The British election that took place two weeks ago was
remarkably unremarkable in every way except one. In one
constituency in London, a man named George Galloway was elected to
the British Parliament.
He was representing the nascent Respect Party, and he stole a
safe Labour Party seat that had been held since 1945, overturning a
seemingly impossible majority of 10,000. It was a historic and
stunning victory.
So how did he do it? The story is best begun during the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. At this
stage Galloway was still a long-standing and well-respected member
of the Labour Party.
This all changed when in an interview he called President Bush
and Tony Blair “wolves,” adding that “even if it
is not realistic to ask a non-Iraqi army to come to defend Iraq, we
see Arab regimes pumping oil for the countries who are attacking
it. We wonder when the Arab leaders will wake up. When are they
going to stand by the Iraqi people?”
This was apparently too much for Blair and the Labour
leadership, and Galloway was promptly suspended and later expelled
from the Labour Party.
But, rising like a phoenix from the flames, he created the new
Respect Party. The vociferous and widespread antiwar feeling in
Britain, particularly in multicultural London, was the vein this
new party hoped to tap into.
It worked brilliantly. And this was despite a dirty and
relentless smear campaign by the mainstream media that must stand
without precedent in British political history.
But here’s the rub. On Tuesday, Galloway was in the United
States giving testimony to a Senate committee that had accused him
of making money off Iraqi oil when Saddam Hussein was in power. It
is, of course, a serious charge, but Galloway has already fended
off similar accusations from the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the
Christian Science Monitor in America.
The evidence the Senate committee produced against Galloway
doesn’t look convincing to the untrained eye. The committee
merely has lists of names of people with supposed business ties
with Saddam, and Galloway appears ““ he says falsely ““
on many of them.
But it is important to realize that even if Galloway is guilty,
it is merely a sideshow to what is surely one of the biggest
scandals of our time.
As Galloway put it to the committee, “I have met Saddam
Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met
him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him
guns.”
The running joke, after all, when U.N. inspectors were searching
Iraq for weapons was that Rumsfeld and his Republican buddies
should know what weapons Saddam had because they sold them to
him.
This might shock those who have listened to Rumsfeld’s
righteous prewar incantations that “Iraq poses a serious and
mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a
nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of
enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant
quantities of uranium from Africa.”
We now know this was all a pack of lies and his elegies to the
Iraqis killed by Saddam were particularly ironic and sickening.
Didn’t he spend much of the ’80s trading in weapons of
mass destruction with his ally Saddam?
In late 2002, the Washington Post reported that declassified
papers revealed the Reagan administration and its special Middle
East envoy ““ yes, Donald Rumsfeld ““ did little to stop
Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s, even
though they were fully aware that Saddam was using chemical weapons
“almost daily” against Iran.
The report said Reagan and Rumsfeld had allowed the export of
biological weapons, including anthrax, ingredients for chemical
weapons and cluster bombs. In 1983, then-Secretary of State George
Shultz received intelligence of “almost daily use of
(chemical weapons)” by Iraq.
But 25 days after this information, Reagan gave a secret order
allowing the administration to do “whatever was necessary and
legal” to help Iraq win the war against Iran.
In December of that year, Rumsfeld met Saddam in Baghdad and
stated the United States’ desire to restore diplomatic
relations.
This support and flow of arms continued long after the end of
the Iran-Iraq war, right up until the first Gulf War in 1990
““ even after Saddam had shelled the Kurdish town of Halabja
in March 1988 with gas bombs, killing an estimated 5,000 civilians
and maiming thousands more.
It just goes to prove the time-honored adage that states
don’t have allies or enemies ““ they merely have
interests.
When Saddam was being a good boy and doing what the United
States and Britain told him ““ selling them oil and fighting
the Shiite militancy of Iran ““ a blind eye was turned to his
human rights abuses and the genocidal actions against his Kurdish
population.
Nothing has changed. In another 15 years, the United States and
Britain might turn their guns on Islam Karimov, the demented
torturing dictator in Uzbekistan, if he departs from his
country’s current role as a partner in the “war on
terror” by acting independently or in line with the wishes of
his population.
We will be inundated with lists of human rights abuses and
exhaustive documentation of barbarism of all kinds (like this
week’s murder of 500 peaceful protesters or the gratuitous
boiling of his political opponents in a cauldron). Then we will
bomb and once again no one will ask why we supported him when he
was at his worst. For now he remains a strategic friend: “Our
relationship is strong and has been growing stronger,” said
Rumsfeld in 2004.
I’m not a big fan of Galloway. He spoke in honeyed tones
when he met Saddam, he is anti-abortion, and he seems to have an
odd nostalgia for the Soviet Union ““ all anathema to my
beliefs.
But focusing so exclusively on his alleged crimes is like
mercilessly interrogating a getaway driver while giving carte
blanche to the actual robber who has fleeced a bank and killed
people in the process.
Forget Galloway. Donald Rumsfeld, along with his partners in
crime in Britain, should be indicted for war crimes.
But as the legendary French novelist Honoré de Balzac once
wrote, “Laws are spiderwebs through which the big flies pass
and the little ones get caught.”
The only crimes with which Galloway has been successfully
convicted are virulently opposing the catastrophic war in Iraq,
attempting to bring an end to the U.S. and U.N. sanctions on Iraq
that killed an estimated 500,000 children, and supporting the
Palestinian people as they enter their 38th year of occupation by a
foreign power.
Yet he has been caught by a bogus spiderweb. The real criminals,
like Donald Rumsfeld, have flown right through the web and come out
the other side preaching their moral innocence.
Balzac ““ and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and
Iranians killed, gassed and tortured to death with Rumsfeld’s
support ““ will be turning in their graves.
Kennard is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
mkennard@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.