Ali discusses Iraq war

Author and commentator Tariq Ali spoke about the war in Iraq and the pressing need for public resistance Monday afternoon to a crowded audience of Hopkins students, faculty, and Baltimore area residents at the Homewood campus' Mudd Hall.

The event was made possible with the Kenan Award from the Deans to support a new undergraduate course taught by Professor Ruby Lal called "Gender, Sexuality, and Modern Islam."

"The idea was to make the course engaging, intellectually stimulating, and pedagogically exciting, and one of the ways to do this was to bring in people who have worked on the question of Islam - and related fields. As part of this arrangement we brought Tariq Ali," said Lal.

The Foreign Affairs Symposium, the University's spring lecture series that brings noteworthy speakers to the Homewood campus to discuss matters of international relations also cosponsored and publicized the event.

"Having a well-known, knowledgeable political expert like Tariq Ali speak on the growing rift between America and the rest of the world was a fantastic kick off event for the Foreign Affairs Symposium and very relevant to our theme this year" Executive Co-Chair Hadi Hussein said.

Ali, an avid anti-war advocate, described the situation in Iraq as another blunder in the history of the American empire. "The botched up operation in Iraq has served to only further isolate the West from this region - it is a disaster that the U.S. is still in there" he said claiming that the aftermath of an invasion is the real determining factor in the success of a mission, "Just look at the situation in Afghanistan now - it's terrible. The puppeteer president Karzai walks around with U.S. military guards - not being able to trust a single of his own countrymen out of fear".

The Pakistani born, Oxford educated activist went on to talk about how the Western powers, namely the U.S. and Great Britain, misled their citizens and the world at large with the reasons for going to war in Iraq.

"The notion of these imperial powers fighting for women's liberation and human rights is a serious joke" said Ali, counting off the number of said "deceptions" of the governments, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair's assertion that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching London in under 45 minutes.

He brushed off the notion of oil as the primary motivator, claiming, "oil is always a reason when anything happens in that region, because it is the cheapest oil produced."

Instead Ali affirmed that this was the Bush administration's way of asserting its military power to the world, an action needed to counterbalance what he saw as the growing economic weakness of the American empire. "The invasion was a carefully planned warning, to show the rising enemy America's capabilities" he continued, cautioning the audience not to be deceived by, "a particularly intellectually challenged President."

"It's actually a good thing for an empire to have a figurehead leader, so that the real influencers behind can wield total power" the British activist mused.

He addressed recent assumptions that the real problem in Iraq is the people, who have become "sick" under the rule of Saddam and don't understand liberation. "Traumatized? Bloody right they have been traumatized, by the continued occupation of their homeland that is" he said with force.

"It's interesting to think that when the Saddam regime was the most repressive in the 1970's and 1980's was when it was close allies with the West. Where were the liberators then?" he asked. Ali affirmed that the Iraqi resistance was permanent, and that the best step was for the U.S. to simply step out and allow the Iraqi people their right to national self-determination.

"There is no way that the U.S. will be able to control Iraq especially with resistance spreading to the Kurdish and Shi'ite populations.

"At this point any further U.S. aims of direct military intervention in Syria or Iran would be suicidal and the only way to pull this off would be to reintroduce the draft" confirmed Ali. "And if this were to happen, then the resistance within the U.S. would quadruple."

Senior Yonina Alexander, a student in Professor Lal's Class, had a critical view of Ali's lecture.

"I found his attitude towards tyranny and terror to be trivializing and miscalculated; I thought his association of the American/British war in Iraq with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was totally ungrounded and demonstrated a clear lack of understanding as to what is going on in that region, and what needs to be done in order to resolve it," she said.

Professor Waleed Hazbun, a political science professor currently teaching "Middle Eastern Politics," also attended the lecture, and had some analytical comments.

"He did not address what could be called the neo-conservative ideological framing of post 9/11 foreign policy which seems to be a critical element driving much of current Bush administration policy and distinguishes the current policy from that of Bush Sr.'s administration." He continued that Ali's lecture had some relevant points.

"But regardless of ones political views, I thought his admonition against those people who have felt helpless and demoralized by the current state of post 9/11 world politics was encouraging and should be taken to heart."