Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald (thanks to Jean-Luc) explains why the Australian "peace movement" is largely just a dhimmi appeasement movement:
Stand by next Saturday for what has been called a "Global Day of Protest Against the Occupation of Iraq" - to be held in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and elsewhere.In Sydney the protest gig is being organised by a group calling itself the Stop the War Coalition. Advertised speakers include Australian expatriate journalist John Pilger. In other words, on March 20, the self-proclaimed anti-war movement will be in action again. . . . Recently he was asked by Green Left Weekly whether he thought "the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq's anti-occupation resistance?"
Pilger replied unequivocally: "Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the Bush gang will attack another country.
"If they [the resistance] succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang."
Clearly, with respect to Iraq, Pilger is not supporting an anti-war position. Rather he is barracking for one of the combatants in a two-sided conflict.
This was confirmed when Pilger was interviewed by Tony Jones on the ABC TV Lateline program last week. This time he extended his comments to include the Australian Defence Force members in Iraq.
Let's go to the tape.
Jones: Can you approve the killing of American, British or Australian troops who are in the occupying forces?
Pilger: Well, yes; they're legitimate targets. They're illegally occupying a country. And I would have thought, from an Iraqi point of view, they are legitimate targets. They'd have to be, sure.
So Australian troops you would regard in Iraq as legitimate targets? - Excuse me. But, really, that's an unbecoming question.
No, it wasn't. The transcript reveals that it was Pilger, not the interviewer, who introduced the concept of a legitimate target at this part of the conversation.
Sure, earlier on, Pilger had conceded that "a resistance is always atrocious; it's always bloody; it always involves terrorism". . . .
The stakes have always been extremely high in Iraq - and this will be even more so if the perpetrators of the Madrid bombings are proven to be linked to some Islamist groups.
As William Shawcross says in his new book, Allies (Allen & Unwin, 2004), "If the US-UK led effort to create a better system of government in Iraq fails", the men who carried out the September 11 attacks in the US and the UN headquarters in Baghdad "will have won a terrible victory".
He could have added Bali to this list. Some of the members of the resistance in Iraq have no agenda other than to defeat the "infidels" - that is, Western society. The same can be said of the September 11 and Bali murderers - and, perhaps, the Madrid assassins as well.
Pilger advocates a victory for the resistance because he wants the "Bush gang" to be defeated.
Yet in a recent issue of New Statesman, Pilger claimed that there was no difference between George Bush and his Democratic Party challenger, John Kerry, and further exaggerated his case by claiming that "the truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush, a crypto-fascist".
So Pilger wants to see the defeat of the "Bush gang" and, if it comes to this, the "Kerry gang" as well. Even if this results in a defeat for democratic forces, including within Muslim societies.
This is what some - but not all - of next Saturday's demonstrators will be marching for.
I'd not read anything by Pilger for quite a while, so I'd forgotten how sickening he can be.
The stop the war coalition are active in the uk as well. Most of the people who turn up are of the sheep mentality. "war is wrong" seems to be the only thought they can hold in their minds at one time.
Well guess what folks, Saddams been defeated. Most of the Iraqis prefer it that way. They feel humiliated that it took foreign nations to kick him out for them, but very few want the chaos that would result from coalition forces being suddenly withdrawn.
The organisers of stop the war are another matter. They comprise two main groups. Islamists and left wingers (with an embarrassingly high proportion of Stalanist apologists). They only care about harming Bush and Blair. Not about Iraq.
And none of them want to talk about the mass graves that are Saddam's legacy.
Is everyone quite sure that should the Sisyphean task of bringing "democracy" to Iraq cannot be achieved, Al Qaeda will have "won a terrible victory," as William Shawcross writes? What if the United States carefully reiterates all the good it has done -- removed a murderous regime, captured or killed its major figures, tracked down stolen money, searched far and wide to locate, and destroy, all major weaponry and to assure itself that there are no future WMD problems, made a start at a new Iraq, with the example of that straight-arrow out of Central Casting, Mr. Bremer, and 130,000 splendid troops, who have built roads, repaired electricity grids, build schools and hospitals, handed out soccer balls -- and been met with fleeting gratitude, at times, but more often with sullen or murderous hostility. But now the men, materiel, money, and political capital that are being expended, on people about whom we should not care overmuch, may in fact be getting in the way of more important matters -- depriving Iran of its nuclear capability, encouraging anti-Arab sentiment among non-Arab Muslims, doing whatever it takes to split and demoralize the world of Islam, putting in taxes to drive down the price of oil and deprive the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs from the discretionary income which will always, without fail, through the funding of mosques in the West and madrasas in the East, necessarily promote the Jihad.
It is possible to believe that the "democracy" project is folly and want the American government to diminish its "hearts and minds" rebuilding of Iraq -- not because we have anything in common with a sinister figure like Pilger, nor because we want the pressure on Islam to be taken off, but for the opposite reason -- because we wish to have the peoples within Islam to see for themselves the complete political, economic, intellectual, and moral failure that is Islam, so that within Islam itself enough pressure will come either to change it, somehow, despite the immutable texts, or to constrain it, as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk constrained it. By helping Iraq succeed, we may be delaying that moment of truth, and certainly we are expending large sums, and risking valuable American lives for a policy that is a substitute for the real one that needs to be adopted: a policy directed insistently, articulately, and coherently against the world-wide Jihad, and that requires that Islamic states fail, and that that failure be seen to be a result of Islam's very essence, until enough Muslims realize that Al Qaeda, in its war on the Infidel, has the diagnosis backwards: Islam is the cause of the problems of the Islamic peoples, not the solution to their problems. If we stop propping them up, supplying foreign aid, and diminish those OPEC trillions that are the result not of any effort but of an accident of geology, then they will necessarily fail, and should fail, and should be seen to have failed -- as Khomeini's Iran has failed so obviously in the eyes of all intelligent Iranians.