Support
The Iraqi
ResistanceMovement!
By James Petras
10 May 2004
globalresearch.ca
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 and sisters (yes, women street fighters)
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" Mubarak, the Iranian
Ayatollah collaborators. 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.
US Leftist Intellectuals
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
" Echoes
of the French intellectuals who also opposed the popular armed resistance
movements against the Nazis because the "Communists had taken over
"
or later because the 'colons' in Algeria also had a "right to be
in Algeria" (Albert Camus). In his book "Listen Yankee",
C. Wright Mills challenged US 'progressives' who balked at supporting
the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960's. "This is a real blood
and guts popular revolution", he said. "You can make a difference,
you can be part of the solution or part of the problem."
The Western intellectuals
are a problem. They are not ordering the troops, even less are they
(or their children or grandchildren) pulling the triggers murdering
Iraqi school kids. They are sitting on their hands. "But",
they protest, "we oppose the war" while they scramble to endorse
candidate Kerry who does support the war and even calls for 40,000 more
troops to pour missiles into crowded neighborhoods., under U .N auspices
to be sure. So where are the Western intellectuals in these days when
the Iraqi people have risen arms in hand to resist the US military juggernaut?
There are two sides: An entire nation fighting a colonial occupation
army and US imperialism. Serious and consequential political intellectuals
must make a choice: To refuse to take sides is tantamount to complicity,
intellectual complacency is a luxury for intellectuals in the empire
which doesn't exist in Iraq. Over 1000 Iraqi intellectuals and professors
have been murdered during the occupation. The issues are not obscure
or complex. One side demands free elections, a free press, and self-
determination while the other, the colonial officials, ban newspapers,
appoint puppet rulers and murder their opponents.
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 April4,2004 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.
James Petras
is a Global
Research Contributing Editor. He is Emeritus Professor at the State
University of New York at Binghamton and Adjunct Professor at St Mary's
University, Halifax. He is the author or coauthor of 63 books, translated
in 18 languages. He is adviser to several popular social movements,
including the MST in Brazil. He is a regular columnist for La Jornada,
Mexico and a frequent contributor to Global Outlook Magazine.
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