The Left's Man in the New Iraq

The war in Iraq has always been a war against fascism, a liberation war for democratic freedom -- even a left-wing war. Or so I have always thought. All over the world there are people who consider themselves liberals or left-wingers who think the same and who have backed the war in one fashion or another, even while criticizing President Bush's way of conducting it.

I have to admit that quite a few other people take a different view and look on the war as a strictly right-wing adventure -- a war for oil, or for imperialism, or for Republican interests. We liberal and left-wing supporters of the war have had a pretty hard time of it as a result.

But 10 days ago in Iraq, the left-wing hawks achieved a genuinely impressive success. A new government took office in Baghdad, led by a prime minister, Iyad Allawi. But directly beneath him is a deputy prime minister who has been selected with the approval of not just the United States government, as you may have been led to believe, but quite a few disparate political factions around the country.

The new deputy prime minister is Barham Salih, a Kurd. Salih is, by all accounts, hugely popular in the Kurdish provinces -- the kind of person who, in a truly democratic Iraq, would rise to a lofty position of power. But something else: He is one of the heroes of the democratic left in the Middle East.

Salih is a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which he joined in 1976, when it was still an underground organization. He was persecuted by Saddam Hussein's secret police, which arrested him twice; he was singled out by Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda affiliate, which tried to assassinate him (and did assassinate his bodyguards).

Yet he persisted and became premier of the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, presiding over the growth of what is, by all accounts, an authentically liberal democratic culture, or at least the beginnings of such a thing, in that region of Iraq.

In January 2003, before the war began, Salih delivered a speech in Rome to the council of the Socialist International that was perhaps the single most important statement of the left-wing hawk position. He pleaded with the democratic left all over the world to support the impending invasion, comparing it to the liberation of Italy by the Allies in 1944. The Italians had suffered under fascism for 20 years, he said, and the invasion of 1944 was their liberation. Iraqis, he said, had suffered under the Baath Party and its "aggressive, racist ideology" for 35 years and needed the same kind of help.