Iraqi Communists partying once again

By Bill King
web posted May 5, 2003

As if there wasn't enough going on in Iraq these days, it turns out that the Iraqi Communist Party is back in business. After having been driven underground decades ago by Saddam's regime, they've recently reopened their Baghdad office and are once again openly publishing their newspaper, Tareeq Al-Sha'ab (The People's Path).

Not surprisingly, the Iraqi Communists are pleased as punch that Saddam has been toppled. Their view is that his regime was, "…one of the most tyrannical dictatorships ever known…" Unlike our smug domestic leftists who hate the west so much that they in effect supported Saddam, these Iraqis actually stood up to him and paid the price for it in torture and executions.

But the fact that the United States military is responsible for their new found freedom has left them in a bit of a conceptual pickle, to say the least. After all, it isn't just any old army that has allowed them to raise the red flag (figuratively, that is) in Baghdad again, we're talking about the Mother of all Imperialist Armies here -- they're supposed to be the bad guys!

So in an effort to prove that, while they may be braver, they're also every bit as harebrained as Western leftists, the Iraqi Communists devote the lead article in the first issue of their newly available newspaper to explaining their stand -- and end up producing some classic communist silliness.

They're happy the regime fell, but opposed the war that made it fall. They call on the US to stop the looting and vandalism, but condemn the US for stopping it by using former policemen. They call for the US to restore public services and authority, but oppose US efforts to help to form an interim Iraqi government. Maybe this is what they call dialectics.

But the clincher, the part where their reasoning reminds you why Communism truly is doomed forever, is when they call for peace, security and stability… and then call for the US to get out and the UN to take over. These guys haven't been reading too much Stalin, they've been reading too much Martin Sheen! I'll leave it up to readers to decide which is worse.

To be fair, someone really should wake them up about the UN. Given its recent track record, one wouldn't wish that type of ineptness even on the Communists, never mind on long-suffering ordinary Iraqis.

In the end I suppose there are more pressing problems than a relatively small number of Iraqi Communists, such as the Islamist radicals among the millions of Iraqi Shias, who are organized and not so contradictory in their take on things.

But just in case you find yourself in Baghdad with a burning desire to discuss dialectics, you can always drop by the Iraqi Communists at their new downtown office, just off of Al-Andulus Square. You can do that without being shot or thrown in jail now that Saddam's regime is gone courtesy of the US military -- just don't remind the Communists about that.

Bill King is a long time observer of the radical left around the world.

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