As a sectologist (not a proctologist though I wonder sometimes ;-) I read the PWW of the CPUSA, Workers Vanguard, Revolutionary Wanker, I mean Worker, and Workers World of the WWP regularly.
Though leaflets I have read by Brian Becker do admit that the Ba'athists tortured to death many Iraqi Communists, and that Saddam Hussein from the time of the assasination attempt on Quassam in '63, if memory serves, was a CIA asset, the below is a representative statement from a leading WWP cadre that presents the Ba'athist dictatorship as somehow progressive.
http://www.workers.org/ww/2003/troops1113.php
> ...Iraq's constitution under the Baathist government insulated the
> country from some of the worst features of what is now called
> globalization.
Last few days I've been polemicizing back and forth w/ Mark Gery,
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/433/
one of a few dozen speakers available via the excellent folks at FPIF, a
project of the lefty think tank IPS,
http://www.fpif.org/iraq/03speakers_body.html
who I caught note of via this conservative bloggers post (and here too,
another Rightist, http://mcj.bloghorn.com/395 , who found it via this
popular blog among rightist Zionists,
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/entry=9268_Peace_Creep-
_Saddams_Victims_Deserved_It
) http://cointelprotool.blogspot.com/ (By the way, "thousands, " in mass
graves by the most recent #'ers I've seen could amt. to 290,000.)
:: Thursday, December 11, 2003 :: Objectively Pro-Fascist
> ...This piece, written by Mark Gery for Middle East Times, is an
> especially crystalline example of the axiom, "they're not anti-war,
> they're just on the other side..."
In the past few months the graves of thousands of civilians have been unearthed in war-torn Iraq. Not surprisingly, the White House wasted no time in declaring the dead to be prime examples of Saddam Hussein's brutality and a further justification for the US-led invasion.
But a check of the historical record on this matter reveals yet another calculated distortion by the US administration and its supporters.
OK, at this point, you're probably thinking, as I was, "here comes another 'we can't use Saddam's brutality as a justification for the war, because we used to support him, and completely abandoned the Kurds and Shia in 1991" screed.
Actually, it's worse than that. Much, much worse ...
At the end of the 1991 Gulf War legions of Shia radicals the kind we've seen clamoring for an Islamic state - assaulted and killed anyone associated with Iraq's secular government. Urged to 'take matters into their own hands' by the first Bush administration and wrongly believing that Iraq's army had been destroyed, armed militants went from city to city in southern Iraq mercilessly butchering scores of innocents.
As put forth by regional analyst Sandra Mackay: "The rebels utilized their guns and numbers to seize the civilian operatives of the Baath government while former Shia conscripts turned on officers of the army. They hung their captives from rafters of an Islamic school, shot them in the head before walls turned into execution chambers, or simply slit their throats at the point of capture.' (The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein, page 24)
Notice the conflation of "innocents" with "civilian opertives of the Baath party" and "officers of the army." This guy says pretty much the same about the Kurdish north ...
Accepting Washington's pronouncements about a vanquished Iraqi military, up to 400,000 Kurds undertook a ferocious spree of mayhem that rivaled that of the Shia. According to Mackay, in Kirkuk "no one bothered to count how many servants of Baghdad were shot, beheaded, or cut to shreds with the traditional dagger stuck in the cummerbund of every Kurdish man. By the time Kurdish rage had exhausted itself, piles of corpses lay in the streets awaiting removal by bulldozers." (The Reckoning, page 26)
This unrestrained carnage, documented by several additional sources, is what the White House (and the media) characterize as "rising up against Saddam".
This blatant lie reminds me of an exchange I witnessed at a February Brookings forum, between Johns Hopkins scholar Victor Tanner (co-author of "The Internally Displaced People of Iraq") and an audience member who served in the autonomous Kurdish government in northern Iraq:
QUESTION: My name is [Hosha Aspsuweli]. I work as a Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Humanitarian Aid and Cooperation in [Irbil]. In fact, I left the region, Irbil, on Sunday. So with due respect the members of the panel don't seem to know much about Iraq and what's happening in Iraq because I am coming from region.
I have a few questions to ask the panelists, but I have an obvious one which is for Mr. Vic Tanner. You mentioned that reprisals [inaudible] which might happen in Iraq like Kirkuk. How much do you know about 1991 uprising when the Kurds took control of Kirkuk and they stayed inside that city for over three weeks. How many people? How many Arabs? How many Turkmen were you killed as you call the reprisal?
So there are other questions I'd like to ask and see clarification from the panel but this is the most important question because it has been exaggerated by outside regional countries that there might be bloodshed between the Kurds, the Turkmen, and the Arabs. I think the 1991 uprising is a good example and we have to learn from it. Thank you. [...] MR. TANNER: This is to answer the gentleman from Irbil. You're quite right. I should have prefaced my comments by saying that I do not believe the people of Iraq are at each other's throats. I do not think there is anything inevitable about Kurds going after Turkmen or Turkmen going after Arabs or Shia going after Sunni and so on and so forth. What I do think, however, and that was the main gist of what I tried to present, is that there is so much pent up violence, pain and resentment as a result of this regime that situations [inaudible] are prone to manipulation by world leaders, by outsiders, certainly by the regime itself as it goes down, by regional actors who you alluded to, and we're all aware of what we mean by that. And that there is not, on the contrary, I believe that many of the leaders in Iraq today in the south and in the north are committed to working together. I don't believe that civil war is inevitable.
But I really want to stress, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that. I was in Northern Iraq in '91 and the aftermath of the Intafada in the north or the uprising in Kirkuk. It is true that the record of the Kurdish authorities in Kirkuk were quite exemplary. There was very little abuse, you're quite right to point that out. However, you must also point out that the majority of the Arab population fled in the south, and this has to be said. And it was probably a good thing that it happened, but it must be said.
Of course, the aftermath of OIF, which has brought a more permanent Kurdish presence to Kirkuk, is further proof of what a colossal liar Gery is.
But the worst is still to come. While Gery considers retributive violence against Iraqi army officers and Baathist fedayeen to be a tragedy, he does not have much sympathy for the majority populations in Iraq:
What government in the world would refrain from using all necessary means to quell a violent uprising of this kind? No one denies that the regime's response was swift and merciless, or that many innocents were caught up in the retaliation and destruction. But if blame is assigned, shouldn't it start with the instigators of the carnage along with the foreign government who misled them about the forces they were going up against and yet egged them on?
This is actually typical of the revisionist, pro-fascist drivel that gets a link to Justin "circus freak" Raimondo's Web site, but I was actually surprised that its author, Mark Gery, is actually an "analyst" with the Orange County Peace Coalition.
Wow.
:: Bill Herbert 10:12 AM [+] :
So, after reading that I found his e-mail address. In his first reply he said, "Michael,
You talk alot but you really don't say anything.
The fact is that Saddam's regime was the internationally recognized government in Iraq and that the KDP, PUK, and other Kurdish militants have been trying to section off a piece of Iraq for decades before Saddam was on the scene.
What did our own Preseident Lincoln do when part of the US wasnted to split off? Simply let it go? No. He commenced a war that took the lives of over 300,000 people, injured countless more, and burned Atlanta to the ground making tens of thousands homeless. Not only is Lincoln not disparaged for these things but he is considered by many our greatest President.
Why do you chastise Iraq's successive governments for doing the same thing?
As I stated in the piece, many innocents were no doubt killed in the counter-attack on the rebels but this was hardly the purpose - then or before - of the Baath's campaigns against the assailaints.
Answer this question if you can: What is (was) the political philosophy of Saddam and the Baath? This will tell me if you know anything about Iraq besides what the media tells you.
Mark Gery
To which, esp. the last bit of snobbery, given he has a M.A. I suppose, I cited a bunch of book and article cites on Iraqi political history and Ba'athist ideology both in Syria and Iraq (which is a mix of pan-Arab nationalism, Fascism and Stalinism) from a range of authors left, right and center (ironically he cited later one co-written by Israeli rightist Zionist Efraim Karsh (those familiar w/ the debates over the Israeli, "New Historians, " Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historians re; the Zionist myths of '48 should peruse his work, http://www.meforum.org/article/466 ) and then went after him for his defense, at all costs, of the "unitary" character of the Iraqi State boundaries drawn up by the British imperialists of the 20's, and his demogogy over the national aspirations of the Kurds and Sh'ia. Whatever happened to the rights of peoples to self-determination? MarGery again >.....What government in the world would refrain from using all necessary means to quell a violent uprising of this kind?" Sounds Kissingeresque realpolitique to me. >...For example, Kissinger was a staunch defender of the People's Republic of China in the wake of the massacre in and around Tienanmen Square in June 1989, writing that "no government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators." http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Take_Him_Away.html by Doug Ireland, In These Times magazine, August 2001, review of Hitchens on Henry K. IAC/A.N.S.W.E.R./WWP on Tienanmen Square, >...The WWP was equally consistent when it came to Asia. The sect even applauded the brutal Chinese repression of pro-democracy students and workers at Tiananmen Square. In the April 12th, 1990 WW, Sara Flounders (currently a leader of the "human rights" organization IAC), wrote: "Now the significance of the suppression of the right-wing movement in Tiananmen Square" could be seen from a "clearer perspective"; namely, that China had "smashed the plot of international anti-China forces to subvert the legal government and the socialist system of China." How did Flounders know this to be true? Because Chinese Premier Li Peng said so in a March 20th speech to the National Peoples Congress in Beijing. (from one of the articles here, http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/03/229254
Finally, instead of aligning w/ reactionary "anti-imperialists, " of the WWP school, activists in US Labor Against The War like local activist David Bacon, as related here in New Politics piece by Alan Johnson, "Iraq and the Third Camp, " http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue35/Johnson35.htm , the anti-war movement needs to, in it's internal self-education and solidarity w/ those opposed to the Occupation but not remnants of the Ba'athist regime or foreign jihadists, junk the perpetual tendency since Comintern days of uncritical support.
-- Michael Pugliese