The use of broad (and narrow) political labels and named ideologies is obviously inevitable on this earth, and useful up to a point, but the many pitfalls the practice leads to can make one wish for a world where all such labels were disavowed, and people could see into eachother’s hearts, and deal only with how best to achieve mutually desired results. We all would like to see less poverty in the world; how do we best achieve that? We all would like to see a more peaceful and just world; how do we best achieve that? And so on. And yet, in the real world, as soon as discussions begin on such questions, differing logic leads to differing ideologies, which leads to competing sides in the argument, which leads right back to those labels.

Well, this naïve and pointless musing was prompted by a recent column from Amir Taheri. He writes about the growing dichotomy between the Left in the West and the Left in the Middle East. While those who consider themselves part of the Left in the Middle East have increasingly come to see American intervention in that region as a force for positive change and a protection against tyrants and murderous religious fanaticism, the European and American Left have allowed their reflexive anti-Americanism to put them in the position of sharing the bed of the dictators and the Islamists. It’s just one example of how political labels don’t travel terribly well through space and time.

BEFORE the U.S.-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, much of the Middle Eastern Left shared the views of its U.S. and European counterparts with regard to America.

“We looked to the Left in the West and imitated it,” says Awad Nasir, one of Iraq’s best-known poets and a life-long Communist. “We heard from the United States and Western Europe that being Left meant being anti-American. So we were anti-American. And then we saw Americans coming from the other side of the world to save us from Saddam Hussein – something that our leftist friends and the Soviet Union would never contemplate.”

Mustafa Kazemi, spokesman for the new Afghan front, expresses similar sentiments. “Our nation is still facing the menace of obscurantism and terror from Taliban and al Qaeda,” he says. “Thus, we are surprised when elements of the Left in the United States and Europe campaign for withdrawal so that our new democracy is left defenseless against its enemies.”

IRAQ’S parties of the Left were shocked when the new Socialist government in Spain decided to withdraw from the U.S.-led coalition in 2004. “We had hoped that with a party of the Left in power in Madrid we would get more support against the Islamofascists, not a withdrawal,” says Aziz al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi communist leader.

Tareq al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country. “Our enemy is al Qaeda, not the United States,” he says.

Jumblatt, the Lebanese leader, says he realized that his life-long anti-Americanism had been misplaced when he saw “long lines of people, waiting to vote in Iraq, in the first free election in an Arab country.”

Samir Qassir, a Lebanese center-left leader murdered by the Syrians, often spoke of anti-Americanism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel” in the Middle East. “Politics is always a question of choice,” Qassir said in one of his last articles. “Here in the Middle East, we face a choice between democracy and alliance with the United States on one hand and surrender to religious fanatics and terrorists on the other.”

SKIMMING through the Middle Eastern press these days can produce unexpected results. It’s not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an American or Western European leftist – and, alongside it on the same page, a pro-American article from an Arab, Iranian or Afghan progressive figure.

In Iran, for example, Hussein Shariatmadari – the ultra-Islamist editor of the daily newspaper Kayhan and a theoretician of the extreme right – often admiringly cites such American leftist figures as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jane Fonda.

Having all but abandoned its traditional opposition to capitalism and the bourgeois democratic system, much of the Western Left is forced to cling to anti-Americanism as its backbone.

To be sure, anti-Americanism is not the ailment of the Western Left alone. Extreme-right parties are also vehemently anti-American. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French neofascist National Front, is as opposed to the new democratic Iraq as Spain’s Socialist Premier Jose Luis Zapatero.

In the Middle East, however, a good part of the Left, while not especially enamored of the United States, sees it as an ally against Islamist and totalitarian pan-Arab movements.

“Anti-Americanism is a luxury we cannot afford in the Middle East,” says Adnan Hussein, a leftist Iraq writer recently picked by the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential columnists in the world. “Blinded by anti-Americanism, the Left in the West ends up on the same side as religious fascists and despots.”

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