Ah but Steve if I didn't have a walloping cold right now, I could have the NRG to scour the Workers World archives for many more direct and implicit statements and analyses by WWP'ers that, despite their acknowledgement the SH was as FDR said about Somoza, Sr., "He may be an S.O.B. But, at least he's our S.O.B., " w/ his CIA and NSC (see the chapter on Iraq in, "American Orientalism, " by Douglas Little, Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 2002 or '03 w/ declassified/FOIA NSC docs detailing the assistance given to the Ba'athists, just like in Indonesia in '65, w/ lists of Iraqi Communists to be killed) aided, the WWP still hold a pov on SH and the Ba'athists that regards them as "anti-imperialists, " and progressives who built a welfare state based on the nationalized oil industry. (Doug Little has much on this, adding much material on British oil/imperial interests.) W/O going into too much of a Shactmanite rant that simply states that when a authoritarian or totalitarian state owns the commanding heights of the means of production, distribution and exchange, absent (as, btw, Lenin saw in his debate w/ LDT in the early twenties about trade unions and the , "militarization of labor, " [some fascinating stuff on this in a book I just picked up for $2 at a new anarchist bookstore here, "Marx at the Millenium, " by Cyril Smith, Pluto Press] an internally pluralist democratic Party w/explicit constitutional safeguards for opposing Parties and democratic, independent trade unions to as Lenin put it, "If 'we' can 'use' the workers organization to protect the workers from 'our' state, 'we' will in return get them, in return to protect 'our' state...Our state is not a workers state as Trotsky abstractly employed the term, but, a workers state w/ bureaucratic distortions." In others words, when the State owns the M.O.P., who "owns" the State? Are the privileged strata battening and fattening on the surplus squeezed out of the subordinate classes? Is WWP (this is a rhetorical question!) buying into, in a mixture of cynicism and self-delusion/illusions, about "Arab Socialism, " that as writers from Adeed Dawisha http://www.meforum.org/article/518 at OSU, http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7549.html ,"Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century: From Triumph to Despair, " and many others have noted from left and right (see from the Left, journals like MERIP and Khamsin, a journal of aran marxists and the Middle East Socialists Network list at yahoogroups.com) was almost entirely ideological.
Justin, that bit about the anti-Communist being beaten by the cop I've heard in other tellings. Cop on a horse beating CPUSA'ers in NYC in the 30's, by a woman, "But, officer, I'm an anti-Communist!" "I don't care what kind of a Communist you are!" Whack!
One other point re: the UN sanctions on Iraq, yes, incredibly brutal (take a look at photos of horrid birth defects on the net), both the Xtian pacifists @ ViTW, as this piece by a former staffer relates, http://www.meforum.org/article/548 , "Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist, " by Charles M. Brown, in their simple-minded earnestness, and the IAC anti-sanctions activists, in their cynicism, totally leave out of the picture in their agit-prop any confrontion w/ the facts of massive corruption by the Baathist elite and the 67 Palaces of SH. Really what groups like WWP do is provide "left" cover for bureaucratic, capitalist elites, that for their reasons, slide back and forth based on geo-politics and their own needs to buttress their class privileges, between alignment w/ the USG, esp. duing the Cold War and "opposition, " but, always w/ their eyes on maximum oppression and exploitation of the w/c and peasantry.