Open
Letter To
The Anti-War Movement
By Hana Abdul Ilah
Al Bayaty
20 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq is not only the biggest crime
of recent history, it is the original sin of the 21st century, a depravity.
In its war on Iraq, the United States has sought to destroy Iraq as
both a state and a nation. It decimated an entire class — the
progressive middle class of Iraq that had proven its capacity to manage
Iraqi resources independently and to the benefit of all; it killed nearly
a million while sending millions more into exile; it orchestrated death
squads and looting and invented new horrors in torture and rape; in
the name of bringing democracy, it brought material destruction on a
mass scale to a people, aiming also to erase their identity, memory,
culture, social fabric, institutions and forms of administration, commerce,
and everyday life; it even attacked Iraq’s unborn generations
with the 4.7 billion-year death of depleted uranium. It has engaged
in civilisational genocide as well as its own moral suicide. Force,
however, does not dictate right. The brutality of power and imperialism
has been definitively exposed while the project for a new American century
has utterly failed. The consequences for American and international
history are conclusive. The world order that formed around erstwhile
US liberal values has evaporated.
The US invasion and occupation
of Iraq is a military, economic, political, moral and cultural disaster
for Americans and the world. US military failure has been demonstrated
by the inability of the best funded and most sophisticated armed force
in the world to defeat the resistance of a small country and its poor
people tired of 13 years of sanctions, exposing war as useless. While
the Americans may attempt to secure their presence in Iraq, they cannot
destroy the belief of Iraqis that they have the right to live as any
other people in the world, free and independent and sovereign in their
land and over their resources. Occupying Iraq is an economic disaster
because the costs of the war for the United States have increased beyond
any economic gain it could have from controlling Iraqi oil. Politically,
the occupation is a disaster for the United States because no one in
the world can argue that it is playing a progressive role. The occupation
is also a moral and cultural disaster for the US. Following the enormous
human suffering of World War II, the world — Americans included
— established international law and human rights law that set
the standard for civilised societies. US neoconservatives and imperialists
are trying to destroy this civilisation, refusing to be subject to international
law and replacing it with the law of the jungle. How can the world —
Americans included — be identified with such a savage enterprise
as the war on and occupation of Iraq?
Arabs are not strangers to
neo-imperial attempts to prevent their development. They recall the
systematic demonisation of their popular movements: the attempted toppling
of the democratically elected Syrian government in 1956 for being “communist”,
the characterisation of Nasser as a “fascist” when he nationalised
the Suez Canal, the criminalisation of the Iraqi Baath Party, referred
to as “Nazis”, when it refused to surrender control over
Iraq’s resources. Even the Palestinian and Lebanese people who
heroically struggle against occupation are considered “terrorists”.
We know well what are colonial policies in general and in this region
in particular. The US always pretends to defend the rights of a minority
— whether its demands are justified or not — in order to
control the majority. In Iraq, since 1991, the US appealed to Kurds
and Shias to rebel, trying to insinuate that those who govern them are
Sunnis. Anyone with intellectual honesty knows that the Baath Party
was neither sectarian in its thinking nor in its membership.
US-Israeli plans, based on
creating divisions among Arabs in one country, or between countries,
have failed. In Iraq, the policy of charming some groups of the Iraqi
Resistance or their supporters in order to divide them and isolate the
resistance has failed completely. Despite repeated declarations made
by war criminal Jalal Talabani, resistance groups are united in their
position. Second, the policy of dividing Iraqi movements into Shia,
Sunni and Kurd, is disintegrating: large movements of opinion insist
on the unity of Iraq and the common interest of its people. Ever more
groups in the south enter the struggle against the occupation and its
local puppet government. The unity of Turkomen, Assyrians and Arabs
on the fate of Kirkuk is an example of underlying unity, as is the deepening
of tribal solidarity, spreading demands for a large political national
front, demonstrations in the north, and ever unifying positions concerning
the future of Iraq’s oil wealth.
Iraq has been a socio-economic
and geopolitical entity for more than 4000 years, it cannot be divided.
It is the cradle of several civilisations. When united this entity has
proven able to enhance human civilisation and be an engine for progress.
Where the Sumerians invented writing, the Babylonians invented law,
followed by the Abbasid who introduced the idea of a state of all its
citizens and of social solidarity in society, opening the path for the
unifying Arab-Muslim civilisation that survives proudly to this day.
The Iraqi people are the expression of this heritage, regardless of
their religion or ethnicity. Never in history could two states cohabitate
the area that is now Iraq. It has always been in the interest of the
peoples who settled in the Iraq basin to organise together a common
geopolitical future. There have been many unsuccessful imperial attempts
to divide this natural entity. No form of aggression, regardless of
how criminal or vengeful, can destroy the Arab-Muslim identity of Iraq
or Iraq’s geopolitical unity. In its attempts to destroy this
civilisation and reality, the US administration has thrown the entire
idea of the so-called West into disarray. Definitively exposed are all
the racist and condescending attitudes that had remained latent or covert.
The “West” — and the United States in particular —
stands naked as a culture of force. The moral accounting, which will
develop inexorably, will change world history. It is the resistance
of the Iraqi people that demands it.
Attempts to choke Arab development
cannot but fail. The three main socio-economic and political currents
developed by Arab societies — nationalists, Islamists and leftists
— are intrinsically anti-imperialist and therefore opposed to
US-Israeli regional designs. For nationalists, retaining control of
national resources to serve the general interest is sacrosanct. For
leftists, opposing the international chains of imperialism and globalisation
is a baseline. For Islamists, resistance to foreign occupation, as written
in the Quran, is a duty. Their interest lies currently in achieving
unity in struggle. They are united by their Arabo-Muslim identity. They
share common principles and values as follows: natural resources, material
heritage, and the riches of culture and civilisation are the property
of the totality of the people; the totality of citizens constitutes
the people; the people are the sole source of sovereignty and of constitutional,
political and judicial legitimacy; government is responsible for and
accountable to all citizens; solidarity between citizens — between
generations, the able and ill, the elderly and young, the orphan and
every human being who finds himself in a state of weakness — should
form the basis of any government’s social policy. The general
interest is the justification and basis for the operation of the state,
with every citizen, free of all forms of discrimination, sharing in
the fruits of national wealth and social development.
The United States established
a collision course confrontation with Iraqi society when it liquidated
the Iraqi state, destroying its accomplishments and erasing its memory.
It was oblivious to the simple truth that society is not a political
movement or head of state that can be conquered, apprehended, bribed
or killed; rather, it is all the living people in a given country. Like
other live societies, Iraqi society possesses huge capabilities —
a sophisticated legacy based on ancient civilisations and an experienced
patriotic movement. Occupation forces faced from the first day a resolute
resistance, culminating in an uprising by all Iraqi movements and organisations,
including those defending women or unemployed youth, human rights organisations,
trade unions, professional syndicates, agencies defending Iraq’s
environment and the rights of prisoners, and all other cultural and
political organisations, side-by-side with provincial and tribal communities
and peaceful and armed resistance groups. A national popular movement,
opposed to occupation and sectarianism, developed taking various forms,
from civil to armed resistance.
In struggling against military-imperial
powers, Iraqis fight in defence of values around which a majority in
the world gathers in consensus. In contrast, the sheer level of force
to which Iraqis have been subjected by imperial powers — from
systematic murder and rape, the desecration of religious and cultural
sites and the destruction of Iraq’s historic heritage, the poisoning
of Iraq’s landscape and rivers by radioactive weapons that will
mark the lives of its future generations for hundreds if not thousands
of years, the terrorising of a whole national population and its attempted
division along lines leading to all out civil war, the plunder of its
resources — prove the decadence and utter immorality of the neoliberal/neoconservative
agenda. The struggle of Iraq is a struggle for civilisation, for culture,
for justice, and for not reducing human life to mere production and
consumption or the conquest of others. Indeed, the present uprising
of Iraqis is not only a part of the wider struggle against savage globalisation
and “free” capital, it is its forefront battle. It is because
the Iraqis refuse to surrender their sovereignty to multinational corporations
that Iraq is being destroyed so viciously.
While the occupation is a
disaster for the United States, for Iraqi society it is a catastrophe.
With the aid of its allies, the US has destroyed all that Iraqis built
in modern times. It should come as no surprise that Iraqis will continue
struggling against the occupation in order to restore their society.
The large educated and marginalised middle class, along with the impoverished
working class and unemployed youth deprived of state subsidies, have
no interest in collaborating with the US policy of creating a class
of blood-soaked feudal warlords. Resistance is the only path for Iraqis
to true liberty, democracy, peace, dignity and achieving their interests,
both as individuals and as a people. The US administration has succeeded
in nothing but destruction, bloodshed and lies. The Iraqi Resistance
is by definition democratic as it is the spontaneous expression of a
people who took its destiny into its hands, and is by definition progressive
as it defends the interests of the people.
While Western societies pose
as being democratic, street action and popular consensus over the past
four years has proven that Western structures of political governance
are impervious to popular will. Despite its failure to solidify our
trust in our ability to change history, the anti-war and anti-globalisation
movement, in its various forms of expression, proves that the people
understand the current divorce between their aspirations and the individuals,
parties and institutions that are supposed to represent and defend them
and their interests. New ways of civil struggle must be found, and urgently.
While its failure is comprehensive, this US administration shows no
sign of changing course. Iraq and the world cannot wait until November
2008, by which time this US administration and its local collaborators
could have killed another one million Iraqis on top of the one million
killed since 2003. Rigorous action is needed, including the impeachment
and prosecution of responsible state leaders and officials for war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide.
We should support the call
of Tun Dr Mahatir Mohammed to criminalise war as a means of resolving
disputes among nations. We should support this call not only because
war is a crime, but also because war again has been proven useless.
Iraq cannot be broken and cannot be subjugated. The defeat of the United
States and the occupation should be a lesson; that never again a military
force tries to subjugate the people of another country. The US did not
and cannot achieve its goals, even if it exterminates whole sections
of Iraqi society. To succeed in stopping this insanity, the anti-war
movement must revise all its terminology and refuse the terms dictated
by the occupation. We must condemn the ignorance that accepts the dehumanising
of the other. We must refuse the word “insurgency” and substitute
it for what exists in reality: legitimate and legal resistance against
vicious foreign occupation. Occupation is a de facto condition, not
a de jure determination. With around 200,000 foreign forces on Iraqi
soil, Iraq cannot be but described as an occupied country. Detainees
in Iraq should thus be considered prisoners of war, with all the protected
rights the Third Geneva Convention assures them.
We ought all to be humbled
by the loses this people has been prepared to endure for our sake and
demand the complete, unconditional and immediate withdrawal of occupation
forces from Iraqi soil, along with the cancellation of any law, treaty,
agreement or contract passed under occupation and the fair payment of
reparations and compensations for the tragic human and material loses
the Iraqis have suffered in defence of civilisation. We must refuse
in total the culture of the military-imperial state if we are to contribute
to the wave of resistance rising worldwide in defence of civilisation,
justice, independence and coexistence. We must retrieve recognition
from any entity imposed by the United States and that claims to represent
the people of Iraq. Long live the Iraqi people and its sole representative,
the Iraqi Resistance.
The writer is a member of
the Executive Committee of The BRussells Tribunal and a frequent contributor
to Global Research.
© Copyright Hana Al-Bayaty,
Global Research, 2007
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