Israel’s Golden Gift

But that is nothing new, as in reality Iraq is far to complex for them to understand and its not the first time that the welfare of the Iraqi people has been dropped by the self-appointed “vanguard” of British proletariat. Historically, Iraq was never a sexy subject to begin with. During the 1980s, when Iraqis in the UK were campaigning, lobbying and protesting against the use of chemical weapons, along with the disappearance of political opponents, few among the British Left had enough insight to stand with those protesting against repression. During the first Gulf War the Left took to the streets under the banner of “No War For Oil”, in opposition to Britain’s military involvement against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, but unsurprisingly those protests soon dried up after the failure of the 1991 uprising against Saddam and after the UN imposed their devastating sanctions. In the decade running up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Britain’s Left played a highly under-active role against the killing of 5,000 Iraqi children per month, whose lives were cut short by embargo related causes. The same political confusion occurred in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, where many left wing and anti-war commentators hid behind slogans of “Imperialism” and “Peace” in substitute to actual events and political changes inside of Iraq, which resulted in a climate of ignorance in the post invasion period. This ignorance was shown with distinctive characteristics, by the Left’s failure to adequately oppose De-Baathification policies, which essentially destroyed Iraqi state infrastructure and opened up the door to an apartheid system of government which directly discriminated against anyone who held a Civil Service position under Saddam Hussain’s 35 year rule.

The same level of ignorance was also applied to the ethnic cleansing of religious and cultural minorities in Iraq. From 2003 through to the present, while many on the British Left have given public support to movements which include hard lined Shi’ite and Sunni groups, no consistent political, or practical, support has ever been provided to Iraq’s orphans, widows, refugee’s, Christians, LGBT or secular civil rights movements. In recent weeks, with the crisis which has befallen Iraq and the upsurge in ISIS related violence, Iraq has become the focus of many media articles which mostly state that the anti-war movement was right to oppose the 2003 war.
While in essence this political sentiment is right, in reality, the needs and demands of the Iraqi people have been lost among the self-aggrandising of Britain’s Left. For years, few voices have been concerned by the lack of security along Iraq’s borders with Syria. The UN stated last year that the conflicts are “merging into one”. Fewer voices have been concerned by the humanitarian plight of Iraqi’s displaced in Mosul, Kirkuk and Tikrit, or by the physical and psychological injuries of those caught up in the crisis. Never mind the rising costs of living being incurred in a country which until 2003 had a welfare state and functioning ration system.

If the current leftist mantra is to be believed that the violence in Iraq is a product of a “failed state” created by the Sykes-Picot agreement decades ago, with the occasional reference to Gertrude Bell to add a questionable credibility, this surely must then pose a question for anyone involved with Britain’s Left: when were you last in Iraq, without the escort of a British armed guard?