WHILE US President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair and their quislings in Baghdad were pumping out propaganda about ‘freedom and democracy’, to get Iraqis out to vote in the referendum on a constitution, the US military engaged in its usual blood-letting in occupied Iraq on Sunday.
After Iraqi patriots of the national resistance movement killed five US Marines occupying their country on Saturday, American warplanes and helicopters bombed two villages near Ramadi, in western Iraq.
F15 warplanes bombed villagers, killing more than 70 people, men, women and children. Twenty five of these people had gone to salvage bits of the Marines’ wrecked military vehicle. A F/A18 warplane bombed another building killing 40 people.
While the US military was attempting to bomb Iraqi families into submission, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was declaring, before a single vote had been counted, that the White House had got what it wanted in the referendum.
Speaking in London, after meeting Blair on Sunday afternoon, Rice declared: ‘Most people assume on the ground that it has probably passed.’
A Downing Street spokesman said: ‘They (Blair and Rice) were greatly encouraged by the level of participation in the referendum and look forward to the political process continuing through to elections in December, and beyond.’
Again, before a single vote had been counted, the capitalist press, doing the bidding of the White House and Downing Street, were saying there had been a 65-per-cent turnout and a 75-per-cent vote for the constitution, which was drawn up by US puppet representatives in the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad.
This vindicates a leaflet put out by Iraqi patriots in the central town of Dawr. This said: ‘No matter how you vote, the result will be a 75-per-cent “yes” vote, because that is what the Americans want.’
It is clear that Iraqis, who support the national resistance, are not conned by the US-British propaganda about ‘democracy’ and are not intimidated by the incessant bombings and slaughter unleashed on them by the 150,000-strong US occupation army and its British allies.
They see through the dirty tricks carried out by American and British special forces, whose bombings have the aim of creating religious divisions amongst Iraqis. The Iranians say the British were involved in bombings in Ahvaz, close to the Iraqi border, while the US are provocatively sending special forces into Syria.
As one Iraqi farmer near Tikrit explained to a visiting journalist: ‘America has installed a government that hates Iraq and kills Sunnis. America wants to turn Iraq into three countries, one for Kurds, one for Shia and one for us, to make sure that we are poor forever.’
A mechanic from Samarra defiantly declared: ‘This constitution has made Sunnis feel like we have been dispossessed of our country. Now our last hope has been removed. All we can do is fight even harder.’
It is to be expected that Bush, Blair and their quislings in Baghdad, ‘President’ Jalal Talabani and ‘Prime Minister’ Ibrahim Jaafari, will announce later this week that the constitution, a blueprint for the Balkanisation of Iraq, has been approved.
We are also confident that the Iraqi national resistance will continue its heroic struggle against the US-British imperialist occupation and their macabre democratic charade of foreign-imposed constitutions and closely-controlled elections on December 15.
It is time that the trade union leaders in Britain and America came to the support of the Iraqi people and implemented their democratic mandates, the policy for a speedy withdrawal of US and British troops from Iraq.
This is not only their duty to the people of Iraq, but also to their own members, who do not want to be represented by governmental leaders who are perpetrating war crimes, as the Nobel Prizewinner Harold Pinter characterised it last week.
In Britain, the leaders of the unions through the Trades Union Congress, must call an all-out national strike to force the withdrawal of British of troops, which can only be achieved by bringing down the Blair government and replacing it with a workers’ government that will get British troops out of Iraq.
