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Unmitigated Galloway
From the May 30, 2005 issue: Saddam's favorite MP goes to Washington.
by Christopher Hitchens
05/30/2005, Volume 010, Issue 35
EVERY JOURNALIST HAS A LIST of regrets: of stories that might have been.
Somewhere on my personal list is an invitation I received several years
ago, from a then-Labour member of parliament named George Galloway.
Would I care, he inquired, to join him on a chartered plane to Baghdad?
He was hoping to call attention to the sufferings of the Iraqi people
under sanctions, and had long been an admirer of my staunch and muscular
prose and my commitment to universal justice (I paraphrase only
slightly). Indeed, in an article in a Communist party newspaper in 2001
he referred to me as "that great British man of letters" and "the
greatest polemicist of our age."
No thanks, was my reply. I had my own worries about the sanctions, but I
had also already been on an officially guided visit to Saddam's Iraq and
had decided that the next time I went to that terrorized slum it would
be with either the Kurdish guerrillas or the U.S. Marines. (I've since
fulfilled both ambitions.) Moreover, I knew a bit about Galloway. He had
had to resign as the head of a charity called "War on Want," after
repaying some disputed expenses for living the high life in dirt-poor
countries. Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement.
Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the
cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was
slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your
feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing's too good for
the working class: what the English call a "wide boy."
This was exactly his demeanor when I ran into him last Tuesday on the
sidewalk of Constitution Avenue, outside the Dirksen Senate Office
Building, where he was due to testify before the subcommittee that has
been uncovering the looting of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. His short,
cocky frame was enveloped in a thicket of recording equipment, and he
was holding forth almost uninterrupted until I asked him about his
endorsement of Saddam Hussein's payment for suicide-murderers in Israel
and the occupied territories. He had evidently been admirably consistent
in his attention to my humble work, because he changed tone and said
that this was just what he'd expect from a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist
popinjay." It takes a little more than this to wound your
correspondent--I could still hold a martini without spilling it when I
was "the greatest polemicist of our age" in 2001--but please note that
the real thrust is contained in the word "Trotskyist." Galloway says
that the worst day of his entire life was the day the Soviet Union fell.
His existence since that dreadful event has involved the pathetic search
for an alternative fatherland. He has recently written that, "just as
Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam
plotted Iraq's own Great Leap Forward." I love the word "scale" in that
sentence. I also admire the use of the word "plotted."
As it happens, I adore the street-fight and soap-box side of political
life, so that when the cluster had moved inside, and when Galloway had
taken his seat flanked by his aides and guards, I decided to deny him
the 10 minutes of unmolested time that otherwise awaited him before the
session began. Denouncing the hearings as a show-trial the previous
week, he had claimed that he had written several times to the
subcommittee (whose members he has publicly called "lickspittles")
asking to be allowed to clear his name, and been ignored. The
subcommittee staff denies possessing any record of such an overture.
Taking a position near where he was sitting, I asked him loudly if he
had brought a copy of his letter, or letters. A fresh hose of abuse was
turned upon me, but I persisted in asking, and after awhile others
joined in--receiving no answer--so at least he didn't get to sit gravely
like a volunteer martyr.
Senators Norm Coleman and Carl Levin then began the proceedings, and
staff members went through a meticulous presentation, with documents and
boards, showing the paperwork of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing
Organization and the Iraqi Oil Ministry. These were augmented by
testimony from an (unnamed) "senior Saddam regime official," who had
vouched for the authenticity of the provenance and the signatures. The
exhibits clearly showed that pro-Saddam political figures in France and
Russia, and at least one American oil company, had earned the right to
profit from illegal oil-trades, and had sweetened the pot by kicking
back a percentage to Saddam's personal palace-building and mass
grave-digging fund.
In several cases, the documents suggested that a man named Fawaz
Zureikat, a Jordanian tycoon, had been intimately involved in these
transactions. Galloway's name also appears in parentheses on the
Zureikat papers--perhaps as an aide-memoire to those processing
them--but you must keep in mind that the material does not show
transfers directly to Galloway himself; only to Zureikat, his patron and
partner and friend. In an analogous way, one cannot accuse Scott Ritter,
who made a ferocious documentary attacking the Iraq war, of being in
Iraqi pay. One may be aware, though, that the Iraqi-American businessman
who financed that film, Shakir al-Khafaji, has since shown up in the
captured Oil-for-Food correspondence.
After about 90 minutes of this cumulative testimony, Galloway was seated
and sworn, and the humiliation began. The humiliation of the
deliberative body, I mean. I once sat in the hearing room while a
uniformed Oliver North hectored a Senate committee and instructed the
legislative branch in its duties, and not since that day have I felt
such alarm and frustration and disgust. Galloway has learned to master
the word "neocon" and the acronym "AIPAC," and he insulted the
subcommittee for its deference to both of these. He took up much of his
time in a demagogic attack on the lie-generated war in Iraq. He
announced that he had never traded in a single barrel of oil, and he
declared that he had never been a public supporter of the Saddam Hussein
regime. As I had guessed he would, he made the most of the anonymity of
the "senior Saddam regime official," and protested at not knowing the
identity of his accuser. He improved on this by suggesting that the
person concerned might now be in a cell in Abu Ghraib.
In a small way--an exceedingly small way--this had the paradoxical
effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a
hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British
Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point
of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. The torpid majesty
of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who
is in addition a man without embarrassment who has stayed just on the
right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting
methods. He has, for example, temporarily won a libel case against the
Daily Telegraph in London, which printed similar documents about him
that were found in the Oil Ministry just after the fall of Baghdad. The
newspaper claimed a public-interest defense, and did not explicitly
state that the documents were genuine. Galloway, for his part, carefully
did not state that they were false, either. The case has now gone to appeal.
When estimating the propensity of anyone to take money or gifts, one
must also balance the propensity of a regime to offer them. I once had
an Iraqi diplomat contact in London, who later became one of Saddam's
ministers. After inviting him to dinner one night, I noticed that he had
wordlessly left a handsome bag, which contained a small but nice rug,
several boxes of Cuban cigars (which I don't smoke), and several bottles
of single malt Scotch. I was at the time a fairly junior editor at a
socialist weekly. More recently, I have interviewed a very senior and
reliable U.N. arms inspector in Iraq, who was directly offered an
enormous bribe by Tariq Aziz himself, and who duly reported the fact to
the U.S. government. If the Baathists would risk approaching this
particular man, it seems to me, they must have tried it with practically
everybody. Quite possibly, though, the Saddam regime decided that
Galloway was entirely incorruptible, and would consider such an
inducement beneath him.
SUCH SPECULATION TO ONE SIDE, the subcommittee and its staff had a
tranche of information on Galloway, and on his record for truthfulness.
It would have been a simple matter for them to call him out on a number
of things. First of all, and easiest, he had dared to state under oath
that he had not been a defender of the Saddam regime. This, from the man
who visited Baghdad after the first Gulf war and, addressing Saddam,
said: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your
indefatigability." How's that for lickspittling? And even if you make
allowances for emotional public moments, you can't argue with Galloway's
own autobiography, blush-makingly entitled I'm Not the Only One, which
was published last spring and from which I offer the following extracts:
The state of Kuwait is "clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole,
stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion." (Kuwait existed long
before Iraq had even been named.) "In my experience none of the Ba'ath
leaders have displayed any hostility to Jews." The post-Gulf war
massacres of Kurds and Shia in 1991 were part of "a civil war that
involved massive violence on both sides." Asked about Saddam's palaces
after one of his many fraternal visits, he remarked, "Our own head of
state has a fair bit of real estate herself." Her Majesty the Queen and
her awful brood may take up a lot of room, but it's hardly comparable to
one palace per province, built during a time of famine. Discussing
Saddam's direct payments to the families of suicide-murderers--the very
question he had refused to answer when I asked him--he once again lapsed
into accidental accuracy, as with the Stalin comparison, and said that
"as the martyred know, he put Iraq's money where his mouth was." That's
true enough: It was indeed Iraq's money, if a bit more than Saddam's mouth.
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.
There was another faction, however, that was, relatively speaking,
nonpolitical. During the imposition of international U.N. sanctions on
Iraq, and the creation of the Oil-for-Food system, it swiftly became
known to a class of middlemen that lavish pickings were to be had by
anyone who could boast an insider contact in Baghdad. This much is well
known and has been solidly established, by the Volcker report and by the
Senate subcommittee. During the material time, George Galloway received
hard-to-get visas for Iraq on multiple occasions, and admits to at least
two personal meetings with Saddam Hussein and more than ten with his
"dear friend" Tariq Aziz. But as far as is known by me, he confined his
activity on these occasions to pro-regime propaganda, with Iraqi crowds
often turned out by the authorities to applaud him, and provide a useful
platform in both parliament and the press back home.
However, his friend and business partner, Fawaz Zureikat, didn't concern
himself so much with ideological questions (though he did try to set up
a broadcasting service for Saddam). He was, as Galloway happily
testified, involved in a vast range of deals in Baghdad. But Galloway's
admitted knowledge of this somehow does not extend to Zureikat's
involvement in any Oil-for-Food transactions, which are now prima facie
established in black and white by the subcommittee's report. Galloway,
indeed, has arranged to be adequately uninformed about this for some
time now: It is two years since he promised the BBC that he would
establish and make known the facts about his Zureikat connection.
Here then are these facts, as we know them without his help. In 1998,
Galloway founded something, easily confused with a charity, known as the
Mariam Appeal. The ostensible aim of the appeal was to provide treatment
in Britain for a 4-year-old Iraqi girl named Mariam Hamza, who suffered
from leukemia. An announced secondary aim was to campaign against the
sanctions then in force, and still a third, somewhat occluded, aim was
to state that Mariam Hamza and many others like her had contracted
cancer from the use of depleted-uranium shells by American forces in the
first Gulf war. A letter exists, on House of Commons writing paper,
signed by Galloway and appointing Fawaz Zureikat as his personal
representative in Iraq, on any and all matters connected to the Mariam
Appeal.
Although it was briefly claimed by one of its officers that the Appeal
raised most of its money from ordinary citizens, Galloway has since
testified that the bulk of the revenue came from the ruler of the United
Arab Emirates and from a Saudi prince. He has also conceded that
Zureikat was a very generous donor. The remainder of the funding is
somewhat opaque, since the British Charity Commissioners, who monitor
such things, began an investigation in 2003. This investigation was
inconclusive. The commissioners were able to determine that the Mariam
Appeal, which had used much of its revenue for political campaigning,
had not but ought to have been legally registered as a charity. They
were not able to determine much beyond this, because it was then
announced that the account books of the Appeal had been removed, first
to Amman, Jordan, and then to Baghdad. This is the first charity or
proto-charity in history to have disposed of its records in that way.
TO THIS DAY, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the
senators, that he has "never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought
one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." As a Clintonian
defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a
kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For
the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge
that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have
been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his
chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly
declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that,
having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in
respect of "charities," he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a
regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious
middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of
the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that
party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think
I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person
would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will
have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.
Even if the matter of subornation and bribery had never arisen, there
would remain the crucial question of Iraq itself. It was said during the
time of sanctions on that long-suffering country that the embargo was
killing, or had killed, as many as a million people, many of them
infants. Give credit to the accusers here. Some of the gravamen of the
charge must be true. Add the parasitic regime to the sanctions, over 12
years, and it is clear that the suffering of average Iraqis must have
been inordinate.
There are only two ways this suffering could have been relieved. Either
the sanctions could have been lifted, as Galloway and others demanded,
or the regime could have been removed. The first policy, if followed
without conditions, would have untied the hands of Saddam. The second
policy would have had the dual effect of ending sanctions and
terminating a hideous and lawless one-man rule. But when the second
policy was proposed, the streets filled with people who absolutely
opposed it. Saying farewell to the regime was, evidently, too high a
price to pay for relief from sanctions.
Let me phrase this another way: Those who had alleged that a million
civilians were dying from sanctions were willing, nay eager, to keep
those same murderous sanctions if it meant preserving Saddam! This is
repellent enough in itself. If the Saddam regime was cheating its
terrified people of food and medicine in order to finance its own
propaganda, that would perhaps be in character. But if it were to be
discovered that any third parties had profited from the persistence of
"sanctions plus regime," prolonging the agony and misery thanks to
personal connections, then one would have to become quite judgmental.
The bad faith of a majority of the left is instanced by four things
(apart, that is, from mass demonstrations in favor of prolonging the
life of a fascist government). First, the antiwar forces never asked the
Iraqi left what it wanted, because they would have heard very clearly
that their comrades wanted the overthrow of Saddam. (President Jalal
Talabani's party, for example, is a member in good standing of the
Socialist International.) This is a betrayal of what used to be called
internationalism. Second, the left decided to scab and blackleg on the
Kurds, whose struggle is the oldest cause of the left in the Middle
East. Third, many leftists and liberals stressed the cost of the Iraq
intervention as against the cost of domestic expenditure, when if they
had been looking for zero-sum comparisons they might have been expected
to cite waste in certain military programs, or perhaps the cost of the
"war on drugs." This, then, was mere cynicism. Fourth, and as mentioned,
their humanitarian talk about the sanctions turned out to be the most
inexpensive hypocrisy.
George Galloway--having been rightly expelled by the British Labour
party for calling for "jihad" against British troops, and having since
then hailed the nihilism and sadism and sectarianism that goes by the
lazy name of the Iraqi "insurgency" or, in his circles,
"resistance"--ran for election in a new seat in East London and was
successful in unseating the Labour incumbent. His party calls itself
RESPECT, which stands for "Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace,
Environment, Community, Trade Unionism." (So that really ought to be
RESPECTU, except that it would then sound less like an Aretha Franklin
song and more like an organ of the Romanian state under Ceausescu.)
The defeated incumbent, Oona King, is of mixed African and Jewish
heritage, and had to endure an appalling whispering campaign, based on
her sex and her combined ethnicities. Who knows who started this torrent
of abuse? Galloway certainly has, once again, remained adequately
uninformed about it. His chief appeal was to the militant Islamist
element among Asian immigrants who live in large numbers in his
district, and his main organizational muscle was provided by a depraved
sub-Leninist sect called the Socialist Workers party. The servants of
the one god finally meet the votaries of the one-party state. Perfect.
To this most opportunist of alliances, add some Tory and Liberal
Democrat "tactical voters" whose hatred of Tony Blair eclipses
everything else.
Perhaps I may be allowed a closing moment of sentiment here? To the
left, the old East End of London was once near-sacred ground. It was
here in 1936 that a massive demonstration of longshoremen, artisans, and
Jewish refugees and migrants made a human wall and drove back a
determined attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to mount a march
of intimidation. The event is still remembered locally as "The Battle of
Cable Street." That part of London, in fact, was one of the few place in
Europe where the attempt to raise the emblems of fascism was defeated by
force.
And now, on the same turf, there struts a little popinjay who defends
dictatorship abroad and who trades on religious sectarianism at home.
Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to
Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in
London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political
thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round
celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the
Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the
same resolve and determination.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting
professor at the New School in New York. His new book is Thomas
Jefferson: Author of America.
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