October 1, 2005

When it comes to the Iraq war, the left has all but abdicated hard thinking.  It has instead embraced a decidedly totalitarian language, one in which there is hardly any room for doubt, rigor, or questioning.  Giving the story a fair hearing, trying to understand its complexities, acquiring the required knowledge about it, have all been replaced with a set of ideologically sanctioned mandates meant as a blueprint for collective thinking.  Virtually any slogan will do, including those coming from Saddam’s and Bin Laden’s ideological heartlands, as long as Bush and company can be taunted by them or as long as the public can be emotionally blackmailed by them.  This language demands total mental surrender.  The result, as Terry Eagleton writes in After Theory, has been quite catastrophic for the left:

Traditionally, it had been the political left which thought in universal terms, and the conservative right which preferred to be modestly piecemeal.  Now, these roles have been reversed with a vengeance.  At the very time when a triumphalist right has been boldly reimagining the shape of the earth, the cultural left has retreated by and large into a dispirited pragmatism.  (p.52)

Dispirited pragmatism indeed: Now is the time to bring the troops home.  Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  The cost is too high.  No blood for oil.  You know the rest.

Among the many supporters and promoters of this orthodoxy none is more notorious than the British MP George Galloway.  In his recent debate in New York with Christopher Hitchens, Galloway spoke behind thick ideological blinkers, telling us absolutely nothing beyond the usual debate-killing fixed meanings he is known for. The evening would have been a total waste of time had it not been for Hitchens.  Hitchens, always refusing to take anything for granted, always judging from a position richly informed by history and politics, spoke with care and precision, laying out before the audience the kind of strategic vision his name has become synonymous with as a first-rate public intellectual.

The British MP is no stranger to Iraq; he’s been to Baghdad a number of times.  But this is not something he would want to talk about.  It is a piece of history he desperately tries to get away from but the history itself refuses to go away.  Like a ghost it follows him everywhere, revealing in graphic detail Galloway’s bedrock alliance with Saddam, his ceaseless efforts at trying to shore up support for his tyranny. During one visit to Saddam in 1994, as Hitchens reminds us, Galloway addressed the thuggishly brutal dictator in these words: “I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”   And Galloway continues to this day to see Iraq through Saddam’s eyes, a Ba’thist preserve, not a multiplicity of peoples and cultures and histories.  Thus, by his own words and deeds, Galloway has managed to turn himself into the second most despised man in Iraq  (after Saddam), and now that he has started heaping praise upon another equally nasty Ba’thist dictator, he has guaranteed himself a similar place among the brutalized people of Syria.

Hitchens has also been to Baghdad a number of times; he has also been to Kurdistan and other parts of the country.  But, unlike Galloway, Hitchens has gone to Iraq to investigate the country and to bring to our attention the enormous suffering under tyranny of a people let down by an indifferent world. Galloway went in as a friend of the oppressor, Hitchens as a friend of the oppressed.

And now, as the twin forces of Ba’thist fascism and Islamic fundamentalism unleash their vicious hatred against the emerging civil society in Iraq, Galloway has decided to become their loyal cheerleader, portraying baby killers, teacher killers, hospital destroyers, rapists, and mind controllers as heroes and liberators.  This was indeed Mr. Galloway’s message the other night in New York. The many in the audience who applauded him did so because they too cannot think outside the box. Too lazy to read, too unwilling to listen, too eager to repeat the parrot-cry of the likes of Cindy Sheehan, they find self-gratification in wooden slogans and automated reactions; they never stop to examine the thick layers of self-deception from which they and their man operate.  To be basically clueless about Iraq, but going around nonetheless making statements about it, is to be taken hostage by ideology—sadly without even knowing it. 

During the debate, Hitchens proceeded honestly and courageously, rigorously trying to help his audience see the situation as it really is.  He demonstrated once again the difference between discussing Iraq with an open mind and discussing it for the sheer purpose of ideological manipulation and sentimental blackmail.  The regime change had to happen because Saddam’s actions both at home and abroad since 1991 had made that a strategic as well as a humanitarian necessity; and despite the obvious difficulties, the benefits were quite substantial, especially for the long suffering Kurds.  The Iraq that Galloway presented was, by contrast, a mirror image of his own fantasies.

Professor Eagleton is right on the mark in his diagnosis.  But the problem here is much bigger than just the left ducking hard political questions regarding Iraq. America’s obsession with here and now and quick fixes simply won’t allow a work-in-progress as complicated as Iraq to take its time.  The enemy knows that, and plans its strategy accordingly, hoping for more Galloways and Sheehans to join the fray.