Betrayed
How Mideast Progressives Feel About Their Western 'Comrades'
by Amir Taheri
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04012007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/betrayed_opedcol\
umnists_amir_taheri.htm

WHILE elements of the Left in the United States and Europe are calling on
Western democracies to abandon Afghanistan and Iraq to the Taliban and al Qaeda
and surrender to the Khomeinists in Iran, new alliances are emerging against the
jihadists in the region.

In much of the Middle East, most notably Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left is part
of these new alliances.

* In Iraq, two rival Communist parties, along with Social Democrats and other
center-left groups, supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and continue to
play a significant role in the new pluralist system. They are resolutely opposed
to a premature withdrawal of American and allied forces, as demanded by the U.S.
Congress.

* In Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party is at the heart of
the democratic movement to against the Islamic Republic's attempt to dominate
the country through its Hezbollah surrogates. The Lebanese democratic movement
includes other parties of the Left, notably the Socialist Salvation Movement
(Inqadh) and the Movement of the Democratic Left.

* In Iran, virtually the whole of the Left rejects President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's anti-Americanism and calls for normalization of ties with the
United States. The recently created independent trade-union movement is emerging
as a vocal challenger to Khomeinism.

PERHAPS the most interest ing new anti-jihadist alli ance, however, is taking
shape in Afghanistan. After months of discussions the leaders of several parties
that had fought each other for two decades have come together to set up a new
alliance called Popular Front (Jibheh Melli).

One major figure in the group is Burhaneddin Rabbani - an Islamic scholar who
served as Afghanistan's president after the Communist regime's collapse in 1992.
As founder and leader of Jami'at Islami (Islamic Society), Rabbani was one of
the first Afghan leaders who started the resistance movement against Soviet
occupation. Yet Rabbani has agreed to enter the Popular Front along with leaders
of Afghanistan's dissolved Communist Party.

Both rival wings of the Communist Party will be present in the new front. One
wing, known as Parcham (The Banner) had always been pro-Soviet; the other, known
as Shoeleh-Javid (Eternal Flame), had Maoist sentiments.

The new front will also include center-left figures such as Nuralhaq Olumi and
Muhammad Gulabzvi, along with anti-Soviet mujahedin commanders such as Gen.
Muhammad Qassim Fahim, a former defense minister.

BEFORE the U.S.-led inter ventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003,
much of the Middle Eastern Left shared the views of its U.S. and European
counterparts with regard to America.

"We looked to the Left in the West and imitated it," says Awad Nasir, one of
Iraq's best-known poets and a life-long Communist. "We heard from the United
States and Western Europe that being Left meant being anti-American. So we were
anti-American. And then we saw Americans coming from the other side of the world
to save us from Saddam Hussein - something that our leftist friends and the
Soviet Union would never contemplate."

Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the new Afghan front, expresses similar
sentiments. "Our nation is still facing the menace of obscurantism and terror
from Taliban and al Qaeda," he says. "Thus, we are surprised when elements of
the Left in the United States and Europe campaign for withdrawal so that our new
democracy is left defenseless against its enemies."

IRAQ'S parties of the Left were shocked when the new So cialist government in
Spain decided to withdraw from the U.S.-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.

Jumblatt, the Lebanese leader, says he realized that his life-long
anti-Americanism had been misplaced when he saw "long lines of people, waiting
to vote in Iraq, in the first free election in an Arab country."

Samir Qassir, a Lebanese center-left leader murdered by the Syrians, often spoke
of anti-Americanism as "the last refuge of the scoundrel" in the Middle East.
"Politics is always a question of choice," Qassir said in one of his last
articles. "Here in the Middle East, we face a choice between democracy and
alliance with the United States on one hand and surrender to religious fanatics
and terrorists on the other."

SKIMMING through the Mid dle Eastern press these days can produce unexpected
results. It's not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an American
or Western European leftist - and, alongside it on the same page, 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.

Having all but abandoned its traditional opposition to capitalism and the
bourgeois democratic system, much of the Western Left is forced to cling to
anti-Americanism as its backbone.

To be sure, anti-Americanism is not the ailment of the Western Left alone.
Extreme-right parties are also vehemently anti-American. Jean-Marie Le Pen,
leader of the French neofascist National Front, is as opposed to the new
democratic Iraq as Spain's Socialist Premier Jose Luis Zapatero.

In the Middle East, however, a good part of the Left, while not especially
enamored of the United States, sees it as an ally against Islamist and
totalitarian pan-Arab movements.

"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."

Parviz Khosravi, a veteran of Iran's Communist movement, cites history as
justification for the Left's rejection of "banal anti-Americanism."

"During the Second World War, all movements of the Left supported an alliance
with the Western democracies led by the United States because the common enemy
was Fascism," he says. "Today, we are in a similar position. Progressive forces
in the Middle East are threatened by an Islamist version of Fascism. An alliance
with Western democracies is not only desirable but necessary."

PRESIDENT Bush, the bete noire of liberals and leftists in the West, might be
surprised to learn that he has a better image among liberals, leftists,
secularists and even moderate Islamists in the Middle East.

While Chomsky and Moore see the United States as "an evil power," many leftists
in the Middle East see it as a force for good that ended the tyranny of the
Taliban in Afghanistan, dismantled the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and
forced the Syrians out of Lebanon after 30 years of occupation.

"In our region, the United States has become a force for the good," says
Jumblatt, who recently met President Bush at the White House for a surprise
meeting.

Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri is based in Europe.