Ramsey Clark: Anti-War or Anti-Iraqi

Slate article. Definitely not what I expected. When I finished I looked up the author and to my surprise it was Christopher Hitchens. Well, sometimes you see good articles in Slate.

I was wondering when Clark would pop up in Baghdad, and there he was last Monday, presenting his credentials to the judge in the Saddam Hussein case and being accepted at his face value as a defense spokesman. He lost no time in showing what he is made of.

The first charge being brought against Saddam Hussein is that in 1982, after his motorcade came under fire near the mainly Shiite town of Dujail, he ordered the torture and murder of 148 men and boys. It's a relatively minor item in the catalog, but there it is. The first prosecution witness in the case, Wadah al-Sheikh, has actually testified that he knows of no direct link between Saddam and the killings. The defense team has to hope that it can prove the same, or perhaps suggest that no such massacre occurred. Not so Ramsey Clark. In a recent BBC interview, he offered the excuse that Iraq was then fighting the Shiite nation of Iran:

He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.

Just go back and read that again. Ramsey Clark believes that A) the massacre and torture did occur and B) that it was ordered by his client and C) that he was justified in ordering it and carrying it out. That is quite sufficiently breathtaking. It is no less breathtaking when one recalls why Saddam "had this huge war going on." He had, after all, ordered a full-scale invasion of the oil-bearing Iranian region of Khuzestan and attempted to redraw the frontiers in Iraq's favor. Most experts accept a figure of about a million and a half as the number of young Iranians and Iraqis who lost their lives in consequence of this aggression (which incidentally enjoyed the approval of that Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter). And Ramsey Clark says that the aggression is an additional reason to justify the massacre at Dujail.

He goes on to quote the anti-war commentator, Jeffrey Blankfort, who clearly separates himself from Clark on this matter.

He is one of the few to have noticed what Ramsey Clark said, and here is his comment:

The problem is Â… that Clark is one of the most well-known representatives of the anti-war movement and represents the ANSWER coalition and in my mind this is more than the conflict of interest that it unquestionably is. Thus, the message that it sends to the Iraqi people is that the anti-war movement doesn't really care about any Iraqis other than those who have been killed by US and UK forces, that it, in fact, does not condemn Saddam for his long history of human rights violations and for his launching a bloody war against Iran that took well over a million lives.

That is to say the least of it. He adds:

It is long past time for the anti-war movement to drop its double standards. It can begin by saying Ramsey Clark does not speak for us. He certainly does not speak for me.

This is a nice twist on the self-regarding "Not In Our Name" slogan under which the anti-war movement filled the streets to hear speeches from Saddam sympathizers, Fidel and Kim groupies, and Islamic fundamentalists. Not really anti-war at all, but pro-war on the other side. It was more like a single standard if you ask me, but let's put this to the test.

Hitchens then ponders if other loud anti-war celebrities will separate themselves from this. Very interesting request, which I doubt will find any actual voice in the MSM.

Ok, so I yanked the majority of the article out, but it's a great piece.

There are also a bunch of microscopic links at the bottom of the page to other Hitchens articles. I found this piece from September on anti-war protestors also amusing.