April 27, 2003
WE ALREADY know George Galloway
WE ALREADY know George Galloway is a traitor. The question is, will he be tried as one?
In other George news, his links to various unfriendly people continue to be explored, and David Aaronovitch points out some interesting George history:
Galloway was once a genuine critic of Saddam's. In the mid-1980s Hansard records him delivering a ferocious assault on the Baath regime, and those in the West who traded with and encouraged it. By 1994, however, he was in Baghdad famously saluting Saddam's courage and indefatigability. He was soon a frequent flyer to Baghdad, and a reveller at Tariq Aziz's Yuletide festivities in 1999 (a fact which Galloway seemed to have forgotten last week, despite my having reminded him of it personally on a television programme in October 2001).
So why did George change? One of the reasons that I ended up supporting this war was that I agreed with Galloway back in the 1980s, and Saddam never got any nicer, or less murderous. What happened?
Leaving aside unproved accusations of personal gain, there are other explanations that might cover George's sudden blindness on the road to Baghdad. And the most obvious is that sin of the committed, the belief that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Or, in the context of the modern world, any anti-American will do. When Iraq stopped being a friend of the West it became a friend of George's.
Aaronovitch's column is quite devastating. Read whole thing.
Posted by Tim Blair at April 27, 2003 03:40 PM