U.S. troops have carried out calculated assaults on Iraqi cities in order to destroy the militia led by Muqtada al-Sadr and other forces opposed to the imperialist occupation, including the insurgents in Fallujah, a longtime base of the former ruling Baath party. The U.S. military, which launched rocket attacks and dropped 500-pound bombs on Fallujah, killed some 700 Iraqis and maimed many others. The Pentagon, which has vowed to press ahead with this offensive, provoked al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army into this confrontation with the goal of getting its combatants into the open, isolating the organization politically, and destroying it militarily.

Washington seeks to consolidate its occupation and impose stability in Iraq on its terms, in order to strengthen U.S. domination of the strategic oil platform that Iraq sits on and deal further blows to its imperialist competitors, especially Paris and Bonn.

Liberal critics of the Bush administration, far from opposing the imperialist occupation, have reinforced Washington’s course—from the complaint by Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry that it is “premature” to meet a June 30 deadline for dressing up the occupation with some form of “Iraqi sovereignty,” to calls by other politicians in his party to send more troops to Iraq.

On the domestic front, leaders of the Democratic Party have criticized the White House by using the 9-11 intelligence hearings to push for more effective “homeland defense” measures—that is, to extend the use of the FBI, CIA, and other political police to use against working people and others who oppose U.S. government policy.

The main problem Washington faces now is not the “quagmire” in Iraq that liberal imperialist politicians continuously bleat about. Rather, its biggest problem is one it can do nothing to stop: the threat of an accelerated slide in the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. Today, the most important obstacle to the U.S. rulers’ offensive is the working-class resistance to the bosses’ assaults—resistance that is continuously generated by the normal operations of capitalism.

Al-Sadr’s militia is an Iraqi equivalent of Hezbollah or Hamas, bourgeois nationalist organizations that do not defend the interests of working people in the Middle East. As recent events have shown, support for al-Sadr among other Shiite groups has been greatly limited.

Similarly, the tactic of taking foreigners hostage to press the occupiers to withdraw their troops has backfired on the groups that have carried out those actions. To date, the Japanese and other imperialist governments involved have firmed up their resolve to stay in Iraq alongside the U.S. Army.

Working people in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East, will over time go through experiences allowing them to forge the kind of leadership that can lead them in their millions to get rid of all their occupiers: the Yankee armed forces, the entire “coalition of the willing,” and all other imperialist troops—those with UN blue helmets and those without.

Regardless of the character of those currently leading the opposition to the imperialist occupation, however, working people in the United States and elsewhere must focus our fire on the wealthy rulers in Washington, London, Tokyo, Madrid, and elsewhere—the same ones who are attacking the wages and conditions of workers and farmers at home.

Our demand is: unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq now!
 
 
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U.S. forces kill hundreds in assault on Iraqi cities  
 
 
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