inside the glass house

Galloway gallantry: A battle in the enemy turf
NEW YORK - George Galloway, a sharp-shooting British parliamentarian, told Bush administration officials last week what they really did not want to hear: the war against Iraq is an unmitigated disaster and the subsequent political coverup an even worse calamity.

In a prime example of superlative cinematic political theatre worthy of an Oscar, Galloway turned the hearings to his own advantage by blasting at his 13 inquisitors firing at them with both barrels.

Voluntarily appearing before a US Senate subcommittee probing allegations against the UN's $64 billion oil-for-food programme, he contemptuously dismissed the hearings as "the mother of all smokescreens" aimed at hiding the real political scandal in Washington DC.

While denying the charges that he was in Saddam Hussein's payroll -- and proving that the subcommittee had got all its facts either mixed up or from thoroughly unreliable sources -- he ridiculed the hyper-enthusiastic chairman, Senator Norm Coleman, as a lawyer who was remarkably cavalier with his own ideas of justice.

A maverick who was expelled from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party last year, Galloway was thrown out by Labourites primarily because of his strong views against the war on Iraq. But he got himself re-elected recently as a member of the new anti-war Respect Party.

Since Coleman is a Republican who sheepishly supported President Bush in his military misadventure in Iraq, Galloway kept hammering at the senator in particular, and at American politicians in general, who have been less than forthright in denouncing the continuing military debacle.

"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning", he told the subcommittee.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies,'' he added.

He also said if the world had listened to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose dismissal had been demanded by Coleman, and if the world had listened to French President Chirac who was dismissed "as some kind of corrupt traitor", and "if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today".

Galloway's acerbic comments took the subcommittee by surprise leaving even Coleman virtually speechless. In hindsight, Coleman perhaps regretted his decision to summon Galloway before the subcommittee because it gave the British politician a platform to tell Americans how their leaders took them for a mighty ride.

The three-hour testimony, which also came live on some American television networks and replayed later, was undoubtedly a blistering attack on US foreign policy and its blatant double standards.

While admitting that he did meet with Saddam Hussein, Galloway used that admission to expose Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's similiar visit to Baghdad when the Iraqi dictator was in power several years back. That was the time the US was backing Saddam Hussein against one of America's avowed enemies: Iran. In the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the US clearly tilted in favour of Iraq against Iran which had ousted the Americans from Tehran after the Islamic Revolution.

Galloway told Coleman: "On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false". "I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein".

"As a matter of fact", he said, taking a well-aimed shot at the US Defence Secretary, "I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns (against the Iranians). I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of Defense made of his," Galloway added.

He also reminded the subcommittee that while it is trying to probe the oil-for-food scandal, it should also train its gun on another equally corrupt story of disrepute: the $8.8 billion of Iraqi money that went missing during the 14-month US administration of Iraq after the Americans invaded that country.

"Have a look at Halliburton (the US company that received the biggest business contracts to rebuild Iraq) and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but also the money of the American taxpayer."

That American money is the estimated $300 billion the Bush administration is spending on the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, about $200 billion of which is earmarked for Iraq.

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