War in Iraq - which side are we on?
In the war between the US/UK and Iraq we should be in favour of a VICTORY TO IRAQ!

Bush and Blair are set to kill hundreds of thousands more Iraqi people. Their crime? To live in a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world, reserves the billionaire oil bosses want to control. For this the Iraqis will be incinerated.

This is the most cowardly war ever. The strongest state in history is launching billions of dollars worth of hi-tech weaponry against a cruelly impoverished country, one it has systematically starved of food and medicine for over a decade.

58% of the British people oppose this war - as do millions of Americans. In London and Washington marches of 400,000 and over showed the depth of anger at what is being done in our name. Millions know this is not about ‘weapons of mass destruction’, 9/11 or ‘war on terrorism’ but about oil and global domination. Trade unions, students, Muslim youth are marching together on every continent. The anti-war movement is getting stronger by the day.

Bush and Blair are hypocrites and killers, but they are not stupid. They remember Vietnam, when protests on the streets played a big role in forcing the USA to back down. So they’re not going to rely on persuading people through patient debate - their arguments are too weak, and they know it. Instead they will launch a campaign of vicious propaganda against the anti-war movement.

Over the coming weeks of bloodshed and massacre, we in the anti-war movement are going to be accused of aiding our nation’s enemies. They will say we are putting British soldiers at risk. In essence they will accuse us of treason - of aiding the defeat of ‘our own’ country at the hands of a foreign power.

But the people putting young soldiers at risk are not the anti-war movement. It’s not us that decided to send a quarter of the British Army to the Gulf. The people responsible for this war are in the White House and Whitehall - and they must take responsibility for every young life brought to a sudden and squalid end.

The ruling class in Britain and America are using patriotism to whip up support for their war. This is a simple idea: we should support our country. Even if we don’t support the reasons for this war, when the shooting starts we are supposed to remember that we are British. Anyone who doesn’t will be accused of letting down their friends, family and community. The patriotic slogan is “my country, right or wrong”, or as Cartman put it in a recent episode of South Park, “If you don’t support the team, get out of the stadium”.

Patriotism is a gigantic fraud. It rests on a lie: that all British people have the same interests, and that they are different from those of all Iraqi people. In fact, the interests of working class people and youth in Britain are the opposite of the billionaire British oil and arms companies. A striking firefighter in London has more in common with an exploited worker in an Iraqi factory than with Bush, Blair or the chairman of BP. Our true interests are based not on our nationality, but on our class.

That is why the forces that back the war most aggressively are those closest to millionaires and the elites - US owned newspapers like the Sun, the pro-business New Labour clique around Blair, the Tories and the City of London. And it’s why organisations of working class people are mostly against the war: most trade unions, local Labour parties, students in schools and colleges all over Britain.

The war aims of British and US governments are unjust - theft and domination. If we oppose them, then we must also desire their defeat in this war. This is because we want them to fail: to fail to seize the oil wells, to fail to intimidate regimes across the third world, to fail to enforce the global system of debt and unfair trade rules, to fail to carve out a new order in the Middle East based on US, British and Israeli occupation of Arab land.

What about the Iraqis themselves? They are the ones facing death in their hundreds of thousands. Their government is not launching a war for domination of the world. They are not trying to steal anyone else’s oil. Unlike the Americans, they are not spending more than all other nations put together on an arsenal of mass destruction. They are defending their country against open aggression and theft. And they have a right to!

Of course the warmongers will claim that we are supporting the dictator Saddam Hussein. What hypocrites. They helped him into power. They blocked UN criticism of him when he gassed his own people. In 1991 they deliberately left him in power. Warmonger-in-chief Donald Rumsfeld (who sold Saddam weapons in the 80s) has offered him an amnesty and immunity from prosecution. If they win, the US will introduce not democracy but a government under their own strict control.

The Iraqis must decide on their own government. To do that they need to establish democracy themselves through their own mass action. And they will never be able to do that while their country is occupied by hundreds of thousands of US and British troops. To win democracy they need to stop US occupation. The Iraqi people know that. That’s why even while they hate Saddam Hussein, they hate the US and its war even more.

We should support the Iraqis’ defence of their country. We should do all we can to help them defeat the US and British attack

A victory for Iraq would encourage resistance to the global superpower and its capitalist culture all over the world. It will encourage working people and youth everywhere to demand our share. It would utterly discredit Blair and his slavish support for everything the White House wants. It would weaken not strengthen dictatorships everywhere by weakening their main sponsor in the world - America, which funds them, trains them, and arms them. Above all it would encourage revolution and the fight for global justice.

That’s why the anti-war movement should carry on the fight and throw the warmongers’ lies back in their faces.

* Solidarity with the Iraqi People

* Defend Iraq

* Defeat imperialism

* Victory to Iraq!

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