THE USA and the UK have launched their new crusade on the pretext of saving the Christians and the Yazidis of Iraq from the ISIS Islamic State group, with their diktat, straight out of the 10th century, of convert or die.
However, the essence of the crusade is that the US and UK are seeking to retain their control over Iraq’s oil.
If they had deep feelings over the safety of the Christians and the Yazidis, they would not have destroyed the Iraqi state in the first place in the war to remove Saddam Hussein, that is still costing tens of thousands of lives.
A feature of that campaign was the sanctions that were imposed on Iraq from 1990, which killed hundreds of thousands of children. This action and its consequences, as far as the children of Iraq were concerned, was praised by the US Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, as a price worth paying, for getting rid of Saddam.
Saddam’s Ba’athist regime was secular. Politics was for the people, religion was the business of the mosques. The two were separate.
Saddam’s regime was supported by the Christians and the Yazidis because it was secular – religious minorities were tolerated. There was no Al Qaeda or ISIS in Iraq.
The Blair-Bush axis destroyed the Iraqi regime and the religious minorities were thrown into hell. Hundreds of thousands had to flee for their lives to Syria and other states, to the point where the existence of Christianity in Iraq was threatened.
Where did ISIS come from and get its strength from? It emerged out of the war in Syria, where its intervention as a ‘liberating force’ to remove Assad was supported by Saudi and Qatari money and US and UK arms and supplies.
The US-UK were its close allies, and allowed young Muslims to travel from the UK and join ISIS in their hundreds. The US and UK built up ISIS and laid the basis for the Islamic State.
In fact, a feature of the war in Syria was that Israel treated wounded Islamists in its hospitals in the occupied Golan Heights. They all lent a hand!
It is a matter of common knowledge that the Syrian government was, and is, supported by all of the country’s religious minorities, from Catholic Nuns to Orthodox priests, as their guardian against the Islamic forces that the US and UK armed and trained in Jordan.
Having grown stronger on Saudi money and US arms, the great opportunity for the Islamists emerged when the US puppet regime in Iraq, headed by Maliki, collapsed under the weight of its own sectarianism. This allowed ISIS to develop its Islamic State and grab oil field after oil field.
Now the US and the UK are screaming from the rooftops about the threat to the remaining Christians and Yazidis, when their real worry is about the oil.
There is another reactionary element to the US-UK campaign. This sees a ‘holy war’ against the Muslims to ‘save the Christians in Iraq’ as a way of trying to equate Hamas with ISIS and from that to justify the Israeli slaughter of the children of Gaza, and the continuing support of the imperialist powers for Israel.
A huge barrage of ‘Christians in danger from Muslim hordes’ is now on the order of the day. This will be to cement the Israel-US-UK alliance since both sides need each other as they have never done before.
The imperialists need Israel as the ruthless, stop at nothing guardian of its oil and gas interests in the Middle East, while Israel needs the US-UK arms and cash supply, and the assurance that however horrible its deeds, in Gaza for instance, a resupply of cash and weaponry is guaranteed.
The new crusaders will have little option but to try and depict the Muslim population in the UK as being disloyal, and part of a fifth column, joining the trade unions as being ‘the enemy within’.
There is only one way forward for the working people of the world. This is to do battle alongside the Arab peoples for the establishment of the state of Palestine and for a revolutionary government in Iraq that will unite the working class and the poor and run ISIS out of Iraq in 24 hours.
The contribution of the British workers must be to bring down the Cameron government and replace it with a workers government and socialism.
