 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! |
