Speak up for Iraqi workers

Submitted by Daniel_Randall on 20 September, 2004 - 12:00

Seventy-one per cent of people in Britain now want the government to set a date to withdraw British troops from Iraq.

Tony Blair replied on 19 September: “Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam… this conflict now taking place in Iraq… is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be decided.”

True, the Islamist militias in Iraq are terrorist, against civilian foreigners taken hostage and then ceremonially beheaded, and against the civilian population of Iraq too.

True, the figure of 71% probably includes a large number who just think Iraq is a mess and someone else should deal with it (the percentage who think the US/UK invasion in 2003 was wrong has actually dropped a bit, to 45%).

But the Islamist-terrorist threat in Iraq has in large part been created by Bush and Blair’s arrogant, oppressive militarism and destruction of the fabric of Iraqi society. Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army was a small group before the USA started trying to “take it out” in April, and now has mass support. The war and occupation have taken a toll between 12,800 and 14,800 reported Iraqi civilian deaths, and more unreported. The government and its US sponsors have lost control in large parts of the country.

To back Blair — which means backing Bush — as a way of combatting the fundamentalists is, to adapt the words of US Republican senator Chuck Hagel, “beyond pitiful, beyond embarrassing… dangerous.”

Hagel was commenting on the fact that only $1 billion of the $18 billion the US was due to spend so far on Iraqi reconstruction has actually gone out (and most of that to pay security guards rather than to reconstruct basic services). A large part of the reason for that is the US government’s insistence on forced privatisation of the Iraqi economy, and diversion of the reconstruction contracts to mostly US multinationals. The US government’s latest response is to give up for now and divert money earmarked for reconstructing water and electricity supplies to more security guards.

The New York Times reported on 16 September that an official US government “National Intelligence Estimate” sees the prospects for Iraq over the next year as, at “most favourable”, a “stability… tenuous in political, economic and security terms”, and, at worst but quite probable, “civil war”.

If the radical Islamist militias triumph, they will not only impose terror (on the model of Iran) on the people of Iraq, but also, almost certainly, tear the country apart in civil war between Shi’a and Sunni militias and the Kurdish military forces.

But the population of Iraq — even those who hesitantly supported the 2003 invasion — now mostly see the US/UK troops as brutal occupiers and want them to leave.

Support Blair and Bush in the hope of getting democracy in Iraq, and we are more likely to get some form of military dictatorship in Iraq to keep a lid on it — or an eventual retreat in which they chop up Iraq and hand over the various bits to whatever reactionary militias seem most likely to cooperate.

The only force that can build an independent, democratic and secular Iraq is the new Iraqi labour movement.

That movement exists. It is battered and divided, but it exists.

In mid-September, at the TUC, the unions voted to launch a solidarity campaign with the Iraqi unions. But at the Labour Party Policy Forum in July, the big unions chose not to push anything on Iraq — any more than on the repeal of anti-union laws — and instead to back Blair in return for small concessions.

The unions have never used their political clout on Iraq. They let all the union representatives on Labour’s National Executive back Blair during the 2003 war. They have never pressed Blair on the fact that Iraqi unions are living in a legal limbo, with Saddam’s 1987 labour law still on the books and promises of a new labour law still unfulfilled.

Nor on the fact that the British occupation forces in Basra have — in the British Empire’s traditions of “indirect rule” — largely ceded the streets to one of the Islamist militias which is cooperating with the occupation, SCIRI.

Nor on the fact that unemployment in Iraq is around 50% — while reconstruction work is still stalled — and the Union of the Unemployed’s demands for jobs or basic income for all remains unmet.

Against the occupation and against the Islamists — the unions must speak up for the Third Camp, the working class camp, in Iraq!

By Martin Thomas

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