MAYBE THERE’S HOPE: Peace protesters are catching hell even in The Observer:

Next weekend, the far Left will once again seek to con tens of thousands of Irish people. Earlier this year, the unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists, under the banner of pacifism, brought the masses on to the streets of Dublin, Derry and Belfast. The M-Lers even managed to fool respected, usually erudite, commentators, writers and artists into believing in the justness of their ’cause’.
But their ’cause’ was, in truth, a carefully produced masquerade, a ruse to dragoon legions of genuinely concerned citizens on this island into their campaign against ‘imperialism’ and for that, of course, please read ‘anti-Americanism’. . . .

Marching for ‘peace’ back in January objectively (a word often used by the M-Lers) entailed support for the retention of the Baath. Now that all the apocalyptic predictions of the Irish peace movement have proved to be wrong, the anti-American Left is now seizing on every grenade attack, shooting and roadside bomb directed at allied forces and, yes, the United Nations, in Iraq. Some of the Irish ultra-Left groups are even abusing language and truth by describing those behind these sorties as the ‘resistance to occupation’. . . .

Suddenly, the Irish extreme Left portrays the Baath loyalists and the fedayeen (an alliance of Islamic fanatics and Saddam sympathisers) as the Vietcong of the twenty-first century, a libellous slur against the heroic people of Vietnam who really did have a just cause to fight for.

What this alliance of Baathists and Islamists fear more than anything (a fear shared by the Arab dictatorships) is the threat of a good example. If Iraq evolves from a one-party gangster state into a pluralist democracy, a process well underway in the northern Kurdish region with its free press and multi-party system, then it will become a beacon of hope for other oppressed people in the region.

Which would be horrible.