the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 10, 2007
If there is one term to describe what the U.S. “surge” is doing to Iraq, that term is “ethnic cleansing.” Iraqis are being violently “resettled” according to their ethnicity or religious sect.
The Iraqi Red Crescent reports that more people have been displaced from their homes since the surge began–600,000–than what had been displaced in the whole rest of the war–499,000. And these official figures can only seriously understate the problem.
Today, Baghdad, which as late as two years ago was still ethnically diverse and mixed, has become a religious war zone, with Sunnis pushed to the west, and Shiites to the east.
These are forced moves, people fleeing to stay ahead of military forces–either those of the U.S. army, which has been moving through big parts of Baghdad and the area west of Baghdad, “cleaning” them out in wide swaths; or those of the sectarian militias, which go into neighborhoods, killing some individuals to terrorize the rest to leave.
The very necessities of life are being used as weapons of warfare–with electricity, water and food denied to areas the U.S. or the militias want to clear.
The whole of Iraq is being force marched into three parts: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south–with each part controlled by military forces organized along sectarian or ethnic lines. Within the Shiite areas, further resettling has been going on, depending on which militia controls which area: the Mahdi army in Baghdad, or the Badr militia in Basra and the south of Iraq.
To reinforce these moves, the U.S. has been funneling money and weapons to certain of the militias, helping them to impose their order on “their area.”
The U.S., faced with increasing problems in its own army, is moving to relieve some of those strains by moving openly toward “ethnic cleansing” as its “final solution.”
The human cost is enormous, with 600,000 Iraqis dead already by the summer of 2006, and how many tens of thousands more since. But no human cost is too great for U.S. imperialism bent on maintaining its control over Iraq, its oil and the oil of the whole Middle East.
On September 15, Bush will deliver his report on Iraq, after leaking its conclusions to the press for weeks. He will say that there is progress on the military level, with U.S. forces reducing violence in Iraq, while the Iraqi government has not moved to end ethnic and religious violence.
What crass cynicism! The main representative of U.S. imperialism blames the Iraqis for what 16 years of intermittent U.S. warfare has done to the country.
As for this blatant lie that violence has dropped–well, yes, it drops every summer because of the drastically high heat. But the number of Iraqis killed this July is still double the number of those killed last July, according to official statistics.
The only peace the Iraqis know is the peace of the graveyard.
The U.S. has no business being in Iraq. Two years more of this damned war? NO! Not two years, not six months, not two weeks more. Every day the U.S. stays only makes the situation for the Iraqis that much worse.
U.S. out now!