Katha Pollitt on Iraqi "resistance": she almost gets it

Katha Pollitt writes for her blog in The Nation, July 13:

2,4,6,8! This Beheading is Really Great!
Why is the anti-war movement so lacklustre when 70% of Americans want to bring the troops home by spring and George W. Bush is the least popular president in history?

Some reasons are obvious: lack of a draft, low casualties, not much TV coverage, perceived futility of big rallies and marches. My fellow columnist Alexander Cockburn has a different idea. In his current Nation column, Alex argues that the anti-war movement is weak because it fails to show "international political solidarity" with "Iraqi resistance fighters."

Where's the love that US leftists felt for the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran FMLN--the sister cities, the links between unions, the love affairs between the "demure sisters in the struggle from Vermont or the Pacific Northwest" and "some valiant son of Sandino or downtrodden Nica sister, liberated by North American inversion from the oppressions of Latin patriarchy"?

True, he acknowledges, the "the contours of the Iraqi resistance are murky and in some aspects unappetizing to secular progressives in the West, or so they virtuously proclaim." ( Note the sarcasm --because nobody who disagrees with Alex could possibly have honorable motives.) But by cutting ourselves off from the Iraqis killling US soldiers, the US left is failing to learn "its internationalist ABCs."

Where to begin? Let's start with those murky contours and secular objections. With whom, exactly, are we supposed to be showing solidarity? Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia? Shiites massacring their Sunni neighbors? Sunnis killing Shiites? Religious reactionaries who have murdered doctors, professors, working women, Christians, students, hand-holding couples? "Ignorance about the Iraqi resistance is somewhat forgivable," Alex concedes, given the lack of first-hand sympathetic reporting--not that he deigns to enlighten the reader.

So, okay, call me ignorant: The Iraqi resistance isn't dominated by theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs? Who haven't tortured and killed trade union leaders, feminists, aid workers, schoolteachers and such? We would like to live--Iraqis would like to live -- in the society they want to create?

The Sandinistas and the FMLN were far from perfect, but they were leftists. They stood for health care, education, land distribution, modernization--not burning down liquor stores and music shops, beating up unveiled women, suicide-bombing ordinary civilians, bringing back sharia law. They had support from all over the left end of the spectrum--labor,churches, feminists, socialists, human rights activists, peace activists--not just because they opposed US imperialism, but because they shared the goals of the American, and global, left.

If the Central American revolutionaries had resisted American intervention in the name of the Spanish Inquisition and spent a lot of time ethnically cleansing their neighborhoods, American leftists probably wouldn't have been so eager to hold potluck suppers for them.

Why Alex thinks embracing the Iraqi resistance would strengthen the US antiwar movement is beyond me. On the contrary, the nature of the resistance is a major reason why the antiwar movement is so weak. No matter how intensely you oppose the war, it is hard to feel good about an Iraq in which the resistance calls the shots. That was not how anti-war Americans saw Central America, or even Vietnam. It's not just that the iraqi insurgents are killing our soldiers--which, let's remember, was not an issue in Central America. It's that they're killing each other.

Good for Katha Pollitt. But, like the rest of the American anti-war movement, she fails to take the next logical step: there is a legitimate civil resistance to support in Iraq. When will they be given a voice at The Nation?

See our last posts on Iraq and the execrable Alexander Cockburn.

Pollit/Cockburn

Pollit's mistake is a failure to separate the grim pragmatics of Iraq from leftist wishful thinking. The fact is, the most powerful military on earth has permanantly destroyed Iraq, caused the deaths of some 1 million people, carried on a campaign of torture, rape, mutilation and murder and sparked the largest refugee crisis on earth.

It would be swell if Iraqi poets, physicians, intellectuals, human rights workers, etc were capable of dealing with this Stateside wave of Nazi filth which has decimated their country and caused unimaginable horror and misery. Unfortunately, such pie-in-the-sky posturing isn't going to rid Iraq of the US any time soon. The people to do it are battle-hardened Jihadists, many of them, outright fanatics.

Further, everyone knows that the sectarian divide and the horror it has spawned was engineereed by the US in a standard divide and conquer strategy. We must hope Sunnis and Shia can again come together and begin wiping out the Americans in earnest. Sadly, that's the only game in town if one is honest and serious about full US withdrawl.

The #1 goal right now is getting the US death toll as high as possible as fast as possible, because that is the only way the US will be forced out of Iraq. Public opinion is totally indifferent to the suffering of the Iraqi people, (just as it was always indifferent to the suffering of the Vietnamese). That's beyond obvious.

Talk about "leftist wishful thinking"!

If the number one priority is to get the death toll of US troops as high as possible, why are your jihadi buds so busy committing mass murder of their fellow Iraqis?

Nobody is in more denial than you.