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The links on this page are to some of my favorite documents from the old site (docs that I kept on my hard-drive or have been able to retrieve from other sources).
I'll keep adding old documents as they become available. I'll also post some completely new documents in the near future....my energy up till now has been directed more to trying to retrieve the old stuff.
The most recent additions are listed at bottom of this page
(Note: All of the current site is somewhat temporary as we are still waiting to learn whether we can retrive the files from our old site.)
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Speech delivered by Dr Barham Salih Prime Minister, Kurdistan Regional Government (Northern Iraq) to The Socialist International (SI) Council, Rome, January 20th, 2003
(This speech is a year old now - but well worth re-reading.)
"So to those who say "No War", I say, of course "yes", but we can only have "No War" if there is "No Dictatorship" and "No Genocide.
"Friends, there will be no war on Iraq. There will be, AND MUST BE, a liberation of Iraq. You have a role to play in that liberation, for your values, the values of the Socialist movement, are utterly opposed to the values of dictatorship and racism. Let us join together in the spirit of solidarity that has always animated Socialists, to make Iraq and the Middle East a place of freedom and peace.
Click here to read more:
Pamela Bone: Why the hypocrites are right this time.
(Another article from early last year.)
"Should the people of Iraq not be freed now because those who would free them are hypocrites?"
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JOSÉ RAMOS-HORTA: War for Peace? It worked in my country (25/02.03)
(José Ramos-Horta is East Timor's minister of foreign affairs and cooperation. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.)
But if the antiwar movement dissuades the United States and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead.
....the antiwar movement would be able to claim its own victory in preventing a war. But it would have to accept that it also helped keep a ruthless dictator in power and explain itself to the tens of thousands of his victims.
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Nine Red Herrings: How the Western 'Left' has Misread Iraq
(An article published at "Marxist.org" in April 2003.)
But how is it possible for us to call ourselves Marxists and support a war waged by a coalition of rich western liberal democracies against the government of a poor "Third World" country? We would turn the question round: how it is possible that Marxism has been so corrupted and distorted that "Marxists" prefer to see thousands more Iraqis die in the torture chambers of the Baath, and millions more suffer under the iniquities excused (not caused) by the UN sanctions, rather than admit that socialists not only can but must support even the worst bourgeois democracy against even the least bad tyranny?
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Articles by LastSuperpower members Barry York and Albert Langer:
Barry York: Not in your name, indeed
"Anti-Americanism is the key to understanding the pseudo-Left, which is more akin to a subculture than a political movement: a mish-mash of Third World romanticism, pacifism, environmentalism and suspicion of progress and modernity"
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Albert Langer: May Day - it's the festival of the distressed
"For more than two decades, the genuine Left has been swamped by a pseudo-Left whose hostility to capitalism is reactionary rather than progressive."
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The Left`s Odd Man Out.
October 2002 interview with Christopher Hitchens.
'The term `the American left` is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics," he says. "It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.'
Click here to read more.
Machiavelli in Mesopotamia
by Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens wrote this back in November 2002.
From conversations I have had on this subject in Washington, I would say that the most fascinating and suggestive conclusion is this: After Sept. 11, several conservative policy-makers decided in effect that there were "root causes" behind the murder-attacks. These "root causes" lay in the political slum that the United States has been running in the region, and in the rotten nexus of client-states from Riyadh to Islamabad. Such causes cannot be publicly admitted, nor can they be addressed all at once. But a slum-clearance program is beginning to form in the political mind.
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