As I trust y'all know, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, was on the leftest edge of SDS. Saw her in the crowd at Modern Times when Bill Ayers w/ Bernadine Dohrn was on his book tour. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1548/4_18/105370445/p1/article.jhtml
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To the Editor:
During my UN human rights work in the l980s, Saddam Hussein's atrocities were well known and documented. I worked with Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Iraqi Communists who were in forced exile and whose families had been tortured and killed. The nadir was 1988, when Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurdish villages and Iranian soldiers in the north. At every step of the way, the Reagan, then Bush administrations blocked every resolution.
I resent the accusation in Juan Cole's essay in your May/June 2003 issue that "the anti-war movement" did not properly address Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses. Had the United States not blocked all diplomatic measures in the 1980s, Hussein would have been toppled, just as the apartheid regime in South Africa was. The problem is the United States, and that's what we need to deal with.
DR. ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ
San Francisco, CA COPYRIGHT 2003 Tikkun Magazine
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/641kyjkk.asp
Unmitigated Galloway
>From the May 30, 2005 issue: Saddam's favorite MP goes to Washington.
by Christopher Hitchens
>...At the hearing, also, Galloway was half-correct in yelling at the
subcommittee that he had been a critic of Saddam Hussein when Donald
Rumsfeld was still making friendly visits to Baghdad. Here, a brief
excursion into the aridities of left history may elucidate more than
the Galloway phenomenon.
There came a time, in the late 1970s, when the Iraqi Communist party realized the horrific mistake it had made in joining the Baath party's Revolutionary Command Council. The Communists in Baghdad, as I can testify from personal experience and interviews at the time, began to protest--too late--at the unbelievable cruelty of Saddam's purge of the army and the state: a prelude to his seizure of total power in a full-blown fascist coup. The consequence of this, in Britain, was the setting-up of a group named CARDRI: the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq. Many democratic socialists and liberals supported this organization, but there was no doubting that its letterhead and its active staff were Communist volunteers. And Galloway joined it. At the time, it is at least half true to say, the United States distinctly preferred Saddam's Iraq to Khomeini's Iran, and acted accordingly. Thus a leftist could attack Saddam for being, among other things, an American client. We ought not to forget the shame of American policy at that time, because the preference for Saddam outlived the war with Iran, and continued into the postwar Anfal campaign to exterminate the Kurds. In today's "antiwar" movement, you may still hear the echoes of that filthy compromise, in the pseudo-ironic jibe that "we" used to be Saddam's ally.
But mark the sequel. It must have been in full knowledge, then, of that repression, and that genocide, and of the invasion of Kuwait and all that ensued from it, that George Galloway shifted his position and became an outright partisan of the Iraqi Baath. There can be only two explanations for this, and they do not by any means exclude one another. The first explanation, which would apply to many leftists of different stripes, is that anti-Americanism simply trumps everything, and that once Saddam Hussein became an official enemy of Washington the whole case was altered. Given what Galloway has said at other times, in defense of Slobodan Milosevic for example, it is fair to assume that he would have taken such a position for nothing: without, in other words, the hope of remuneration.