IRAQ is in the middle of a civil war, the country’s former interim puppet prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said yesterday. Allawi was appointed by the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer.
The man who returned to Iraq with the imperialist forces in March 2003 was in fact warning the US-UK imperialists that they are playing with fire.
He warned them that the fire could spread abroad even to the US and the UK. Allawi was essentially urging the US and the UK – after three failed months of the Iraqi pro-imperialist political parties seeking to form a national unity government – to reimpose him as their dictator of Iraq to save the situation for the imperialist powers.
However, the Iraqi insurgency has torn the guts out of the US and UK armies, and they now no longer have the power, even to put all of their puppets into the same political straitjacket.
But there is movement amongst the imperialist leaders and their military men.
US Defence Secretary, Rumsfeld, is now on record as saying that the US army will keep out of any Iraqi civil war, and limit itself to supplying arms to the pro-US parties.
His military men have rubber stamped this position, while the British military is desperate to quit Iraq before it completely demoralises and destroys their armed forces. They are in favour of any tactic that allows their fragile forces to quit Mesopotamia.
Now their propagandists are having second thoughts in public, where all can examine their dilemma.
A Mr Gareth Stansfield announced in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph that ‘it is time to consider partition’.
This true democrat is not talking about consultation with the Iraqi ‘democratic parties’.
He is talking about ‘Redrawing the Map’ while admitting that this ‘reeks of imperialism’, adding ‘but Kurdistan, and Basra are already out of the orbit of Baghdad.’
This is imperialism at work, forced to discuss its dirty work out in the open by the strength of the Iraqi insurgency.
In fact, it was British imperialism that drew up the map in the first place, creating the lines in the sand that delineated the boundaries of Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia, which were then dictated to its local allies.
Drawing and redrawing the maps comes naturally to these imperialist vultures, without any consideration of the fate of the people they are disposing of.
Stansfield makes clear that this is not a democratic issue but one of the imperialist applying the force of arms. He asks: ‘or should the Coalition be proactive in enforcing a managed partition of Iraq, decentralising political authority to the Shia in the south, the Kurds in the north, and the Sunnis in the centre.’
He observes that his ‘redrawing of the map’ carries with it the risk of ‘military intervention – in the wider regions. Yet it would, perhaps result in a less chaotic situation in Iraq (or what we now consider “Iraq”) itself.’ There you have it. What imperialism has put together it has the right to break apart, and put an end to ‘what we now consider Iraq’ regardless of the consequences for the people of the region.
Having been unable to stop the imperialist powers from attacking Iraq in March 2003, workers in the metropolitan capitalist states have a duty to organise their trade unions to stop the war in Iraq and achieve the withdrawal of all imperialist troops, to prevent the US and the UK from organising a bloody war throughout the entire region.
This means forcing the British trade union leaders to call a general strike to bring down the Blair government and bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies, including the withdrawal of all British troops from the Gulf and the Middle East, to allow the Arab peoples to determine their own affairs in the arabian peninsula.
