Reviewing news coverage of the most recent Baghdad bombing I came across this eyewitness report from Channel Four News:
I knew Iraq would be dangerous but I didn’t expect to be so close to a bomb blast.
This morning I was sitting with my colleague John Tipple in the lobby of the Al-Rasheed hotel inside the green zone in Baghdad. As we sat talking in the large East German-built hotel lobby the panels of the huge plate glass windows were blown out by a loud blast.
We both realised straight away that this was a bomb attack and dived under the table that separated us, as we had been told to do by the security personnel who have looked after us since our arrival.
Barrister Nick Wrack was in Baghdad on behalf of Danny Fitzsimons, the British security worker arrested for the murder of two co-workers, when a blast ripped through his hotel.
A quick thinking lawyer then, but where have we heard that name before?
*Sound of writer ‘wracking’ his brains*
I’ll cut to the chase: Comrade Nick Wrack was a high-ranking member of various febrile Trotskyist sects until he was finally expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 2007. He is currently on the National Steering Committee of the Stop the War Coalition and also the National Chair of a certain target for well-deserved ridicule at Harry’s Place: Respect – the Unity Coalition.
You remember Respect? They still have an MP. George Galloway – who said this of the suicide-murderers operating in Iraq four years ago after one of his little jaunts to the surviving Baathist-regime, Syria:
“These poor Iraqis–ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons–are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which have made the country ungovernable by the people who occupy it…They decided when the foreign invaders came to defend their country, to defend their honor, to defend their families, their religion, their way of life from a military superpower which landed among them…The Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs, they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony.”
Two questions come to mind not put to Comrade Wrack by Channel Four News:
(a) What thoughts went through his head as he took shelter under that well-placed hotel lobby table? ‘Jeez, that was a bit too close’ maybe, or ‘Cripes! Such a magnificent blow against perfidious Western hegemony by a ragged-sandaled Kalashnikov-toting revolutionary. That fellow is truly writing his name in the stars…’
(b) More pertinently for Wrack’s anti-imperialist credentials: what exactly was one of Respect’s head-honchos doing in Iraq anyway? Answer: Spiriting away the British private security guy alleged to have murdered a couple of colleagues on the basis that Arab justice isn’t up to dealing fairly with his client. That’s hardly going to increase his popularity among the remaining members of his rapidly-dwindling Trot-Islamist lash-up is it?