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read the extended version  —  links GORGEOUS GEORGE One man beats the American senate. The portrait of an exceptional politician “I would you had but the wit: ’twere better than your dukedom.” Falstaff, Henry the IV, pt. II, by William Shakespeare    | Florin Popescu (BERLIN). The atmosphere in the packed hall was edgy — whilst some minor preliminary bouts were being yawned at, the spectators and the media were all glancing back at the entrance for the arrival of the main event: a wide-bodied and large mouthed amateur boxer nicknamed Gorgeous George. The underdog from England had boasted about coming to Washington with guns blazing, to take on two American heavyweights at once. As he walked in, staring stolidly ahead, photo flashes and microphones swarmed around him like mad flies. Amazingly, before he even stepped onto the ring, he swung at — and flattened — a heckling newspaper boy, whose muttering slogan of retreat was: “You’re a real bully, aren’t you?”    Less than an hour later, he won the bout, leaving his outclassed opponents and the American media shaking their heads in disbelief — who IS this guy? they all asked. Political theatre not seen in the Senate for decades, they said. Disgraceful, they said. A fiery performance, they said. To the British correspondents, some of whom thought more highly of the Devil himself than the Member of Parliament from Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloway, of the Respect Coalition. The event took place in the Dirksen Office Building of the U.S. Senate on May 17th, 2005. His opponents were Senators Norm Coleman, Republican from Minnesota, and Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan. OIL AND ARMS    The affair in question has been documented amply elsewhere, and can be summarized briefly as a spat between politicians — not just the aforementioned three but many others. Basically, a ruthless young officer with Western sponsored political ambitions deposed a democratically elected leader of an oil-rich Arab country who was becoming inconvenient to the leaders of the free world. Next to it, a religious democracy was born of a revolution against another ruthless dictator who had been sponsored by the CIA to depose yet another democratically elected leader with dangerous ideas about nationalizing his country’s natural resources.    The new dictator was encouraged by the Western powers to attack the new Islamic Republic. The war did not produce the results that Western leaders wished, although it managed to kill millions, and both the West and the Russians managed to sell lots of weapons to both sides, in exchange for discounted oil. Iran survived, radicalised and confident. However, the US also sold chemical weapons to an increasingly ambitious Saddam, who did not hesitate to use them to suppress internal resistance, an act for which he is on trial today. Few in the West dared suggest this “genocide” was happening at the time — and were called mad agitators in the press and by state officials for doing so. One such Iraq critic was a young Scottish politician named George Galloway, who had become an MP not by attending college and kissing posteriors of superiors, as most do, but by moving up in the world of organized Labor, leveraging an unusual talent for oratory discourse.    Although bloody and badly managed, this entire “crisis” may have remained a small chapter in the messy history of big and small power relations, but suddenly Saddam overstepped his bounds, attacking another non-democratic state he was not permitted to attack, while menacing the powerful state of Israel, and everyone started switching chairs. American politicians decided to stop sponsoring Saddam and go to war with him. They and the media described him as a new Hitler, a monster that had to be removed, but once Iraq was defeated, the public was essentially told that it was better to leave this new Führer in power for reasons which only professional policy makers could understand. Ten years later, as we know, many of the same politicians, or their friends and relatives at least, changed their mind, and started talking about incoming mushroom clouds. During that intervening decade, the Western left also changed its mind: Saddam was a monster when he was US-sponsored, but not so bad when a US enemy. Besides, they had something to cry about: the mind-befuddling embargo, which Galloway described to the two US senators as “infanticide masquerading as politics”.    And so Mr. Galloway, already a supporter of the Palestinian cause, invited himself over to Saddam’s house with the purpose of allowing the operation of a charity on behalf of Iraqi children suffering from cancer and in need of medicine. He ingratiated himself to the regime by praising Saddam’s “courage, strength and indefatigability” in a public event, a lapse in taste and judgment which hounds his reputation to this day. At the time, Western politicians had set up a barter system in which the Iraqis were allowed to export discounted oil in exchange for humanitarian goods, to whom they wished, while being loosely controlled by the United Nations. A major contributor to Miriam Appeal, and wealthy patron of Mr. Galloway’s causes was a wealthy Jordanian businessman named Fawaz Zureikat, who apparently did not hesitate to participate in what was an obvious backroom deal bonanza: buy discounted oil from Iraq and resell it at market prices. Neither did Kofi Annan’s son, it seems... and the head of the United Nations is disliked by the Republican Party. The entire program was the subject of the US Senate inquiry of that day, and already things were going badly for Senator Coleman when it was revealed that American oil companies were in fact the major wheelers and dealers in this scam. It got worse when Galloway started talking about forged documents. It turns out he had already been accused (twice) right-wing British newspapers of pocketing cash from the Oil-for-Food scam, and had twice won defamation lawsuits against them, proving that documents allegedly implicating him, mysteriously found in Baghdad after the second war, were crude forgeries. Someone in this messy story has been making a lot of bad forgeries, the most famous being the yellowcake in Niger photocopy. We mortals will never know whether these various documents were produced by autonomous cells or by an international network of badly-trained forgers.    Thus, the entire befuddling story of Iraq and the West reads like a badly written mystery novel. By the time of Galloway’s testimony, the public was already tired of the logical contortionism of Bush, Blair and their subordinates, as well as the foaming-at-the-mouth histrionics of the right-wing press. The case for Iraq policy has lost public support not because opposing views were given “equal time” (they were not), but because it does not have common sense on its side. And then, suddenly, two American politicians were unwise enough to bring one of the most eloquent critics of Iraq blunders past and present to the US Senate on weak charges badly prepared by their staff of young Starbuckspowered career seekers, and thereby give the fellow a free opportunity to humiliate them live on CNN, and expose the hypocrisy and nonsense behind the entire Iraq affair. To appreciate it, one must search for the transcript on the Internet and read it entirely. You will find it on sites such as informationclearinghouse, but not on the US Senate web site, which offers gigabytes of testimony on crucial public matters such as teenage bicycle helmet use, but not this matter: it was deleted from the public record, Ministry of Truth style. [errata corrige: the entire hearing is on the Senate’s website, see links. W|O] TAKE IT TO THE YANKS    A lot has already been written about the testimony in the English-speaking press, and has lead to measured praise even from the very right-wing tabloids that regularly attack Mr. Galloway with ferocious and sometimes reckless zeal. The reasons for begrudging accolades were simple: the readership of the tabloid press is solidly proletarian and so is the flamboyant exboxer nicknamed Gorgeous George, at least in his roots. They could not afford to berate the local boy who “showed the Yanks”. In the US on the other hand, while the testimony itself was not given significant TV news time, it managed to energize the pusillanimous left, who were shown that logic being on your side, it is wiser to attack than stay silent. Needless to say, Mr. Galloway was not prosecuted for anything since his testimony, although Mr. Coleman said he might indict him on perjury charges — although he indicated no reasons for suspecting an act of perjury other than Mr. Galloway testifying under oath. All discussions of facts and principles aside, a former factory worker and amateur boxer with no formal college education — but plenty of experience in hard hitting British parliamentary debate — simply showed a better command of rhetoric, public demeanor and use of English than Senator Levin, a Harvard Law school graduate and Senator Coleman, a former public prosecutor. Not to forget the hurt he put on Christopher Hitchens, the aforementioned heckling journa-list, an Oxford graduate and member of the British literary elite who earns his bread as political commentator in America, providing “the Yanks” with that half of wit they apparently lack — all while living it up as New York socialite in the jet-setting company of some interesting, famous, cocktail-loving friends. Although Mr. Hitchens started on as a Trotskyist, and although he made his start in the US as a commentator for the leading left-wing magazine “The Nation”, he switched sides on the eve of Gulf War II, counting himself among neoconservatives, appearing in far right-wing publications such as the National Review. This athletic flip-flop may seem bewildering, but former admirers ofTrotsky and acolytes of neoconservative guru Leo Strauss do have something in common: the belief that ordinary man is a brutish lout, that a vanguard of outstanding intellectuals is needed to shape public opinion and policy — or just get filthy rich on speaking fees if all else fails. VOTE GALLOWAY!    America needs such speakers as Galloway, otherwise the country might witness more former boxers able to point out that the real political scandal is what has happened to the people of Iraq, their health, security and the natural resources which are rightfully theirs, which were discounted away before and after a string of wars and dictatorships, and which are being siphoned off to this day, while they are served generous servings of ideology of all kinds. They will, it is true, no longer have to endure authoritarian government. Instead, we will teach them how to govern themselves as we do: by politicians who cannot answer articulately, policy makers who cannot reason clearly and a press who cannot reliably pose proper questions. to Top GORGEOUS GEORGE  (extended essay) “I would you had but the wit: ’twere better than your dukedom.” Falstaff, Henry the IV, pt. II, by William Shakespeare    | The atmosphere in the packed hall was edgy — whilst some minor preliminary bouts were being yawned at, the spectators and the packed media were all glancing back at the hall’s entrance for the arrival of the main event: a wide-bodied and large mouthed amateur boxer nicknamed Gorgeous George. The underdog from England had boasted about coming to Washington with guns blazing, to take on two much heavier American opponents at once. As he walked into the hall photo flashes and microphones swarmed around him while he looked straight on stolidly. Amazingly, before he even stepped onto the ring, he swung at — and flattened — a heckling newspaper journalist, whose muttering slogan of retreat was: ’You’re a real bully, aren’t you?’    A few hours later, he won the bout, leaving his outclassed opponents and the American media shaking their heads in disbelief — who IS this guy? they all asked. Political theatre not seen in the Senate for decades, they said. To the British correspondents, the outcome was no surprise — his performance managed to impress even those UK foes who for years had believed him crook, liar, megalomaniac and traitor. The event took place in the Dirksen Office Building of the U.S. Senate on May 17 of 2005. His opponents were Senators Norm Coleman, Republican from Minnesota, and Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan, who had asked the Member of Parliament from Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloway, of the Respect Coalition, to come and testify before a special committee set up to investigate (and hopefully smear) the United Nations’ handling of the Oil for Food program in the latter days of Saddam Hussein, in light of the scandal surrounding Kofi Annan’s son.    A lot has already been written about the testimony in the English-speaking press, and has lead to measured praise even from the very right-wing tabloids that regularly attack Mr. Galloway with ferocious and sometimes reckless zeal — as evidenced by the string of libel lawsuits that ’Gorgeous George’, as they have named him in order to draw attention to his posh suits and alleged philandering, has won against these publications. The reasons for begrudging accolades were simple: the readership of the tabloid press is solidly proletarian and so is Gorgeous George, at least in his roots. Whether or not the editorial boards of these papers, some of which are part of the Murdoch empire, would have preferred to spin the story towards ’shameless crook disrespects the mighty US Senate’, the readership would have leaned towards the jingoist ’I hate him but our boy really showed those Yanks’ take anyway. They must have figured some better opportunity to pick a fight with the ’controversial MP’ will arise at a future date — if, given the heavy surveillance that he is under he could be counted on to be very careful about his finances and private affairs, his loquaciousness would surely undo him at some point.    What did his ’victory’ consist of? All discussions of facts and principles aside, a former factory worker and amateur boxer with no formal college education simply showed a better command of rhetoric, public demeanor and use of English than Senator Levin, a Harvard Law school graduate and Senator Coleman, a former public prosecutor. Not to forget Christopher Hitchens, the heckling journalist aforementioned, an Oxford graduate and member of the British literary elite who earns his bread as political commentator in America, providing ’the Yanks’ with that half of the wit they apparently lack (one of a pack of British émigrés of this kind, on both the left and right and sometimes both — more on this later). Although Mr. Hitchens started on as a Trotskyist, and along with bosom buddy and fellow émigré Alexander Cockburn made his start in the land of Liberty commentator for the leading left-wing magazine The Nation, he has recently switched sides, counting himself among neoconservatives, appearing in far right-wing publications such as the National Review. This athletic flip-flop may seem bewildering, but admirers of Trotsky and neoconservative gurus such as Leo Strauss do have something in common: the belief that the common man is a brutish lout, and that a vanguard of outstanding intellectuals is needed to shape public opinion and policy. Not surprisingly, neither school has ever won a general election without being embedded in a ’more vulgar’ coalition. Although the populist George Galloway has a record of opposition to Trotskyism, he and ’Hitch’ have in the past showered accolades on each other.    Mr. Hitchens claims that his switch was due to his disillusion with the left-wing tendency to turn a blind eye to tyrants, especially Saddam Hussein. This is a fair comment and a possible reason to dislike a boisterous opponent of the Iraq invasion such as Mr. Galloway. Had he continued to provide self-criticism from the left, or even moved to the center (as he has in the UK, being an enthusiastic supporter of the governing Labor party at his first home, and a Republican cheerleader in the states), one might be tempted to take him seriously. But the wholesale switch of beliefs, not just on spreading ’freedom’ but other issues, makes one suspect that Mr. Hitchens, known for his love of drink and simultaneous double interpretation of the term ’political party’, simply decided to go to the side whose soirees offered more — and tastier — complimentary cocktails. What party lover could refuse a lifetime supply Kissinger Kamikazes? His career has not suffered for his switch — as a liberal he was living in shadowed obscurity, as a neocon his book sales and TV appearances have soared.    While Americans continue to be tickled with Hitch’s dexterous stylishness, a Scot smacked the British pundit in the face with the wit he himself lacked. Unless fortune favors Mr. Hitchens with an opportunity to outshine this moment, the phrase he will be most remembered for is one he absorbed as beer in the face instead of one he served. “You’re a drink-soaked former-Trotskyist popinjay... Your hands are shaking, you badly need another drink!”    Hitch’s reply was mental rehearsal, mental rehearsal, headache, and a muttered ’Wide body!’ — an insult few understood — apparently it is London slang for a small-time trader in stolen goods or something. Not that many people in the Washington know what a ’popinjay’ is, but does it matter? Note that later commentary by Hitchens, to his credit, actually praised Galloway’s performance. It is difficult to say whether the MP lied about the Hitch’s hands shaking, but he was not on oath at the time. All I can say, is that, if Mr. Hitchens hopes to continue his meteoric rise as an author and outshine his longtime friend Martin Amis, he has a long way to go, and not just in the wit department. This author has known a lot of drunks in his time, and a few unfortunate ill folk, but has never seen anyone’s hands shake as much as Mr. Amis’s. What those hands have been doing lately, who knows, but surely not applauding the MP from Bethnal Green: Mr. Amis is part of an ever growing number of European intellectuals who are, as the saying goes, arsonists in their youth and firemen in old age.    Gorgeous George was no less merciful to the tag team senatorial committee than to his enemy from the British elite: “...I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question...”    Both Mr. Hitchens and Senator Coleman seem to want a rematch. The former wants a public debate mano a mano, to which Mr. Galloway is yet to agree to. The senator from Minnesota believes that Mr. Galloway may have committed perjury, and promised to prosecute him once he finds the necessary proof, although he could provide no other justification for his suspicion other than the fact that his opponent was under oath.    So thorough was this beating, that the transcript was deleted, Ministry of Truth style, for a time, from the US Senate site, which has otherwise terabytes of data of mundane legislative session transcripts about testimony on issues such as car tire safety to offer inquisitive citizens in the name of government Transparency. However, both transcript and video of the session are available at: informationclearinghouse So who IS this guy?    All countries have their own hermetic world of scandalous and flamboyant politicians, most of which do not attain the threshold of controversy (such as Georg Haider, for example) to make themselves known internationally. Even though the UK and the US share a language and ’special relationship’, most people in the US had never heard of George Galloway before, nor can they readily identify the term ’MP’. The political cultures are also different: the Member of Parliament from Bethnall and Green exhibited a demeanor that is common to House of Commons: heavy on invective and cool under fire, which the sound-bite trained US public and politicians are unaccustomed to. Arguing with dozens of screaming lawyers at once is one thing: debating a TV camera is another. The language of British parliamentary debate is also significantly more florid than that used in the States, unless one counts rule-making exceptions such as the ageing firebrand Senator Robert Byrd, and although no notable phrase masters such as Winston Churchill have made a lasting mark upon the British political scene in the last few decades. In the US, one could argue that elegant speechifying has not been heard since the Roosevelts and William Jennings Bryan. In fact, I am led to believe that most people in the Dirksen hall that morning, and the television era viewers, were bewildered by the term ’traduced’, unaware that not only does it really have a meaning in English, it sports two fancy ones. Yet, the British public is long familiar with Mr. Galloway’s dictums, which have often been elegant in delivery and questionable, to say the least, in judgment.    George Galloway is a burly Scot from Glasgow, who sweated on a factory floor and a boxing ring before he got involved with labor union activism. His talent with words, undoubtedly in the service of a good measure of youthful idealism, propelled him quickly through the ranks of the Labor Party. The rags to riches story script found him a very young member of Parliament representing Glasgow. His second wife is a Palestinian professor based in the UK. Mr. Galloway not only had the Palestinian cause in his household but in his heart as well, becoming an outspoken critic of Israel, but not an automatic supporter of all Arab causes. He had in fact been an active opponent of the Iraqi regime. In the early 80s, Saddam was being supported by the United States, as underscored in that part of Mr. Galloway’s testimony which claimed that he had met Mr. Hussein exactly as many times as Donald Rumsfeld, and for better purposes than the latter, who was in Baghdad to peddle weapons to be used against Iran. The Reagan era support of Hussein and Bin Laden has always been an embarrassment to the War on Terror era US Government, and it is very rarely discussed in the US Public sphere, and much less in the halls of Congress. In the 80s, Mr. Galloway had in fact protested against the Saddam regime’s human rights abuses, notably its crack down on internal Communist opposition, with a tyrannical ferocity cheered in Washington. All this in a time when one was considered a dangerous leftist agitator if one dared suggest that Saddam was using chemical weapons.    However, after the first Gulf War, which he opposed, Mr. Galloway became much friendlier with the Iraqi regime. The most defensible part of this change in demeanor, least likely linked to an enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic, praised the substantial public services the latter offered its people as a windfall of oil riches. Although Mr. Hussein cannot be compared to Adolf Hitler in the scale of his crimes, the two former tyrants do share a common strategy of shoring popular support in safeguarding the economic development of its peoples, while running a ruthless police state. Although politics and diplomacy invariably involves the gratuitous praise of crooks and brutes, and although Mr. Rumsfeld must have himself praised Saddam in his time out of timely necessity, Mr. Galloway went one step beyond flattery, and it proved to be the greatest linguistic blunder of his career. Yet, the story must be told in proper context.    The aftermath of the Gulf War is now undisputedly regarded as a humanitarian disaster, the permanent embargo of one of the world’s leading oil producers being, in former US Representative Bonior’s words, and as Senator Coleman was reminded by Mr. Galloway, ’infanticide masquerading as politics’. The death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children that resulted was at the time downplayed in major media, disputed by conservatives as faint-hearted hysteria, and criticized mainly by unmuzzleable left wingers such as Mr. Galloway. In one of the dozens of bewildering flip flops that followed the Iraq war, the humanitarian crisis is now not only accepted by conservatives, but actually used as an ipso facto justification for a war that the public — in the US, Europe and almost the whole world — no longer believes was justified. We did it to save the children! Mr. Galloway, in 1998, went much further than mere pamphleteering. He founded a charity called the Miriam Foundation, which started as a benefit for an Iraqi girl suffering from cancer, but became a showpiece for the absurdity of the sanctions program. This meant frequent visits, and a friendship, with Tariq Aziz, the friendly Groucho Marx face of the Iraqi regime, and the two infamous meetings with Saddam Hussein. The highlight of these visits was a speech in which Mr. Galloway said to an audience that included the dictator ’Sir, I salute your strength, your courage, your indefatigability’. Although Mr. Galloway now claims he was speaking to the entire Iraqi people, one must be skeptical: a master of the English idiom such as he must have known that an entire people is not usually addressed as ’Sir’. Is it more politically correct to say Mrs. France or Mr. France? His detractors have never missed an opportunity to remind of this tasteless blunder and neither did Senator Coleman.    However, Mr. Galloway has over the years produced other less memorable but equally questionable phrases. Although he has championed some reasonable yet unpopular causes on foreign and domestic policy in the press and in Parliament, his relentless and stinging criticism of Mr. Blair finally won him expulsion from the Labor Party and a virtual TKO from public service, through that old, time-tested trick of representative democracy: re-districting. Furthermore, but he was subjected to repeated media and government inquiries over the financing of the political campaigns and charity work, his flamboyant lifestyle as evidence by his villa in Portugal, his fancy suits and vinho tinto sun tan, his accounting of travel expenses and his alleged frequent associations with women who were not his wife. One must admit this is strange behavior for a politician, and if any others are found with similar indiscretions they should be banished from public service and into the halls of shame. Yet he has survived all these public trials, except perhaps his marriage, as his wife is purportedly filing for divorce. He has outwitted Tony Blair by entering a Parliamentary election in a district of London known for its left- and Muslim- affinity, under a new party of his own creation, and winning in a landslide.    Thus, Mr. Galloway’s reputation as a witty bon-vivant whose irreverence to upper castes both delights and vexes. His weakness, his courage and fallibility, makes him as perplexing as Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff. Yet in Elizabethan times, it was unacceptable for a commoner to be allowed to chide a prince like Hal with such gall, so this man of the people is fictionally knighted, and fictionally banished from power for his lack of respect for the commoners — not the case of Galloway, who is anything but a coward, an aristocrat and a piece of fiction, unless one counts the media as author. The common strand they share is the embodiment of a fallible popular genius, but unlike the about-face of the great bard in Henry V, George Galloway cannot be written off the play of history simply because he is inconvenient.    He remains as annoying to Tony Blair as a case of psoriasis: not quite a political life-threatening malady but nevertheless an unsightly itch that just won’t go away. The silliest attempts by the British media (with the possible collusion of forces darker than the ink in with which they are printed) was the publication of documents miraculously found in Iraq by journalists searching around ruined buildings, months after the US/UK invasion, linking him to payments received from the Saddam regime. These documents were judged to be forgeries and thus, the only payments related to this affair which could be demonstrated as being received by Mr. Galloway were those he received as payment in the resulting libel lawsuits. Which brings us to the Dirksen Federal Building. Scandal: which scandal?    One week prior to the ’thrill on the Hill’ the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a report which, to judge it fairly, was shoddily assembled by its well funded staff of lawyers and interns. Mr. Galloway saw things more harshly.    The report muddled references to documents already proven to be forgeries or similar ones, without offering proof of their provenance. They also referred to testimony of an unnamed ’former Iraqi official’ in US Custody which has recently confessed to having known of payments made to Mr. Galloway. Thus he stood accused of having the hand in the till, but without showing any evidence that there was anything in his pockets that he could not account for, and referencing mere hearsay about payments made. It is no wonder the accused promised to come out with guns blazing: fighting such an amateurish indictment was, in retrospect, like shooting fish in a barrel. An oil barrel.    But Gorgeous George had even bigger plans. He would testify under oath, which was not required to as a non-US citizen and foreign official. For his cooperation, he would get a 10 minute opening statement: there are after all some safeguards of fairness in the inherent imbalance of power of congressional hearings, where one could be asked under oath: ’do you deny the evidence which I have here behind my back?’. In this speech, he not only shot the fish that had to be taken out and fried, but managed to squeeze in, as one squeezes a bottle of ketchup to the point of eruption, a tart invective on US policy versus Iraq that no US politician has yet had the courage, or interest, to mutter in even off the record. A look at the transcript will bear witness to that, and eyewitness reports of the smeared faces of the baffled interlocutors. He addressed a question which was unrelated to the matter at hand, but undoubtedly more important: Why are the US senators worried about kickbacks in an inherently corrupt regime when the real problem was the massive suffering of the Iraqi people? He also asked why was the Senate picking on him, when most of the oil-for-food kickback smuggling was done by US companies, and when much more oil and money has slipped out from the rightful dominion of the Iraqi people since the invasion than before? This charge was not received with the oohs and aahs Mr. Galloway might have expected, since Senator Levin had already that morning received testimony to that effect to the displeasure of his colleague, who had gotten up that morning all keen on bashing the union of all nations and not his own.    What followed was a skirmish of acumen and some lawyerly ducking and fencing. Senator Coleman’s questioning started by abandoning the charge of bribery, as if, we tried, now let’s try something else. He wanted to know about the second biggest donor to the Miriam Appeal, a wealthy Jordanian businessman named Fawaz Zureikat. The charge in the report presented to Mr. Galloway that morning (and not before) was pretty much this: the Iraqi government gave ’allocations’ to whom it wished, that is, the right to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian assistance in a program overseen by the UN. Since the oil in question was to be sold at much less than market price, the beneficiaries of the ’allocations’ stood to profit greatly, and did. The Iraqis asked for kickbacks to Saddam Hussein in return. Thus, based on testimony from former Iraqi officials now in US Custody named and unnamed, and documents of uncertain provenance, the senators charged that Mr. Zureikat obtained allocations as a quid-pro-quo based on his substantial donation to the Miriam Fund, for which he paid a bribe to Mr. Galloway and another to Saddam Hussein. Since Mr. Galloway had quite persuasively argued that he did not receive such bribes and was not found to have done so in prior investigations, Mr. Coleman wanted to know, at least, if the ’accused’ at least know that Mr. Zureikat was involved in oil deals and has received such allocations. Mr. Galloway was elusive in his answers, although he finally declared that he did not know or inquire about oil deals involving Mr. Zureikat, stating that it was not his business to know where the donations came from, that Mr. Zureikat was a very wealthy man before the oil-for-food program, and that he could not investigate the finances of other donors such as Saudi Princes, although he had reason to suspect, as a leftist, that such people are unfairly rich. In fact, in the entire testimony, this is the only part where he could be found to have perjured himself. However, the only way of proving it would be to force Mr. Zureikat to testify, which he would rather not do, since as a wealthy businessman he is not eager to go to jail, and can protect himself just fine from American justice with lawyers and influence. Besides, he lives in Jordan, a country friendly to the US. Even if Jordan were to part with one of its more influential citizens, it may ask for the extradition of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident formerly friendly with Mr. Cheney and now Oil Minister in Iraq, who stands convicted of bank fraud in Jordan and who has evaded this sentence for a long time while residing in the US. In any case, the details of real politik and international law are rather complicated and boring, aren’t they?    Suffice it to say that Sen. Coleman did not get very far with his questioning, even having to answer defensively Mr. Galloway’s countercharge that he himself probably does not check the private finances of the wealthy donors to his recent political campaign for the Senate seat he now occupies. Sen. Levin, a more experienced and respected politician than Mr. Coleman, took over. He wasted his first fifteen questions trying to get Mr. Galloway to contest or accept the authenticity of a translation of a copy of a document implicating him in oil allocations, allegedly found recently in the Oil Ministry archives, and different from the forgeries previously used against the accused. It ended in visible frustration, as he had to agree to provide Mr. Galloway the original such that he may do forensic tests on it and give his opinion on its authenticity!    The bumbling tribunal went on. Sen. Levin then wanted to know, IF the document were true, and IF Mr. Zureikat managed and partially funded the Miriam Appeal, only to profit from oil deals in violation of INTERNATIONAL law, WOULD Mr. Galloway be troubled by this? It may not be immediately clear why an accuser would ask a witness to clarify a hypothetical belief, but it later became clear that what Sen. Levin wanted to trap the witness into was a promise to give the money back (to whom, he did not specify). However, the following exchange is the bizarre reward Sen. Levin received for his zeal, after the witness remarked that he was troubled by much more important things, such as the fact that an entire people was made to starve because the Western powers had a falling out with its dictator, by means of economic sanctions which he opposed. MR. LEVIN: There were a lot of things you opposed, but you don’t believe that they should be circumvented in illegal ways. Isn’t that — GALLOWAY: But, please, Senator! You supported an illegal attack on Iraq! Don’t talk to me about illegality — MR. LEVIN: Sorry about that. I didn’t. But that’s beside the point. That’s beside the point.    Those commentators which were sympathetic to the senators, in the aftermath, claimed that Mr. Galloway’s error in stating that Mr. Levin had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq was proof of his ridiculousness, perhaps also missed a point. The final exchange was, on the other hand, better handled by Mr. Levin, when he pointed out that American politicians return political donations when it later turns out that they came from crooked donors. It was not the remark itself that bit, but the fact that he quickly moved the questioning to another topic — Tariq Aziz — and thus did not give his opponent time to bite back with the evident counter-argument that returning donations to political campaigns and those to charity for cancer patients were not equivalent. And so the match ended and Mr. Galloway was excused, and not invited to the Senate cafeteria for lunch. That was ok for the MP from overseas, as he went back to smoking the Cuban cigar he had brought with him in order to have something else to brag about later.    All of this does not make George Galloway a martyr, and by no means a saint. Yet, it is astounding how two senior politicians and well trained lawyers, with a large staff of eager young helpers from top universities, on the way up in Washington, could so thoroughly botch a highly publicized hearing, in which they really could have put the witness on the defensive, instead of themselves. Perhaps they were sleepy that morning, but they must have been aware that major news channels were broadcasting this hearing live. The Senators’ facial expressions during the feed — described by some present as backwards eye rolling and side to side head shaking — were not seen on TV — instead one could watch a British MP with a funny accent looking serious, confident, calm when he wanted to and angry when he didn’t, and delivering long speeches without reading from notes. Of course, there was the use of language to consider, the one-liners that only came from the witness table.    There is a basic irony to that this circus underscores. American neoconservatives — and Oxford lecturers back in England — are united in the belief that a classical education grounded in the Western Canon prepares young minds for public service. Yet these supposedly enlightened minds were trumped by a self-educated Scot, much as they were, centuries ago, by a Scottish born British liberal politician of greater eminence than Mr. Galloway — whose name was David Hume. We are reminded, once again, that genius is not the exclusive product of this and that educational system, social class, gender or country. Rhetoric — up until the Industrial Revoltion — was mainstay of European university education — is hardly taught and studied any more. Back then the main theory of history was that it was made by Great Men, a theory now discredited. A look around the modern political scene might suggest one reason for it: that great statesmen, craftsmen of thought, speech and action from both Left and Right, are a thing of the past. One can hardly imagine Mr. Galloway making mincemeat of Winston Churchill in a similar way in parliamentary debate, had he lived in different times. It is less likely that education, which has not changed that much in some places, is to blame: rather an increasingly polarized, black and white, political arena heavily laden with ideological dogma deposited by history since the last great age of intrepid thought and open debate, a long bloody era of ideological revolutions and wars. One can only hope that a new generation of men and women will arise from great schools, and yes, even factories, who will be less interested in the pursuit of clout and a glorious career and more interested in finding a path to peace and prosperity in an increasingly dangerous world.    As for the performance of the US Senators, who are hardly expected to fill the shoes of the Great Men, it is possible that American lawyers are trained not to make fancy arguments, since most trials are jury trials: the common man might not understand, and actually be offended by smarter-than-thou-ism. Yet the senators failed in the back-and-forth jabs of debate, in which they had the upper hand, since they could direct questioning, and which they should never have allowed to become a debate. By the time the meaning of the answer is parsed by the interlocutor, the point beside the point has already been made. What is beside the point, completely, is that Mr. Galloway talked about some very important things that should have been discussed in the US Senate already, and that Iraq remains a mess today, and its suffering people can in no way be persuaded that the winners of similar foregone debates in London and Washington had devised a master plan of supporting Saddam, fighting Saddam and bombing the country to bits, leaving him in power, punishing its people while he gets richer, then invading the country again to get rid of him, while all the while the same elites get rich on shady oil — a plan which almost didn’t work because of a corrupt and pusillanimous United Nations.    You don’t have to be a master of the craft of rhetoric to see that. to Top LINKS VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT: GALLOWAY VS. THE US SENATE The Senate page with the complete hearing George Galloway’s speech at the rally at Oxford Town Hall on Monday 19 January 2004 (indymedia) Wikipedia: George Galloway