John Galloway’s Place in Kurdish History

27 May 2005

By: Sabah Salih

Last week’s long-awaited appearance by British parliamentarian John Galloway before a congressional sub-committing investigating wrong-doing in Iraq’s oil-for-food program was a reminder that those who abuse language need to be aware that language sooner or later will come back at them.

Fortunately, in Mr. Galloway’s case linguistic justice didn’t have to wait that long.  Mr. Galloway said he had come not as “the accused” but as “the accuser.” This was his way of dodging the questions. He attacked instead the war in Iraq—ferociously, a performance Senator Carl Levin, himself a war opponent, rightly called “political theater.” 

Mr. Galloway’s arsenal of weapons for turning the tables around contained, among others, this piece of sophistry which was coined in part originally by Saddam Hussain: “the mother of all smokescreens.”   He used it to describe the investigation, which was another of saying that the subcommittee was trying to deflect attention from some nasty business American was doing in Iraq. 

But the phrase immediately backfired on him, for in a democracy, unlike a dictatorship, such terms always have the tendency to draw more attention to those who use them than to those being described by them.  All was needed to reach the sub-text of this wretched phrase was a little research, and what I found can hardly be flattering for Mr. Galloway.  There he is in Baghdad, standing erect in a smart suit and tie, lavishing praise upon a beaming pistol-packing Saddam, using some of the loftiest words imaginable.  Hearing “I salute your strength,” Saddam can hardly believe his ears, as do his entourage theirs. These are obviously not the words of a man troubled by Saddam’s killing fields. Then there is Mr. Galloway in his own home turf making the rounds, among a jeering crowd of Saddam opponents, at the dictator’s London embassy, in an obvious show of solidarity with a beleaguered tyrant.

Mr. Galloway’s next term, “puppet,” did not fair much better either. That’s how he described the Iraqi government’s relation with the United States.  Like the previous one, this word too when used as a value judgment has the tendency to put the spotlight on its opportunistic user.  As that happens, the term forces the charge of puppetry to fall apart, thus putting the accusation in grave doubt.  It is like the term is retorting in rebuke and with a warning: if you use me to describe a government’s relation with another government in today’s globalized politics, then all I can do is register a falsehood for which you—not me—will be held accountable.

Accountability here means one’s place in history, and the only history that matters today is the history written by those involved in its making.  That’s what liberation means. In Iraq’s case, those millions who fought bravely against Saddam, particularly the Kurds, will now have the power to narrate their history.  Mr. Galloway, no doubt, will be in it; he will be facing the wrath of Kurdish schoolchildren, who will immediately realize that had the likes of Mr. Galloway succeeded in their campaign to keep Saddam in power unconditionally, theirs would have been a very different kind of history—one in which the world would have been in the dark about the 779 Kurdish villages the dictator bulldozed between 1987-88, not to mention the thousands upon thousands he killed or displaced.

Mr. Galloway’s other point, that he was right all along in opposing the war, is equally hallow.  Being against a war—except in a pacifist’s case—is not a matter of being right; it is rather a matter of judgment, and judgments are at root political decisions.  It is less important what that judgment is than how a person arrives at it.  In Galloway’s case this was transparent—indeed all too transparent. The survival of tyranny was his ultimate goal, as was of course the goal of many others.  When it was time for him to side with the oppressed, he chose to side with the oppressor. That’s how millions of Kurds, as well as Iraqis, will remember him.

Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA. ssalih@bloomu.edu