Iraqi rebels not freedom fighters

Andrew Anthony Guardian News Service London

In a New York Times review of Nicholson Baker's new novel, Checkpoint (Knopf), Leon Wieseltier employs the phrase "liberal demagoguery". He does so not as a cultural relativist might, in reference to western promotion of secular-liberalism, but in response to what he sees as the left's adoption of the right's penchant for crude reductionism.

The plot of Checkpoint concerns a man who is so disenchanted with what George W. Bush has done to America and the world that he plots to kill the president, or at least fantasizes about it. In real life, liberals on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly lending their support, if only vocally, to simple solutions to what is in Iraq, and elsewhere, a complex situation.

At its most innocuous, this tendency manifests in uncritical applause for Michael Moore. I'd be a wealthy man if I had a quid for every time someone had told me that they didn't care whether or not Moore was a reliable documentary-maker just so long as he is against the war in Iraq.

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore seems to suggest, with good reason, that the Iraq war was a needless diversion from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his followers. But point out that he was against going after bin Laden when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and that his initial response to the attack on the World Trade Center was that it was wrong because New York "voted against Bush!", and few of his new fans appear bothered. Yeah, they say, he may not be consistent, but he's a counterbalance to the mad neocons. And that's all that matters. In other words, to use the old Arabic saying, my enemy's enemy is my friend.

In which case, you can end up with some very strange friends. Recently I voiced the opinion that the tragedy of the war in Iraq, aside from the many innocent dead and injured, is that is has created the conditions in which reactionaries such as Moqtada al-Sadr and his followers can flourish. The woman I shared this thought with, a cultured liberal who cut her teeth in the anti- Vietnam war movement, looked at me in disbelief. "But they're freedom fighters," she said with something that sounded like pride.

Now Sadr's militiamen may be fighting for a number of things. Two young Britons were reported on Wednesday to have joined Sadr's Shia militia in Najaf to fight a "jihad" to defend their religion. (Perhaps, but the fact is that the Shia enjoy more liberty to practice their religion in Iraq now than they did under Saddam Hussein, whose ruthless anti-Shia policies seemed to inspire few British jihadists.) Certainly it is possible to argue that, in terms of removing an occupying force, they have a just cause. But what they are absolutely not fighting for is freedom.

Freedom may mean different things to different people but there are limits to how much you can stretch the word and those limits stop worryingly short of the Iraq that Sadr would like to see. The kind of "freedom" Sadr aims to establish is the kind that operates in the neighboring theocracy of Iran. A broad spectrum of opposition forces helped depose the shah of Iran back in 1979 but Ayatollah Khomeini, Sadr's role model, was not much interested in pluralism. Thus, when he assumed control, he had his erstwhile anti-imperialist comrades either imprisoned or murdered.

At the time, a number of European intellectuals were excited by the extremity of Khomeini's anti-American rhetoric. As Francis Wheen observes in How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, Michel Foucault "came back to Paris enraptured by the 'beauty' of the Ayatollah Khomeini's neanderthal regime". But as will prove the case with Sadr if he gets the chance, the violence of Khomeini's language towards America was as nothing compared with the violence he unleashed on his own people.

When the American-appointed Iraqi government recently closed down the al-Jazeera TV office in Baghdad, it was correctly noted that such censorship betrayed the supposed freedom that America promised to bring. Yet is it any better for liberals who oppose Bush to idealize theocratic fascists? Does that not betray the very concept of liberalism?

Turn on Fox News in America and you'll receive a diet of neocon propaganda -- not quite as hysterical as al-Jazeera, perhaps, but leaning that way. The liberal answer to such shrill warmongering not only need not match it knee-jerk for knee-jerk, it must not if it wants to remain liberal.

The best arguments against Bush are not necessarily the loudest. He may well have got it wrong in Iraq, though that doesn't mean it can't be made more wrong or less free. My own proviso on the question of an enemy's enemy being a friend is that it only makes moral sense if the enemy's enemy is not worse than the original enemy. Liberal demagogues may not wish to recognize such subtle distinctions. But if they don't, the Iraqis could end up with a real demagogue who won't be very liberal at all.