It's Groundhog Day with Tariq Ali over the West's role in Iraq

The many repellant features of the Saddam regime consitiute an unpleasantness which Ali strives to ignore, save for the occasional grudging nod in the direction of Saddam's crimes. In Ali's long diatribe in the New Left Review one looks in vain to find a single mention of the genocide, the mass graves, the torture chambers or the fascist ideology which lies at the heart of Ba'athism. These notable omissions are a common feature of Ali's Ground Hog Day mentality.
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It's also worth reminding the reader that it's not just at Iraq's expense that Ali has got his kicks. Ali was also the champion of Milosevic, and the opponent of "imperialist" NATO aggression which he described at one time as "anti-Serbian racism". Apart from conveniently ignoring the concentration camps and the now confirmed mass graves, this was a particularly novel anthropological insight. The "racism" identified by Ali apparently mutated into virulent self-loathing on the part of the numerous Serbs who celebrated the demise of the Serbian butcher. Ah but the return of ethnic cleansing in Europe was but a small matter next to the rekindling of the anti- imperialist struggle!

Ali is also obviously chuffed by his insight that the much maligned Blair has been undervilified as merely a US poodle! The poodle after all, calls up an altogether too benign and friendly image. In his Age piece, Ali has Blair pegged as a "petty mastiff snarling at the leash" - a characterization first used when Ali attacked Blair for having the effrontery to marshal the NATO incursion in the former Yugoslavia. This was an intervention which could be criticized only for coming too late. Too late to save - among many others - the 10,000 Kosovar Albanians who were executed by the police and paramilitaries of that plucky nationalist Milosevic.

Afghanistan, too, was for Ali a sweet reprise of the constant need to struggle against imperialism, but space prevents the exploration of his more hysterical claims on this front. Suffice it to say that Ali's nostrums for that sad place would have the Taliban still firmly in the saddle with, we can be confident, those wonderful weekly executions and mutilations at Kabul's soccer field.

Ali’s ground hog day ideology has nothing at all to say to the challenges presented by islamist fanaticism or human rights abuses. His writing revives the spectre of a previous generation of Stalinists for whom no atrocity – so long as it was committed by a ‘socialist’ dictator - was too great that it could not be ignored or downplayed in the greater cause. This mentality has now bizarrely morphed into a preparedness to rationalize the acts not of secular socialists, but of fascists like Saddam and medieval religious fanatics. Rationalising the atrocities of Stalin Mao etc was indeed a tragedy – elevating the likes of the Iraqi ‘resistance’ Saddam and the Islamist religious fanatics to the status of ‘anti-imperialists’ is just plain farce.

Tariq Ali’s hyperbole may have at its heart stale old fashioned Stalinism, but its confected indignation and moral humbug gives it an amusing tone. May his self important exaggerations now situate him where he richly deserves to be - the intellectual moral equivalent of that other famous Ali – Comical.