councilor.org
| Source | Chris Burford |
| Date | 04/04/12/09:10 |
| This is the week the US lost the war.
The US has no military move to make that will not unite the Iraqi people more against it. It is already dependent on the goodwill of its suddenly no-longer puppet Iraq Governmental Council. The Brits are quietly working to undermine any military solution, which it is in their interest to do. The key question is that the Iraqis have shown the armed men of the Sunnis and Shia will cooperate against the USA. It is therefore false for the UK Guardian editorial today to say that Britain and the US must stay in Iraq to avert civil war. Unless the USA is sufficiently Macchiavellian to hand Saddam Hussein over to the IGC now, to split the Sunnis and the Shia, it has lost. It is in their own imperialist interests to go rapidly. 30 June has become April 11. And the deadline for the withdrawal of US and UK troops must be brought forward far faster than the undefined date pencilled in for long after June 30. This could indeed be a revolutionary situation both in Iraq and for the Middle East, and perhaps even the balance of world power. But it is hard to predict the range of possibilities, and to know which way each progressive should lean. Concentrating on citizens of US and UK the call should be for troops out now. More difficult is how to articulate that the aid, indeed the reparations to which the people of Iraq are entitled, should be cut free of imperialist strings. Even people like Robin Cook will hedge on questions like this. For progressives inside Iraq, not many of whom presumably have time to read this e-mail list, there is indeed a complicated struggle, hopefully non violent, about how to unite all progressive strata in a new state structure that recognises the reality of existing bodies of armed men, regional and religious differences, individual human rights and religious convictions. Liberal materialist democrats in Iraq will be tempted to have dialogue with international financial reconstruction initiatives that are capitalist and imperialist in nature to balance the power of the fundamentalists. It is much harder for anti-imperialists in the imperialists heartlands to define demands for a reconstruction programme that will not impose the requirements of international finance capitalism on the struggling Iraqi people but rather envisage economic and social reconstruction growing up from the lives of the Iraqi people themselves. With a majority of one, this morning, I lean towards a call for a reparations/reconstruction fund as the best way to articulate this. How about an Argentinian presence on the supervisory board? Plus the demand for a Middle East peace settlement. An effective alliance between anti-imperialist islam and progressive forces could in principle over the next year shift the balance of power in the world. There are enough funds to finance this, and enough massive mistrust of the whole Iraq war among progressive strata in the West. It won't happen but it could, and the sharing of imagination is the first step to action. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho