Right, heres where it gets complicated...
The Stop the War coalition here in the UK is made up from many groups all opposed to the war - it organised the demonstration over here in cooperation with the Muslim Association of Britain and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I don't mind working with CND - but I have serious misgivings about involving the MAB, for precisely the reasons you have stated.
Lets get this straight first though, I don't oppose these people because they are Muslim - I oppose them because they are the British wing of the international organisation the "Muslim Brotherhood". Admittedly a slightly more presentable face of fundamentalism, but it still holds many of the undesirable characteristics. The Muslim Brotherhood, at least in other countries, has supported some pretty nasty movements and done some pretty nasty stuff. But as a rule the British left over here accept their involvment as the MAB presents itself not as a wing of a political islmamisist organisation but instead as simply a community pressure group - apolitcal. This is hard to swallow, considering their international pedigree.
But where it gets really disturbing is the more recent work the Brotherhood have done - most notably the Cairo declaration. Basically the Brotherhood organised a conference in Cairo, including the British SWP but more importantly the Iraqi foreign minister. This conference then passed a particularly belligerent motion proposed by said representative of Saddam Hussein's government. This was then passed by the Stop the War campaign back here in the UK at their national conference by a unanimous vote.
My problem here is that we aren't strong enough as a movement against either the Muslim Brotherhood or Saddam Hussein and his government. For a movement that is supposedly supporting the people of Iraq it seems to give a whole new level of respectability to their oppressors. The problem is that a large amount of people in the coalition just have a complete number blindness on this issue - they want to see huge numbers of people at the demonstrations and will abandon ideology to get them their. Involvment of the MAB is therefore vital to them, and particularly unpalatable to me and lots of other people who actually know who the hell this group really is internationally.
As I said earlier, this post is really only in reference to the British Stop the War movement. I do not think we are getting this right at the moment - we give tacit support to Hussein. A specific march against him? Well - just as you have misconstrued this march as being in favour of him as it is against the war surely some people would misconstrue being against Saddam as being in favour of war. I would rather have a demonstration in favour of the Iraqi people - against war on them and against Saddam oppressing them. If you think that war is the only answer to Saddam then I think you miss the point of democracy - you can't impose it from the top down. Action has to come from the people to get rid of him, so we need solidarity with those people - we don't want to bomb the living bejeezus (I love that word...
) out of them in order to help them.
So, no to war, no to Saddam. A message that I agree is being lost at present under the pressure to get people on the streets.