It seems that people like to get bogged down in Iraqi politics, which is indeed an interesting and multi-layered subject.

Howver, as long as Iraq is occupied by foreign invaders, any and all questions of internal politics are secondary – as would be the case with British politics if Denmark, for example, were to occupy the UK – and when the invaders are routed, while the world is free to opine, it will be up to the Iraqi people to sort out their internal political issues just as the Americans do, just as the British do. I don’t always agree necessarily with the politics of a lot of countries, however, unless one is an adherent of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, which I am not, Americans, Iraqis, Englishmen, Estonians and everybody else have the right to self-determination, whether I agree with their politics or not!

I’m afraid I can’t agree with it, nor with many of the other positions held by the CPGD. (For example, this statement:

“The real criminals are not Saddam and his co-defendants; the real criminals are the perpetrators of the vicious, brutal, inhuman war on Iraq. Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Rice et al are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. It is they, not Saddam, who deserve the ultimate punishment for their horrendous crimes”,

is just ridiculous. Saddam was a murderous tyrant who perpetrated gross war crimes and crimes against humanity against Iran and against his own people. One has to accept that, regardless of one’s views on the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation.)

The leaflet you quote doesn’t show that the resistance fighters are not involved in the sectarian killing, and it doesn’t show that violent resistance is, in this case, morally justified. In my opinion, although Iraqis have a right to resist using violence if necessary, taking into account the human costs of violent resistance, and the alternatives to violence, and the chances of success, etc. etc., I don’t think violent resistance is moral here.

In Iraq, the year 2006 closed with the judicial murder of president Saddam Hussein, the death of the 3,000th US soldier, the slaughter of nearly 700,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children, and the wholesale destruction of Iraqi towns and villages.

Defeat for imperialism

For all the carnage and devastation wreaked by it on Iraq, and the murder of its president, US and British imperialism are staring in the face of a most ignominious defeat.

The resistance attacks on the occupation forces have become ever more lethal and frequent – running at 180 a day. Even the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad is no longer under the control of the occupation forces and its puppets.

Everyone, except perhaps a small clique of neo-conservative lunatics, is agreed on two things. First, that the Iraq war has been a total disaster for Anglo-American imperialism; second, that the imperialist occupiers have already lost the war, and lost it big time.

Everyone, from respectable bourgeois think tanks to the political and ideological representatives of Anglo-American imperialism, as well as the serving soldiers in Iraq, is, with increasing frequency, embracing these obvious truths.

Even that war criminal and inveterate liar, British prime minister Tony Blair, when asked, during his appearance on al-Jazeera television, whether the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq had “so far been pretty much of a disaster”, replied: “It has.”

And US president Bush’s stubborn refusal to recognise reality has begun to crack. Whereas in October 2006, he was saying “absolutely we are winning in Iraq”, a mere two months later, in the run up to Christmas, he was obliged to backtrack, with the words “we’re not winning, we’re not losing”.

Bush’s new secretary of defence, Robert Gates, during the Congressional confirmation proceedings, on being asked whether the US was winning the war, replied: “No, sir.”

Futile measures

Hot on the heels of Bush’s election debacle came the bombshell from the Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose report makes clear that the Iraq war has been a disaster; that the US must find a way to extricate itself from this war by handing over the mess of its own creation to its Iraqi puppets; and that in the end the US may have no option other than to withdraw its forces while blaming the puppet Iraqi government for its own complete failure.

Instead of accepting the face-saving recommendations of the ISG report for an exit from Iraq, President Bush has announced, as expected, a ‘surge’ in American forces by an addition of 21,500 troops.

Lies exposed

Yet the very attempt to increase US troop levels in Iraq is an admission that all past US efforts at pacifying Baghdad, let alone the whole of Iraq, have been a total failure, even though all along Bush and his cronies were feeding the world the lie that America was winning the war and the ‘terrorists’ were on the run.

Further, the latest surge in US troop levels is an admission that the Iraqi puppet government faces an imminent collapse if it is not propped up by additional imperialist soldiers, even though all along the world was being fed the lie that the Iraqi government, this tiny collection of despicable stooges, represented the democratic will of the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people.

Now it is clear that the Iraqi ‘government’ represents only the interests of US imperialism, along with a handful of its venal stooges brought back from their émigré existence abroad on US tanks and with no social base in Iraq.

Tables turned

As a matter of fact, the US lost the war in Iraq quite some time ago. And with it, the strategy pursued by US imperialism, particularly by the Bush administration, has gone up in smoke.
A war waged for domination has turned into an instrument for undermining US domination to such an extent that it faces expulsion from the Middle East.
So it is that the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq marks a crushing defeat for Anglo-American imperialism, a source of great joy for all progressive humanity.

StW Coalition cowardice

It is still not too late for the anti-war movement to belatedly cast aside all prevarication and declare itself in solidarity with those whose courage and determination has brought our imperialist masters to such a pass.

No single political step would do more to weaken the cords that bind the British working class to social democracy than such a frank assertion of solidarity.

The leadership of the Stop the War Coalition has disgraced itself by choosing this moment to turn its back on the triumph of the Iraqi resistance, doing its damnedest to lock the whole anti-war movement behind the narrow, bourgeois-pacifist agenda of CND.

Our watchword remains, as ever,
Victory to the Iraqi resistance!

It makes sense that as the civil war -sparked by government-backed death squads and al-Qaeda jihadists – intensifies, more and more resistance fighters will turn from fighting the occupation to fighting the Shi’a. That, as I say, is a real shame, since the sectarian violence is extremely damaging for Iraqis (not least those who are murdered as a result) and to the fight against the occupation.

(If you mean with regards to the article above – it doesn’t effect it much. The point was to highlight the hypocrisy of those who demonise the resistance, and some of the myths they use to do it. If it is true, though, that there is no ‘honourable insurgency’, then it definitely means that we shouldn’t be supporting it. Which is fine in any case since, as David says, expressing “support” for the insurgency is effectively meaningless gesture politics).