suspected al-Qa'ida operative who the U.S. believes has masterminded the insurgency's embrace of terrorism.

Not troubled by the truth about these fanatics, Ali marshals his best Battle of Algiers revolutionary rhetoric, to anoint the “resistance” as representing the “courage of the poor of Baghdad, Basra and Fallujah” who have exposed the political leaders of the West.   Really?

Contrast Ali’s dewey-eyed depiction with that of the parties of the secular left in Iraq, most notably the Iraqi Communist Party, who are unambiguous in their support for the Iraqi interim government. Last week’s edition of Tareeq Al-Shaab – the official paper of the Iraqi Communist Party had this to say about the havoc wrought by Ali’s doughty “resistance”:

Such murders and intentional harm have exposed the true nature and designs of those who carry them out and those who stand behind them. Were they to achieve their sinister aims, Iraqis would obviously face a grim future under a despotic regime similar to that of Saddam Hussein and his clique. However, the fig leaf that the terrorists sought to take cover behind has fallen. All attempts to give their crimes the semblance of credible resistance have failed.

The “butchering of Iraqis” will only further complicate the situation, and will not bring the people closer to achieving their aims in regaining full sovereignty and building a secure, peaceful country. It will only provide additional pretext for those, inside and outside the country, who want to keep Iraq bleeding in order to achieve their sinister self-interested design.

Who to believe? – Ali, the cosseted international jet-setting faux revolutionary, or the genuine article? As those tricky imperialists would say – it’s a no-brainer.

Little wonder that the Iraqi comrades have a different view but it’s still no surprise that Ali ignores them.  After all, he has managed once again to discuss Iraq with not a mention of the 300,000 Iraqis who lie in mass graves thanks to Saddam.

The pitiable end point has now been reached by this postmodern Hitler-Stalin pact of ultra leftists and Islamists – no amount of genocide, mass murder, suicide bombing, be-headings, or assassinations should get in the way of opposition to the US “imperialists”.   The game was given away by Ali’s other comrade, John Pilger, who said recently on ABC television when giving his seal of approval to the “resistance”, we “can’t afford to be choosy”.

Last year when Ali visited Australia – you remember, courtesy of Bush’s bull mastiff Blair and the British taxpayer – he pompously announced to one of the succession of fawning baby interviewers, that he would be writing a libretto about the Iranian revolution.

Now that Ali has at long last discovered torture (no scare quotes) – admittedly so far only when administered by imperialists – can we live in hope that his operatic confection will deal with the systematic human rights abuses under the mad mullahs?  Or will they too receive the gentlest cuffing from Ali’s ideological kid gloves as another band of doughty anti imperialists? No worries that the forces of secular democracy, not to mention the Iranian communists, were among the first victims of the mullahs’ very own theocratic republic of fear.

For Ali, unadulterated anti-Americanism trumps all. Remember, Ali was vehemently against Clinton and Blair’s maintenance of the no-fly zones which protected Iraqi Kurdistan for a decade. Protected against Saddam’s malignant terror, the Kurds created the free-est state in the Islamic world. Free, among other things, from the ravages of the UN sanctions which Saddam cynically turned to his propaganda advantage with the aid and comfort of the likes of Ali. Remember also Ali’s telling insight that the attack on the twin towers was a “godsend” for Bush.

Unlike the Bush family, which at last has abandoned the old “realist” foreign policy, Ali appears to be congenitally and intellectually incapable of abandoning his own attachment to the famous nostrum that “he [insert human rights abusing dictator here] might be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch”. As the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn pointed out, the fatal flaw in this old approach is demonstrated by reversing the terms of the proposition – he might have been our son of a bitch but he’s still a son of a bitch.

The real implication of Ali’s tired position adds up to no more than a recipe for more tyranny, mayhem and murder and no hope for the Iraqi people, as the Iraqi Communist Party recognises only too well.  Despite Ali’s twists and turns, he would take Iraq directly into a maelstrom of terror at the hands of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. Terrorist, jihadist executioner, murderer, the hideous al-Zarkawi has a new mantle thanks to Ali and the bankrupt intellectual opponents of a better Iraq in the name of a fantasy “anti imperialism” – he’s just Ali’s son of a bitch.