I don’t claim all of them are, but a lot of Iraqi people are fighting the occupation. They were very happy to get rid of Saddam. Over the years they were struggling, they were paying with their blood to get rid of Saddam. But they are not under any circumstances welcoming the occupiers. There are 14 to 20 assaults or ‘incidents’ taking place every day against the US or British troops in Baghdad alone.
At the same time, the Iraqis are suffering - I wouldn’t say worse or better than before, there’s no way to compare - but definitely it is a continuation of suffering for Iraqi people on all levels. They are suffering from unemployment and lack of security. Some of my family - my sisters, my nieces - haven’t left their houses in the last four or five months. And because of the heat of the summer, and because they don’t have electricity or water, they’ve been reduced to living in two rooms. We’re talking about seven or eight people living in the kitchen and one bedroom, because this is the only area they can have the air conditioning working. They spend most of their time in a struggle to arrange electricity.
My brother just came back from Iraq. He said some people are happy because they got rid of Saddam. But that doesn’t mean they are happy accepting the occupation. By six or seven o’clock at night no one is on the streets. There are three main streets in Baghdad. My brother is a pharmacist on one of them. By 1.30pm he has to close and leave because it’s too dangerous to stay there. What kind of liberation is this?
If we look back before this so called ‘liberation’ the only way Saddam could control this country was by force, by combining a very strong, oppressive regime with the full support of the west. Iraqi people were capable of changing that regime on their own, if it hadn’t been for the west supplying weapons and all kinds of support.
Increasing the number of troops in Iraq isn’t going to sort anything out. The only way they can sort out the situation is to hand it over to Iraqis themselves with the help of the UN and the NGOs.
I’ll give you this example: the first couple of days of the occupation, a delegation of engineers went to the Palestine Hotel and spoke to the commander. They said, ‘Look, we can start repairing the electricity, we can do something. We did it before, during the sanctions years, we know very well how to deal with this problem. Let us do it.’ He told them to leave immediately because they were waiting for consultants to arrive from Washington.
It’s the same thing with the troops. Unless Iraqi people are in charge there is no way they can hold a big country like this - a country with a long history of struggle against one of the most oppressive regimes. They’re going to train policemen - will there be more control on the streets? I don’t think so. Any policeman is going to turn against the Americans sooner or later. If they establish a new army, this army is going to turn against them sooner or later. They are really trapped there.
Just have a quick look at the modern history of Iraq. Look back to the 1920s and see how they dealt with the British. It doesn’t take a genius to see they are doing exactly the same thing at the moment.
Ghada Razuki Iraqi who works for the Stop the War Coalition
Every meeting that we do, when we call for the troops to be withdrawn, many people’s concern - purely from a humanitarian basis - is that if the troops are withdrawn, Iraq will fall into more and more chaos. Therefore they argue that they should be withdrawn more slowly and that the UN should be put in to look after the Iraqis until they get back on their feet. The second thing that they feel very strongly about is that Britain and the US should compensate them for the chaos that they’ve put their country into.
These are exactly the same reasons why a lot of these people marched on 15 February - they want what’s best for the Iraqis. What I say at meetings is that if Iraqis themselves call for the UN to come in then that’s fine - that’s up to the Iraqis to determine their own fate. But one thing that the Iraqis I speak to probably hate equally, if not more, than the US and British troops is the UN - because it was the UN that imposed sanctions on them. So if you speak to any Iraqi that lived in Iraq pre-1991 they talk about Iraq pre the sanctions and during the sanctions, and how the sanctions absolutely ruined their lives. You know the figures about kids dying, but they also talk about inflation - the fact that a chicken costs a month’s wages and so on.
It’s not a difficult argument to win, but it takes some time to get over to people, and that’s why it’s really important that meetings take place around the country. But I think the resistance movement out there will not distinguish between a blue helmet and a US helmet. Any soldier that is not an Iraqi will be a target.
What the UN will do, I feel, is prolong the battle that’s taking place in Iraq at the moment and let the US and Britain off the hook, releasing those troops maybe to go and fight another war. All the time those troops are tied up in Iraq it’s going to make it near impossible for Bush and Blair to go on to their next country.
Ghayasuddin Siddiqui Leader of the Muslim Parliament
The lie that there was any legal or moral justification for the war on Iraq is now completely exposed. There are no weapons of mass destruction; there is no link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaida.
It’s now obvious that the neoconservatives in the US have been planning to attack and acquire Iraq whatever happened to Saddam Hussein. When Bush came to power they put this plan into top gear. It appears now that 11 September 2001 was used as a cover to carry out their operation. If you remember, we were told immediately after 11 September that the US wanted to attack Iraq. It was Blair who somehow managed to persuade Bush that they should go for Afghanistan first, then Iraq.
We also know that the Americans know that there are two areas where major sources of oil exist - Central Asia and of course Iraq. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were waged to undermine these two areas because Afghanistan provides the shortest route for any oil pipeline from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. So this is how Afghanistan came to be at war. This war was about resources and markets, nothing else.
They did not think of the consequences - that if you attack innocent people for no reason then they’re going to resist. And this is precisely what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ordinary people who have nothing to do with Bin Laden or the Taliban or Saddam Hussein are simply resisting because it is their land, their houses and their lives that have been destroyed.
The way that Bush is now trying to find some fig leaf of legitimacy through the UN shows that they now recognise how stupid this whole operation was. They were so arrogant that they wanted to go and reap the benefits without regard for all the other possible interests in the international arena. But they are now stuck.
This is once again a challenge to the other members of the Security Council and to other nations. A challenge to see that we could use the crisis to bring about changes in the UN and also to recognise that the US was a superpower - and is a superpower - but that there are limits to its power. Iraq has shown that even the greatest power on earth cannot go and tamper with other lands the way they are doing.
There is real chaos in Iraq. If there is a situation where the Americans totally hand over the control of decision making to the UN and they declare that they are going to hand over the destiny of Iraq to local people, then I think a case can be made that the UN comes in to sort out this very difficult situation. But ongoing occupation is something that we should not accept and we cannot accept. A solution has to be found and the coalition forces have to leave Iraq and hand over power to the Iraqi people under the supervision of the UN.
-- Michael Pugliese