Resist The U.S. Invasion of Iraq!
Statement Of Peace and Freedom Party Congressional Candidate Steve Argue.
Wednesday, March 19th 2003 is a day that will live in infamy. Despite millions of people marching against war around the world the Bush regime of the United States has begun its invasion of Iraq. Today the Iraqi people are being subjected to massive aerial bombardment and will soon face the bullets of 300,000 hostile troops. In the face of mass opposition to war around the world Bush made clear from the outset that his intention was war no matter what the truth be, no matter what the people of the world said.
The whole world has watched in horror. With a straight face Bush’s excuses for bloodshed have fluctuated as his claims against Iraq have been proven lies.
Today, in the 21st century, there are those who are still old enough to have grown up in Nazi Germany under the hypnosis of Nazi propaganda newsreels. Some of those people still believe that Poland had to be invaded by Germany because it posed a threat to German national security. Likewise there are those in America brainwashed by CNN and other corporate sources of lies that actually believe that Iraq had something to do with September 11th and that Iraq poses a threat to the United States.
What is the reality of this “threat” that Iraq poses to the United States? On one side in this conflict is the starved and disarmed nation of Iraq that has no choice but to try to defend itself, on the other side Bush has assembled the most advanced weapons of modern warfare with 100 warships, 1,000 fighter jets, 1,800 tanks and ground artillery, and 300,000 troops. In addition Bush has not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict.
Let there be no mistake, the opening of this war will be a one sided bloodbath with massive Iraqi civilian casualties. In the traditions of Adolf Hitler’s policy of schrecklicheit the Bush administration is planning to drop 3,000 “smart” bombs in 48 hours to produce “shock and awe” at the US military offensive and shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically”. In addition the U.S. plans on using the new M.O.A.B. (Massive Ordinance Air Burst) bomb, a bomb that despite not being radioactive has a blast the size of a small nuclear weapon. Also slated for use are actual nuclear “bunker buster” bombs and “tank buster” A-10 ammunition made from highly radioactive nuclear waste.
We are told that the Bush administration's "shock and awe" invasion will be high tech and will have little "collateral damage" (a U.S. government euphemism for mass murder of innocent civilians). Yet the United Nations, planning to provide humanitarian relief, recently produced a document that tells a far different story. According to the UN, the expected outcomes of a U.S. campaign of bombing and invasion include: 500,000 civilian casualties; 2,000,000 people homeless; 10,000,000 people without enough to eat; 18,000,000 without access to clean water; and more than 1,000,000 children under the age of 5, at risk of death from malnutrition.
In the last major US attack on Iraq we watched the same staged “smart” bomb (literally the same one) perform its amazing acrobatics on CNN while actual bombs were killing around 35,000 Iraqi civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure. This destruction included destroying the ability to provide clean disease free water. Large numbers of children have died as a result of the dirty drinking water.
In addition the US successfully used its “tank buster” A-10 ammunition in its destruction of the retreating Iraqi military. As part of this operation the U.S. killed over 100,000 retreating soldiers, burying many of them alive. One thing the “victorious” U.S. soldiers were never told, however, was that the “tank buster” ammunition that had been used scattered radiation across the battlefields that they occupied. A few years later the British Guardian sent reporters into these battlefields where they found radiation 30 times higher than normal background radiation, and 50 times higher on tanks destroyed by the A-10 “tank buster” ammunition. US soldiers were never warned of this known danger and climbed around on these tanks without protective suits as they celebrated the US’s easy victory. These soldiers later died or became very ill from the resulting radiation poisoning. The illness they suffered then became known as the supposedly mysterious “Persian Gulf War Syndrome.”
The top military brass denied knowledge and claimed ignorance of what had happened to the soldiers. The US corporate media speculated on the syndrome being the impact of Saddam’s biological or chemical warfare agents. Yet the U.S. military actually new full well what they had exposed the US troops to, as well as knowing the symptoms of radiation poisoning. History had been repeated. Just as Vietnam veterans were knowingly poisoned by the U.S. military with Agent Orange and abused as hypochondriacs as they became very ill or died, so too were Gulf War Veterans knowingly poisoned with the residue of radioactive ammunition. As some would say of Saddam Hussein the same can be said of the U.S. government: “they killed their own people”.
The radiation unleashed by the US in 1991 has since been killing large numbers of Iraqis as well. This includes childhood leukemia wards that have been full of dying children. Not only are these children dying, they can not get needed medicine as a result of the UN/US imposed economic blockade imposed on Iraq.
For months Bush claimed that the war would be waged to end Saddam Hussein’s production of weapons of mass destruction (whether they were found or not) and that “Saddam” would have to prove a negative and show that Iraq did not have these weapons. Today we are told that war is being waged to liberate the Iraqi people from the regime of Saddam Hussein. Little mention is made in the corporate media of how two oilmen, Bush and Cheney, will be able to gain financially from the privatization of 84 billion dollars worth of Iraqi oil.
In attempting to comply with the dictates of the Bush regime and UN arms inspector Hans Blix Iraq recently even destroyed its Al Samoud missiles, missiles that only have a range of 100 miles and are not prohibited under any UN resolution. By pushing for the destruction of these missiles UN inspector Hans Blix cynically participated in the disarmament of a week nation that was on the verge of being mercilessly attacked.
The United States is the country in the world that has the most weapons of mass destruction, and has used them. The idea that Iraq and North Korea do not have the right to defend themselves from the same United States that has waged war on both peoples is a good indication of the aggressive arrogance of U.S. imperialism. We should not forget that Korea lost 3 million people as a result of the war the U.S. waged on them in the 1950s and we should also recognize that North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons is an important deterrent to the war plans of U.S. imperialism on the Korean peninsula. If Iraq had ignored UN resolutions and developed its own nuclear weapons program the current war may have been averted.
Especially bitter for the Arab peoples must be the fact that Israel has the largest arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in the Arab region. Yet the US continues to arm the Israeli war machine with about ten billion dollars in “aid” even as Palestinians are being purposely starved, shot, imprisoned, and their homes destroyed for no crime other than being born an ethnicity that the racist Zionist government wants cleansed from the face of the earth, or at least cleansed from racist Israel. As Sharon’s cabinet minister Benny Alon recently stated of the Palestinians, “Make their lives so bitter that they will transfer themselves (out of Israel) voluntarily”.
Not only has Iraq been deprived of the means to defend themselves, the people are also being starved and deprived of needed medicine. The US, through the UN, has been starving the people of Iraq through an economic blockade for the past twelve years. This economic blockade has murdered a million and a half people, most of them being children.
For “liberated” Iraq Bush plans to install a military government headed by a US general and talks of an US occupation lasting 25 years. The ability of the US to rule in a country that has been starved and bombed by the United States for the past twelve years has caused some in the mainstream corporate media of the US to raise the specter of Stalingrad like resistance by the five million people of Baghdad. This is in reference to the long and heroic resistance Hitler faced from the population of Stalingrad when the Third Reich tried to occupy that city in its war of conquest against the Soviet Union.
Today film footage of hundreds of thousands in the streets of Baghdad with automatic weapons and pistols in their hands should strike fear into the hearts of mothers, fathers and loved ones of those deployed to the Persian Gulf. The anti-war movement, with our differing positions on the right of Iraq to exist under its own rule and on its right to defend itself, agree that the way to stand on the side of US soldiers is to call for the troops to be brought home safely today.
Most of the world stands in opposition to the bloodbath the US government has begun to unleash. In Rome 3 million people marched against the pro-war policies of the right-wing Italian government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on February 15th. These kinds of numbers moving into the streets have been useful in bringing on a number of strikes against the war carried out by the Italian working class. Not only have the Italian workers started to hit their pro-war capitalist class directly in the pocket books by striking, the workers have also directly blockaded military goods headed for the Persian Gulf.
In addition many of the unions in western Australia have pledged a general strike at the outbreak of war. Australia has only about 3,000 troops participating in the war, but the Australian working class still sees this force as a disgrace to be resisted, and rightly so.
Likewise the ruling class of the UK, America’s largest junior imperial partner in the war, is facing the wrath of a working class that has stopped train shipments of arms and has also marched in the millions (1.5 to 2 million in London on February 15th alone). In addition top trade union leaders have warned the UK government of general strikes and general unrest from the working class at the outbreak of the major UK/US assault in the war.
In St. John Canada the ILA (dock worker’s union) have issued an edict calling for stopping the shipment of military cargo destined for the Iraqi war. This stands as an example for dockworkers in the US, the rest of Canada, and around the world. If we, as workers, stop the arms shipments, production of armaments, etc., we can shut down their war machine. Likewise resistance from the soldiers, as occurred in the U.S. Vietnam War (1955-1975), could stop the war on Iraq if the war becomes prolonged and a U.S. imperialist victory is impeded by prolonged resistance by the Iraqi population and the world working class.
While resistance to the war has taken place around the world, in part it has come from different quarters representing differing class interests. There is the resistance of the masses of the working class and other progressive minded people in the streets in the millions around the world. There are countries like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and China that oppose the U.S. war partly because they know that the crazy American government may target them next. And there is a third group. They are the heads of state and other politicians who realize the interests of their own capitalist class are being put in jeopardy by this war. Some have realized this through their fear of working class resistance, others are opposing the US to defend their country’s own capitalist investments in Iraq.
In Europe we can clearly see the breakdown of the alliances that have been in place since the end of World War Two. The ruling capitalist classes of France, Russia, and Germany are standing up to the United States trying to assert their own economic interests in Iraq, which include payment for substantial investments they’ve made in the development of Iraqi oil fields. Meanwhile the United States and its junior imperial partner, the UK, see dollar signs in taking direct control of Iraq’s estimated 84 billion dollars worth of oil for themselves. Germany with its strong industrial base and Russia with its stockpile of weaponry and weapons industry left over from the days of the Soviet Union could easily become a powerful alliance to assert their own imperial interests against the hegemony of US imperialism. As such competing interests face off on Iraq as a result of Bush’s aggressive policies, one can see in this conflict the seeds of powerful hostile capitalist interests that may lead to World War Three.
The working class, revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and anti-war forces of the world rarely have real interests in common with any of the bourgeoisies of the powerful capitalist countries of the world. The opposition posed by the French, Russian, and German governments is one of those rare examples. Yet their motivations are about protecting the wealth of their own capitalist classes. As such their motivations are the same as those of Bush.
Lest anyone be awe struck by the “social democratic” humanitarianism of the capitalist leaders of these countries it would pay to look at some of their own imperialist credentials.
The French capitalist class has been an aggressive imperialist force themselves in Africa, despite loosing direct colonial control. In the early 1990s France actively backed the chauvinist Hutu regime of Rwanda that murdered over 800,000 Tutsis in 1994. In addition France has an occupation army in the Ivory Coast where the competing capitalist interests of the region are fighting for control of the areas rich diamond mines.
The capitalist counter-revolution in East Germany formed a united capitalist Germany that has intervened to participate in the break up of Yugoslavia. One of the ways they did this was by backing the fascistic government of Tudjman that was created by breaking the Republic of Croatia away from the Yugoslavian federation (the U.S. backed Tudjman as well). As Germany’s ally, Tudjman, then raised the Ustashi flag of Nazi occupation as the official flag of Croatia once again and preceded to drive 500,000 Serbs and other working class families from their homes by destroying over 1,000 villages. Continued German and US intervention in Yugoslavia, along with the fratricidal wars they helped unleash, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and caused millions to be driven from their homes. Yet, to the benefit of German and U.S. imperialism, as a result of the death and destruction they unleashed, much of the Yugoslavian economy has either been privatized or destroyed. Thus they succeeded in destroying competition and created new ways for capitalist investors to profiteer where they could not in the past.
The newly formed Russian capitalist class is also asserting its imperial interests and ambitions by carrying out a brutal war in Chechnya against the country’s popular aspirations for self-determination. As the Russian capitalist class sends its working class youth to die in Chechnya they have stripped the working class of most of the rights to work and healthcare gained in the 1917 revolution. As a result life expectancy has dropped by 10 years in the past ten years while a new class of a very few ultra-rich capitalists have emerged, mainly from the privatization of oil exploitation.
The resistance by Russian, French, and German imperial capitalists to this war is not based on more enlightened ruling classes but merely coming from different competing capitalist class interests.
While it may feel good to see the US getting resistance for its war drive from any quarter, no matter how reactionary, socialists look towards building an independent working class, student, and soldier resistance that does not in any way look towards the representatives of the wealthy in power for political leadership. Instead, around the world, we are part of building mass demonstrations of millions of people in the streets. These demonstrations are built with the understanding that they help educate ever-larger circles, invigorate participants with the knowledge of our numbers, and build towards real forms of resistance to the war and other capitalist injustices. One of our ultimate goals is an end to all imperialist wars through socialist revolution.
Throughout the world resistance to war, and perceived future resistance to war and the unrest it will create, have also produced other allies we cannot trust in the higher ruling circles.
In Egypt hundreds of protesters tried to state their opposition to the impending war on February 15th. They were met by violent repression from the Egyptian police (the Egyptian government is one of the top recipients of U.S. military aid in the world). Yet after crushing this attempt by the people to protest against the war on their own, the Egyptian government felt pressure from below to call its own demonstration against the war. In response to the official call half a million to a million people came out to protest the war in Cairo on February 27th. Yet to expect anything but fake and symbolic acts of solidarity with the people of Iraq from the Egyptian government would be a mistake.
Likewise in the United States sections of the ruling class have, for various reasons, felt obliged to oppose the war. Politically this ruling class opposition is represented locally in the Santa Cruz area primarily Sam Farr, a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Sam Farr has stated, and voted, his opposition to the current war on Iraq. Yet Farr supports the starvation blockade against Iraq, voted for this years 440 billion dollar war budget, voted in favor of war against Yugoslavia, and has voted in favor of supplying billions of dollars to the U.S. backed death squad government of Colombia. There should be no surprise here, just look at how the wealthy and the corporate media are the ones who put Farr and the likes of him in power. Sam Farr’s opposition to war in Iraq lies in his fear of alienating his anti-war constituency as well as his fear of the working class unrest that will be unleashed around the world as a result of the war. The reasons he gives for opposing war are actual reasons that are for promoting a more efficient and more respected U.S. imperial policy around the world. Farr and the Democratic Party want to defend the interests of imperialism where as myself and the Peace and Freedom Party stand for ending all imperialist wars across the globe.
Like the “dove” Democrats of the United States the government of Turkey has been under the direct pressure of the masses of people. Unlike the Democrats, however, they took real action against the war. In a major victory for the anti-imperialist movement the Turkish parliament voted not to allow their country to be used as a staging ground for a second front in the invasion of Iraq.
Yet official Turkish opposition to being a U.S. base in the war does not mean Turkey is not heavily involved. Seeing the writing on the wall and jumping to grab what they can the lesser capitalist regimes both of neighboring Turkey and Iran have already sent troops into Iraq. With little hope of maintaining control over the Iraqi oil they seize after U.S. and British forces move in, the main goal of these troops is to control minority national aspirations that could spill over causing more unrest in their own countries. Turkey already has 1,200 troops occupying part of Kurdish Iraq with plans to send in thousands of more troops. Iran also has troops in Iraq occupying areas of the Kurdish north and areas of the Shi’ite south.
Knowing of Turkey’s murderous treatment of the Kurdish nation living inside Turkey, tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds have demonstrated against this Turkish incursion into their territory and have vowed to resist the Turkish occupation. It is interesting enough that the Turkish government’s genocidal policies towards the Kurdish people are rarely reported in the United States while Saddam Hussein gets constant bad press for carrying out the same types of policies of genocide over ten years ago. This, of course, is a rather consistent sort of double standard we find in the American corporate media, friends of the United States who carry out genocide with U.S. supplied weaponry and training (as Turkey is) are rarely described as “killing their own people”.
Many of the Kurds know that their national interest to self-determination, without the genocidal repression they currently face throughout their homeland, will never be established by the “liberating” forces of Turkey, Iran, or US imperialism. British imperialism divided Kurdistan, a country with its own unique language and culture, into a minority inside the nations of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Today the Kurds are the largest nation without a homeland in the world. Yet while the U.S. government supplies the military hardware to kill Turkish Kurds they cry crocodile tears for Iraqi Kurds. Imperialism, with its motto of divide and conquer, never has and never will solve the Kurdish question. A free and united Kurdistan will only be born through a sweeping socialist revolution that overthrows the capitalist regimes of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria while challenging the dictates of the United States.
Just as U.S. imperialism will never solve the Kurdish question, nor will it ever solve the question of women’s liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.
The Taliban, who the U.S. put in power, are rightly seen as the anti-women clerical fascists they really are. Among the lies about “liberated” Afghanistan, however, has been the idea that women’s rights have greatly benefited. According to a UN report issued for International Woman’s Day March 8th 2003, "The fact that women in many parts of the country continue to face gross violations of their rights, is a matter of concern… Women are the primary victims of insecurity...Taliban-like restrictions continue to be applied to women in some parts of the country by local leaders."
These local leaders were, and most of them still are, supported militarily by the U.S. government. The entire history of these Mujahideen warlords has been one of combating women’s rights. In fact it was opposition to women’s rights that was one of the Mujahideen’s main issues of opposition to the left-progressive PDPA government that came to power in Afghanistan in 1978. As the PDPA began carrying literacy campaigns for little girls and the poor the CIA, in opposition, began funding the Mujahideen religious fanatics that were killing women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women liberated from the veil. As the US poured billions of dollars into the Osama Bin Laden/Mujahideen holy war against literacy and women’s rights and the CIA recruited 100,000 Islamic religious fanatics from around the world to fight their war the Soviet Union moved troops into Afghanistan under the invitation of the PDPA to help them combat the anti-woman fanatics.
The CIA’s men in Afghanistan are in fact the same forces that are now accused of blowing up innocent civilians in the World Trade Center. The Mujahideen and their Taliban offspring are in fact the vile creations of U.S. imperialism and have the same disregard for innocent human life and women’s rights as their imperialist creators.
About 3,000 Afghani civilians have died in the ongoing US war in Afghanistan, and many more will die in Iraq.
As the US government goes to war in Iraq many Americans don’t know that US soldiers continue to be engaged in combat with various factions in Afghanistan and US troops are taking many casualties while Afghan civilians are taking many more. Even the US puppet government of Hamid Karzai, a “government” that only rules the city of Kabul, has felt obliged to ask the US military to stop killing civilians. In February Presidential spokesman Fazal Akbar told the BBC Pashro news service, "The Afghan President stressed the need that the military operations must be targeted and that the operations should not affect civilians." This was said of a meeting with U.S. General Daniel K. McNeil. The meeting took place after at least 17 civilians died in raids by US-led coalition forces in the Baghran district of the southern Helmand Province.
In Afghanistan we can see the results of thirty-four years of U.S. military intervention, results that include the total destruction of human rights. The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. is squandering on killing Iraqis and stealing their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States.
Register to vote with the Peace and Freedom Party! Resist the war in the streets, workplaces, schools, and in the barracks! Organize to end imperial bloodshed through socialist revolution!
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