I'd rather it was money than belief that made George Galloway support Saddam

If you cheered Galloway at the anti-war rally, now is the time to pause and ask yourself: what did I do?

Yesterday morning, I was woken up at six a.m. "I told you! I told you!", an Iraqi voice said to me. It was an exile friend, squealing with pleasure. "I always said he was being paid by Saddam!" When I switched on the news to see what she was talking about, it wasn't a great shock. Many Iraqi exiles have long reckoned that George Galloway had ulterior, dodgy motives. They suspected that nobody who was seriously concerned for the well-being of the Iraqi people would have behaved in the bizarre way that Galloway has over the past decade.

Unlike the vast majority of the people in the anti-war movement, the maverick MP has plainly offered support and sympathy for Saddam's Baathist tyranny. He greeted the dictator in 1994 with the words: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." He said this to a man who had "the courage" to murder hundreds of thousands of Muslims. A man who had "the strength" to drain the swamps of the Marsh Arabs and shunt them into desert shacks. A man who had the "indefatigability" to gas the Kurds.

There are two possible motives for this behaviour: admiration for Saddam, or gratitude for his cash. Both options stink: either he was paid by Saddam, or Saddam didn't need to offer him cash. I for one will think better of Galloway if he is a crook. If he was just doing this for the old, foul motive of an extra £375,000 a year, he is a bit less immoral than if he backs Saddam's atrocities sincerely. As the French left said when Chirac faced Le Pen in the presidential elections last year: "Better a crook than a fascist."

If you read the interview he conducted with the dictator last year for the Mail on Sunday, the belief that Galloway might in some warped way actually believe he was helping the wretched people of Iraq vanishes into air. It is a moist panegyric for the fascistic dictator, the latest example of a horrible genre – lefties drooling over tyrants, a la George Bernard Shaw's interview with Stalin – which many of us thought was dead. Galloway fawns that Saddam "radiates power. There's a nervousness and over-eagerness among those around him, but also a zen-like calm". The interview continues in this drooling tone: Saddam makes one throwaway comment about Winston Churchill, so Galloway says he is "evidently something of a Churchill scholar". He has fresh flowers, "artfully arranged", in his bunker, so Galloway says that it is "hardly the heart of darkness or the axis of evil". Think about the moral evasion contained in that thought. I don't think, George, that anybody said Saddam was evil because his flower-arranging skills were deficient.

The truth is that, to all decent people, Galloway and his dwindling band of comrades were rotting in a political graveyard before any of these accusations emerged. We do not need allegations of financial crookedness; we already know that he is morally crooked. The evidence for his authoritarianism is clear (indeed, I had documented it at length in this column, and said that he should be expelled from the Labour Party long before the current scandal). He has said that he would describe himself as a Stalinist (death toll: 30 million) if it was not "making a rod for my own back". He describes the day the Soviet Union fell as "the worst day of my life". He supports the death penalty. He praised General Musharraf's coup in Pakistan, saying that "in poor third world countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians. Pakistan is always on the brink of breaking apart into its widely disparate components. Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together ... Democracy is a means, not an end in itself." (I know Bush and Blair have also praised Musharraf; they too should be ashamed).

Central to Galloway's world-view is his decision to blame all of the woes in Iraq on the UN sanctions regime, thereby letting Saddam off the hook. All that is bad in Iraq is thus laid at Britain and America's door. Sanctions were ineffective and should have been abandoned sooner, but the absurdly inflated claims by the Gallowayite anti-sanctions campaign neglect a basic truth: a vast amount of the damage done by sanctions was caused not by the policy itself, but by Saddam's sadistic way of implementing them. The evidence for this is clear. The same sanctions apply in northern Iraq, which was administered not by Saddam's tyranny but by the democratic Kurdish regime and the UN oil-for-food programme. Did children die in northern Iraq, as they have in the south? Did the hospitals run dry of basic supplies, as they have in Saddam's territory? No. Infant mortality rates improved; life expectancy for all groups got better – and all under sanctions. Saddam, in contrast, concentrated the resources which did come into the country – which were more than sufficient for the population – on his own cronies, while in the north the UN and Kurds used the available resources for all the people.

If the current allegations are true, Saddam could afford over £300k in pocket money for George Galloway and god knows how many other stooges. Sanctions did not make him squander this money and hoard medicines while Iraqi children died; he did it of his own free will. Yet Galloway and his friend and ally John Pilger still say that it is sanctions themselves – not their implementation – that caused all of Iraq's problems. Pilger last week said that before the UN introduced the restrictions, "Saddam Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular society and a large and prosperous middle class ... All this was smashed by the Anglo-American embargo". Saddam was broadly good, then, before the wicked Americans came along. (Apart from the "totalitarian nature of the regime", which he mentions briefly, in passing, bloodlessly and with no post-1991 illustrations, as ever).

It is a sign of how deranged the far left has become that one of their most prominent spokesmen can be seriously accused of being a paid agent of an appalling totalitarian regime, and it doesn't surprise anyone. Whether or not Galloway is actually Saddam's client (he says he'll sue the Telegraph), it should shake all decent people who followed Galloway's call to realise that he has only spoken in ways that would comfort Saddam and his gang of torturers. For this, he was applauded time and again at anti-war rallies by the very people who should be most repulsed by tyranny.

If you are one of the mostly decent people who cheered Galloway at the anti-war rally, now is the time to pause and ask yourself: "What did I do?" I am drawn to the left; it is my political home; but something has gone horribly wrong for us when Saddam-saluting Galloway can be seen as one of our leaders. The day when the left might not even have to be paid by a tyrant – when it might be offering him comfort for free – is a day from hell. We are living in that long, suplhur-scented day.

j.hari@independent.co.uk