Iraq Welcome Shows Naysayers Hopelessly Wrong Apologies Are Now Due From Leftists BBC’s Omaar, Gilligan Should Be In Mea Culpa Mode Too The left, the conscientious objectors, and the peacenik wing of the Labour party were horribly wrong about the U.S.S.R., the Cold War, Kuwait, nuclear disarmament, just about every crisis you can think off which required courage, commitment and a love of freedom, and now Iraq. As ever, the communists, fascists and dupes of the left have been on the side of the tyrant and the status quo, and against the liberation of people. The BBC, by its conduct in Iraq, has shown itself to be a corrupt, incompetent and irretrievably biased organisation, controlled by the left. One thing is for sure. None of these wrongheaded ignoramuses will ever come close to admit that they were wrong. The left won’t apologise, it never does, no matter how egregiously wrong it has been. And the BBC will carry on thumbing its nose at mainstream British opinion, even though the public is forced to fund this bloated information monopoly. When the next crisis comes around, the BBC will still drag out the likes of Anthony Wedgewood hyphen Benn, Robin Cook, Vanessa Redgrave, Bruce Kent, Baroness “millions of women and children will be killed” Shirley Williams, and Tariq Ali for their authoritative and representative views. They won’t be introduced with any reference to their past failures. They never are. Apologies Please We are also owed an apology by Rageh Omaar and Andrew Gilligan. For weeks these two BBC “reporters” in Baghdad told us that the ordinary Iraqi in the street was not interested in being liberated by the West because that would be like going back to the bad old days of consul-generals and colonialism. The intrepid pair made forays into the Baghdad suburbs and Iraqi hinterland to find what real Iraqis were thinking. They always reported that Iraqis might not like the police state, the death squads, the squandering of their money on weapons of mass destruction, the use of food rationing to force political quiescence. But liberation by America? Nobody wanted that. They told us one particular interviewee’s anti-American feeling was “clearly genuine”. They (and another “expert” who is wrong all the time – The Independent’s Robert Fisk) bought the regime’s line that two bombing incidents in market places were the responsibility of coalition forces, without question. Their tone was consistently in favour of the Saddam regime, which is probably not surprising given that all their broadcasts were monitored in person by government officials. This was always a solid reason for pulling them both out, but revenue for the BBC’s reckless CNN-matching 24-hour World TV news service plan was always more important than principled reporting. Even Al-Jazeera showed it had more editorial responsibility than the BBC when it pulled its correspondents out of Iraq because it wasn’t allowed to act freely. Nauseating What was been even more nauseating for me though was the Omaar/Gilligan reporting of the dancing in the streets as the Iraqis were liberated. Not once did I hear any hint that they had got it hopelessly wrong. They simply reported what was happening, even though this showed that what they had been doing in the past weeks was utterly dishonest. And Gilligan, (Omaar seems to have disappeared for a while) is now fully into trying to score points off the liberating forces with the ridiculous assertion that because things are temporarily out of control, that will last forever, and it’s all the American’s fault. The locals, fearing the looters, would rather have Saddam back. Now Gilligan is zeroing in on what he preposterously calls the American forces’ lack of discipline as it handled deadly snipers and fedayeen forces loyal to Saddam. Wrong About Everything As for the Labour party’s peacenik wing (that’s probably about 75 per cent of MPs, and 99.9 per cent of the membership) and its apologists like Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, and assorted wet Church of England leaders, the left has been proved wrong on all the major issues of the last 50 years, from defence to economics, welfare and health. But it is in the field of defence and foreign policy that the left has been particularly pernicious, because if we had listened to them, everything would have been lost. Leftists’ mindless statism on health, education, welfare and economics merely impoverishes us all, and the poor in particular. In foreign policy the stakes are much higher. The Left never apologises, never explains. If we’d listened to them in the 1980s we would have conceded defeat to the Soviet Union. President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher faced down the communist threat in 1980s, ignoring the defeatist left who took to the streets to try and block the deployment of Pershing missiles to counter the Soviet Union’s SS20 missiles in Europe. Freedom – Thanks To Greenham Common! The Berlin Wall would still be there if we’d listened to the left. Or maybe it would have been breached in the other direction and Russians would be controlling Western Europe. And leftists are trying to build up the canard that the Soviet Union was not defeated by the steely determination of Reagan and Thatcher but because of the influence of the fools of Greenham Common! But despite this pitiful record, whenever there is a crisis, the Benns and Tariq Alis are rounded up by the BBC and we are asked to take seriously their poisonous, treacherous warblings. They are questioned, straight-faced, by journalists, and their thoughts are taken seriously, as if they had an authoritative record of success. Benn Found Out There is one glimmer of hope though; at least Benn has finally been found out. The public will never again take him seriously after his cringing, cowardly “interview” with Saddam Hussein on TV before hostilities started. Benn made Uriah Heap look like Donald Rumsfeld. Neil Winton, April 15, 2003 Top