BETRAYING THE IRAQI PEOPLE IN THE NAME OF PEACE:

The anti-war movement is a private party. It has proved to be a remarkably fastidious friend of suffering peoples of the Middle East, and its doors are always open to non-Iraqi Muslims – but it’s not at home to Muslims from Iraq.

As far as I can work out from the coalition’s membership list, only two Iraqi organisations – one calling itself the Iraqi Network for Human Rights and a second called the Federation of Kurdish Community Organisations – have signed its manifesto. No Iraqi exile I have interviewed has heard of either.

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi dissidents are an embarrassment to the Left. After enduring misery few of us can imagine, they have discovered that, without foreign intervention, their country won’t be freed from a tyrant who matches Stalin in his success in liquidating domestic opponents. Only America can intervene. Therefore an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation.

There’s a damnable logic to this that no amount of wriggling can escape. If you say to the Iraqi opposition that America is very selective in its condemnation of dictatorships, they shrug and ask why Iraqis should care. If you say that Iraq shouldn’t be liberated from Saddam until Palestinians are liberated from Israeli occupation, they ask if the converse also applies. (It never does, incidentally.) They confront the anti-war movement with the disconcerting thought that there are worse things in the world than George W Bush and American imperialism, and Saddam Hussein and his prison state are among them.

To right-thinking, Left-leaning people, such thoughts are not merely disconcerting but unthinkable.

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