While I would be wrong to accuse Yoshie of having any feelings of solicitude or solidarity with the Iraqi Ba'athist regime, some other tendencies of the hard left have no such sqeemishness, indeed they seem to revel in the brutality regularly meted out by the regime to it's citizenry.Displacement or Projection of unowned aggressiveness onto the Other? Anyway, I made a few posts on pen-l recently, mostly cut and paste of Iraqi Communist Party statements on Kurdistan and the foul nature of the Hussein regime. And comments on the works of exiled Iraqi ex-Trotskyist, Kenan Makiya aka Samir al-Khalil on the regime. The sequel to his, "Republic of Fear, " entitled, "Silence and Fear, " featured his reportage of a trip to Kurdistan after the uprising that was crushed by the regime, with the connivance of the Bush regime in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Yet, another regime that has murdered thousands of leftists over the decades, that gets the "anti-imperialist" seal of approval from WWP.
On the Kurds, standard left agit-prop, correctly highlights the destruction by the NATO member, Turkey of thousands of Kurdish villages in the 80's. Christopher Hitchens is great as well at pointing out the role of Kissenger, Nixon and the Shah, in an earlier period in smashing the Kurds. Pretty sure, I cut and paste a long doc from Iraqi leftists about a week ago here on the "Anfal, " of the Iraqi regime, too. http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/0181.html Aw, well, as FDR said of Somoza, Sr."He may be a bastard but, he's our bastard."???
On the Kurdish side of all this, the shifting alliances of the PUK and PKK with various regional actors, and esp. (think I have this right, PKK is the group founded by Ocalan who is still on trial, no, in Turkey?) the PUK aligning itself with the Ba'athists and thus dividing the Kurdish people, has been disastrous. More on Kurdistan see a book of photos published by Aperture by Susan Meiselas. And, Gerald Chaliand has a volume too. Chaliand, in the late 60's wrote about North Vietnam for Pengion books. And early 70's classic, "Revolution in the Third World, " also from Penguin/Viking. Preface by Wallerstein. Intro by Chomsky. Presents a neo-Shactmanite analysis of M-L national liberation movements, equally discomfitting to the neo-cons and their hard left twins/mirrors. Michael Pugliese