[WCUSP] Open letter to the anti-war movement

[yvonne simmons]

> Subject: Fw: Open letter to the anti-war movement
> Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:32:53 -0700
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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20070318&articleId=5103
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>   Open letter to the anti-war movement
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   By Hana Abdul Ilah Al Bayaty
> 
> 
>   Global Research , March 18, 2007
> 
> 
>   The national popular resistance in Iraq, in
> defending the whole of humanity against a culture of
> force, deserves our recognition and support, writes
> Hana Abdul Ilah Al Bayaty 
> 
>   The illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq is
> not only the biggest crime of recent history, it is
> the original sin of the 21st century, a depravity.
> In its war on Iraq, the United States has sought to
> destroy Iraq as both a state and a nation. It
> decimated an entire class — the progressive middle
> class of Iraq that had proven its capacity to manage
> Iraqi resources independently and to the benefit of
> all; it killed nearly a million while sending
> millions more into exile; it orchestrated death
> squads and looting and invented new horrors in
> torture and rape; in the name of bringing democracy,
> it brought material destruction on a mass scale to a
> people, aiming also to erase their identity, memory,
> culture, social fabric, institutions and forms of
> administration, commerce, and everyday life; it even
> attacked Iraq's unborn generations with the 4.7
> billion-year death of depleted uranium. It has
> engaged in civilisational genocide as well as its
> own moral suicide. Force, however, does not dictate
> right. The brutality of power and imperialism has
> been definitively exposed while the project for a
> new American century has utterly failed. The
> consequences for American and international history
> are conclusive. The world order that formed around
> erstwhile US liberal values has evaporated. 
> 
>   The US invasion and occupation of Iraq is a
> military, economic, political, moral and cultural
> disaster for Americans and the world. US military
> failure has been demonstrated by the inability of
> the best funded and most sophisticated armed force
> in the world to defeat the resistance of a small
> country and its poor people tired of 13 years of
> sanctions, exposing war as useless. While the
> Americans may attempt to secure their presence in
> Iraq, they cannot destroy the belief of Iraqis that
> they have the right to live as any other people in
> the world, free and independent and sovereign in
> their land and over their resources. Occupying Iraq
> is an economic disaster because the costs of the war
> for the United States have increased beyond any
> economic gain it could have from controlling Iraqi
> oil. Politically, the occupation is a disaster for
> the United States because no one in the world can
> argue that it is playing a progressive role. The
> occupation is also a moral and cultural disaster for
> the US. Following the enormous human suffering of
> World War II, the world — Americans included —
> established international law and human rights law
> that set the standard for civilised societies. US
> neoconservatives and imperialists are trying to
> destroy this civilisation, refusing to be subject to
> international law and replacing it with the law of
> the jungle. How can the world — Americans included —
> be identified with such a savage enterprise as the
> war on and occupation of Iraq? 
> 
>   Arabs are not strangers to neo-imperial attempts
> to prevent their development. They recall the
> systematic demonisation of their popular movements:
> the attempted toppling of the democratically elected
> Syrian government in 1956 for being "communist", the
> characterisation of Nasser as a "fascist" when he
> nationalised the Suez Canal, the criminalisation of
> the Iraqi Baath Party, referred to as "Nazis", when
> it refused to surrender control over Iraq's
> resources. Even the Palestinian and Lebanese people
> who heroically struggle against occupation are
> considered "terrorists". We know well what are
> colonial policies in general and in this region in
> particular. The US always pretends to defend the
> rights of a minority — whether its demands are
> justified or not — in order to control the majority.
> In Iraq, since 1991, the US appealed to Kurds and
> Shias to rebel, trying to insinuate that those who
> govern them are Sunnis. Anyone with intellectual
> honesty knows that the Baath Party was neither
> sectarian in its thinking nor in its membership. 
> 
>   US-Israeli plans, based on creating divisions
> among Arabs in one country, or between countries,
> have failed. In Iraq, the policy of charming some
> groups of the Iraqi Resistance or their supporters
> in order to divide them and isolate the resistance
> has failed completely. Despite repeated declarations
> made by war criminal Jalal Talabani, resistance
> groups are united in their position. Second, the
> policy of dividing Iraqi movements into Shia, Sunni
> and Kurd, is disintegrating: large movements of
> opinion insist on the unity of Iraq and the common
> interest of its people. Ever more groups in the
> south enter the struggle against the occupation and
> its local puppet government. The unity of Turkomen,
> Assyrians and Arabs on the fate of Kirkuk is an
> example of underlying unity, as is the deepening of
> tribal solidarity, spreading demands for a large
> political national front, demonstrations in the
> north, and ever unifying positions concerning the
> future of Iraq's oil wealth. 
> 
>   Iraq has been a socio-economic and geopolitical
> entity for more than 4000 years, it cannot be
> divided. It is the cradle of several civilisations.
> When united this entity has proven able to enhance
> human civilisation and be an engine for progress.
> Where the Sumerians invented writing, the
> Babylonians invented law, followed by the Abbasid
> who introduced the idea of a state of all its
> citizens and of social solidarity in society,
> opening the path for the unifying Arab-Muslim
> civilisation that survives proudly to this day. The
> Iraqi people are the expression of this heritage,
> regardless of their religion or ethnicity. Never in
> history could two states cohabitate the area that is
> now Iraq. It has always been in the interest of the
> peoples who settled in the Iraq basin to organise
> together a common geopolitical future. There have
> been many unsuccessful imperial attempts to divide
> this natural entity. No form of aggression,
> regardless of how criminal or vengeful, can destroy
> the Arab-Muslim identity of Iraq or Iraq's
> geopolitical unity. In its attempts to destroy this
> civilisation and reality, the US administration has
> thrown the entire idea of the so-called West into
> disarray. Definitively exposed are all the racist
> and condescending attitudes that had remained latent
> or covert. The "West" — and the United States in
> particular — stands naked as a culture of force. The
> moral accounting, which will develop inexorably,
> will change world history. It is the resistance of
> the Iraqi people that demands it. 
> 
>   Attempts to choke Arab development cannot but
> fail. The three main socio-economic and political
> currents developed by Arab societies — nationalists,
> Islamists and leftists — are intrinsically
> anti-imperialist and therefore opposed to US-Israeli
> regional designs. For nationalists, retaining
> control of national resources to serve the general
> interest is sacrosanct. For leftists, opposing the
> international chains of imperialism and
> globalisation is a baseline. For Islamists,
> resistance to foreign occupation, as written in the
> Quran, is a duty. Their interest lies currently in
> achieving unity in struggle. They are united by
> their Arabo-Muslim identity. They share common
> principles and values as follows: natural resources,
> material heritage, and the riches of culture and
> civilisation are the property of the totality of the
> people; the totality of citizens constitutes the
> people; the people are the sole source of
> sovereignty and of constitutional, political and
> judicial legitimacy; government is responsible for
> and accountable to all citizens; solidarity between
> citizens — between generations, the able and ill,
> the elderly and young, the orphan and every human
> being who finds himself in a state of weakness —
> should form the basis of any government's social
> policy. The general interest is the justification
> and basis for the operation of the state, with every
> citizen, free of all forms of discrimination,
> sharing in the fruits of national wealth and social
> development. 
> 
>   The United States established a collision course
> confrontation with Iraqi society when it liquidated
> the Iraqi state, destroying its accomplishments and
> erasing its memory. It was oblivious to the simple
> truth that society is not a political movement or
> head of state that can be conquered, apprehended,
> bribed or killed; rather, it is all the living
> people in a given country. Like other live
> societies, Iraqi society possesses huge capabilities
> — a sophisticated legacy based on ancient
> civilisations and an experienced patriotic movement.
> Occupation forces faced from the first day a
> resolute resistance, culminating in an uprising by
> all Iraqi movements and organisations, including
> those defending women or unemployed youth, human
> rights organisations, trade unions, professional
> syndicates, agencies defending Iraq's environment
> and the rights of prisoners, and all other cultural
> and political organisations, side-by-side with
> provincial and tribal communities and peaceful and
> armed resistance groups. A national popular
> movement, opposed to occupation and sectarianism,
> developed taking various forms, from civil to armed
> resistance. 
> 
>   In struggling against military-imperial powers,
> Iraqis fight in defence of values around which a
> majority in the world gathers in consensus. In
> contrast, the sheer level of force to which Iraqis
> have been subjected by imperial powers — from
> systematic murder and rape, the desecration of
> religious and cultural sites and the destruction of
> Iraq's historic heritage, the poisoning of Iraq's
> landscape and rivers by radioactive weapons that
> will mark the lives of its future generations for
> hundreds if not thousands of years, the terrorising
> of a whole national population and its attempted
> division along lines leading to all out civil war,
> the plunder of its resources — prove the decadence
> and utter immorality of the
> neoliberal/neoconservative agenda. The struggle of
> Iraq is a struggle for civilisation, for culture,
> for justice, and for not reducing human life to mere
> production and consumption or the conquest of
> others. Indeed, the present uprising of Iraqis is
> not only a part of the wider struggle against savage
> globalisation and "free" capital, it is its
> forefront battle. It is because the Iraqis refuse to
> surrender their sovereignty to multinational
> corporations that Iraq is being destroyed so
> viciously. 
> 
>   While the occupation is a disaster for the United
> States, for Iraqi society it is a catastrophe. With
> the aid of its allies, the US has destroyed all that
> Iraqis built in modern times. It should come as no
> surprise that Iraqis will continue struggling
> against the occupation in order to restore their
> society. The large educated and marginalised middle
> class, along with the impoverished working class and
> unemployed youth deprived of state subsidies, have
> no interest in collaborating with the US policy of
> creating a class of blood-soaked feudal warlords.
> Resistance is the only path for Iraqis to true
> liberty, democracy, peace, dignity and achieving
> their interests, both as individuals and as a
> people. The US administration has succeeded in
> nothing but destruction, bloodshed and lies. The
> Iraqi Resistance is by definition democratic as it
> is the spontaneous expression of a people who took
> its destiny into its hands, and is by definition
> progressive as it defends the interests of the
> people. 
> 
>   While Western societies pose as being democratic,
> street action and popular consensus over the past
> four years has proven that Western structures of
> political governance are impervious to popular will.
> Despite its failure to solidify our trust in our
> ability to change history, the anti-war and
> anti-globalisation movement, in its various forms of
> expression, proves that the people understand the
> current divorce between their aspirations and the
> individuals, parties and institutions that are
> supposed to represent and defend them and their
> interests. New ways of civil struggle must be found,
> and urgently. While its failure is comprehensive,
> this US administration shows no sign of changing
> course. Iraq and the world cannot wait until
> November 2008, by which time this US administration
> and its local collaborators could have killed
> another one million Iraqis on top of the one million
> killed since 2003. Rigorous action is needed,
> including the impeachment and prosecution of
> responsible state leaders and officials for war
> crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of
> genocide. 
> 
>   We should support the call of Tun Dr Mahatir
> Mohammed to criminalise war as a means of resolving
> disputes among nations. We should support this call
> not only because war is a crime, but also because
> war again has been proven useless. Iraq cannot be
> broken and cannot be subjugated. The defeat of the
> United States and the occupation should be a lesson;
> that never again a military force tries to subjugate
> the people of another country. The US did not and
> cannot achieve its goals, even if it exterminates
> whole sections of Iraqi society. To succeed in
> stopping this insanity, the anti-war movement must
> revise all its terminology and refuse the terms
> dictated by the occupation. We must condemn the
> ignorance that accepts the dehumanising of the
> other. We must refuse the word "insurgency" and
> substitute it for what exists in reality: legitimate
> and legal resistance against vicious foreign
> occupation. Occupation is a de facto condition, not
> a de jure determination. With around 200,000 foreign
> forces on Iraqi soil, Iraq cannot be but described
> as an occupied country. Detainees in Iraq should
> thus be considered prisoners of war, with all the
> protected rights the Third Geneva Convention assures
> them. 
> 
>   We ought all to be humbled by the loses this
> people has been prepared to endure for our sake and
> demand the complete, unconditional and immediate
> withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraqi soil,
> along with the cancellation of any law, treaty,
> agreement or contract passed under occupation and
> the fair payment of reparations and compensations
> for the tragic human and material loses the Iraqis
> have suffered in defence of civilisation. We must
> refuse in total the culture of the military-imperial
> state if we are to contribute to the wave of
> resistance rising worldwide in defence of
> civilisation, justice, independence and coexistence.
> We must retrieve recognition from any entity imposed
> by the United States and that claims to represent
> the people of Iraq. Long live the Iraqi people and
> its sole representative, the Iraqi Resistance. 
> 
>   The writer is a member of the Executive Committee
> of The BRussells Tribunal and a frequent contributor
> to Global Research. 
> 
> 
> 
>   © Copyright Hana Al-Bayaty, Global Research, 2007 
> 
> 
>   The url address of this article is:
>
www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=5103
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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>
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
>   [Peace without justice & equality is an explosion
> waiting to happen. 
>   Justice without the pursuit of peace & equality is
> a torturous path to nowhere] 
>   --------------------------------------------- 
> 
> 
> 
> 



 
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