Workers' Liberty

May Day Message from the General Union of Dock Workers in Iraq to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the United States: Dear Brothers and Sisters of ILWU in California,
The courageous decision you made to carry out a strike on May Day to protest against the war and occupation of Iraq advances our struggle against occupation to bring a better future for us and for the rest of the world as well.

May Day 2008 Statement from the Iraqi Labour Movement To the Workers and All Peace Loving People of the World

Q. You’re writing a polemic for the AWL “majority” position on Iraq against “the minority”?

A. It falsifies the debate to put it that way. For a start, “the minority” have different views among themselves. The final revised proposal on Iraq for AWL conference submitted by David Broder and two other AWL people differs seriously — in politics, not just literarily — from what David wrote in Solidarity 3/128.

Arthur Bough

I have posted a response to Martin's argument on Iraq on my blog here - Three D's and Four X's

The relative stability and quiet in Iraq since September 2007 has been very, very relative. And now it could unravel in a very ugly way.

Kathy Black spoke for US Labor Against War (USLAW) at a meeting at Melbourne Trade on 12 March. Riki Lane summarises her speech.

Nick Broomfield’s latest cinematic offering dramatises a particular brutal and harrowing chapter in the five year history of the U.S occupation of Iraq.

The first two weeks of March saw dozens of shootings, roadside bombs, car bombs and discoveries of mass graves in Iraq. Five years into the war, the country remains torn apart by sectarian violence, which marks its toll not only in bodies but also in destroyed basic infrastructure, power and supplies shortages and a grave lack of hospital beds.

AWL members, supporters and friends collected money for the campaign to free the jailed socialist students in Iran on the Stop The War demonstration in London on 15 March.

The brief Turkish invasion of the autonomous Kurdish north on Iraq at the end of February is evidence, above all, of how far Iraq is from a liveable political settlement five years after the US/UK invasion of the country.

Turkey has some 15 million Kurds, mostly living in the south and east of the country, near the borders with Iraq and Iran. Although repression of the Kurds in Turkey has slackened recently, Turkey has a longstanding hostility to Kurdish self-assertion, and especially to Turkish-Kurdish guerrillas who base themselves in remote mountain areas of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Iraqi LGBT have recently obtained new video evidence highlighting the brutality of the Badr Corps and police treatment of LGBT people in Iraq. It shows LGBT people being arrested, held in custody and having their heads shaved and taunted with songs of hate and revenge.

The first video shows two gay men celebrating a wedding ceremony when they are stopped at a checking point between Al-Kut and Baghdad and violently pulled out of their car.

Hezbollah were among the organisations represented at the “World Against War” rally in Friends’ Meeting House, London on 25 February, with the Stop the War Coalition seeing fit to give a platform to the clerical fascist Lebanese militia.

The minority argue that the only principled line on the conflict, and only chance to build independent working-class forces, is to stand sharply opposed to US-UK intervention in the region as well as Islamism. In contrast, the majority argue that we should acquiesce to the occupation of Iraq, since if we demanded that the troops leave and they did, Islamist militias would win out and crush democratic space in Iraq.

The left devotes much of its efforts to campaigning against imperialism, which is no surprise given the present foreign policy of the American and British governments.

A footnote to Pat Longman’s review of The Shock Doctrine (Solidarity 3-126). Capitalism has always been full of “hard-faced men who did well out of the war” — or out of whatever recent disaster may have thrown society off balance.

Already hailed as a masterpiece, this film is one of the bookies’ favourite for the Oscars, particularly for Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of oil man Daniel Plainview. His performance certainly dominates the film — he is central to all but two scenes in the film — and it is as subtle and understated as it is masterful.

AWL conference notes

1. The rise of workers' struggles in Iran

In my last summary article on Iraq (Solidarity 3/117, 13/09/07) I wrote that the Bush "administration now seems to have no strategy but to bash on and hope it can keep things relatively under control until it hands over the mess to another US presidency in January 2009".

See attachments for the leaflet we distributed at the conference.

The Stop The War Coalition conference, which took place in London on 27 October, featured Somaye Zadeh from the SWP-led group Campaign Iran telling us that "the lies about Iran" aren’t true.

Energetic US diplomacy may have headed off – for the time being – the threat of a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq.

By Sacha Ismail

In "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed up", written in July 1916, Lenin wrote as follows:

By Martin Thomas

Two of Iraq’s major union federations have formed a united front to fight against oil privatisation and the government’s attempt to outlaw the oil unions.

By Martin Thomas

Police have banned a demonstration on Iraq scheduled by the Stop The War Coalition for 8 October.

The stated purpose of the USA’s troop “surge” in Iraq which started early this year was to damp down the country’s conflicts enough that the current US-friendly Iraqi government (or, maybe, a

The International Federation of Iraqi Refugees has issued the following appeal.

AusIraq, in Australia, has put out a petition supporting the Iraqi oil unions now under attack from the Iraqi government. Download an adapted version here; please circulate it and seek signatures.