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Lead

IRAQ - PATRIOTS LAUNCH COUNTER SURGE

by our Arab Affairs Correspondent

RESISTANCE fighters have launched a “surge” offensive of their own, pushing the imperialists back on the defensive in Iraq in fierce fighting throughout the country. While tens of thousands of American and puppet troops have been deployed in Baghdad since February under Bush’s new “security” plan, it has done little to thwart partisan attacks in heart of the city and on the heavily fortified “Green Zone” military compound.

In one of the most lethal attacks on American troops since the war began, a suicide car bomber struck a patrol base north-east of Baghdad in Diyala province on Monday. After the initial blast the guerrillas opened fire on fuel trucks inside the depot, which exploded leaving nine American soldiers dead and 20 more wounded.

It was the second bold attack against a US base north of Baghdad in just over two months and was notable for its use of a suicide car bomber as insurgents have mostly used hit-and-run ambushes, roadside bombs or mortars on US troops and stayed away from direct assaults on fortified military compounds to avoid US firepower.

The deaths raised to 98 the number of British and American troops who have died in Iraq in April, the deadliest month for American troops since December, when 112 died. It was the single deadliest attack on ground forces since December 2005, when a roadside bomb killed 10 Marines and wounded 11 on a foot patrol near Fallujah.

With the death toll mounting, Democratic leaders in Washington agreed on Monday on legislation that requires the first American combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by 1st October with a goal of a complete pullout six months later. Bush has promised to veto any such measure as the legislative confrontation intensifies.

In Baghdad the construction of a five km long concrete wall to seal off a Sunni Muslim nationalist quarter has enraged Baghdadis and Arab opinion far beyond Iraq. The Americans claim the wall around the Azamiyah neighbourhood will reduce sectarian attacks between Sunni and Shia extremists but the real objective is to partition the capital into sectarian enclaves to make it easier for the occupation army to raid them and control the major roads in and out of the city.

to the streets

The people of Azamiyah have taken to the streets to denounce the “sectarian wall” that would make them prisoners in their own city. And they’ve won the backing of maverick Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr who said the protests showed that Iraqis reject “the sectarian, racist and unjust wall that seeks to divide” Sunnis and Shias.

Al Sadr said the wall showed the “evil will” of the “American occupiers”. He urged his Mahdi Army followers to join the Sunnis in new demonstrations against the wall, while the underground Baath Party called on the United Nations to immediately intervene to halt its construction.

Puppet “premier” Nouri al-Maliki appeared to bow to the anger on the street on Sunday when he ordered work on the wall to stop. But he soon backed down saying the subject would be “discussed” and stating that he would not rule out all barriers such as barbed wire.

Meanwhile in the British controlled southern zone of Iraq, Sunni and Shia resistance groups formed a united front last weekend. Fifteen southern partisan groups, including some Shia militias but not Mahdi Army, announced the formation of the Popular Front of the Iraqi Resistance on 21st April.

Abu Abdullah al Dawsari, a field commander in the “Brigades of the Freemen of the South” resistance organisation, said that the Popular Front had several objectives.

“The first of our aims is to make the southern front the equal of the western, north-western, and central fronts in Iraq in the fight against the foreign alliance. Our efforts are also dedicated to trying to stop the Iranian penetration into Iraq that is coming in under the cover of the occupation forces,” he declared.

“We are also trying to arouse the zeal of the Arab tribes in southern Iraq, who are no less patriotic and Iraqi than the tribes in the rest of the country, even though the nature of the repression practiced by the religious parties on them obscures the extent to which they reject the occupation.”

And many Arab tribesmen are now leading the resistance in the south, enraged at the occupation authorities and the puppet politicians of the cities who serve imperialism and treat the Arab tribes as aliens in their own land.

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Editorial

Traitor Yeltsin

BORIS YELTSIN is dead and not mourned by communists and progressives around the world, nor by the millions of Russians who found themselves robbed of their pensions, their savings, their jobs and their state welfare as Yeltsin presided over the sell-off of everything of value in the Russian economy to greedy, self-seeking capitalist fortune seekers. He put the final nails into the coffin of the Soviet Union. He accepted huge loans from the imperialist countries and so allowed control over Russia’s huge mineral wealth to fall into the hands of Russia’s enemies.

Yet the western press has been lauding him as though he was some sort of great hero. We saw a drunken buffoon, flattered and manipulated by the western powers, who reduced a once great nation almost to the status of a Third World country. His successor Putin has retrieved the situation a little; he has reasserted Russia’s control over her own mineral resources and jailed some of the greedy oil tycoons for failing to pay their taxes.

But Russia still remains now a capitalist country with a huge wealth gap between the few ultra-rich and the many very poor; life expectancy is short, especially for men and alcoholism and drug abuse are high as the people are demoralised and betrayed.

Yeltsin of course was not the sole author of this disaster; Gorbachov paved the way and it says something about the state of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that it allowed both these traitors to rise through its ranks and that the first “oligarchs” ready to seize the valuable assets of the Soviet people had been leading party members.

That situation will be examined and analysed for possibly hundreds of years to come as a grim warning to other socialist states aspiring to communism.

Nevertheless the first socialist state in the world lasted longer than the first bourgeois republic in Britain – the Commonwealth that lasted from 1649 until 1660 – and it achieved far more politically, economically and socially. It proved that workers were capable of creating their own state power to rule over a fairer and more just society; that they were capable of transforming a backward economy into a leading super-state and that they were capable of defeating the might of Hitler’s Third Reich.

The end of Britain’s bourgeois republic and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was not the end of Parliamentary bourgeois power and influence in Britain or the world – it was hardly the beginning. In 1688 the “Glorious Revolution” saw the power of Parliament restored and the creation of a constitutional monarchy.

Similarly, the failure of the Soviet Union is not the end of working class socialist power in the world or in Russia – it is hardly the beginning.

Right now the most greedy and reactionary sections of the World’s imperialist ruling classes are stuck in Iraq like Brer Rabbit was stuck to the tar-baby. Their greed for oil and their arrogance have trapped them.

Meanwhile in China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam and Cuba workers continue to build and to defend their workers’ states. At the same time in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Nepal and in dozens of other places, workers are asserting their power as a class to bring rising living standards, education, healthcare and social justice to their countries while the imperialists can only curse and swear.

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