RE: [Marxism] Re: response to Fred (by Steve Gabosch)

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The resistance is composed mainly of Baathists and Islamists...

Well, that about covers it, doesn't it? Who else is there in Iraq but people
who are motivated mainly by secular and nationalist concerns and people
whose motivation for resistance comes from their religious faith? Well over
90% of the people of Iraq are Islamists.

As a ruling party in a one party state, the Baath Party must have included
tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Baath to get
a job or in some other way to get along in Iraqi society. Exactly the same
thing happened all over the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe, and it
used to be the fashion in the United States to discount the ideological
component of communism in party members as just what one had to profess to
get along. To allege that the resistance is made up of Baathists should be
qualified; it is made up partly of Baathists who have decided to defend
their country from invaders, and power to them, I say.

Saddam is behind the resistance...

Let's give the devil his due: he did distribute arms to the people just
before the invasion; he did empty the jails; he did organize for an
"inconceivable" caching of arms apparently everywhere in Iraq.

As I have argued before, it appears that the collapse of the Iraqi army in
the period immediately before the taking of Baghdad, was at least partially
planned, in what can reasonably be called a mousetrap strategy that has
worked like a charm. You don't have to be a Saddamite to acknowledge this
reality. Who could know that the US would help spark the resistance by
allowing Iraq's (and humanity's) cultural heritage to be trashed and looted,
Iraqi civilians to be shot on sight because they didn't respond to orders in
a unknown tongue, unarmed demonstrations to be shot up with machine guns (as
in Fallujah), or any of its other shoot-yourself-in-the-foot mistakes the US
made to jump start the resistance?

When big historical events unfold according to what we like to call the line
of march of history, they are always accompanied by secondary and tertiary
forces that appear random and that are then used by apologists to explain
away those same big historical events. In Vietnam, for instance, it is
alleged that the US would have won if a) the armed forces had been allowed
to fight; b) if racial and societal tensions had not undermined the army's
ability to field forces actually willing to fight, and so on.

Vietnam was lost because of the indomitable willingness of the Vietnamese
masses to fight for their liberation. Period. Likewise in Iraq today the
resistance is driven by the will of the people to rid their country of
occupiers, despite the innumerable secondary reasons, problems,
contingencies, imperialist fuckups and so forth that will eventually be
blamed for the US defeat in Iraq. I find it embarrassing to have to argue
for the existence of a patently obvious war of  the whole people to someone
who claims to write under the banner of Marxism.

For the record, I agree completely with Fred that this is unlikely to result
in an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. The stakes are way too high for
imperialism, way higher than in Vietnam, and the unity of the ruling class
around the war in the US remains almost complete. An Iraqi analogue to that
last trooper clinging to the landing gear as the last helicopter lifted off
the roof of the US embassy in Saigon is what I expect.

Where, in these AP lists of who comprises the resistance, is the category of
people who are pissed off because their mother, father, brother, sister,
son, or daughter, neighbor, or friend has been slaughtered by the Americans?
I'm sure there are millions of such people in Iraq nowadays. Perhaps they
are all dead-end tribalists nursing Islamo-Baathist revenge fantasies.

David McDonald


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