Support the Iraqi resistance!
By James Petras
Falluja, Baghdad, Ramadi, Nasiriya - an entire people has risen to
confront the colonial occupation army, its mercenaries, clients, and
collaborators. First in massive peaceful protests, they were massacred
by US, British, Spanish and Polish troops: Bare hands against tanks
and machineguns. The armed resistance, in the beginning a minority now
indisputably the most popular force, backed by millions. The colonial
armies, fearful of every Iraqi, shoot wildly into crowds and retreat;
they encircle whole cities, fire missiles into crowded working class
neighborhoods, helicopters pour machinegun fire into homes, factories,
mosques... In the eyes of the colonial soldiers, the enemy is
everywhere. For once they are right. The resistance resists, every
block, every house, every store rings out with gunfire, the resistance
is everywhere. Every house takes hits, the resistance fight on. The
people aid the wounded fighters, wash their wounds. They provide water
to the thirsty to quench their parched throats and cool their hands -
the automatic weapons are hot.
And where are the western mercenaries? The $1,000 dollar a day hired
guns with their flak vests, dark glasses, --their swagger and
insolence have disappeared. They too have seen the charred bodies of
their ex-partners of death.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed, thousands have been injured, many
more will die but after each funeral tens of thousands more, the
peaceful, apolitical, "wait and see" ones have taken up the gun.
'It's a civil war', brays the bourgeois press. This is wishful
thinking. Shia and Sunni are in this together, brothers in arms, each
covering their comrades' backs as they confront the tanks. And the
resistance is winning. Never mind the "proportions" - five or ten or
twenty Iraqis for each colonial soldier. The Iraqi Resistance has won
politically: No appointed official has any future : They exist as long
as the US military remains but they will flee from the rooftops of
their bunkers as the US withdraws.
Militarily, the US and the mercenaries are taking thousands of
casualties - scores of deaths and wounded everyday. In Washington, the
civilian militarists, the architects of the destruction of Iraq are
panicking. "Send more troops!" say Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the
would-be president Kerry. From his Texas ranch, Bush proclaims the
resistance leader Moqtada Sadr a "killer". Far from the fire, the
mayhem, the massacres, his television doesn't show the child with the
mangled face. Bush once again is far from the killing fields - Vietnam
and now Iraq. Now he can claim a draft deferment - he is nominally the
President who unilaterally declared the end of the war in May 2003.
Now, April 2004 there are more than 600 dead US soldiers as the Iraqi
resistance rose to meet Bush's challenge "Bring them on" and took the
streets from the colonial army, then they came on and conquered the
cities and with sheer courage and absolute determination they hold
their ground.
The "Arabs" resist, while the overstuffed cabbage Sharon is silent.
His once loquacious agents, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and their
underlings are strangely silent. Are they worried that there might be
a mass backlash against those who cooked the data to get the US into a
war in which thousands of US soldiers will die and be maimed - in
order to "protect" Israel's undisputed claim to dominance in the
Middle East?
In the early spring of 2004, in April to be exact, the dreams of a new
colonial empire came crashing down on the masterminds of the New World
Order, an undisputed, unilateral Empire. The end of the
Sharon-Wolfowitz-Blair-Chaney "Greater Mid-East Co-Prosperity Sphere".
The Iraqi resistance has turned the Rumsfeld- Wolfowitz dream of a
series of wars against Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea into a
nightmare of bloody street battles on every block in Fallujah and Sadr
City, Baghdad.
The heroism, the valor, the inspiration, the mass resistance is all
the more so as the Iraqi people draw on their resources, their own
solidarity, their own history, their belief that they will be free or
take down every colonial soldier as they fight to the death. The
phrase "Patria o Muerte" takes on a special and very specific meaning
in Iraq: It is not a slogan of a leader, a vanguard, to arouse and
inspire the people - it is the living practice of a whole people.
Patria or Muerte comes out of the mouths of teenage street fighters as
well as street venders and widows with black scarves. The "Iraqi April
Days" are a lesson to for the whole Third World and other would-be
imperial colonialists: Mass armed resistance cannot be politically or
militarily defeated. The heroism of the Iraqi resistance stands in
stark contrast to the cowardly self-styled Arab leaders: The Jordanian
and Saudi monarchs, the garrulous corrupt "President for Life". Not
one has moved a finger to aid the Iraqi national liberation struggle.
They fear the example of the successful Iraqi resistance will light a
fire under their ample buttocks.
And the Western intellectuals? Since the resistance began a year
ago... not a single US intellectual, of the dozens of progressive,
critical thinkers ("Not in My Name") has dared to declare their
solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle. They have "problems", I
hear, "about supporting Arab fundamentalists, terrorists, anti-Semites
etc..."…
The paralysis of the US leftist intellectuals, their inability to
express solidarity with the Iraqi resistance is a disease which
afflicts all "leftist" intellectuals in the colonial countries. They
are fearful of the problem (the colonial war) and fearful of the
resolution (national liberation). In the end, the comforts and
freedoms they enjoy, the university applause and adulation they
receive in the colonial motherland weighs more heavily than the mental
costs of a straightforward declaration of support for the
revolutionary liberation movements. They resort to phony "moral
equivalences", against the war and against the "fundamentalists", the
"terrorists", the 'whoever' who is engaged in their own
self-emancipation and has not paid sufficient attention to the
self-appointed guardians of Western Democratic Values. It is not
difficult to understand the absence of solidarity with liberation
movements among the progressive intellectuals in the imperial
countries: they too have been colonized, mentally and materially.
Thousands of humble people in Iraq are giving these erudite
intellectuals a practical lesson in solidarity: on April 4,2004 in the
midst of hostile tanks and helicopter gunships, thousands marched from
Baghdad to Fallujah carrying food and medicine to the embattled and
encircled people in that city which will forever be remembered as the
cradle of emancipation. Will our intellectuals take note? Can they at
least circulate a statement "In Our Name" in solidarity with the
Iraqui resistance?
In the meantime, the mass popular resistance in Iraq takes on the
well-fed, over-armed armies of occupation in hand to hand warfare.
They do no ask if their neighbor, friends or comrades are Sunni,
secular, Shia, Baathist or Communist, they do not stand aside when a
mosque, a school or a housing project is bombed or machine-
gunned...they have made a commitment to engage in the struggle, to
join in one national movement to oust the invader, the oil thieves,
the murderers at hand and afar. It's a pity, more for themselves than
for any material contribution they could make to the historical
struggle that the US progressive intellectuals have chosen to abstain
and once again demonstrate the irrelevance of the Western
intellectuals to Third World Liberation.
http://www.nationalvanguard.org http://www.natvan.com
http://www.thebirdman.org http://www.ihr.org/
http://wsi.matriots.com/jews.html http://www.nsm88.com/
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