Failure to form a government
It is more than four months since, under the shadow of the guns of the 200,000-strong army of occupation, the farcical elections to the puppet Iraqi assembly were held. As was to be expected, under the sectarian constitution devised by US imperialism, these ‘elections’ were won by the shia coalition known as the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which secured 180 seats. But up to now the parties represented in this puppet assembly, divided on sectarian religious and ethnic lines and fighting with one another over the spoils of office, have been unable to form a government of (don’t laugh!) national unity.
Al-Jaafari dumped
Initially the UIA voted by a narrow majority to nominate Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the imperialist-appointed interim puppet prime minister, to head the first so-called ‘constitutional’ government since the barbaric Anglo-American imperialist aggression against Iraq three years ago that resulted in the illegal overthrow of Iraq’s elected and legitimate president, Saddam Hussein. The US and some of its Iraqi puppets, notably the leadership of the Kurds, were opposed to the choice of al-Jaafari for two reasons: first, al-Jaafari’s Da’awa party is considered by the US to be too close to Iran, which makes the US rather uncomfortable, since it is involved in open dispute with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, and second, al-Jaafari only won the nomination because he received the support of the group of Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi army staged two uprisings in 2004 against US occupation, and which has emerged from the 15 December 2005 ‘elections’ as the biggest group in the shia bloc and has formed an alliance with the Da’awa Party.
In view of these developments, the Financial Times of 20 March correctly observed that “America’s reputation – for statesmanship, for projecting power, for even basic competence – has been badly damaged” by the Iraq war, adding that “increasing US impotence shows in its destructive recourse to air strikes”. Referring to the flight of the Iraqi middle class and managerial sections of the population, the Financial Times states sarcastically: “Iraqi reconstruction is an unqualified success – in Jordan.” (Leading article, Financial Times, 20 March 2006)
On 30 March this year, Bush expressed his frustration at the continuing stalemate and the failure of the Iraqi puppets to string together at least a nominal government of ‘national unity’. Two days later, on 2 April, Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the US administration’s irritation, saying that the Iraqi people (read: the US administration) are “losing patience”. In the end, following arm-twisting by the US and the visit of Secretary Rice and Britain’s Jack Straw, the shia bloc agreed on 21 April to drop al-Jaafari and instead nominate Jawad al-Maliki, who is also from the Da’awa Party, as prime minister-designate. Apparently al-Maliki is marginally more acceptable to the US.
The economy and infrastructure in ruins
While this irrelevant side show, aimed at concocting a puppet government subservient to the occupation powers, continues its tragic-comic proceedings, the occupation regime is totally incapable of catering to the most basic needs of the Iraqi people. Oil production has dwindled to half the pre-war output (2.05 mbd as compared to 3.70 mbd in the 1970s); only 32 percent of the Iraqi population has access to clean drinking water now, compared with 50 percent before the war (according to the US Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen); and only 19 percent of Iraqis today have working sewer connections, compared with 24 percent in 2003.
The reconstruction effort has ground to a halt as the blows directed by the resistance have obliged the occupation regime to siphon off an increasing percentage of the reconstruction funds to security-related projects – from training puppet police and military units to building concentration camps and paying private security firms – with the result that security-related costs account for 47.2 percent of the so-called reconstruction funds. (Information in preceding paragraphs taken from a report in The Times of India, 8 April 2006)
The utter failure of the occupation to subjugate Iraq, and the successes of the resistance in its fight to end the occupation, are revealed by the grim statistics emanating from Iraq. More than 20,000 US troops have been killed or injured (nearly 2,600 killed) since the start of the war three years ago. The resistance has destroyed 1,000 US army vehicles and brought down 71 helicopter gunships and 14 Chinook helicopters. The year 2005 witnessed nearly 190 attacks by the resistance on oil fields and pipelines in the north and south of the country, crippling oil production and causing losses to the tune of $6.5bn in 2005, resulting in the deaths of over 150 personnel in the oil industry, according to Asam Jihad from the ‘Iraqi’ Petroleum Ministry.
Feats of the resistance
Apart from the routine daily blows delivered by the resistance to the occupation forces, there have been some spectacular feats performed by the national liberation forces in Iraq. Here are but a few examples. On 21 March 2006, the Iraqi resistance stormed a jail at daybreak, killing 18 police officers and releasing all the inmates. According to the report of this attack in the International Herald Tribune of 22 March, more than 100 masked resistance fighters surrounded the jail in Muqdadiya, 100 km north east of Baghdad, and blasted government buildings with mortars, machine guns and grenades.
Being overpowered, the puppet Iraqi forces radioed for help, to which call US helicopter gunships responded quickly. However, the helicopters were met with rifle fire. The battle raged for close to an hour and showed that “the anti-government insurgency is hardly over”.
During this attack, 20 puppet vehicles were destroyed. On the same day, according to the International Herald Tribune, the resistance attacked a number of police patrols and government buildings across the country. The response of the US military and its puppets was to rampage around the resistance stronghold of Samarra backed by the largest air assault since the invasion three years ago, round up thousands of innocent civilians in the countryside, and hand them over to the tender mercies of the sectarian militias who routinely torture and beat to death thousands of people every month for no other reason than that they come from places that are strongholds of resistance.
With each passing month, it becomes clearer that, far from being exceptional, the torture and brutality practised by the US forces at the Abu Ghraib concentration camp are typical of what the occupation regime is doing all over the country. It has turned the whole of Iraq into a vast concentration camp and torture chamber. Dr John Pace, the outgoing UN human rights chief, dropped a bombshell when he revealed to the Times of Malta, a Maltese daily, that a thousand detainees a month are tortured to death in Iraq. He also stated that:
“The Baghdad morgue received 1,100 bodies in July alone, about 900 of whom bore evidence of torture or summary execution. That continued throughout the year, and last December there were 780 bodies, including 400 having gunshot wounds or wounds as those caused by electric drills.”
He added that between 80-90 percent of those rounded up and thrown into prisons, there to be tortured and brutally murdered, were neither criminals nor insurgents.
Sunday 9 April was the third anniversary of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in the centre of Baghdad by the US military. The occupation regime named it ‘Freedom Day’ in the forlorn hope that it might become an annual celebration to mark Iraq’s ‘liberation’. But the resistance, representing the occupied Iraqi people, marked this anniversary by a renewed offensive across the entire country. In Ramadi, the resistance forced the Americans and their puppets out of 60 percent of the town, and occupation forces in nearly all the big cities of the country were fiercely attacked by the forces of national liberation.
In March, some apologists for the occupation regime, on the basis of there having been relatively few US casualties, were claiming that the Iraqi resistance was on the retreat. On 12 April, however, the US army stated that in just the first 11 days of April, 36 US troops had been killed – a figure in excess of American casualties for the whole of March. The US ambassador (Pro-Consul would be a better description), Zalmay Khalilzad, was much closer to reality when, at the beginning of March, he said that America had “opened … a Pandora’s box” when it invaded Iraq. (Reported in the Financial Times, 11 March 2006)
Disaster for British policy
It has been the constant refrain of the British establishment that the situation in the south of Iraq is much better, and that the relationship between the British army of occupation and the local population is marked by a degree of cordiality, if not warmth. This, it was further alleged, was solely due to the skill and understanding of the British army, gained through several centuries of colonialism.
That smug complacency was wiped out by the events in Basra last September, and things have got far worse since then. The British army is fighting a guerrilla movement determined to liberate Iraq from the grip of the occupation. The incident of 6 May, and the developments following it, are sufficient proof of this assertion.
A member of the Mahdi Party shot down a British army Lynx helicopter over the centre of Baghdad with a shoulder-launched missile, killing all the five servicemen travelling in it. The downing of the helicopter prompted scenes of jubilation among the Iraqis. Iraqi television and al-Jazeera showed hundreds of people dancing in the streets and hurling stones at British soldiers as a plume of black smoke rose from the helicopter into the sky.
The crash was followed by clashes between British soldiers from the 20th Armoured Brigade and supporters of the Mahdi Army, resulting in the deaths of at least four civilians, including a child, and injuries to several dozens of other civilians. Following these incidents, Jassan Khalaf, a commander of the Mahdi Army, on being contacted by the Sunday Times, threatened further attacks on the 8,000-strong British military in southern Iraq: “We will target their tanks and their troops. We have the right to choose the time. It was a good time today.” (Sunday Times, 7 May 2006)
The incident was the worst for the British forces since January 2005, when 10 British soldiers were killed in a Hercules aircraft shot down by small arms fire near Balad, north of Baghdad. Helicopters are increasingly the mode of transport for the British forces to move around the city, following the deaths of several British soldiers in a series of roadside bombings since last September. According to military experts and analysts, the latest crash represents a disaster for the British policy in southern Iraq. Major Charles Hayman of Jane’s Defence Consultancy observed:
“It’s a very worrying development for military commanders on the ground because they will have to stop choppers flying. Meanwhile the boys on the street see it as a blow against the occupiers.” (Reported in Sunday Times, 7 May 2006)
The attack delivers a shattering blow to the British army’s attempt to pacify and control Basra, Iraq’s second biggest city and a stronghold of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Already the British ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to enlist the support of the local population had ground to a halt, as had the attempt to train local police, which became heavily infiltrated by Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other groups.
Over the weekend of 6-7 May, the resistance distributed leaflets throughout Baghdad, threatening a Jihad if the occupation forces did not leave. The British military headquarters on the fringes of the town came under rocket fire on Monday 8 May and once more since then. On 13 May, two British soldiers died in a roadside bombing, bringing the total of British soldiers killed in Iraq to 110.
However, the number of British soldiers injured in Iraq runs to several thousand. In January this year, John Reid, the then Defence Minister, was claiming that only 23 British soldiers had been wounded in Iraq. Since then the Ministry of Defence has admitted that close to 6,700 servicemen have been hospitalised in Iraq since the invasion. Of these, 4,000 had to be brought to Britain for treatment. These figures group together those wounded in action with victims of accidents, stress and illness.
It is now clear that the occupation forces face a well-armed and virile national liberation movement in both the north and south of Iraq. Meanwhile, it is not inconceivable that the twisted but persistent logic of imperialism may drive the US into some mad adventure against Iran. If that were to happen, “the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle”. These are the words of a ‘Pentagon advisor’ in his conversation with US journalist Seymour Hersh, while a former four-star general told Hersh that, the presence of 8,000 British troops notwithstanding, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck”.
All these developments cannot fail to put further pressure on the British government to end its involvement in this mad imperialist venture. In any case, they will not fail to acquaint the British working class and the wider population with the realities of Iraq and shatter the cosy myths propagated by Her Majesty’s mercenary ministers and the venal journalist fraternity.
Dissension and calls for withdrawal
The ignominious failure of the Anglo-American predatory war has provoked dissensions even within the ruling classes of the US and Britain, with calls for the withdrawal of their forces from Iraq growing louder and louder with each passing month.
In Britain, Michael Ancram, former Conservative Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Defence Secretary, has called for British troops to be pulled out of Iraq, describing their presence as “both pointless and dangerous”, adding that the Tories got it wrong when they gave their support to the Iraq war. Writing in the Daily Mail of Friday 21 April, he says: “It is time for us now to get out of Iraq with dignity and honour while we still can.”
He goes on: “We are officially in Iraq and have been since the war, to assist the Iraqi civil authority establish and maintain public order. It is increasingly debatable whether there is any sustainable degree of public order to be maintained or indeed any real civil authority to assist any more.
“It is now hard to see what further good we can do by staying on. Having set out at the beginning to be part of the solution, it is now sadly evident that we are in danger of becoming part of the problem.”
Exposing the Bush-Blair make-believe assertions that democracy is taking hold (when the ‘Iraqi’ government has authority over only a few acres of Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone) and that the resistance is being crushed (at a time when upwards of 50,000 armed Iraqis are tearing the guts out of the mightiest killing machine known to humanity), Mr Ancram condemns the “unbelievable state of denial of both the US and British governments in relation to the realities in Iraq of today”, which he says has made the position of British troops “untenable”.
“Whatever word games Tony Blair, Jack Straw [then Foreign Secretary] and John Reid [Defence Secretary at the time] may try to play, the insurgency is on the increase. As for the civil authority, the new ‘government’ is headless … the shadow of Vietnam hovers and our options narrow. We can withdraw now … or we can risk being driven out in more dangerous circumstances later.”
Continues Mr Ancram: “For the moment, the unavoidable truth is that Iraq is a mess – and a dangerous one at that. Far from getting better, it is getting worse.
“We cannot pretend that none of this is happening. We have been in Iraq for three long years, and it is now time to take stock.”
He concludes: “No amount of wishful thinking can any longer disguise the truth. We have done our job. We have done it well [being a blue-blooded Tory and an imperialist politician to boot, Michael Ancram cannot help displaying his own illusions about the job well done]. Now we should get out.”
In the US, no less a war-mongering imperialist politician than Zbigniew Brzezinsky stated that the “occupation of Iraq has proved to be … costly and destructive of Iraq’s social fabric”. Characterising the Anglo-American aggression against, and occupation of, Iraq as “a bloody war of attrition waged by an ineffective occupier”, he says “the time is ripe to adopt a strategy for terminating the US military presence in the country”. Brzezinsky of course does not give a damn about the social fabric of Iraq and its destruction by the pillaging hordes of the Anglo-American imperialist soldiery, any more than he cared a fig for the social fabric of Afghanistan and its destruction by the imperialist-sponsored and funded mercenaries at the time that he was former president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. He is, however, alarmed by the damage being done to US prestige and, more importantly, to US economic and political interests. Surveying the larger scene and the devastating effects of the continuing war in Iraq on American’s global position, he speaks thus:
“The US needs to recognise that its intervention in Iraq is becoming part of a wider, dangerous collision between America and the muslim world – a collision that could prove, if it becomes truly widespread, devastating to American’s global position. An America in conflict with the world of Islam as a whole will be an America with more enemies and fewer friends, an America more isolated and less secure.” (‘Is it time to plan for American withdrawal from Iraq?’, Financial Times, 18 April 2006)
The Financial Times, one of the most representative spokesmen of British finance capital, in its editorial of 25 March, says that the Iraq war has “badly discredited liberal interventionism [the Financial Times’ self-deluding expression for Anglo-American imperialism’s predatory wars in the Balkans, west Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq], while at the same time turning Iraq into … a new incubator of terrorism”. It goes on to say that with the intervention in Iraq, “Iran’s leverage has been enormously increased, while America’s (and Britain’s) reputation is at rock bottom.” In other words, the war in Iraq has been such a disaster as to pose a formidable obstacle to future imperialist wars (“liberal and interventionist internationalism”, if it pleases the sages in the editorial offices of the Financial Times) being planned by the US and Britain, as for instance against Iran. (See ‘Blair’s flawed defence of foreign activism’, Financial Times)
Iraqi reality
If some of the prominent imperialist politicians and prestigious publications are questioning the war in Iraq and calling for the troops to be pulled out, they are merely reflecting the reality of the theatre of battlefield in Iraq, where the imperialist occupation forces, thanks to the heroic resistance of the Iraqi people, are staring defeat in the face. The imperialist soldiery is suffering increasing casualties and demoralisation, both of which are eating into its fighting capacity. While almost the entire population of Iraq hate and oppose the occupation and wish to see the back of the occupiers, the Iraqi puppet forces have no stomach for the fight, and the majority of American soldiers in Iraq want to pull out of Iraq.
The Guardian of 8 February 2006 reported that, according to a large-scale opinion poll recently conducted by Maryland University, 87 percent of Iraqis (including 64 percent of Kurds) “endorsed a demand for a timetabled withdrawal of the occupiers”. Most of the British media ignored these findings.
Further, most American troops in Iraq are of the opinion that the US should withdraw within the next 12 months. A Zogby International/Le Moyne College poll found that while a mere 23 percent of US troops believed that they should stay in Iraq “as long as they are needed”, a whopping 72 percent said that the US should vacate within 12 months, with 29 percent expressing themselves in favour of an immediate pull-out. In view of this, it is not surprising that US president Bush’s overall approval rating fell to a new low of 34 percent in the first week of March, while his handling of the war in Iraq received the approval of a mere 30 percent of the respondents, according to a CBS Newspoll (See ‘US troops back swift pull out from Iraq’, Financial Times, 1 March 2006)
As for Britain, the continuation of this filthy, bloody and unjust imperialist war has begun to affect the morale of the British army. Several British soldiers have openly stood up against the war, including the doctor who refused service in Iraq on grounds of its illegality and an SAS soldier who resigned. When the SAS soldier was told during his court-martial proceedings that he was guilty of disobeying orders, he correctly replied that even a soldier was duty-bound to refuse to obey illegal orders, as was established at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi criminals. Many more soldiers have opted for disappearing without leave. The number of such soldiers has trebled since the invasion began. According to a recent report in The Independent on Sunday, nearly 400 soldiers went AWOL in 2005 and have failed to report for duty since then.
The US attempt to Iraqise the fight has failed miserably. Although the nominal strength of the puppet Iraqi army stands at an impressive 113,000 troops, its fighting capacity counts for little. “No one enlisted out of … principle,” said one young officer. “They signed up for money.”
In a country with horrendous levels of unemployment, thanks to the destruction wrought by the imperialist aggressors, even the miserable $300 a month paid to an Iraqi soldier must look like a handsome fee. All the same, these puppet troops have no desire to fight their own countrymen. As a result, in many units, two-thirds of the soldiers have gone absent without leave, finding it demoralising to fight “a largely invisible foe”. (See Financial Times, 29 March 2006)
Unfairness of all-volunteer army
At least 20,000 American soldiers have been killed or injured in Iraq to date. If, in spite of these casualties, there is not an outcry and a truly mass movement against the war in the US, it is because of the absence of the draft (conscription). Writing in the Financial Times of 23 March, John Weisberg says that “the comfortable classes find it shockingly easy to forget about the conflict”, because most “middle-class professionals, academics and journalists do not have relatives or friends in Iraq or Afghanistan” and because they “have not been called on to make sacrifices, financial or otherwise”, as well as the fact that we “hear less and less about the occupation on the evening news”.
No one is calling for the draft – neither Bush nor Cheney – for “the prospect of conscription would make their decision to invade Iraq even more unpopular”, and having “lived through Vietnam and shirked the draft themselves, they understand that if people anywhere near their own station in life were forced to fight any remaining support for wars of arguable necessity would dry up and blow away”. (Ibid)
Although a soldier’s chances of being killed in Iraq are slightly lower than in Vietnam, thanks mainly to impressive advances in medicine, the risk of being hurt in Iraq, and thus surviving only with catastrophic and life-altering injuries, is far higher than it was in Vietnam – 3.1 percent as opposed to 1.8 percent. With this comes the dawning realisation of the dangers of duty in Iraq, which makes it more and more difficult for the US military to meet its recruitment targets.
“Despite raising cash bonuses to $10,000 and College scholarships to $70,000”, says Mr Weisberg, “the army missed its recruiting target last year by 10 percent. It has now even stopped routinely discharging people with drug and alcohol problems.” Thus it is clear that an all-volunteer force is “plainly undemocratic and unfair”, for poor young people “without good opportunities in life are handling the fighting and dying for those with better things to do”. Although the alternative – a resumption of the draft – “would be everyone’s nightmare”, says Mr Weisberg, “let us be honest enough to admit that not having the draft is not working either”.
In other words, the absence of conscription is producing manpower shortages and stretching the US army to its limits as it invades country after country and gets bogged down in unwinnable predatory wars, whereas the introduction of the draft, by forcing the “comfortable classes” to fight would add to the problems of US imperialism by making its wars much more unpopular.
Attempts to provoke a sectarian war
Impotent in the face of Iraqi resistance, the Anglo-American armies of occupation, in addition to resorting to indiscriminate and destructive air strikes, are turning increasingly to mass murder through the use of death squads. While hypocritically expressing fear at the prospect of such civil strife, they are actually doing their damnedest to provoke a civil war along confessional lines as the only way out of the mess they find themselves in,.
Although our ‘free’ and ‘truth-loving’ media do not report it, the armies of occupation have already put into practice the Salvador Option, whereby US-trained and armed death squads indiscriminately attack sunnis and shias alike, in an attempt to incite civil war. Just as the US through its death squads murdered 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands and forced millions into exile in Central America during Reagan’s presidency; just as, under Operation Phoenix, the CIA-directed death squads murdered 50,000 people in Vietnam, so today, the occupiers of Iraq are in the process of enacting a tragedy of similar proportions.
Support for these claims comes from some unexpected quarters. Two US generals have admitted to the presence of death squads, while in February 2005, the Wall Street Journal let slip the presence of six US-trained secret militias. In the same month, Lt Gen William Boykin, the deputy under-secretary for intelligence, told the New York Times: “I think we are doing what the Phoenix programme was designed to do.” Wayne Downing, a retired general and the former head of special operations forces, confirmed that US-led death squads commenced their operations soon after the March 2003 invasion. He told an NBC interviewer: “Katie, it is a nasty situation in Iraq right now, and this may help it get better.” (Information in the preceding paragraph taken from The Guardian, 8 February 2006)
Last September’s events in Basra, when two SAS soldiers from the British army, dressed as Arabs, were caught red-handed while on a bombing mission to provoke strife between Iraqis of different brands of Islam, clearly laid bare the imperialist strategy. The bombing on 22 February this year of the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra – a Shia shrine known as the Golden Mosque – in broad daylight by a highly-trained commando unit dressed in black, the colour of the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr, was in pursuit of the same wicked aim. But the attempt has been a failure, thanks to the efforts of the leaders of both sunni and shia communities, who have rightly pointed the finger at the occupation forces and demanded their exit from the country in no uncertain terms. Accusing the Americans of being behind the destruction of the Golden Mosque, the Iraqi underground state that “America is the main party responsible for the crime of attacking the tomb of Ali al-Hadi … because it is the power that occupies Iraq and has a basic interest in committing it.” (30 December 2005)
Addressing a Friday prayer meeting on 24 February, Muqtada al Sadr demanded an end to attacks on sunni muslims, saying “We are not enemies but brothers. Anyone who attacks a muslim is not a muslim”, adding “And he who assaults sacraments and mosques shall get his just punishment.”
Within 24 hours of al-Sadr’s call, his Mahdi Army were busy protecting sunni mosques. Al-Sadr, following in his late father’s footsteps, is famous for his attempts to forge unity between sunni and shia muslims and for portraying the US and Israel as their common enemies. At the time of the bombing of the Golden Mosque, al-Sadr was in Lebanon, from where he issued a statement, through al-Jazeera television, warning of “a plan by the occupation to spark a sectarian war”.
Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, with a considerable following among the shia community in Iraq, issued a statement laying the blame for the destruction of the mosque in Samarra squarely at the door of the imperialist powers occupying Iraq. He said: “The occupation forces and zionism, which seeing their plans dissolve, have planned this atrocity to sow hate between muslims and fuel divisions between sunnis and shiites … do not fall into the enemy trap by attacking mosques and sacred places of your sunni brothers … The enemy wants nothing more than weakening of the Islamic front.”
The sunnis, for their part, have galvanised themselves to help reconstruct the Golden Mosque, with sunni religious bodies donating large sums of money to pay for the construction. In the aftermath of the bombing, representatives of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a high-ranking sunni religious body in Iraq, and followers of al-Sadr met in Baghdad and issued a joint statement in which they condemned sectarian attacks on places of worship of either side as “terrorist attacks”. Blaming the occupation for the heinous acts unfolding in Iraq, they jointly demanded the withdrawal of the imperialist armies. This firm stand of the leaders of the two communities has served to diffuse the tensions and thus helped frustrate the imperialist attempts at provoking a civil war designed to break up Iraq and make it easy for Anglo-American forces to subjugate and dominate the country.
There is no civil war along confessional lines. This story is part and parcel of the deception campaign unleashed by the occupying powers as a subterfuge for carrying on with the occupation in an attempt at salvaging their doomed enterprise from shipwreck.
The truth is that the occupation forces are on their own, for a huge number of the Iraqi policemen and soldiers, whose ability and willingness to fight the resistance are supposed to prepare the ground for the withdrawal of the imperialist armies of occupation, are making themselves members of the Iraqi resistance, which has successfully managed to infiltrate the puppet security forces created by, paid for and armed by imperialism. The truth is that almost the entire Iraqi people ardently desire the foreign occupation armies to leave Iraq. The Iraqi people want real sovereignty, not a cosmetic facade; they want a total and complete withdrawal and not a partial one that leaves Anglo-American imperialism in control of the permanent bases currently being completed; they want to have their own government and not a puppet government whose allegedly sovereign ministries are controlled by the US and which negotiate back-door privatisation of Iraq’s national assets.
The Iraqi national resistance, with the warm and wholehearted support of the Iraqi people, is waging a heroic war of resistance against brutal enemies armed to the teeth with the latest and most sophisticated killing machines that modern science and technology can provide. All the same, the victory of the resistance is as inevitable as is the doom of Anglo-American imperialism certain, for the latter is waging an unjust predatory war, for which there is support neither in the US and Britain nor in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter.
Neither divide-and-rule tactics nor death squads, torture and kidnappings, chemical attacks and depleted uranium, nor saturation bombing, destruction of entire cities and the genocidal massacres of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as a consequence will save Anglo-American imperialism from defeat at the hands of the Iraqi people.
The proletariat in Britain must discharge its proletarian internationalist duty by supporting the Iraqi people’s struggle for national liberation. Failure to do so would make us accomplices in this filthy war and tie us to the war chariot of imperialism, thereby compounding our slavery a hundredfold.
Victory to the Iraqi people!
Death to Anglo-American imperialism!
> Anglo American imperialism caught between a rock and a hard place in Iraq
