>
> It's worse than that, haven't you heard? The Iraqi communists are really
> social democrats...the horror, the horror.
>
> Grant.
For the reflections of an Iraqi Communist intellectual, Ali Shamsavari see, "Post-Marxism and the Middle East, " ed. by Faleh A. Jabar, Al-Saqi Books, London.
Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics pronounces himself content for Marxism to define the political debate in Arab countries, without necessarily providing the answers, though even that minor achievement fades as Halliday sadly acknowledges that "the greatest success of Marxism in the Middle East may have been to provide the Islamists with much of their political vocabulary." And in one passage, obvious to most of us but dramatic for a radical leftist, he flat-out admits that "Not everything can be ascribed to imperialism."
-- Michael Pugliese