Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

DONT ATTACK ATTACK IRAQ

Socialist Resistance no4  |  page 6-7

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

second largest in the world. The invasion of Iraq, therefore, will be another huge demonstration of US military strength, a grab for oil reserves, and a bid for world domination.

Now Tony Blair, like George Bush, insists that the key issue is no longer disarming Iraq, but "regime change". If we leave Saddam in power, he now argues, we will have failed the dying children and those he has tortured and murdered in the past.

But this "moral" line is also one that excludes any possible peaceful solution: and it assumes that the regime that replaces Saddam will be more acceptable to the Iraqi people and to the world at large.

There are no great reasons to believe that the Bush government which rejected any notion of "nation-building" after the Afghanistan war will allow any kind of popular government to take over in Baghdad. Washington has been sifting through the Iraqi opposition in exile to find individuals who suit their political agenda - and discarding the rest.

We should recall earlier periods in which US governments have time and again pressed for "regime change" not against despicable tyrants like Saddam, but against popular and elected governments which threaten to challenge US interests.

Since the second world war the US has repeatedly launched brutal wars, notably in Korea and then in Vietnam and Cambodia, aimed at propping up corrupt puppet regimes against popular resistance.

In the 1950s and 1960s a succession of CIA-engineered coups ousted radical nationalist and popular regimes which did not suit the USA in countries including Guatemala, Iran, Brazil, Zaire, and - in the bloodiest repression of all - Indonesia.

And in 1973 came the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile.

Though US governments have propped up Pinochet and all of the most vicious police regimes around the world, they have never once intervened to support a popular

or left-leaning government.

Instead the US lust for power has if anything become more overt and blatant, with the recent bankrolling of the general strike

by oil-workers against the Chavez governthe US and the United Nations arl

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If the wr neel ABA stance March 2003 trac Americans join the campaign for "regime change Washington, as