[Marxism] "Elections have to be an Iraqi demand, not the demand of the foreign countries."

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Before the news article, which includes an excellent statement by a
Sunni figure on the elections and a very defensive-sounding statement by
a Shia leader, I want to make some comments on the discussion of Iraq.

What I have been submitting to the list are, in a sense, drafts of an
article I am writing for the Canadian based Socialist Voice.  So
everybody's comments have been very helpful.

One reason I contribute to the list is not just to finish discussions,
but to start them when I think they are needed.  And one of the reasons
I submit ideas is to, as they use to say in the ad industry, "run them
up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes" -- that is, to bounce them
off the ideas of other list members.
This hearkens back to the days when I had editors and editorial staff
members to sound off to, but it is actually better because the
standpoints on the list are much less "homogeneous" so I get criticisms
or comments from varied directions

(2) The title of my the article Jose responded to was completely on the
politically wrong axis. "A policy of "slaughter, slaughter, slaughter
and opposition to majority rule...."  I changed it to a more appropriate
title when I submitted a subsequent draft.  But even that was off,
because we can NEVER lose sight of the fact that US (and British)
imperialism is responsible for all the violence in Iraq today, just and
unjust.

(3) Since then, I have switched to placing my axis on Washington's
attempts to inflict a destructive civil war on Iraq to provide a base
for the imperialist war against the Iraqi people and the resistance
groups.

(4) As I tried to make clear in all drafts of my ideas on this, I
believe that this election is an illegitimate election, a colonial
election, and that the government it elects will not and cannot-- unless
it turns sharply and completely against the occupation -- represent
"majority rule" but only the rule of the occupying powers. I am for
opposing the election, though I suspect that "stop the election at all
costs" is a political trap for the resistance, in the context of the
sectarian divisions.

(5) I think the evidence is convincing that the strongest currents in
the resistance today are Islamism and Baathism.  I believe this is a
bourgeois resistance in its leadership against a foreign occupation.  As
such it deserves to be defended unconditionally against our imperialist
enemy.

(6) I don't think it was all planned in advance but I think it is likely
that Saddam was involved in planning a fight as well as a retreat.
After all, the Iraqi government never surrendered, and, before the
flight, the army was fighting much harder than it had in the Gulf War.
Suddenly it seemed to just evaporate.  This interpretation is completely
different than my judgment at the time. Of course, to the extent Saddam
played an initiating role, this is completely to his historic credit.

(7) I think most of the fighters today have been recruited since the
occupation.  The original group was probably a core of fighters from
within the regime, perhaps in alliance with some Sunni Islamic groups.
But this resistance is not simply the state institutions gone
underground. And Baathist certainly doesn't equal "Saddamist."

(6) I have never been a big fan of "kill the collaborators" as a
strategy, and I certainly don't consider it a moral imperative. I have
always thought that the resistance groups rely much too heavily on
violence and intimidation directed at sections of the population. Over
time, I have raised this concern often on the list. I don't think we
have to find some positive explanation of all their actions. My heart
doesn't soar when the bodies of 18 Shia who were looking for jobs from
the army and police are found in Mosul -- if the story is as the US
media tell it. I reject a body count standard of victory.  Also
definitions of collaborator are open-ended.  If a cabdriver can kill
prostitutes as collaborators because they hire out to Americans, someone
else can kill the cabdriver because he picks up Americans.  And so it
goes.

(7) The reason I raised my difference on this so sharply now is because
of the US drive to supplement the occupation war with a civil war, and
our need as well as the Iraqis' to avoid the Sunni-Shia trap which is
being set by the imperialists.  As my drafts have proceeded, I have laid
particular emphasis on the need to fight the Sunni-phobic campaign
(obviously just another form of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism) now
being waged in the US media with occassional reflections in the radical
press.

(8) I don't think the Shia are an oppressed nationality like the Kurds.
They consider themselves as Iraqis who have suffered institutionalized
discrimination set up by the British which is now in collapse.  I favor
unity of the Iraqi Arab nation against the occupiers, which means, among
other things, I think the perspective of restoring the old set-up, aside
from being very improbable, divides the resistance movement and
strengthens the imperialist hand.

(9) My own read is that the situation in Iraq is so awful, and the
imperialists have had so little to offer except ruin and plunder, that
the Sunni-Shia civil war will probably be avoided, and the
Shia will shift back toward the resistance or split along
resistance/pro-occupation lines with the resistance gaining over time.
But things will go better, the better the situation that the US is
trying to create is understood and fought against.

Fred Feldman






 MSNBC.com
Three senior Iraqi officials abducted
Also, man beheaded a day after U.S. general warned of 'spectacular'
attacks

MSNBC News Services
Updated: 10:20 a.m. ET Jan. 8, 2005


BAGHDAD, Iraq - Militants abducted three senior Iraqi officials,
beheaded a man who worked for the U.S. military, and killed four people
in a suicide car bombing south of Baghdad, officials said Saturday. At
least three others were killed in separate attacks across the country, a
day after a U.S. general warned that insurgents may be planning
"horrific" attacks ahead of Jan. 30 elections.

Meanwhile, Shiite and Sunni religious leaders voiced sharply divergent
views on whether the vote should be held at all.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, deputy chief of staff for strategic
communications in Iraq, said Friday the United States has no
intelligence indicating specific plots. But he said American leaders
expected a rise in attacks.

"I think a worst case is where they have a series of horrific attacks
that cause mass casualties in some spectacular fashion in the days
leading up to the elections," Lessel said.

"If you look over the last six months, they have steadily escalated the
barbaric nature of the attacks they have been committing. A year ago,
you didn't see these kinds of horrific things," he said.


In Washington, President Bush said the elections will be "an incredibly
hopeful experience" despite rising violence and doubts that the vote
will bring stability and democracy.

"I know it's hard but it's hard for a reason," Bush said. He
acknowledged security problems in four of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Rising sectarian tension
The comments came amid an escalating insurgency believed to be led by
minority Sunnis who dominated the country during Saddam Hussein's
regime. In the election - the first democratic vote in Iraq since the
country was formed in 1932 - the Sunnis are certain to lose their
dominance to the Shiites, who comprise 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million
people.

Reflecting Shiites' demands to hold the vote as scheduled and Sunnis'
calls for a boycott or postponement, two senior religious leaders
expressed sharply differing views during Friday prayers.

"We want all the Iraqis to participate, we also insist on holding the
elections as scheduled and to put these elections behind us as a way to
end the conflict in Iraq," Saadr Aldeen al-Qubbanji, a leader of a
prominent Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq, said in the southern city of Najaf.

"We all want elections, but we are seeking fair and free elections,"
Sheik Mahmoud Al-Somaidie of the Sunnis' Association of Muslim Scholars
said in Baghdad. "Those of us who are calling for postponement are
seeking that for the benefit of the country. Elections have to be an
Iraqi demand, not the demand of the foreign countries."

The United States insists on holding the vote as planned, and strongly
opposes a postponement.

Escalating insurgency
This week has seen a string of assassinations, suicide car bombings and
other assaults that killed nearly 100 people, mostly Iraqi security
troops, who are seen by the militants as collaborators with the American
occupiers.

Authorities in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit said Saturday that gunmen
abducted a deputy governor of a central Iraqi province and two other
senior officials as they traveled to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, Iraq's most prominent Shiite leader, in the holy city of
Najaf to discuss national elections.

The delegation was stopped and the members kidnapped about 40 miles
south of Baghdad on Friday. The area is in the so-called "triangle of
death," a string of Sunni-controlled towns that have been the scene of
frequent attacks.

In Baqouba, insurgents beheaded a translator who was working with the
U.S. army after breaking into his house, police said Saturday.

Elsewhere, a suicide bomber detonated his car at a petrol station near
an Iraqi police and army checkpoint south of Baghdad on Saturday,
killing four civilians and wounding 19, police said.

They said most of those killed had been lining up at the fuel pump in
the village of Mahaweel, about 50 miles south of the capital, which was
crowded amid chronic fuel shortages.

The explosion wrecked at least three cars but did not hurt any of the
police or soldiers manning the checkpoint a little further down the
road.

Police said the blast appeared to target the gas station, although the
motive was unclear. Insurgents frequently attack Iraqi police and troops
whom they accuse of working with U.S.-led forces they want out of the
country.

Policeman, tribal representative killed
In other violence, an Iraqi policeman was killed by masked gunmen as he
was leaving his house the southern Dora neighborhood of Baghdad.

In Baghdad's western neighborhood of Khadraa, gunmen shot dead Abboud
Khalaf al-Lahibi, deputy secretary-general of the National Front for
Iraqi tribes - a group representing several Iraqi tribes - his aide,
Ibrahim al-Farhan, said. A bodyguard was killed and three others wounded
in the attack, he said.

On Friday, a U.S. soldier was killed in a non-hostile vehicle accident
in the western province of Anbar, the U.S. military said. The incident
is under investigation, and the Marine's name was being withheld pending
notification of the family.

Lessel said he expects the insurgents would escalate attacks before the
election, and that the incidents would probably decline after the vote.

"What the terrorists fear most is a simple piece of paper called a
ballot," he said. "They fear the election. I think successful elections
will have a significant impact on the insurgents."

Other developments

A retired four-star U.S. general will travel to Iraq next week at the
behest of the Pentagon to review the U.S. military's policy there, The
New York Times reported Friday.
The body of a civilian truck driver missing since April has been found
near where his convoy was ambushed in Iraq nine months ago. The man,
identified as William Bradley, was in a fuel truck convoy that was
ambushed near Baghdad on April 9. Four members of his convoy were
killed, and two remain unaccounted for. Another was captured but managed
to escape in May.
Forces in the multinational coalition in Iraq have turned up no sign of
Florence Aubenas, the French journalist who is missing with her
interpreter in Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman said Friday. The
French daily newspaper Liberation said it had not heard from Aubenas and
her translator, Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi, who were last seen Wednesday at
her Baghdad hotel.
The Army is planning to spend $84 million to armor hundreds of older
troop carriers for service in Iraq, officials said. Armoring vehicles to
protect soldiers in Iraq has received new attention since a soldier in
Kuwait questioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the armor on
his unit's vehicles last month. Rumsfeld came under fire for not doing
more to ensure that all the trucks and Humvees in Iraq were armored
against the threat of ambushes and roadside bombs.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6727646/


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