Tariq Ali of the New Left Review opens his latest book, Bush In Babylon: The Recolonization Of Iraq, pondering why otherwise intelligent people in Britain and the United States are surprised that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis don't like being occupied. Written in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-British invasion of the oil-rich Arab nation, Ali gives a lesson in Arab history few Americans know anything about.

Most Americans probably hadn't heard of Iraq until after its invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and the subsequent U.S. led military intervention to expel its forces from the small British-created monarchy. The second chapter is dedicated to Iraqi poetry and its resistance to occupation and tyranny. Here the reader is introduced to Iraqi poets in exile Saadi Youssef and Madhaffar al-Nawal. Youssef fled Iraq after Saddam Hussein became absolute ruler in 1979 because he did not want "to write bad poems," as Ali put it, and that it was "impossible to make peace with the new Inquisition and remain creative." In other words, Youssef didn't want to have to shine Hussein's shoes to survive under his coming tyranny.

In a letter to U.S. General Tommy Franks earlier this year Youssef refers to Saddam as the "imbecile" who "has denied me the air of my country for more than 30 years." The reader will no doubt find amusement when Ali describes The Imbecile's past attempts to coopt his poetic enemies abroad by inviting them to take part in state-sponsored public readings. Now Youssef and his poetic comrades abroad are being denied the air of their country by the U.S-British occupation and their Iraqi collaborators. Ali provides his readers with Youssef's scathing indictment of the Iraqi collaborators, "The Jackals' Wedding," in English translation for the first time. The piece, written on the occasion of the creation of the collaborationist Iraqi Governing Council, and dedicated to fellow Iraqi poet in exile Mudhaffar al-Nawal, is now a big hit on the Iraqi street.

Thanks in large part to mass media coverage of the Middle East, many Americans might think a majority of Arabs are militant Islamacists and suicide bombers. They're not; even leading neo-con exponent of the War On Terror Daniel Pipes figures the number of Muslims who are hardcore fundamentalists is only 10-15 percent of the entire world's Muslim population. Ali gives a brief history of occupation and resistance in Iraq over the centuries, from the looting of Baghdad in the 12th century by the Monguls to the sacking of the city under the watch of the U.S. military earlier this year.

One of the defining features of Iraqi society in the 20th century has been its overwhelmingly secular character. The influence of the secular Soviet Union on the resistance to British colonialism ran very deep. The Iraq Communist Party (ICP), now an official collaborator with the current occupation, was the largest Communist parties in the Arab world. The other major secular player in Iraqi politics in the late 20th century was the Ba'ath Socialist Party. The Ba'ath was created in Syria in 1943 by Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, in part in reaction to the lack of support for colonial emancipation by the Soviet and Western Communist parties. It was these secular currents that formed the base for the ousting of the British-installed post-colonial puppet government in 1958, which was Iraq's finest hour in the post-World War II decolonization period.

However, the hopes promised by decolonization and independence were gradually swept away by Ba'athist despotism, starting in 1963, and recolonization, starting in 1990. The ICP was gradually murdered out of existence by the Ba'athists, with U.S. support, starting in 1963 and culminating in the 1968 Ba'athist coup. These events paved the way for Saddam Hussein's rise to absolute power in 1979. Ali provides his readers with a very personal account of the Iraqi Ba'athists coup in 1968. Ali describes his 35-year quest to discover the fate of his friend, ICP leader Ahmed Zaki, aka "Iraq's Che Guevara," who was killed in combat against the Ba'athists in the marshes of Southern Iraq during the year of the coup.

Ali's books are mostly polemical appeals and not scholarly undertakings. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of his current book and its predecessor, The Clash Of Fundamentalisms. The problem with this is that Ali is dealing with a history that few Americans have even a rudimentary knowledge of. Nothing Ali writes can't be backed up by the documentary record, but he needs to be more meticulous with documenting the claims he makes. Ali does make reference to the work of the late Hanna Batatu, who he argues wrote the best scholarly accounts of Iraq and Syria. It is with Batatu that readers will find a much more detailed scholarly analysis of these two closely related societies.

Ali is at his best when speaking to the more radical elements of the global anti-war movement that emerged to opposed the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. Ali ends his book with some advice for the millions of young activists who poured out onto the streets to oppose the invasion and occupation--advice you won't read in a Todd Gitlin book. Ali argues that the global movement against neo-liberal economics, expressed most strongly in the emergence of the World Social Forum, needs to merge with the global anti-war movement. Ali points out that the most ardent exponents of neoliberalism, like Friedrich von Hayek, were also supporters of colonial conquest. In looking to the future of resistance to the Empire, Ali closes Bush In Babylon by suggesting that "The movement that is needed can only be effective if it is global, and if it understands that the neo-liberal legs on which the imperial giant walks are not as strong as capitalist witch-doctors like to suggest."

--Rick Giombetti. This article was originally published at, and can be commented on, the author's blogsite at: http://rickgiombetti.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_rickgiombetti_archive.html. The author can contacted at:: rickjgio@speakeasy.net

Saying Yes: In Defense Of Drug Use, by Jacom Sullum, senior editor at Reason, is an excellent polemic against the War On Drugs and for moderate drug use by consenting adults.

Sullum commits the heresy of demonstrating that most drug users don't become hopeless addicts with dim prospects for future success. The majority of drug users engage in drug use either for a brief period of time in their lives or in moderation on a frequent basis, and the government agencies prosecuting the War On Drugs have the data for the author to make his case. Daily users take drugs in moderation while holding down jobs and supporting families, like Larry Seguin, a truck driver and long time marijuana smoker from upstate New York, who was arrested and convicted on marijuana charges in 1998. Or Jim Dahl, a physician whose career was nearly ruined for the crime against humanity of using the pain killer Vicodin for nine months starting in 1998 without another doctor's prescription. Dahl was pressured by the Drug Enforcement Administration into surrendering his federal prescription license and to undergo "rehabilitation," even though he was already tapering off the Vicodin at the time the drug warriors came knocking on his door.

Sullum takes on many of the myths perpetrated by the drug warriors and drug treatment evangelists over the years. An example: the myth of the drug that is "so good" and addicting that nobody should take it "even once." In the '70s it was heroin that was promoted this way by the drug prohibitionists. Then in the '80s it was crack-cocaine. By the '90s methamphetamine was the most dangerous drug of the decade. Sullum demonstrates the changing perceptions of how a particular drug affects users. In the early 20th century, anti-marijuana crusaders depicted marijuana smokers as raving maniacs driven to extreme violence. By the '60s, the image of the shiftless stoner smoking marijuana all day had taken hold of public consciousness.

The other important contribution Sullum adds to the debate over drug laws is the blurring of the lines between medical and recreational use of drugs, which has been brought about by the aggressive marketing of antidepressant drugs since 1988. A drug user who copes with depression by taking heroin is an "addict" engaged in a "crime," while a Prozac user seeking out the same thing as the heroin user is a "patient" seeking "treatment." Sullum rightly points out the limitations of the arguments in favor of medicalizing all drug use, like with "medical marijuana." The reason for this is because the assumption underlying medicalization is the notion that, say, smoking a joint just for the sake of getting high is not a legitimate use of marijuana and should, therefore, remain illegal.

Sullum offers his readers an important primer on how we can liberate ourselves from the oppressive War On Drugs regime. With talk radio host's Rush Limbaugh's highly publicized drug problem now making headlines, Saying Yes should guide the terms of debate on reforming drug laws in favor of decriminalizing the purchase of drugs by consenting and responsible adults.

--Rick Giombetti (This article was originally published at, and can be commented on, the author's blogsite as above.)