Tariq Ali in the Guardian tries in vain to look on the bright side of life after the elections.
1. Chin up old chap, never mind, it still might go wrong:
The “high” turnout was widely interpreted as a rejection of the Iraqi resistance. But was it? Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s many followers voted to please him, but if he is unable to deliver peace and an end to the occupation, they too might defect.
They voted to please Sistani – that is the closest Tariq Ali gets in this piece to recognising the fact that millions of Iraqis risked their lives to vote.
2. The continuing fantasy:
The popular resistance will continue. Many in the west find it increasingly difficult to support this resistance. The arguments for and against it are old ones. In 1885, the English socialist William Morris celebrated the defeat of General Gordon by the Mahdi: “Khartoum fallen – into the hands of the people it belongs to”. Morris argued that the duty of English internationalists was to support all those being oppressed by the British empire despite disagreements with nationalism or fanaticism.
The ‘resistance’ then are the people Iraq belongs to? Are we talking the Ba’athists or the Jihadists who possess these ownership rights?
3. Utter nonsense
The triumphalist chorus of the western media reflects a single fact: the Iraqi elections were designed not so much to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west. After Bush’s re-election the French and Germans were looking for a bridge back to Washington.
Oh so that’s why there were elections in Iraq. Amazing people those Iraqi voters, risking (and in some cases giving) their lives to help build a bridge between the French and George Bush. And the triumphalist chorus of the western media????
4. New neo-con Nazi Link revealed:
Carl Schmitt, a theorist of the Third Reich, developed the view that politics is encompassed by the essential categories of “friend” and “enemy”. After the second world war, Schmitt’s writings were adapted to the needs of the US and are now the bedrock of neocon thinking.
5. Not even a blogger would come up with this crap:
At the Nuremberg trials, Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, was charged for providing the justification for Hitler’s pre-emptive strike against Norway. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw in a dock of the future? Unlikely, but desirable.