On 12/1/15 12:08 PM, Tom Walker wrote: > "...the left was ecstatic..." In New Jersey, leftists were dancing in > the streets. I saw it on T.V.
I know you are making a stupid joke but the truth is exactly that. --- After George W. Bush invaded Iraq, the left followed the war with keen interest hoping against hope that the American military would be sent packing in the same fashion as in Vietnam thirty years earlier. Even though there was little evidence of socialist ideology among the Sunni or the Shi’ite militias who fought the Americans more sporadically, the consensus was that they deserved our support. Like some of the key battles in Vietnam such as the Tet Offensive of 1968, the battle for Fallujah in 2004 became a turning point in the war. The World Socialist Website (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/fall-m04.html) was ecstatic over the resistance to American imperialism at the time: One resident who spoke to the Los Angles Times described the uprising as a popular revolt against the occupying power. “Every Fallujan who was able to carry weapons participated,” he said. “All of us are mujahedin. No masks will be used anymore by the mujahedin. We are struggling openly. Our relationship with the new Iraqi commander and his people is very good. They did not come on the back of the American tanks. They are our sons.” The Times reporter cited a sign hanging on the gate of a mosque that captured the mood. It read, “We are the soldiers of Muhammad and not the soldiers of Saddam. We love death as you love life.” Now, 11 years later, mujahideen has become a dirty word on the left. The Arabic word, which refers to people “performing jihad”, is enough to induce a chest-thumping battle cry to “bring it” to ISIS. The same kind of war fever that followed September 11, 2001 is cropping up again in the aftermath of the terrorist massacre in Paris. And, now as then, there are some on the left who call for bombing the jihadists as a way of eradicating terror. It was one thing for someone to describe themselves as “soldiers of Muhammad” when they aimed an AK-47 at a marine but when you turn the same weapon on a Baathist soldier today you automatically become an Islamofascist ipso facto. The same rhetoric that Christopher Hitchens would have used back then against the Fallujah fighters is now used routinely against rebels in Syria who are aggregated into an undifferentiated mass of jihadist bogeymen. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled “Fallujah” dated April 2, 2004 Hitchens wrote: “The mob could have cooked and eaten its victims without making things very much worse.” The “mob”, of course, was a reference to the Sunni fighters and their victims the American marines. There was very little interest on the left in exactly what life was like in Fallujah except that we admired the courage of the citizens. But as “liberated territory”, it doesn’t sound that much different from places under ISIS control today as Nir Rosen reported in an article titled “Resistance: Meet the People of Fallujah” (http://socialistreview.org.uk/289/resistance-meet-people-fallujah) that appeared in the October 2004 Socialist Review, the monthly magazine of the British SWP: They had banned alcohol, western films, make-up, hairdressers, 'behaving like women' (ie homosexuality), and even dominoes in the coffee houses. Men found publicly drunk had been flogged, and I was told of a dozen men beaten and imprisoned for selling drugs. Islamic courts were being established in association with mujahideen units and mosque leaders, meting out punishment consistent with the Koran. Erstwhile Ba'ath Party members told me they were expiating the sins of their former secularism, and Ba'ath ideology had now become Islamist. An assistant to the mayor confirmed that there were Islamic courts with their own qadis, or judges, who acted independently of the police. Did the left somehow miss that Fallujah bore a striking resemblance to ISIS or Taliban-controlled territory? To its credit, it largely understood that such “conservative” social norms were not a litmus test. It was up to the Iraqis themselves to decide how to organize their society, not outside powers with an air force ready to impose Enlightenment values through napalm or what Rudyard Kipling referred to as taking up “the White Man’s Burden”. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
