>>The rising desire of Iraqis to defend their country, among other processes in the masses, has proved incompatible with the maintenance of a front of "totalitarian" unity by the military-police regime.
Among other things the defense of Iraq will probably require a considerable degree of decentralized initiative and organization, given the weapons the imperialists have for disrupting communications networks. (The Cuban territorial troops militias are organized to meet this threat, as well as others, but of course Cuba makes no pretense to totalitarian-syle centralziation.)
Imperialism's main target in Iraq is not Saddam Hussein but the independence and sovereignty won over decades of struggle by the people of Iraq. In the situation today, a defense of Saddam's regime against imperialist "regime change" pretty much comes with the package of defending the country.
But it is becoming more important to have in mind that Saddam's government and the independence and sovereignty of the people of Iraq are not the same thing.<<
full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg20982.html
2. CISPES: I was a member of CISPES from 1980 to 1984 and nothing Perrin states about this organization is true. Rather than being a gang of "Leninists", the average member was wary of all ideology other than a broad sympathy for the revolution in El Salvador. "Paper sellers" were neither represented in the national leadership, nor in the leaderships of the local committees except on the basis of hard work. Furthermore, the refugee asylum movement and CISPES, while having divergent goals, worked closely together with each other. This is not simply a question of a Rashomon-like clash of perspectives. Anybody who takes the trouble to look at the CISPES website (http://www.cispes.org/english/index.html) will see that it has nothing in common with Perrin's diseased anticommunist obsessions.
3. Yugoslavia: While I have no relationship to Jared Israel today (he left the Marxism list after tiring of defending his conspiracy theories), his website was my suggestion. I would be quite happy to answer Perrin's State Department liberal views on the Balkans here or anywhere else. (I suspect it will be elsewhere after Henwood comes back from his honeymoon or until his custodian removes me.)