The Weeks Review

Hussein Blames Bush, Iran and Israel Supporters for Iraq's Troubles

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 20 Saddam Hussein's defense lawyers on Thursday released a letter Mr. Hussein recently wrote in prison that tries to convince the American people that the United States should leave Iraq because President Bush misled them into a deadly quagmire.

The 5,000-word letter is a rambling treatise outlining what Mr. Hussein asserts are the false reasons the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq, from illicit weapons to links with Al Qaeda. Mr. Hussein said he had written it at the behest of Ramsey Clark, the former United States attorney general who serves on his defense team.

Mr. Hussein blames Iran and pro-Israel interests for helping lead the Americans into war. He invokes the specter of the Vietnam War and the spirit of Mao, saying the Chinese revolutionary is "laughing in his grave because his prediction has been fulfilled and America is a paper tiger."

The letter is dated July 7 and was handed by Mr. Hussein to Mr. Clark, said Rasha Oudeh, the office manager for Mr. Hussein's eldest daughter.

One has to really wonder about the character of Ramsey Clark and just what goes on inside of his head. He was also a staunch defender of Slobodan Milosevic as well as the murderers in Rwanda, indicating that he has some sort of fetish for bloodthirsty dictators. Exactly how does one go from Attorney General of the United States to defender of the very worst the human race has to offer?

From a 1999 Salon article, Ian Williams states, in part:

Many liberals and leftists cut Clark a considerable degree of slack. For a start he is almost the only person the American left has had in high public office since World War II, even if it was a retrospective success, since his long march leftward only began afterward. His views as the former attorney general are listened to with a respect that would be accorded to few others with such eccentric opinions. As a revered spokesman of the left, he is a perfect symbol for its near-impotence in American politics today.

Everyone who has dealings with Clark uses the word "nice" to describe him. But he often sides with people whom no one with a full deck would call nice. (Clark did not respond to a Salon News interview request.) Many former friends, more in sorrow than in anger, trace his present positions to the company he keeps: the International Action Center, which proclaims him its founder but seems entirely in the thrall of an obscure Trotskyist sect, the Workers World Party. Whoever writes his scripts, there is little doubt what Ramsey Clark is against now -- any manifestation of the power of the state he once served at the height of the Vietnam War.

Clark is a perfect example of the fallacy of what we call "the left". While they claim to be "liberal", they are anything but. The fact is, they have always has a soft spot for Communists of every stripe, whether it be Soviet or Red Chinese. They gloss over the untold millions of lives that were taken during the spread of global communism, while placing every American misstep under a microscope. They call Bush a fascist and Castro the creator of a political paradise.

A man like Ramsey Clark should be publicly ostracized from both sides of the political spectrum, and the fact that he is not says more about those who call themselves "the left" than is does about him.