The Mask Slips

Neil Clark, in a piece in the Guardian titled "Keep these Quislings out" weighs in on the question of whether or not Iraqi interpreters who have been working for the Coalition should be granted Asylum because the Jihadists have marked them for death. Where he stands isn't too much of a mystery, given that in the title itself he compares the interpreters to pro-Nazi traitors and, by implication, calling the Coalition forces Nazis. However, his attitude summed up in this quote is particularly striking (emphasis added):

The interpreters did not work for "us", the British people, but for themselves - they are paid around £16 a day, an excellent wage in Iraq - and for an illegal occupying force. Let's not cast them as heroes. The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.

As Seumas Milne wrote in yesterday's Guardian: "More than any other single factor, it has been the war of attrition waged by Iraq's armed resistance that has successfully challenged the world's most powerful army and driven the demand for withdrawal to the top of the political agenda in Washington."

"Resisted" in this case being stretched to include blowing up markets, beheading journalists, kidnapping aid workers, baking children and feeding them to their families, wiping out whole villages, and trying to recreate the Taliban all over again. The quote in the second paragraph is also revealing in that it shows the nostalgia that the Left has injected into the war. Mr. Clark may hark back to French Resistance, but it's clear that his real models are rose-tinted and sanitsed versions Che Guevara other Communist "resistance" leaders who the Chattering Classes lauded as the true representatives of The People to be supported against the evil, Capitalist West, but whose fruit was invariably the gulag and the guillotine.

As the old saw goes, they're not anti-war, they're just on the other side.