The guerrilla war to get the US out of Vietnam was an eight-year long struggle, which cost the lives of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans before the anti-war movement was able to build enough strength and support to Sheila Malone 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003. Over half were women and children. Nearly all were killed by calculated aerial bombardment of their towns and villages, as in the savage assault on Fallujah.
They died pursued and terrified, as US bombs wreaked collective punishment on a people who have dared to resist occupation by the most powerful army in the world.
Downing Street has rushed to try to deny and dismiss these casualties, in the same breath announcing further assaults not only on Fallujah but at least another 20 towns.
Yet the figures, published recently in the British medical journal The Lancet, and from a study by both US and Iraqi public health experts, are the most reliable death toll so far.
They dispel any pretence that occupation forces are involved in rebuilding the country, bringing civil society and democracy, combating terrorism', or that this war of conquest is in any way a liberating, benign or humanitarian intervention to help the Iraqi
On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of the population oppose the occupation and want foreign troops to leave
Nevertheless (and the more so since Bush's re-election to the White House), the US
firmly intends to remain in Iraq, and is using any means
necessary to do so.
Its forces, with the approval
of their puppet president
Allawi are engaged in daily
bombardments and sweeping
arrests in all areas considered
hostile or 'insurgent'
This, we are told is in order
to 'make the country safe and
stable prior to the holding of
elections'. But it is an obvious
way to repress and liquidate
your opposition.
Interestingly, it took
former dictator Saddam
Hussein decades to slaughter
an estimated 300,000 of his
own people under the same
pretext of' "security, but in
fact to maintain his own
power. Iraq's new rulers have
managed 100,000 deaths so far
in only 18 months.
As long as widespread bombing continues, there will also be no chance of rebuilding Iraq. In fact, the US has just transferred $3.5bn which should have been for repair of shattered power, water and sewage plants to its vast security budget.
This money will be used instead to equip and train more army, police and secret police, many of them recruited from Saddam Hussein's old Baathist apparatus.
The first need of our antiwar movement here is to support the Iraqis in their resistance to occupation and call for troop withdrawal.
But this is a much more difficult task than was coming together to try to stop imminent invasion.
We know therefore that we are in for a long haul. aid an eventual military and political victory.
The guerrilla war to get the US out of Vietnam was an eight-year long struggle, which cost the lives of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans.. This is a terrible price to have paid before the anti-war
movement was able to build
enough strength and support to aid an eventual military and political victory.
The US war machine has since expanded into a huge
and barbaric monster, which
could never be defeated by
military means alone.
At the same time, however,
alongside the anti-war movement the anti-globalisation
movement has this monster A British major is confronted by women who have fled from Fallujah before the renewed onslaught begins in its sights, identifying it as part of the onslaught of economic liberalism presently rampaging round the world, destroying people and planet.
The linking up of these two currents has been the natural result of the awareness amongst so many people -especially the young - of the nature of modern imperialism.
On Iraq, it is understood that the US and other imperialisms have always sought client states in the Middle East in order to secure and control its huge oil reserves -two thirds of the world's supplies.
In fact, people in the Middle East sometimes speak of the oil under their sands as a kind of curse, which has made them the target of constant foreign interference. Dictatorial elites, installed through armed intervention, fostered coups, bribery and corruption necessarily depend for their survival on the policies of their backers.
Their economies are consequently distorted into basically one-product suppliers of others needs.
Underdevelopment, debt and poverty for the many is the result, kept under control by a huge and repressive security apparatus. (Iraq's foreign debt is calculated at $120bn, much of it from an budget taking 30% of GNP
during the 1980s)
This misuse of the possible benefits of oil has not only devastated lives in the Middle East. It is fast doing so in the imperialist countries themselves.
The war on Iraq, with the conquering and killing of its people, the destruction of its infrastructure and the pouring of tons of toxic pollutants into its earth and skies, has been fought to facilitate the export of oil for unbridled use , subject not even to the Kyoto restrictions.
This is a nightmare world for both East and West. So campaigning for the development and use of alternative, renewable energy sources is a vital part of combating it, and needs to be a part of our arguments against imperialist wars, in the same way that opposition to nuclear power has been.
We need to target companies involved in the oil business, by picketing their offices - as well as the many others now lining up to privatise, pillage and pollute in Iraq.
We need also to demand the cancellation or Iraq's debts. Instead reparations should be paid by those who have ravaged this country with punishing economic sanctions, war and occupation,
Last April the town of Fallujah was subjected to a barbaric assault which killed
up to 1,000 of its inhabitants,
maiming and wounding hundreds more, and demolishing
their homes and markets.
Now these terrorised and beleagured people have again become the focus of sustained attack, after a 'softening up' through nightly bombings and the cutting off of water, power and food supply routes - the task of the redeployed British Black Watch reinforcements..
Tragically, some of these young servicemen have already lost their lives in an exercise condemned by many of their grieving families as a More and more U.S. soldiers