Clive Furness examines life on Planet Hayden

Tom Hayden – the celebrated veteran of the anti-Vietnam war movement – has penned a piece which will no doubt inform much of the American and British Lefts narrative on Iraq but is deeply flawed. Here Clive Furness, a founder member of CARDRI (Campaign against repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq) who has been to Iraq four times, most recently on the LFIQ delegation in the Spring, examines where Hayden goes wrong.

Hayden's starting point is the common one for those who believe themselves to be on the Left but who have become the objective bedfellows of a group of assorted neo fascists(The Baath) and religiously inspired psychopaths, (Al Qaeda in Iraq). A psychopathic mass murderer (Zarqawi) becomes a misguided Islamic revolutionary". Give me a break!

This is the 'resistance' to which he warmly refers. Indeed on his own web page he has stated that he sees the reinstatement of the Iraqi army as the means to bring stability to Iraq. It is fascinating to see the blind spots of some of the Left. Not only are 12 years of war, the Anfal, Halabja, the destruction of the Barzan Valley, the mass graves etc ignored, but their perpetrators are first feted as some form of noble resistance and then trotted out as an answer to the problem.
Make no mistake. It is they who were the problem in the first place and there is precious little desire to see them return.

He mentions Al Sadr as a part of this extended Baath/Sunni-Salafist resistance. Quite simply this is bizarre. The Muqtadr al Sadr phenomenon is the result of the history of his family (very anti-Baath)and the contemporary struggle for legitimacy and ascendancy within the Shia community where his faction battles with those of Ayatollah Hakim. Al Sadr is conservative in his religion and nationalist and authoritarian in his politics. The Hakim faction (SCIRI) are perceived as being too close to Iran.

Under Saddam there was no question of legitimate authority. The question was entirely moot because, outside of Kurdistan, there was no chance of anything else. With his ouster there came a number of competing claims of legitimate authority. Ayatollah Sistani remains the most respected religious leader, and he has sought to remain out of the political arena. The occupation forces have based their claim on their role as liberators and later on the mandate of the UN), SCIRI and al Sadr have based theirs on an army and the loyalty of a distinct section of the Shia community (roughly al Sadr in the centre and Hakim in the south of the country). The Baath have relied upon their traditional ascendancy and the salafists on a perversion of religion that has non-Iraqis deliberately try to remove the majority population from the country.

Lastly, an elected government has based its claim of legitimacy upon a free
election and a cabinet that represents all of the major religious and ethnic traditions. In old fashioned words, upon the will of the people, and there is little doubt that what the people want is peace and an end to the insurgency.

This leaves a question for the Left and Hayden in particular, whether the democratic and progressive principles he espouses are stronger than his distaste of George Bush Jnr. One suspects that they are not.