Have been reading some articles marking the anniversary of the Iraq war - George Monbiot pens a thoughtful piece on interventionism while Andrew Anthony sums up his doubts on the anti-war movement leaders (many of which I share - even if I hadn’t been with Francis on Saturday I would not have joined the protests in London this time). He refers to a particularly disgraceful passage by John Pilger referring to the Madrid bombings as part of the “struggle agains the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination” (more in this piece) while Monbiot refers to a spluttering performance by perhaps the least talented political hack in the world, Harold Pinter, on a Newsnight Special [RealVideo link] last week. Both of these articles sum up my utter frustration that the leading (well, noisiest) names against the war are hysterical idiots. Another example - after the comedy random word generator that is Julie Burchill accused George Galloway of stealing his ex-girlfriend’s knickers (in fact it was a completely different MP) she was lambasted for making “a deliberately malicious, malignly-motivated smear, on a Goebbellian scale”.

This favouring of shouting “They’re all Nazis/fascists” comes far too easily to those leading the anti-war brigade (Pilger refers to the American regime as “the Third Reich of our times”, while Yvonne Ridley equates the pro-Taliban jihadi with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, in a truly loathsome article), is a source of tremendous frustration for me and, I suspect, many others on the left who oppose current neo-conservative American and British policy in Iraq but are looking for constructive, principled voices and not hysterical rubbish like this. As far as I’m aware, there is little support or action for the pro-democracy movements in Iraq from people like the RESPECT Coalition, who are more concerned with wild rhetoric (and Julie Burchill) and are happy to ignore what’s happening in the real world. By failing to acknowledge the fact that the war went ahead and neglecting to face up to the consequences, the anti-war movement has failed its own commitment to democracy and peace. We should now be doing our damnedest to help a democratic Iraq take hold, instead of childish posturing like supporting the attacks of the resistance (whose victims are more often Iraqi than American or British) as Pilger has done.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 at 23:58:51 and is filed under General.