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IRAQ OCCUPATION SEVERELY SHAKEN

by our Arab Affairs Correspondent

IRAQI resistance fighters are striking telling blows against the Anglo-American army of occupation in the run-up to a sham election that increasingly looks like being postponed. Two leading Iraqi quislings have been gunned down in Baghdad in as many weeks.

The British and American consulates in the southern port of Basra have been shelled. Guerrillas are continuing hit-and-run attacks in the ruins of Fallujah. Street fighting rages in all the major towns and cities of Iraq and partisan attacks on oil refineries and pipelines continue relentlessly.

Washington maintains that the bogus elections will go ahead as planned at the end of the month but the imperialist hold on the country is slipping as the days go by.

overshadowed

Whistle-stop fly-in tours by Tony Blair and Donald Rumsfeld just before Christmas were overshadowed by the devastating bomb attack on the American camp in Mosul that killed 22 US troops and contractors and wounded over a hundred more and the rocketing of a new US observation post in Baghdad that totally razed the building killing all inside.

Attacks throughout Iraq are escalating and are, in fact, becoming more deadly as the resistance groups become more familiar with the tactics of the occupation troops and use this knowledge to their advantage.

Nowhere is safe for the Americans or their puppets, least of all the capital, Baghdad. There the resistance has gone beyond the daily ambushes, bombings and street battles to targeting high-profile quislings in the US puppet government. On 18th December the stooge deputy minister of communications was gunned down on his way to work.

The puppet governor of Baghdad – a post similar to mayor – died this Tuesday when his motorcade was sprayed with machine-gun fire and the office of puppet premier Iyyad Alawi inside the US “Green Zone” compound was rocketed.

General Shawani, the puppet regime’s intelligence chief admitted this week that the resistance can count on more than 200,000 active fighters and sympathisers.

bigger

“I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people,” he declared. Shawani said this estimate included part-time fighters and volunteers who provide the resistance with intelligence, shelter and logistics with a hard-core of 40,000 partisans.

A senior US military officer declined to comment one way or another on these figures which are far higher than the estimates that appear in US propaganda.

Washington’s original intention was to follow up the sham election with a mock trial of Saddam Hussein and other members of his Baathist government. But even that is beginning to backfire with the news that high-profile American human-rights lawyer Ramsey Clarke has joined the Saddam defence team.

legal challenge

Ramsey Clarke, who was Attorney-General in US President Johnson’s administration in the 1960s, is well-known in the American peace movement for his campaigning work against the wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq and is currently involved in the defence of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. Clarke, in Jordan last week to consult his colleagues in the defence team, challenged the legality of the Baghdad court to try his client.

“In international law anyone accused of crime has the right to be tried by a confident, independent and impartial court, and there can be no fair trial without those qualities,” he told the press.

“The special court in Iraq was created by the Iraqi governing council, which is nothing more than a creation of the US military occupation and has no authority in law as a criminal court,” he said.

During the Vietnam War, which the Americans also lost, Washington’s response to increasing resistance was military escalation. But that option is not available these days without restoring the draft – the hated selective call-up that would be political suicide for Bush on the home front. And America’s allies and vassals in the “coalition of the willing” are a dwindling band.

Thousands of GIs have deserted to Canada on home leave and a number have even tried the risky business of deserting through Iraqi networks. The going rate for deserters in Iraq via the northern Kurdish province is now $1,000 plus a weapon and the uniform.

trying to escape

Last April an American woman soldier was captured by the pro-American Kurdish militia, dressed and veiled like a Muslim, who was trying to escape to Turkey.

With the US military death toll now at 1,492 and the wounded topping the 10,000 mark this week it’s not surprising that morale amongst the US expeditionary force is plummeting.

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Editorial

Stand by the tsunami victims

THE INDIAN OCEAN disaster has touched the hearts of millions of working people in Britain. Over 160,000 people are believed to have perished in the countries hit by the earthquake and tsunami in December. Millions more have been left homeless and destitute in the wake of the terror that struck countries from Indonesia to Somalia.

A massive £76 million has already been raised by the public in days for the disaster appeal to help the devastated countries. It’s forced the Blair Government to match the public donations pound for pound. It shamed Tony Blair into cutting short his luxury Christmas holiday in Egypt to return to London this week.

All over the world people and governments are contributing to the disaster appeals and calling for emergency action to help the survivors. People’s China has rushed medical experts to the afflicted areas and is contributing millions to the aid appeal. Democratic Korea, still recovering from the terrible floods and storms of the 1990s has chipped in donating $150,000.

British and American politicians are flying to Asia to publicly show their concern. But there has been little comment about the fact that American monitoring stations soon realised that a massive tsunami was on its way but no real warning was passed on to the countries it was soon to deluge.

Scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) realised within minutes that the Indonesian earthquake on Boxing Day would trigger a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The NOAA is part of the US military-scientific complex and they immediately alerted the US military base on the nominally British islands of Diego Garcia. But apart from some e-mails to Indonesian officials little effort was made to warn other countries of the danger.

The Bush administration has jumped into the act sending Colin Powell to the distressed areas and trumpeting its own contribution to the relief work which is still less than the money pledged by Germany and Japan.

The proposal to freeze the debt repayments from the most badly hit Asian countries, some £1.58 billion, is portrayed as an act of overwhelming generosity. But imperialisms’ gifts are only a minute fraction of the wealth they’ve plundered and continue to plunder from Asia and the rest of the world. Had such “generosity” been shown before, thousands of lives could have been spared.

Earthquakes and tidal waves cannot be prevented but the much of December’s destruction could have been avoided if an international warning system had been in place.

Tsunami detection buoys have been used in the Pacific for over 50 years to cover the west coast of America, Hawaii and its Pacific dependencies. Just two of them at a cost of a mere $500,000 could have provided an early warning system for the Indian Ocean. The poverty-stricken countries of south-east Asia could not afford to set up such a system themselves nor did the Americans offer to help them when the idea was proposed by the American NOAA last June. US imperialism spends $1,500 million a day on its global war machine.

The immediate task is emergency action to prevent the spread of deadly diseases in the devastated areas. That must be soon followed up by unconditional reconstruction aid to the countries concerned followed by the establishment of a global earthquake and tsunami warning system under the auspices of the United Nations.

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