Iraq, Northern Ireland and the left

Evoking a Northern Ireland comparative context for what has been happening in Iraq, Henry McDonald takes the Irish anti-war left to task:

To understand the cynicism behind the brutality of last week's slaughter of Shia pilgrims in Karbala and Baghdad, try making a comparison with Northern Ireland.

Imagine that bombs had been planted in and around Clonard Monastery in West Belfast at the time of the Solemn Novena every June. Or, alternatively, that explosive devices had been strategically placed along the route march of the Orangemen all the way from Clifton Street to the Field. At either event, both sacred days for Catholics and Protestants, the likelihood would be carnage on a grand scale. And the likely result of such large loss of life would undoubtedly be outright civil war.
.....
If the IRA, INLA, UDA or UVF had carried out operations like the Karbala/Baghdad massacres during the Troubles the Province would have been plunged into total chaos. Moreover, in the case of the IRA and INLA, such deliberate wide-scale atrocities would have prompted their 'intellectual allies' (and I use the first term very loosely) to abandon the Provos and the Erps forever.

The cheerleaders from the Irish and British ultra-left who for so long lent republican violence some spurious radical edge would have left the field instantly once their 'heroes' started fomenting total sectarian conflict. The fact that by and large the paramilitaries avoided an inevitable all-out 'war' via a series of Karbala-style atrocities shows that there were limits, both moral and political, even to the cold-hearted calculations of republicans and loyalists.

Massacres such as Enniskillen, no matter how morally repulsive and politically counter-productive, were not only rare but also not generally the policy of the paramilitary leaderships. Incredibly, however, large sections of the Irish left seem to have no problem aligning themselves with the people who are doing exactly that in Iraq today.

Since Saddam Hussein was overthrown last year and the attacks both on the Allies and - more importantly - the Iraqi people began, the far left have awarded the alliance of the ex-Baathists and the Islamists the morally loaded nomenclature 'resistance'.
.....
Why does the left in Ireland have no problem siding objectively with those determined to strangle democracy at birth in Iraq? And why in turn did they not support those Iraqis including the party, which holds membership of the Socialist International, attempting to build up their country after the nightmare years of Saddam's rule?
.....
Yet what is even more astonishing is that the mainstream, rational left has surrendered the agenda to the Trots and Stalinists. Because not a single voice in the Irish Labour Party spoke out in favour of their comrades in the Iraqi Socialist Party who supported the War as the last resort to free their country from Saddam's despotism.

There were no Irish equivalents of the courageous Welsh Labour MP Ann Clywd who, unlike most of her counterparts in Britain and Ireland, had seen at first hand what the Baath dictatorship inflicted on the Kurds.

Read the rest. (Hat tip: David Officer.)