IF CHUTZPAH WERE A TRADABLE currency, chances are George Galloway could buy out Microsoft. Last week the renegade British member of parliament, always full of bluster, responded to allegations that he lied under oath before a U.S. Senate panel about his financial dealings with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by demanding–no–“begging for prosecution.” Showing the pugilistic bravado that’s made him a hero to the antiwar movement, Galloway, 51, challenged Sen. Norm Coleman–“this lickspittle,” in the Scotsman’s locution–to “put up or shut up.” He also got cheeky. “I’ll head for Heathrow now,” Galloway said, “pausing only to pick up my toothbrush, if they will promise to charge me with perjury.” For Galloway, this is personal. He’s even flirting with the option of booking a venue in Coleman’s home state of Minnesota and pestering the senator to debate him. “We want to take the fight to the enemy,” he crowed.
Coleman, who’s led a Senate probe of Galloway’s ties to the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, can only laugh at the MP’s swagger. “Debate me about what?” he asks. “The bank records? Debate the bank!”
According to Coleman, GOP chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “The bank records are the smoking gun.” These records–from Citibank, Lloyd’s TSB Bank, Co-operative Bank, Arab Bank, and others–along with testimony from Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s former deputy premier, official Saddam-era documents, and the depositions of two key oil traders indicate that Galloway sought and took bribes from Baghdad to fund the Mariam Appeal, his anti-sanctions project, and then offered spurious testimony to the Senate on May 17, 2005.
In its 47-page report on the Galloway matter issued last Tuesday, the subcommittee made five principal claims.
(1) “Galloway personally solicited and was granted oil allocations from the Government of Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein. The Hussein regime granted Galloway and the Mariam Appeal eight allocations totaling 23 million barrels from 1999 through 2003.”
(2) “Galloway’s wife, Dr. Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received approximately $150,000 in connection with one of those oil allocations.”
(3) “Galloway’s political campaign, the Mariam Appeal, received at least $446,000 in connection with the oil allocations granted to Galloway and the Mariam Appeal under the Oil-for-Food Program.”
(4) “The Hussein regime received improper ‘surcharge’ payments amounting to $1,642,000.65 in connection with the oil allocations granted to Galloway and the Mariam Appeal.”
(5) “Galloway knowingly made false or misleading statements under oath before the Subcommittee at its hearings on May 17, 2005.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Galloway’s MO, picture a mustachioed, middle-aged demagogue spewing wild conspiracy theories about George Bush, Tony Blair, the neocons, the Zionists, et al., in a thick Scottish brogue. He combines Howard Dean’s bombast and Michael Moore’s buffoonish anti-Americanism with Fidel Castro’s taste for cigars and John Gotti’s weakness for posh suits.
The Dundee-born Galloway has served in parliament nearly without interruption since 1987. “Gorgeous George,” who boasts an unimpeachably leftist CV, fiercely opposed the first Gulf war, and later became a full-throated critic of the U.N. sanctions regime. In January 1994, he paid a visit to the dictator in Baghdad and gushed, on Iraqi state television, “I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you”–adding, in Arabic, “until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem.” He also flattered Iraq’s “excellency” with the news “that even today, three years after the war,” there were still Palestinian families “who [named] their newborn sons Saddam.”
This round of bootlicking earned Galloway a “severe reprimand” from his colleagues in the Labour party. But his pro-Saddam sycophancy continued throughout the 1990s. Galloway also founded the Mariam Appeal, a dual-purpose organization designed to campaign against U.N. sanctions and raise money for a four-year-old Iraqi girl, Mariam Hamza, afflicted with leukemia. After rallying Labour resistance to the second Gulf war, Galloway finally got cashiered from the party in October 2003–for, among other things, urging Arabs to defend Iraq and calling on U.K. troops to refuse orders. But in May 2005, now wearing the colors of his self-created Respect party, he was elected to a new seat representing East London’s Muslim-heavy Bethnal Green & Bow district.
That same month, Galloway strutted into Washington like a peacock. Not only had he secured “one of the most remarkable results in modern British electoral history,” as the BBC hailed it. He had also, in December 2004, won some $280,000 in libel damages from London’s Daily Telegraph, which had reported in April 2003, on the basis of documents found amidst the rubble of Iraq’s foreign ministry, that Galloway had received over $600,000 through Oil-for-Food mischief. (Crucially, Galloway’s lawyers never questioned the documents’ authenticity. Rather, Judge David Eady held that because Galloway was not given a proper chance to read the documents or comment on them before they were published, the Telegraph had defamed him.)
With the wind at his back, Galloway ridiculed his Senate inquisitors, especially Sen. Coleman. “I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf,” he insisted, reprising a shopworn talking point. Galloway’s critique of the Bush-Blair rationale for war (“a pack of lies”) won him plaudits from the international media–plus a fawning profile in the New York Times. It was Springtime for Galloway.
But now things look rather different. Last week, just two days after the subcommittee report came out, Paul Volcker’s U.N.-sponsored Independent Inquiry Committee issued its final appraisal of Oil-for-Food. The Volcker team corroborated Sen. Coleman’s findings, and uncovered an extra $120,000 that Galloway’s wife had pocketed from illicit Oil-for-Food schemes. Both reports detail how Abu-Zayyad profited from Iraqi oil transactions with the aid of Galloway’s close chum, Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zureikat. (True, Galloway and Abu-Zayyad are now estranged. But they lived together at the time these deals occurred.)
Galloway’s explanation beggars belief. “I am not responsible for my wife,” he told a British radio station. “I am not party to Mr. Zureikat’s business arrangements. I am completely bemused.” The stocky Scotsman claimed he “did not know [Abu-Zayyad] had received money from Mr. Zureikat, if she indeed had.”
Parliament, however, now has reasonable grounds to expel Galloway for violating its disclosure rules. Meanwhile, back in the States, Sen. Coleman says he will refer all Galloway-relevant subcommittee documents to officials at the Justice Department, who could easily seek to indict the antiwar paladin for perjury and/or obstruction of a Senate investigation.
Gorgeous George reputedly loves the rough-and-tumble of political theater. He’d better enjoy it while he can. His curtain call may be fast approaching.
Duncan Currie is a reporter for The Weekly Standard.
