Our Enemy is Al-Qaeda, not the United States

hand and surrender to religious fanatics and terrorists on the other.”

Iraq’s parties of the left were shocked when the new Socialist government in Spain decided to withdraw from the US-led coalition in 2004.

“We had hoped that with a party of the left in power in Madrid we would get more support against the Islamofascists not a withdrawal,” says Aziz Al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi Communist leader.

Tareq Al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country.

“Our enemy is Al-Qaeda, not the United States,” he says.

Skimming through Middle Eastern press these days could produce unexpected results. It is not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an American or Western European leftist appearing on the same page of a newspaper alongside a pro-American article from an Arab, Iranian or Afghan progressive figure.

In Iran, for example, Hussein Shariatmadari, the ultra Islamist editor of the daily newspaper Kayhan and a theoretician of the extreme right, often admiringly cites such American leftist figures as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jane Fonda…

“Anti-Americanism is a luxury we cannot afford in the Middle East,” says Adnan Hussein, a leftist Iraq writer recently picked by the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential columnists in the world. “Blinded by anti-Americanism, the left in the West ends up on the same side as religious fascists and despots.”