Steve’s page for democracy in Iraq

A web page of Steve Wallis

 

 

Oppose the occupation of Iraq – united demos in Lebanon provide hope

 

The war on Iraq by US and British imperialism was about control of the massive oil resources in the Middle East. There were massive demonstrations calling for elections in the immediate aftermath of the war and in January 2004. The elections were delayed another year, until after Bush’s fraudulent election victory (see my page on US electoral fraud) and the vicious assault on civilians and insurgents alike in the city of Fallujah, guaranteeing huge tensions between the different national and religious groupings within Iraq. Divide-and-rule was used by British imperialism between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, and similar methods are being used by them together with their US masters in Iraq.

Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq are opposed to the occupation, the main political parties will continue to support it and therefore act as stooges for imperialism. Even if the Shia forces genuinely wanted to end the occupation, the Iraqi army and police force are too weak to deal with the ‘resistance’ of predominantly Sunni Muslims (which is mainly positive, but also includes Islamic fundamentalists who use suicide bombings, beheadings, and murder of trade unionists and foreign journalists, etc., to alienate genuine working class people in Iraq and around the world).

The overwhelming majority of Kurds are in favour of independence, and since they are concentrated in the north of Iraq (South Kurdistan) that is a realistic prospect, but their main parties are linked to the US, and NATO includes Turkey whose regime oppresses the Kurds within its borders. The carve-up of Kurdistan was part of the general carve-up by the British ruling class of the Middle East in the days of the British Empire, with artificial borders as a policy of divide-and-rule to maintain control of the region by big business.

Hopefully, working class people cross Iraq can be inspired by united movements in Lebanon against the Syrian occupation (see my page on international issues) and unite against the US and British occupation in a similar way.

Socialists should continue to oppose the war at home (by going on demonstrations, attending meetings, etc.) and support genuine left-wing forces in Iraq, such as the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq (which is uniting working class people of all religions and nationalities against the occupation) and independent trade unions. I know the leader of that organisation in the UK, Burhan Fatah, and he told me fairly recently that whereas they had previously operated radio stations, they are now raising money for a TV station. I hope that I (perhaps with the help of other band members) can provide sufficient financial support via my socialist band Galaxia and/or the sales of my book Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen? to enable this TV station to be set up, which would be a big step forward in the struggle against the occupation and for a socialist Middle East.

We should also support Military Families Against the War, which unites families of British soldiers killed in Iraq opposed to the occupation, including the family of 19-year old Gordon Gentle from Glasgow Pollok who are fighting for justice for Gordon.  

I have set up the ‘iraq-democracy’ mailing list to bring together people around the world who are opposed to the occupation of Iraq and are in favour of freedom and democracy, and to promote solidarity action in support of people in Iraq struggling for freedom. If you agree with these aims then you are welcome to join the list, whether you are a pacifist or support armed uprisings against the occupation.

 


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Opposing wars and supporting struggles for democracy

 

In the run-up to the war on Iraq, anti-war activists should have more consistently pointed out that the war was for oil. A BBC News 24 poll showed that 78% of people in Britain thought, when asked, that George W Bush was mainly motivated by oil. Therefore, if activists had consistently said “Stop the war for oil” in speeches and newspaper headlines and on leaflets, websites, placards and banners, a much higher proportion of people would have opposed the war.

 

The Daily Mirror editors were the biggest culprits amongst the anti-war movement – I scoured pages and pages of anti-war coverage, but did not find a miniscule hint that oil may be a motivation until it was too late (there was a sentence to that effect when war had just broken out, and it was mentioned as one possible motivation in a Mirror poll near the end of the conflict). This is only to be expected from a mass circulation newspaper produced by big business.

 

Unfortunately, ‘left-wing’ organisations were not much better. Not one of the three organisations that co-organised most of the demonstrations (the Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or Muslim Association of Britain) was prepared to point this out to any significant extent. The Socialist Workers Party, which dominates the Stop the War Coalition, did sometimes point out that oil was responsible in their newspaper Socialist Worker, but oil was not mentioned in a single front page headline. In my opinion, this was not a mistake but a deliberate policy of the agents of big business that infiltrate these organisations in order to undermine them from within.

 

The Scottish Socialist Party was better (though it too suffers from infiltration to a certain extent), having “No blood for oil” as a front page headline and on many placards. The proportion of people who opposed the war was higher in Scotland than in Britain as a whole.

 

I produced a few batches of leaflets (distributing about 20,000 of one batch) with the headline “Stop the war for oil”. I believe that it was my intervention in the anti-war movement in Manchester that forced the Greater Manchester Coalition to Stop the War to build one demonstration using the slogan “No blood for oil”. The first batch of leaflets produced for that demo had an anodyne headline (that would convince no-one who wasn’t already convinced of the need to oppose the war) but a second batch, produced after I started intervening, switched to the oil slogan.

 

Virtually every anti-war activist in the West was opposed to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist regime. Anti-war activists, and socialists who make up many of our numbers in particular, should be the strongest advocates of democracy. However, I did not hear of a single speaker at a demonstration in the run-up to the war who said that ordinary people should rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime! Yet, if you don’t support wars or sanctions, and have no illusions in diplomacy via the United Nations (which links representatives of dictatorial regimes and democratic governments dominated by multinationals), that is clearly the only solution! Refusing to point this out made it seem as though anti-war activists were appeasers of Saddam Hussein.

 

I summed up my views on the future war on Iraq in a single paragraph, and used it (sometimes editing it very slightly due to lack of space) on all my anti-war leaflets and at the start of the description of my revolutionary anti-war mailing list. The paragraph I used was as follows:

 

“The US and British governments seem determined to conduct a war against Iraq. They want a regime in power that is friendly towards them – like the vicious Saudi Arabian dictatorship. Sanctions have already killed about 500,000 babies and children, and many more innocent people will die if there is war. The only solution is for ordinary people in Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime. The Western powers don’t want a truly democratic country to arise (after an uprising by the people or a war by them) since that would threaten the West’s control of oil throughout the Middle East.”

 

After the war started, putting forward a coherent position against war and dictatorships was more tricky. At times during both Gulf Wars, the Western leaders were seemingly in favour of uprisings by ordinary people in Iraq. I pointed out that a small scale uprising could be in their interests whereas a large scale uprising was in danger of posing a serious threat to them. That is why the West allowed the Iraqi regime to crush the Shia uprising in Basra at the end of the first Gulf War and why Western leaders were overly optimistic about signs that a small scale uprising in Basra was occurring towards the start of the second. I wrote an email message, which became a leaflet, on the subject of opposing dictatorships as well as war at about the middle of this war. I strongly recommend all anti-war activists to read this document as a guide to opposing future wars from a revolutionary, rather than pacifist, position. You can read it by clicking here.

 

I set up a revolutionary anti-war mailing list before the war started, in order to bring together anti-war activists around the position outlined in the paragraph in italics above. The list is continuing, as a forum to discuss opposition to war, sanctions and dictatorships in relation to the ongoing situation in Iraq as well as possible future wars in Iran, Syria or North Korea.

 


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Links

 

Anti-war and anti-sanctions organisations in the UK:

  • Voices in the Wilderness UK – they organised sanctions-breaking trips to Iraq, opposed the Ba’athist regime, and also oppose the occupation of Iraq

 

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