Solidarity 138, 11 September 2008

Nadia Mahmood of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq discussed current developments in Iraq with Martin Thomas from Solidarity Martin: The USA and the Maliki government in Iraq are negotiating an agreement. It looks as if it will say that US troops have to be out of Iraqi cities by June next year, and combat forces out of Iraq altogether by 2011. The background here seems to be that the Maliki government is becoming more confident. Until recently, they felt they had to agree to almost anything the Americans wanted, because without American military support their government would collapse, but...

Comrade Machover: You are someone for whom I have long had a certain regard and even affection. I regret that you have chosen to join in the bizarre heresy-hunt, entirely Stalinist in conception, purpose, and execution, around my discussion article “What If Israel Bombs Iran?”, Solidarity 3/136 . Click here for the whole debate I would have said that your chief trait, and sometimes fault, is an obstreperous pedantry rather than the sloppy-mindedness of those with whom you now run in a pack. I would also have expected from you an instinctive resistance to mob hysteria. Most — not all — of your...

The lynchpin of the SSP’s politics is its call for an “independent socialist Scotland” or a “Scottish socialist republic.” [This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper] In the small print – and, to be fair to the SSP, not necessarily just in the small print – these slogans are qualified by statements such as “a fully-fledged socialist society could never be achieved within the borders of a small country such as Scotland.” The independent Scottish socialist republic, therefore, turns out to be a country with “a socialist government,” and “a socialist economy with an...

The USA's attempt to get a "State of Forces Agreement" that would give the US military open-ended powers as a virtual parallel government in Iraq has failed. Negotiations between the USA and the Iraqi government are now around formulas which call for US troops to be out of Iraq's cities by June next year - there are currently 16,000 within Baghdad, for example - and all US combat forces to be out of Iraq by 2011. [This is a longer version of the article than appears in the printed paper] This shift indicates that Nouri al-Maliki's Iraqi government is more confident and assertive. The US...

Examining Gilles Kepel's comprehensive history, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press) . "Left-leaning Arab intellectuals have traditionally regarded the [Muslim] Brothers as a populist movement... [with] similarities to the workings of European fascism during... the 1930s... "In the eyes of leftist intellectuals, both among Muslims and in the West, Islamist groups represented a religious variety of fascism... "But gradually, as Islamist numbers increased... the left discovered that Islamism had a popular base; consequently Marxist thinkers of every stripe, casting...