iraq's man in the house of commons
George Galloway.
George Galloway, the Scottish Labour MP famed for his close ties to the Palestinians, may have received up to $10 million from Saddam Hussein between 1992 and 2003, according to documents discovered by The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Galloway, who in 1982 advocated a Communist/Labour Party merger, was defended immediately in the pages of The Guardian by sex offender Scott Ritter, a man who has taken money from the Hussein regime through Iraqi businessman Shakir al-Khafaji. al-Khafaji has also donated money to the campaigns of U.S. congressmen David Bonior and John Conyers, as well as U.S. senator Carl Levin. Additionally, al-Khafaji donated $5000 to Jim McDermott, the U.S. congressmen who travelled (with David Bonior and another congressman) to Iraq before the war to proclaim that George Bush "would mislead the American people."
It is tempting to simply dismiss these men as corrupt. Certainly they are, but that alone can not explain why any official member of the American or British governments would accept money in order to act as an apologist for someone as demonstrably evil as Saddam Hussein. Martin Amis, in his excellent Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, calls the Western left to task for their irrational love of Joseph Stalin and their almost pathological inability to acknowledge his crimes. Even today, Fidel Castro continues to be embraced by the American left as a courageous revolutionary, bravely standing against the American juggernaut. Director Oliver Stone recently finished an admiring documentary of the Cuban dictator - titled Comandante, who made news earlier this year with a new round of show trials of his political adversaries.
The answer may, to some degree, be that they are part of the "blame America (or, in Galloway's case, Britain) first crowd," as Jeane Kirkpatrick famously coined in 1984. Perhaps each of these men suffer from that quiet delusion that every ill in the world somehow, some way, in the the end is the fault of the West - and that they, who understand this better than their fellow citizens, are noble warriors in a struggle to undermine the system they consider the true source of villianry. Kim Philby, the most notorious member of the Cambridge Five KGB spy ring, maintained that view until his death in 1988.
Galloway is now suspended from the Labour Party pending an investigation into the allegations surrounding him.
15.05.2003 © ljr