What did Sam Smith have to say?
>** Alexander Cockburn is the author The Golden Age is In Us (Verso, 1995)
>and 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000) with
>Jeffrey St. Clair. Cockburn and St. Clair are the editors of CounterPunch,
>the nation's best political newsletter, where this article first appeared.
>
>This article can be viewed on the web at:
>http://ww.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Cockburn_Blowback.htm
On page 193 of The Golden Age Cockburn writes, in 1991, about the anti-Gulf War movement and responds to a letter-writer who complains Cockburn is encouraging a split within the movement. Cockburn's response is "... After all, Hegel said a political party truly exists only when it is divided against itself. Maybe the same is true of the peace movement. I'd think more of Michael Ratner's ecumenism if I didn't remember his letter containing the lines 'Making criticisms of Iraq part of the progressive community's agenda, I believe, is outweighed by the mischief and obfuscation that could cause.' Try this:
'As an Iraqi expatriate who had experienced Saddam's brutality firsthand, I am appalled by the pro-dictator position some in the American left have taken. Do these people know what their fate would be if they lived in Iraq? No better than my friend's. Bahram's only crime was that he had Arabic translations of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto. Someone had passed the information to the secret police, who, having searched his house and found no more 'subversive literature', took Bahram away while he was teaching English at a high school. Weeks and months passed and his family was still not informed about his whereabouts. His mother petitioned Saddam and was told he wouldn't interfere in matters of 'national security'! Like other parents who had lost their sons in similar fashion, by now Bahram's parents' only wish was to get back their son's body. And what a body they got back! One summer night it was left in a sack on their doorstep: eyes were gouged out; genitals, fingers and tongue cut; chest splattered with blood. The mother died in horror.' A. Miran (a Kurd) --- And in Al Gore: A User's Manual (2000), Cockburn writes on page 216 "Al Gore has always worked by simple recipes. In June of Campaign 2000, he publicly distanced himself from the president on Iraq policy, reiterating that Saddam has to fall, and pledging support to an exile group called the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi. In the late 1990s Chalabi's cause was pressed by Republicans in Congress, most notably Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, and by that baleful schemer and hero of Israel's ultra-rejectionists, Richard Perle. A bizarre aliance, stretching from Helms to Perle and The New Republic to Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, pressed Chalabi's call for the US to guarantee "military exclusion zones" in northern Iraq and in the south near Basra and the oil fields, to be administered by the Iraqi National Congress. In 1998, Clinton reluctantly authorized an appropriation of $97 million from the Pentagon budget to go to Chabali's group. But as a consequence of a fierce CIA attack on Chalabi's credentials and prowess, only $84,000 was actually released, and that merely to pay for offices and some training in public relations. -------- So, Hitchens hasn't "turned" and has in fact consistently stuck up for the Kurds and Iraqis who long to be free of Saddam.
Peter