Christopher Hitchens has an absolutely
scathing piece on the hidden sponsors of the anti-war movement. As with Vietnam, the supposed true-blue patriots standing up for freedom by stopping Bush’s "rush for war" are often being manipulated as useful idiots by less than noble interests.
Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.
But some don’t even bother to make this disavowal. In the United States, the main organizer of anti-war propaganda is Ramsey Clark, who perhaps understandably can’t forgive himself for having been Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general. However, he fails to live down this early disgrace by acting as a front man for a sinister sect — the International Action Center, cover name for the Workers World Party — which refuses to make any criticism of the Saddam regime. It is this quasi-Stalinist group, co-organized by a man with the wondrous name of Clark Kissinger, which has recruited such figures as Ed Asner and Marisa Tomei to sign the "Not In Our Name" petition. Funny as this may be in some ways (I don’t think the administration is going to war in the name of Ed Asner or Marisa Tomei, let alone Gore Vidal), it is based on a surreptitious political agenda. In Britain, the chief spokesman of the “anti-war” faction is a Labour MP named George Galloway, who is never happier than when writing moist profiles of Saddam and who says that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst moment of his life.
The Left wants to create the idea that they are the moral party for stopping the United States from entering into what they see as a long and bloody war. Yet there seems to be precious little concern for those under the bootheels of the Hussein regime or the ethnic minorities being protected from genocide by the no-fly zones enforced by the United States and Britain. It appears that the hatred of the United States by many in the anti-war movement outshadows any condemnation of Saddam Hussein in any real terms.
