>Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 11:56:38 +1200
>From: Philip Ferguson <plf13 at it.canterbury.ac.nz>
>
>
> > George Galloway: Labour maverick who's a target for Blairites and 'The Sun'
> > 'I believe the entire city of Baghdad will become a firestorm and the
> Iraqis
> > will fight to the end and then beyond the end' says the MP for Glasgow
> > Kelvin
> > By Marie Woolf Chief Political Correspondent
> > The Independent
> > 07 April 2003
> >
>
>
>I hate this kind of thing. It makes the left look like apocalyptic morons.
>
>It was clear from the beginning that the imperialists were *not* going
>to turn Baghdad into a firestorm and that the Iraqis would not "fight to
>the end and then beyond".
>
>If Galloway said this, and is not being misquoted, then he is, frankly,
>an idiot.
>
>Iraq is no Vietnam and Saddam is not Ho Chi Minh.
>
>The imperialist invasion can be politically opposed and organised
>against on the basis that it negates Iraqi national sovereignty, that it
>is an imperialist war that has nothing to do with 'liberating' the Iraqi
>people, etc etc, without engaging in completely over-the-top rhetoric
>that makes the left look silly.
>
>The imperialist policy these days is to replace all the old Cold War
>dictators with shiny new pseudo-democratic regimes that are even more
>beholden to Washington than the old dictators. In order to do this,
>they do actually have to build up some kind of popular support, or
>social base, in these countries and present their interference in some
>kind of humanitarian light. They also want to win public support for
>these interventions in the imperialist countries themselves.
>
>All of this means that they are actually not trying to wipe out large
>numbers of Iraqi civilians nor totally devastate the infrastructure of
>Iraq. Such extreme measures are only taken by the imperialists when
>they are fighting mass national liberation movements like in Vietnam,
>Nicaragua and so on.
>
>When people on the left don't develop any kind of analysis of
>imperialist policy, other than imagining that every imperialist war is
>exactly the same and that the imperialists always try to wipe out as
>many civilians as possible, ordinary people notice the gap between the
>over-the-top rhetoric and the reality. They conclude that the left are
>nuts who make up stuff.
>
>This makes it harder for serious Marxists to win people over and also
>makes it harder for us to expose the imperialists when they do commit
>mass atrocities.
>
>Let's have less apocalyptic fantasies and more sober analysis. The
>everyday operations of imperialism are quite bad enough without idiots
>like Galloway - and some serious activists on the far left who should
>know better - dishing up catastrophist/apocalyptic scenarios.
>
>Philip Ferguson