Australian Labor Party barrister
Jim Nolan on Saddam apologist Tariq Ali:
Marx famously observed in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that history repeated itself - first as tragedy and then as farce. Tariq Ali's piece of invective masquerading as analysis ("Occupied Iraq will never know peace", on Wednesday) called this instantly to mind.
Let's measure a couple of Ali's canards against the facts.
The UN, he tells us, is viewed by Iraqis as "one of Washington's more ruthless enforcers" since it supervised the sanctions that were directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children.
This was the favourite whopper retailed by the Saddam propaganda machine. Of course we now know that the food-for-oil program was diverted into Saddam's oil-for-palaces program. The tragedy was all Saddam's own work. He cynically starved his own people to garner the kind of credulous support he still appears to enjoy from the likes of Ali.
But the most bizarre claim by Ali is the casting of the Iraqi dead-enders as a heroic and doughty "resistance" - as if by the mere invocation of the word "resistance", the murderers of UN workers morph into their moral opposites.
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Tariq's hyperbole may have the quality of stale, old-fashioned Stalinism, but its confected indignation and moral humbug gives it a faintly amusing tone. May his self-important exaggerations now situate him where he richly deserves to be - the intellectual moral equivalent of that other famous Ali, Comical.
What highly enlightened shining example of muddle thought newspaper published Tariq's diatribe? The
Guardian. Go read the
hateful words for yourself.
Hat tip to
Michael Totten.
