Socialist Worker Backs Ba’athist Tariq Aziz and the Terrorists

In the Winter Review of Bookmarks (a bookshop associated with the Socialist Workers Party) Martin Smith reviews Christian Parenti’s new book The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (The New Press, 2004).

Smith begins his review with a quote from Tariq Aziz, (Saddam’s Number 2): 'People say to me, you are not Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps to hide in. I reply, let our cities be our swamps and our buildings be our jungles’. Smith comments, ‘How true’. Smith passes over in silence the record of Tariq Aziz as a fascistic murderer, No. 2 in a regime of mass graves and ethnic cleansing. Instead, Smith treats Tariq Aziz as a freedom fighter, comparable to Ho Chi Minh.

Smith’s review ends on this note: ‘Go buy yourself a copy of The Freedom it’ll grab your attention like an RPG hitting a Humvee’. But Smith and the SWP know the RPG’s also hit the reopened Water Treatment Plant at al-Ummal on 30 September 2004 killing at least 41 people, among them 34 children. Smith and the SWP know the RPG’s also hit the car of an Iraqi Communist Party leader Comrade Wadhah Hassan Abdul Amir (Saadoun), a member of the Interim National Assembly, and killed him on 13th November 2004, along with two of his comrades, while travelling from Baghdad to Kirkuk. Smith and the SWP know the RPG’s also hit the train on the railway line between Mosel and Baghdad murdering the IFTU members aboard, an atack that moved Tony Woodley, General Secretary of the TGWU to write to Abdullah Muhsin, ‘It is horrifying to learn that four of your members have been killed and mutilated by terrorists while driving and working on a freight train carrying consumer goods’ (http://www.iraqitradeunions.org/archives/000111.html)

The question is why the SWP don’t care anymore about those kids, those socialists or those trade unionists. And the other question is why so many are still prepared to follow their lead. Time to move on. (Alan Johnson).