Iraq and the unions

Brad Plumer catches his colleague not having a clue what he's talking about:

Jamie Kirchick laments the decline of the "anti-totalitarian left" and claims that the U.S. labor movement has abandoned its counterparts in Iraq:

"Whereas once the AFL-CIO had a large and effective international office, you'd be hard-pressed to hear, for instance, what they're doing for Iraqi trade-unionists."

But hang on, you'd only be "hard-pressed" if you didn't have access to Google. Just this past March, John Sweeney brokered a meeting between "17 top leaders from five Iraqi trade union federations" and the financial institutions working in Iraq. The AFL-CIO has been one of the few places tracking worker abuses in the country. Its Solidarity Center has been holding training workshops for Iraqi workers, pushing women's rights, and "connect[ing] Iraqi trade unions with their counterparts throughout the region." And so on. Now, the AFL-CIO has always been a fairly conservative group, and I don't agree with everything they did during the cold war (e.g.), but it's wrong to suggest that they've been ignoring Iraq.

Precisely. Of course, issuing sweeping critiques with opportunistic omissions (much like this one) is a favored tactic on the right. Every time Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International releases a report critical of America or Israel, conservatives bemoan the "fact" that neither human rights group ever says anything about atrocities committed by, for instance, Arab countries. It's the sort of "fact", of course, that a quick Google search can roundly refute, but no matter. One might wonder how a writer for The New Republic (and a temporary contributor to The Atlantic Monthly) could engage in the same sort of disingenuous argumentation. But then one should be reminded that said writer enjoys the devoted patronage of Marty Peretz, who does stuff like this all the time.