Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Hypocrites and Simpletons against WarAuthor(s): Henry McDonaldSource: Fortnight, No. 414 (May, 2003), p. 8Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25560859 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 09:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Fortnight Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Fortnight.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 46.243.173.196 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 09:53:22 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Fortnight MAY 2003 |

Henry McDonald the war

:::lHYPOCRITES AND SIMPLETONS

;AGAINST WAR How appropriate that the militant wing of the Irish anti-war movement should choose to dress up in mock chemical warfare kits outside Belfast City Hall on the second day of George Bush's visit. Because what they possess in terms of fervour and self assurance they lack in irony.

The masked boiler suited peaceniks engineered their confrontation with the PSNI on the very same as day as Kurds were

enjoying picnics in northern Iraq. The Kurds were lunching on the graves

of their loved ones inside cemeteries for the dead of Halabja. They had something to celebrate: the death at the hands of British forces in Basra of one of their chief tormentors; the man known as Chemical

Ali. Saddam's cousin had planned and executed the mass gassing of 5,000 Kurdish

men, women and children at Halabja in 1988.

CHEMICAL The Shia in Basra had something to celebrate too. Chemical Ali was the key organiser of the Ba'athist regime's brutal suppression of the uprising in the southern Iraqi city in 1991 - a rebellion shamelessly encouraged and then abandoned by the

Americans. During the Iraqi regime's operation to seize back Basra, Chemical Ali dispatched troops to the edge of the city dressed in chemical warfare suits and gas masks. When the citizens of Basra saw those soldiers scattering white powder around the approaches to their city, knowing Chemical

Ali's reputation in Kurdistan, there was widespread panic. Human rights organis ations and Iraqi exiles report that this incident of mass intimidation was pivotal in terrifying the recalcitrant Shia population into submission.

One wonders what the Shia and the Kurds, newly liberated from the clammy grasp of Ba'athist power, would think of all those young Irish peace protestors dressed up in mock chemical warfare suits, blocking traffic in Belfast, proclaiming in the name of ordinary Iraqis, that there should be no war. Possibly they are reminded of the menacing sight of Saddam's soldiers (the ones who are very good at killing civilians but very bad at facing other professional soldiers) at the edge of Basra 12 years ago. The victims of the Ba'ath terror regime could be forgiven for thinking that these demonstrators are objectively at least the Saddam Hussein Preservation Society.

EXILES Genuine Iraqi exiles (not the ones who are in Ireland and the UK courtesy of the

Saddam dictatorship's patronage) spit blood when you mention the western anti

war movement in conversation. Their riposte to the simplistic mantras of "No blood for oil" and "No to U.S. Imperialist intervention" is always the same. "If not

America and Britain, then who else will come to our rescue."

Certainly not the "international community" who in the guise of the UN stood idly by and watched the first act of genocide to take place on European soil since the Holocaust, when Dutch blue berets stayed in their bases and allowed the Serbs to slaughter unarmed Bosnian

Moslems in their thousands. Certainly not the French whose current President colluded with Saddam Hussein in the mid 1970s to build a nuclear reactor and who agreed to the Iraqi's terms and conditions that no French Jews be allowed to work on the project! Certainly not fellow Arab dictatorships who fear a federal democratic Iraq (the threat of a good example!) more than a brutal thug like Saddam.

The most powerful counter-argument against the Irish anti-war movement's position is personified in Freshta Raper.

Mrs Raper is the same age as I am but has undergone horrifying experiences that neither you nor I could ever imagine in a lifetime. A native of Halabja, she has lost 21

members of her family to the Iraqi regime and was herself tortured and raped by Saddam's servants. She has been scathing in her criticism of the self-indulgent not-in

my-name British peaceniks. The Iraqi Kurdish born teacher brilliantly put down the writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on BBC's

Question Time by reminding her that, "She (Brown) should be grateful that as an Asian immigrant she has a British passport and not an Iraqi one."

PACIFICISM A mixture of genuine pacifism, self-righteousness, ignorance and sullen anti-Americanism moti vates the Irish anti-war movement. The pacifists have the best excuse because they genuinely believe that all war is wrong, although by their logic it would have been better to surrender to Hitler in 1939 than fight a six-year war against the Nazis.

The self-righteous and the ignorant are mainly confined to the younger generation of protestors who don't know the realities about Saddam's Iraq and simply see the root of all evil in the world as having the stars and stripes on it.

The final segment however is

far more sinister - the hard left of both the Stalinist and Trotskyist strain. They have never forgiven the west for winning the Cold War. These are the same people that by and large deluded hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young people during the

Northern Ireland Troubles, with their fantasies about the IRA and INLA's "armed struggles" being harnessed to a socialist revolution in Ireland.

They were the revolutionary surfers who caught the wave of violence and thought they could guide it towards the golden sands of socialism but when the breakers crashed down on the rocks of compromise

were marooned, wailing against the world in their isolation, left behind by the very

people they had sought to lead and liberate.

What these disparate elements of Ireland's anti-war movement have in common is that they cannot look someone like Freshta Raper in the face and tell her she has no right to be free. Many of them used to say the same thing to the peoples of Eastern Europe under communism. Fortunately Mrs Raper along with her fellow Kurds, Shia and now increasingly Iraqi Sunnis, just like the citizens of Berlin,

Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Bucharest in 1989, are not listening to them.

THERE'S NOTHING NEW TO SAY

There's nothing new to say, no words to stem

the flow of gunfire with a flower. Not one

arresting line that comes full-stop. No

embracing image big enough to catch

the bombs with smart or dirty tricks before

they drop. No redder lips than blood from theirs,

the latest dead. No redder shame than this

a blind, old poet weeps to see the lines

of soldiers drawn again, lines from the heart

un-minded still. The lives of many slip

like sand through a few, fat, warring fingers.

Nothing new.

Ruth Carr

I PAGE 8 1

This content downloaded from 46.243.173.196 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 09:53:22 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions