"from Yossi Schwartz - 23.08.2004 19:01
How can the workers and the poor in Iraq defeat the imperialist occupation?
What role for the Iraqi working class
in the resistance movement?
By Yossi Schwartz
The severe fighting taking place in Iraq is presented to us as some inexplicable phenomenon, produced by “dark forces” resisting the march of “progress and democracy”. In reality what we are facing is a mass resistance movement aimed at expelling a foreign army of occupation. This movement is fuelled by the terrible conditions Iraqi workers are facing, conditions created by the domination of imperialism.
Every informed person knows that Bush and Blair lied about the reasons for the war against the people of Iraq. They were not motivated by the threat of Saddam Hussein, lack of democracy, nor for his alleged connections to al-Qaeda, neither by the alleged WMDs. These were all lies, served up to convince the public in Britain, the USA and beyond, that the war was a “just war”. The real reasons for the war were a mix of greed for oil, military strategy, the need to push to one side European competition and a desperate attempt to preserve the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Now we are being fed new lies regarding the new US-appointed Allawi interim government which “took office” on June 28, 2004. According to Bush and Blair, “It is a government whose role is to restore stability and end the occupation”. At the end of June they declared that, “We are handing over sovereignty to Iraqis."
In spite of the claims of both the UN and Bush that the US is preparing to leave Iraq, and sovereignty is on the horizon, the number of imperialist troops in the country is actually increasing and the war between the masses fighting for national liberation and the imperialist occupiers is becoming more intense with every passing day."
The rest of this has just been published at:
http://beirut.indymedia.org/en/2004/08/1600.shtmlThere's lots of information we don't usually hear in the article, explaining the roots of the present crisis in Iraq (and other countries concerned).