Exclusive: An Interview with George Galloway

On September 14, hundreds of rabid partisans packed a lecture hall at New York’s Baruch College to see British MP George Galloway—one the world’s most passionate anti-war activists—debate the Left’s bete noire Christopher Hitchens, the former Nation columnist who has seen the Right in recent years and supports the invasion of Iraq. To incessant boos, howls, heckles, and cheers, two of Britain's most eloquent sons sparred over the benefits and costs of the war, while pointedly attacking the other’s record. Galloway slammed Hitchens’ conversion: “You were a butterfly. You’re now a slug. You did write like an angel, but you're now working for the Devil, and damn you and all your works.” Hitchens, like many before him, criticized Galloway for his meetings and connections to leaders in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein: “How can anyone who is a business partner of this regime show their face in a city like this?”

Outrage has not been an uncommon response to George Galloway. He was dismissed from the UK Labour party for suggesting that British soldiers disobey their murderous orders in Iraq (he since won a seat with the Respect party). His comments at a 1994 meeting with Hussein, “Sir, I salute you, your courage, your strength, your indefatigability,” were widely misinterpreted as praise for the regime (in context, it’s clear he was referring to the Iraqi people). And he continues to shock colleagues by actually talking to people like Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, with whom he recently met, that most American and British politicians are content to simply denounce as “evil.”

Galloway's new book, Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington, focuses on the MPs surreal adventure before a Senate subcommittee investigating abuses of the UN’s Oil-for-Food program. On thin and seemingly forged evidence, the committee had already condemned Galloway as a profiteer of Hussein’s embezzlement. Despite this odd disregard of the judicial process, the gifted orator insisted on appearing before the committee. In doing so, he quickly dissected the case against him into oblivion, and offered a blistering indictment of the American war machine. In the months since, this brilliant star of the British anti-war movement has risen in the US as well: Galloway’s recent speaking tour of American cities was greeted with sell-out crowds and was a featured speaker at this weekend’s anti-war rally in Washington D.C.

The day after the debate, Evan Serpick sat down with Galloway in his publisher’s office (The New Press) to discuss the debate, the war, the Iraqi resistance, the nature of terrorism, the anti-war movement, the US political climate, and his curious American ancestry.

ES: How did you think the debate with Hitchens went last night?

GG: I think it was a sad occasion, really. It marked the depth to which Christopher Hitchens has sunk, the trajectory he’s now on, to total political destruction. The reason I pushed the Palestine button repeatedly was partly to demonstrate the hatred of Palestine among his new supporters. It was evident: Every time I mentioned Israel, it was greeted with a chorus of boos from Christopher Hitchens’ supporters. This from the former friend of Edward Said, from the author of [pro-Palestinian book] Blaming the Victim, the man I met in a YMCA in Jerusalem 25 years ago, and who was a champion of Palestinian rights. He’s now dependent for his political support on people who hate the very idea of Palestine. And that’s just about as low as it gets, I think.

I felt that I kicked his ass, and I was pleased about that. But my feeling, as I reflected on it later was one of sadness that someone who had been a real adornment, a flower in our arrangement on the Left, had degenerated so, and his political degeneration is mirrored in the way he behaves, his moral behavior. It’s not just that he’s degenerated politically. He’s resorting to things and saying things that he’d never have dreamt of before.

ES: Hitchens listed what he perceived as benefits of the invasion of Iraq, including the deposition of a brutal dictator, more freedom for Kurds, freedom of movement, freedom in society. He also chalked up Libya’s disarmament. Do you see any benefits, thus far, of invading Iraq?

GG: Yes, of course. But everything in life has to be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. There’s no point in curing a patient if you kill the patient. The cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq operation very clearly must conclude that, in balance sheet terms, it’s bankrupted. On the one hand, the benefit of removing one dictatorship in one Arab country, a dictatorship that was no threat to anybody by the time it fell, a dictatorship that was completely contained, isolated, and could never rebuild it’s military strength, was a benefit, to get rid of such a dictatorship. But when you balance it against the cost to the Iraqi people, the cost to the people of the region in terms of the instability that it had injected into the region, the cost in the further Islamicization of the Arab masses—fanaticization of some of them, the danger of increased terrorism around the world, the disfiguring of the international legal and political system, the discrediting of the United Nations, the discrediting of the whole idea of the rule of law in state-to-state relations, the undermining, I think fatally, of peoples’ trust in their own government to tell them the truth—in Britain and the United States in particular, but in Italy and Spain as well—when you add all these things up, then the costs of the enterprise far outweigh the benefit.

As for the Kurds, they were already free. The Kurds have been free for a decade. No soldier or official of the Iraqi regime could set foot in Kurdistan for 10 years. So, I don’t think you can really count that one as a benefit. But as it happens, I’m a lifelong supporter of the rights of the Kurdish people—all the Kurdish people, not just the Iraqi Kurdish people, which are the only ones that seem to occupy Hitchens’ mind—for a state of their own. They are 40 million people without a state and a solution ought to have been found long ago for their national demands, but never will be. The powers that “freed” the Iraqi Kurds have no intention of freeing the Turkish Kurds. They may come belatedly to want to free to Syrian Kurds, but only because they want to destroy the Syrian regime. Of course, the Kurds in Iran will be abandoned to their fate if the United States decides that the Iranian regime is too much to swallow.

ES: What do you think of the notion of Hitchens and others that the invasion of Iraq has spawned a flowering freedom throughout the Middle East? Besides Libya, he cited—

GG: Well, there’s no democracy in Libya. In fact, nothing could be more threadbare than that part of his case. There is no democracy in Libya, but I’ll tell you what there is: The Libyan armed forces and the Libyan security services are now being trained in England, at Sandhurst, by the British MI-6. What are the purposes of the Libyan armed forces and their intelligence but to repress their own people more effectively on behalf of Colonel Qadafi, who is the same dictator today who he was yesterday? The idea that Libya had a weapons program that threatened anybody is absurd. There is nobody who believes that. Professor Juan Cole, who I quoted last night, has dealt with this in depth in his piece that’s on the Internet .

Egypt? President Hosni Mubarak implicitly accepted that the previous elections were rigged because he said these were the first free elections. He got more votes in this free election than he got in the last rigged one! He got 84.6 in the rigged one, 88.4 in the free one. Does anybody really believe that 88.4 percent of the people of Egypt wanted Hosni Mubarak as the president? It’s absurd.

Lebanon, the very last thing they’re demanding in Lebanon is democracy. They want the opposite of democracy. They want to enshrine a confessional constitution, which means that in order to be the president you have to be a Christian, even though the Christians are only 20 percent, if 20 percent, of the population. If there was democracy in Lebanon, the Hezbollah leader would be elected president. I don’t think Hitchens is in favor of that. I certainly know the United States is not in favor of that.

ES: Are you in favor of that?

GG: Yes. I’m in favor of the Lebanese people choosing their president on a one-person, one-vote basis, and that we have to live with whomsoever they choose. That’s what democracy is. I have to live with the fact that George Bush is the president of the United States, even though I think he’s the world’s most dangerous man, because the United States people chose him. And if the Lebanese people chose Nasra Allah, as I’m sure that they would, we would have to live with that if we wanted democracy in Lebanon. But that’s not what they want at all.

ES: You stood very strongly for a very long time against the sanctions in Iraq, and, obviously, also against the invasion of Iraq. But you also were very outspoken about Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the crimes he committed against his people. What, if any, action would you have advocated to end that?

GG: I did, throughout the late 70’s and all of the 80’s, campaign to give assistance to the Iraqi democrats abroad, who had been driven into exile by Saddam, to show solidarity with them, to help them, in any way that I could, get back to their country and change it. That’s a different thing than accepting that the state in which I lived had a right to invade the other state and bring about political leadership more to their liking, partly for moral reasons, but largely, frankly, for practical reasons. You see, there’s no end to that, as a system, if you enter it. The Indian government doesn’t like the Pakistani government and the Pakistani government is involved in supporting the liberation struggle in Kashmir. The Indian government, on the basis of the Bush doctrine, would be perfectly entitled to invade Pakistan and replace its leadership with another more to its liking. You don’t have to be Einstein to work out what the consequences of that would be. In New York today is President Hugo Chavez. I happen to think he’s a great man, one of the greatest of the last half-century. But George Bush thinks he’s close to the devil.

ES: And Pat Robertson thinks he should be assassinated.

GG: And Pat Robertson thinks he should be killed! Now, we can’t run the world that way. We have to face the fact that countries will have leadership, some of whom we’ll like, some of whom we won’t, some of whom we will like and then dislike, some of whom we will dislike and then like. That’s the way the complexity of international relations has to work. If you set out on a doctrine of preemption, that you’re going to go around proactively seeking out regimes to destroy them, you’ll end up in a state of total international anarchy, which is what we’re on the brink of now.

ES: In the public’s mind—even among people who might disagree with the invasion of Iraq—many see the Iraqi resistance in terms of the suicide bombings, violent responses, killing a lot of innocent people. Can you support those who resist the occupation outright, or are there tactics that make it difficult?

GG: Tariq Ali, my comrade in London in the anti-war movement, in one of his books, coined this phrase, and it’s a very good explanation of this: “If occupation is ugly, how can resistance be pretty?” If the foreign invasion of a country is ugly, then the fight against it is going to be as ugly and, on some occasions, uglier than the occupation itself. It goes without saying that if the occupation hadn’t taken place there would be no need for a resistance. I certainly don’t support every action by every person who says he’s a member of the Iraqi resistance. That was one of the lowest of the cheap smears launched by Hitchens last night. The sectarian attacks on people, because they’re Shiites for example, either in a religious parade or in a mosque, not only is this morally reprehensible, of course, it weakens the Iraqi resistance, not strengthens it.

Now, I don’t know who’s carrying out all of these operations. Some people claim these operations, but who these people are is not entirely clear. And lest you think that sounds like a conspiracy theory, I recommend to you Graham Greene’s Quiet American or the movie with Michael Caine and you’ll see that the United States special forces, secret forces were involved in precisely those kind of explosions in Saigon in the early 1960’s to create conditions that suited the American policy of the time and many other countries, including my own, have been involved in that.
But even if I accept that some or all of these horrific sectarian confessional attacks are being carried out by a strand of the resistance, in the form of the Zarqawi group, this hardly invalidates the notion of the right of people who are occupied to resist their occupation. All resistance to all occupation contains horrific acts of violence, whether it’s in Palestine or in Ireland or in Vietnam or in Algeria or in America. Let me tell you, if you study the annals of the British coverage of the American Revolution, Paul Revere was a terrorist! You were all terrorists! You were conducting a terrorist campaign against the lawful government of this colony. But there are not many people in the United States who believe Paul Revere was a terrorist. On the contrary, he was, if you’ll forgive the pun, revered as a revolutionary fighter against the foreign occupation of the country.

ES: So as long as American and British forces are occupying Iraq, Zarqawi and other operators would be justified, in your view, in conducting these operations.

GG: There’s an international legal right enshrined in the Geneva Convention for all occupied people to resist their occupation. This is not even a matter for debate. And frankly all would and will. If my country was occupied, I would resist it by any means necessary and any self-respecting person in Britain would do the same. And we were almost occupied, as you know. In 1940 we stood alone. The United States was watching the war on newsreel. All the other Allied powers had been defeated. The Soviet Union had not entered the war. And we stood alone against Hitler, who was 21 miles away at the Channel port and any day, he might have invaded. And, by the way, if he had, Mr. Churchill laid in, along the Channel, a horrific battery of chemical and biological weapons to meet the invading army. And if we had been occupied, the best of the British people would have resisted it. And no doubt, some terrible acts would be carried out by the British resistance. In order to kill one Nazi occupier, 20 innocent people might have been killed in some of these operations, as is happening in Iraq today. But that would not invalidate the right of the British people to oppose the occupation.

ES: You recently met with Bashar Al-Assad of Syria and have been criticized for it. What was that meeting like and what are your thoughts about him?

GG: Bashar Al-Assad is widely regarded—not by me, let me pray and aid Mr. Tony Blair, who brought him to London to meet the Queen because he said that Bashar Al-Assad was a hopeful sign in the development of a more democratic politics in Syria. And the British government tried very hard to set up a special relationship with Bashar Al-Assad. As I say, he was brought to Buckingham Palace just two years ago to take tea with the Queen. The Syrian regime is a secular regime. Its opponents are Islamic fundamentalists. If Bashar Al-Assad falls, he will fall to a Zarqawi-type government. But the problem for America and Britain and France is that Bashar Al-Assad refuses a number of demands of the Western leaders. He refuses to expel the Palestinian resistance from Damascus. He refuses to sever ties with Hezbollah. Above all, he refuses to allow Syria to be used as a military base to crush the insurgency in Iraq. For these reasons, they hate him.

ES: As you said, in Lebanon, if there were democracy, Hezbollah would be elected. In Syria, if there were democracy, you have to think Bashar Al-Assad would not be in power.

GG: That’s right.

ES: Is it difficult to support leaders when they are not necessarily the voice of the people, in a society where there is not a lot of freedom of media, of society?

GG: You’re right. Be careful what you wish for. My problem is, America doesn’t intend democracy in Syria. That would be a different matter. If the Syrian people were being offered the alternative of Bashar or a free election to choose their leadership and the recognition of that leadership by the West, that would be a different matter, but that’s not the proposition.

ES: I want to ask you about one of the most interesting things of your book, which surprised me. Bush and Blair are often considered by the anti-war movement as fools who believed faulty intelligence that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and used it to scare everyone and to achieve their own goals. But in the book, you suggest that they must have known there were none, which I found surprising.

GG: I honestly believe it and I think that, evidentially, that’s slowly becoming more and more clear. If Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it would not have been invaded. That seems to be a matter of logic. North Korea has weapons of mass destruction and will never be invaded, precisely for the reason that it has them. They would not have sent hundreds of thousands of their own soldiers into a country that they genuinely believed had the ability to deliver ballistic missiles with biological and chemical weapons.

Secondly, if they genuinely believed that these weapons existed, they would not have allowed the looting which was unleashed by the fall of the regime in Baghdad to take place. They would have been sick with worry, they’d have been hospitalized with worry about these thousands looters, looting everything in every government building—except the oil ministry—from artifacts to chemical and biological weapons, which would then have been on sale all around the world. But they didn’t give a damn about the looters, didn’t even put soldiers on the buildings. The very buildings they said were the places where the weapons were, were left completely unguarded after the fall of Baghdad. They would never have done that if they really thought there were weapons there.

It became clear in the course of the Butler Inquiry in Britain that Blair knew that the weapons he was talking about were battlefield weapons, in other words, with a range of a few hundred yards, rather than ballistic missiles capable of hitting Cyprus, which is what he claimed in his famous 45-minute dossier.

So, that’s what I knew at the time. Now that Iraq has been scoured and one vial of Botox, as I say in the book, less than is carried in the rosy cheeks of Joan Collins, is the sum total of the whole of weapons. It’s beyond my belief that the leaders of two most powerful countries in the world, the most powerful and another very powerful country—the United States spent $30 billion a year on intelligence—it’s beyond credulity that these people genuinely believed that they were going into battle against a country that was in position with these kind of weapons.

ES: What were your impressions of going to Washington and seeing American government in action, or inaction, as it were?

GG: Yeah, it was kind of sobering to see how pitiful the American political elite has become. It’s a matter of great consternation around the world how a country as successful as this one can be led by the political class that it’s led by, that such a man as George Bush could be elected twice as President—well, once really—that his father could be elected. It seems odd that a country that can produce the greatest engineers and scientists and industrialists and sportsmen and cultural figures and so on cannot produce political leadership better than that. And when I realized that Senator Norm Coleman was a genuine hopeful to be President of the United States! Well, he would make George Bush look like Aristotle. So, it was a sobering experience to how shrunken the American political class has become, and that’s partly because of the American media and the way it treats the American nobility as somehow beyond criticism, beyond analysis, beyond proper rigorous scrutiny, and partly to do with the corruption of American politics by big money, that you can’t reach power in America unless you can raise a billion or more. And to raise a billion or more to corporate interests, you have to be within a certain parameter, and that’s what’s failing the country and, I think, failing the world.

ES: As you said last night and in the book, the coalition clearly has no intention of leaving Iraq.

GG: Not of their own volition, no.

ES: What would it take to actually make that happen?

GG: Rising casualty figures and more and more scandals and I’m afraid that that’s what lies ahead of us.

ES: What can the movement do?

GG: I think the military families phenomenon is a very important one: Mothers, fathers, brother and sisters of people who have been serving there and people who have been killed. This was an important component of the anti-Vietnam War movement. It’ll have to become a lot more important here. But we start from a high base of opposition now to the war. Despite the fog that surrounds this question, a majority of American people can already see that this is a mistake, and that’s a very substantial achievement. I’m not saying the anti-war movement played a decisive role in that. The good sense of the majority of Americans may well be the most important part of that, and the mirrored unbelievability of Bush and the performance in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast has left them standing naked.

ES: Poll numbers came out today showing Bush at his lowest-ever approval ratings, 41 percent.

GG: Wow, well there you are. That’s a good base to be starting from, though we’re not really starting. But it’s a good base to now move on from. I think the Republicans now will have start thinking about whether they’re going to go down with the ship, whether they’re going to continue backing Bush and the dynasty as they take their party to the floor.

ES: And with mid-term elections coming.

GG: Exactly. I would have thought that someone like McCain may make a break from the Bush line in the next year. Of course the big $64,000 question—as we used to call it when $64,000 was a lot of money—is what the Democrats will do, what direction they’ll go. We’ll have to wait and see about that.

ES: Don’t you have an ancestor who was American and emigrated?

GG: The only woman in the 19th Century who emigrated from America to Scotland! I think she got on the wrong boat, but if she hadn’t I wouldn’t be here. I’m trying to find out more about her. I only know her name and the fact that she sailed from New York to Glasgow in the late 1880s and by 1892 was living with my great-grandfather with their two children and a lodger in a one-room house.

ES: That must be why you feel so strongly about America. It’s in your blood.

GG: (laughs) Exactly.