http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=94405&d=31&m=3&y=2007
Saturday, 31, March, 2007 (12, Rabi` al-Awwal, 1428)
Left No Longer Anti-US
Amir Taheri, Arab News
While elements of the left in the US and Europe are calling on Western
democracies to abandon Afghanistan and Iraq to Taleban and Al-Qaeda, and
surrender to the Khomeinists in Iran, new alliances are emerging against the
jihadists in the region.
What is interesting is that in much of the Middle East, most notably
Afghanistan and Iraq, the left is part of these new alliances.
In Iraq, the two Communist parties, along with the Social Democrats and
other center-left groups, supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and
continue to play a significant role in shaping the new pluralist system.
In Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) is at the
heart of the democratic movement against the Islamic republic's attempt to
dominate the country through Hezbollah. The Lebanese democratic movement
includes other parties of the left, notably the Socialist Salvation Movement
(Inqadh) and the Movement of the Democratic Left (MDL).
In Iran, virtually the whole of the left rejects President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's anti-Americanism, and calls for normalization with the United
States. The recently created independent trade union movement is emerging as a
vocal challenger to Khomeinism.
However, perhaps the most interesting new anti-jihadist alliance is
taking shape in Afghanistan.
After months of discussions the leaders of several parties that had
fought each other for two decades have come together to set up a new alliance
called Popular Front (Jibheh Melli).
One major figure in the group is Burhaneddin Rabbani, an Islamic scholar
who served as Afghanistan's president after the Communist regime's collapse in
1992. As founder and leader of Jami'at Islami (Islamic Society), Rabbani was
one of the first Afghan leaders who started the resistance movement against
Soviet occupation.
And, yet, Rabbani has agreed to enter the Popular Front along with
leaders of Afghanistan's dissolved Communist Party.
Both rival wings of the Communist Party will be present in the new front.
One wing, known as Parcham (The Banner) had always been pro-Soviet while the
other, known as Shoeleh-Javid (Eternal Flame), had Maoist sentiments.
The new front will also include center-left figures such as Nuralhaq
Olumi and Muhammad Gulabzvi along with anti-Soviet Mujahedeen commanders such
as Gen. Muhammad Qassim Fahim, a former defense minister.
Before the US-led intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003,
much of the left in the Middle East shared the views of its American and
European counterparts with regard to the United States.
"We looked to the left in the West and imitated it," says Awad Nasir, one
of Iraq's best-known poets and a lifelong Communist. "We heard from the US and
Western Europe that being left meant being anti-American. So we were
anti-American. And then we saw Americans coming from the other side of the
world to save us from Saddam Hussein, something that our leftist friends and
the Soviet Union would never contemplate."
Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the new Afghan front expresses similar
sentiments. "Our nation is still facing the menace of obscurantism and terror
from Taleban and Al-Qaeda," he says. "Thus, we are surprised when elements of
the left in the US and Europe campaign for withdrawal so that our new democracy
is left defenseless against its enemies."
For his part, Jumblatt, the Lebanese leader, says he realized that his
lifelong anti-Americanism had been misplaced when he saw "long lines of people,
waiting to vote in Iraq, in the first free election in an Arab country."
Samir Qassir, the Lebanese center-left leader, often spoke of
anti-Americanism as "the last refuge of the scoundrel" in the Middle East.
"Politics is always a question of choice," Qassir said in one of the
articles before he was killed in a car bomb in Beirut on June 2, 2005. "Here in
the Middle East we face a choice between democracy and alliance with the US on
one hand and surrender to religious fanatics and terrorists on the other."
Iraq's parties of the left were shocked when the new Socialist government
in Spain decided to withdraw from the US-led coalition in 2004.
"We had hoped that with a party of the left in power in Madrid we would
get more support against the Islamofascists not a withdrawal," says Aziz
Al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi Communist leader.
Tareq Al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable
progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country.
"Our enemy is Al-Qaeda, not the United Sates," he says.
Skimming through Middle Eastern press these days could produce unexpected
results. It is not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an
American or Western European leftist appearing on the same page of a newspaper
alongside a pro-American article from an Arab, Iranian or Afghan progressive
figure.
In Iran, for example, Hussein Shariatmadari, the ultra Islamist editor of
the daily newspaper Kayhan and a theoretician of the extreme right, often
admiringly cites such American leftist figures as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore
and Jane Fonda.
Having all but abandoned its traditional opposition to capitalism and the
bourgeois democratic system, much of the Western left is forced to cling to
anti-Americanism as its backbone.
To be sure, anti-Americanism is not the ailment of the Western left
alone. Extreme right parties in both the United States and Europe are also
vehemently anti-American. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French neo fascist
National Front, is as opposed to the new democratic Iraq as Spain's Socialist
Premier Jose Luis Zapatero.
In the Middle East, however, a good part of the left, while not
especially enamored of the United States, sees it as a powerful ally against
reactionary Islamist and totalitarian pan-Arab movements.
"Anti-Americanism is a luxury we cannot afford in the Middle East," says
Adnan Hussein, a leftist Iraq writer recently picked by the Financial Times as
one of the 50 most influential columnists in the world. "Blinded by
anti-Americanism, the left in the West ends up on the same side as religious
fascists and despots."
Reza Khosravi, a veteran of Iran's Communist movement, cites history as
justification for the left's rejection of "banal anti-Americanism."
"During World War II all movements of the left supported an alliance with
the Western democracies led by the United States because the common enemy was
Fascism," he says. "Today, we are in a similar position. Progressive forces in
the Middle East are threatened by an Islamist version of Fascism. An alliance
with Western democracies is not only desirable but necessary."
George W. Bush, the bete-noire of liberals and leftists in the West,
might be surprised to learn that he has a better image among liberals,
leftists, secularists, and even moderate Islamists in the Middle East. While
Chomsky and Moore see the US as "an evil power", many leftists in the Middle
East see it as a force for good that ended the tyranny of the Taleban in
Afghanistan, dismantled the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and forced the
Syrians out of Lebanon after 30 years of occupation.
"In our region, the US has become a force for the good," says Jumblatt
who recently met President Bush at the White House for a surprise meeting
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