Iraq resistance
A public humiliation to U.S. imperialism
From a talk by WWP Secretariat member Sara Flounders to
the Nov. 13-14 National Fightback Conference.
The U.S. siege of Falluja represents in the starkest and the
most brutal terms the problems of U.S. imperialism and the
potential for mobilized people's resistance in this period.
The U.S. war machine makes it clear that they have the
massive high-tech firepower to overwhelm any possible opponent.
Yet their own think tanks are telling them that they cannot win
the continuing war in Iraq.
This does not mean U.S. imperialism can or will decide to
leave Iraq any time soon. These are the irrational and
unsolvable contradictions that can tear the imperialist ruling
class apart and inflame a global movement.
Falluja was to be an example of how the 22 other cities the
occupation has lost control of would be reconquered in order to
orchestrate an election. The offensive there began with the
destruction of two hospitals and occupation of the largest
hospital. Al Jazeera and other Arab news media were shut down
to try to control images of destruction comparable to the Nazi
bombing of Guernica in Spain or the Warsaw Ghetto in
Poland.
The media have reported use of white phosphorous, napalm,
depleted uranium rounds, giant bunker busters and even poison
gas. Based on the U.S. claim that mosques were a center of
resistance, over 60 mosques were directly targeted. The
destruction is horrendous.
But the U.S. military machine is facing guerrilla warfare
tactics that have taken a page from Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh,
from Che Guevara and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and adapted them to
an urban and desert setting.
Pentagon spokespeople are bragging that Falluja is under
control and the resistance is defeated. Yet U.S. forces
continue to suffer daily casualties.
Meanwhile hundreds of armed resisters have regained control
of Ramadi. In Mosul, the major city of north Iraq, they stormed
a half-dozen police stations. The U.S.-trained Iraqi police
disappeared. Stations were stripped of weapons, ammunition,
body armor, uniforms and even generators.
Whole sections of Baghdad are totally out of U.S. control
for the first time since U.S. occupation forces rolled in April
2003.
Iraqi Railway workers have announced they will refuse to
move all supplies to U.S. troops. They will only carry United
Nations food for Iraqi people.
The coalition of collaborators is in a meltdown. The only
Sunni political party and the Association of Muslim Scholars
have just announced an official boycott of the January
elections.
Planning for people's resistance
From Iraq three weeks before the U.S. invasion began, I
reported in the pages of Workers World newspaper about the
public training of the entire Iraqi adult population--both men
and women--in urban warfare tactics. It was no secret. Weapons,
ammunition and months of food supplies were publicly
distributed to the entire population. Images of the heroic
Palestinian resistance reminded the Iraqis that it is possible
for a whole people to resist for more than 50 years against
overwhelming force.
The shock and awe of massive bombing was calculated to
totally overwhelm and demoralize the entire population. But the
Pentagon, Rumsfeld, the whole U.S. ruling class made a historic
miscalculation. They are so drunk with the power of their
high-tech weapons that they don't consider that this higher
technical level is now a world phenomenon.
Their weapons are only one aspect of high tech. Millions of
workers who make this technology also must be trained to
understand and use it. The technology enters the capitalist
marketplace in the form of millions of cheap gadgets.
No isolated, illiterate peasantry, the Iraqi workers are
technically sophisticated and conscious of the aims of colonial
occupation. They are well aware of the massive world movement
that mobilized in the streets to oppose the U.S. war.
Thousands of engineers, scientists, technicians, and
mechanics are able to rig thousands of cell phones and
remote-control doorbells to set off ambushes and booby
traps.
The working class today, as Marx predicted 150 years ago, is
educated, technically sophisticated and truly a world class.
When millions of jobs and work days are configured around
global time zones, workers themselves begin to understand
this.
The whole world is watching
U.S. imperialism's biggest problem--greater than an
insurgency that they can't seem to defeat--is that this is
happening in a floodlight of world attention.
Instant information and communication seems so powerful when
marines can call in deadly strikes via satellite phones to jets
far overhead. But instant communication is an entirely
different political phenomenon when throughout the Arab world,
and in Pakistan, the Philippines, Venezuela and South Korea,
workers can go into an Internet café and scroll through
thousands of images of Iraqi resistance fighters.
Instant communication takes on a different character when a
U.S. platoon, which refused a direct military order to drive a
convoy of trucks, was able to contact their families and
contact the media in Jackson, Miss., before the top brass in
the Green Zone had even heard of the mutiny.
Officers now worry that GIs can record and photograph
illegal orders and war crimes with their cell phones.
All of this technology takes on a different character when
you can google in the words "rights in the military" or
"anti-war" or "struggle against racism" or "Mumia" or hundreds
of other resistance words and web sites that activists have
connected to us or that we help to maintain pop up.
All of these web sites, like all of our printed literature,
have a consistent theme of resistance to imperialist war and
racism, solidarity with all peoples under attack, and promoting
the power of working people when they organize.
A generation ago there was a song: "The revolution will not
be televised." Maybe it still won't be televised, but we can be
sure to catch it on the Internet.
Reprinted from the Dec. 2, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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