Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Middle East in flames: I - Iraq

Socialist Resistance no43  |  page 12-13

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.

The balance sheet of the imperialist expeditions conducted by the absolutely disastrous. Even in Afghanistan, it is today the Taliban 1. It is, however, Iraq that was the main objective of the imperial offensive, and it is the Iraqi fiasco that represents the most serious failure of the Bush administration. Its initial - neo-conservative - plan who are on the offensive... aimed at the establishment in Iraq of a regime with a "democratic" façade, with a majority social base and dominated by the allies of Washington.

It was quickly understood that the base for that did not exist, and that the dominant forces among the Iraqi Shiites - the community that was supposed to be grateful to the United States - were the proIranian forces.

The failure of this plan led the administration, in the adventurism that is today denounced by a growing majority of the United States ruling class.

The other major option in the ranks of the establishment (Baker-Hamilton) calls for looking for a way out of the impasse for the United States by means that are above all political, in particular by negotiating compromises with Iran and Syria.

The objective is in this way to limit the damage and to try to consolidate a hegemony less absolute and less authoritarian than that envisaged by the Bush administration. The latter rejects such an option as representing a major defeat for the project of unipolar

hegemony of the United States, which it has

The armed organizations created in the Sunni Arab regions of Iraq have been conducting from the beginning both a legitimate struggle against the occupation and a reactionary struggle against the rule of the Shite majority.

For the last year the principal movement acting against the occupation among the Shiite Arabs has in its turn engaged in a bloody practice of religious reprisals.

The project of Moqtada alSadr, of unifying the Iraqi Arabs in a common nationalist opposition to the occupier, seems definitely compromised.

The only force conducting a struggle that is still today capable of finding support in all the Iraqi communities is a class force: the union of oil workers.

This struggle is all the more important in that it centres on the main reason for the invasion of Iraq. It must be supported by anti-imperialists and by the workers' movement in every country.

page 13 of the scan

world and within Islam.

It is for this reason that it is

priority target of