War crimes in Iraq

The uprising against the American-led occupation of Iraq is a surprise only to those who believe that Washington commands unlimited power and authority based on its apparent military might.

No wonder some American politicians are talking of a Vietnam-style “quagmire”, this time in the Middle East. Then, a small country proved that dropping endless bombs and chemicals could not subdue a national revolt and the US had to flee Vietnam.

Over a quarter of a century later, the gung-ho Bush regime in the White House, with their Blairite cheerleaders and accomplices in London, thought they could breeze into Iraq and deliver the alleged virtues of a free-market economy at the point of a gun.

They assumed that putting a few Iraqi stooges – some of whom prompted the invasion by spreading lies about “weapons of mass destruction” - on a toothless “Governing Council” was enough to satisfy a people who had suffered long years of dictatorship.

Such is the stuff that dreams are made of.

If many Iraqis welcomed the downfall of Saddam, they did so because they hoped that democratic self-rule would follow and they could rebuild a country destroyed by sanctions. Instead, the US-British occupation still runs Iraq and is carving up the economy for the global corporations. The invasion replaced one tyranny with another.

Iraqis fought long and hard to throw out their colonial masters and the struggle against foreign occupation runs deep in their history. Today’s revolt of both Shi’ite and Sunni communities, with joint prayers organised in Baghdad to endorse the uprising, is the legitimate and not entirely unexpected response of a new generation.

The massacre of civilians in Fallujah by US forces is reminiscent of the atrocities committed by the Marines in Vietnam, when innocent villagers were lined up and shot. This is “pacification” US style and the slaughter in Fallujah is a war crime on a grand scale.

Bush and Blair have, by their lies over weapons and their oppression of the Iraqi people, made the planet a far more dangerous place than it was before the invasion of Iraq. They have become the best recruiting sergeants Al-Qaeda has ever had. They deserve the same fate as that handed out to Saddam Hussein.

Movement for a Socialist Future
10 April 2004