"The U.S. war on Iraq is racist."
I think we need to distinguish between racism as a strategy and racism as a tactic. As a student of the "materialist theory of history", and as I have said before on this list, I do not believe that every atrocity inflicted on large groups of people are necessarily racist crimes; on the contrary, I think these are more often motivated by surplus extraction. (Racist crimes being associated with primitive accumulation rather than the more typical and "mundane" forms of capitalist accumulation.) My belief is that the colonisation of Iraq was primarily motivated by several items on the political agenda of international capital such as the need to justify continued/new defence expenditure/contracts, the global oil market, the opening of Iraq as a market/investment site, etc. To a lesser degree, I can see that the war also served to take pressure off Israel in the region and to remove one of the best known figures of Arab nationalism, i.e. Saddam Hussein. I don't believe that the latter two motivations combined were sufficient motives/incentives for the ruling classes in terms of accumulation. Therefore, I don't believe that -- in a strategic sense -- the war was primarily racism. Of course, racism was and is useful as a tactic in pursuing the above motives.
"As per this thread, the anti-racist character of the armed resistance to the U.S. invasion and occupation contributes to its definition as a national liberation and "resistance" (in the sense of politically correct) struggle."
I think one has to bear in mind the objective similarities among the ideologies of the invaders _and_the_resistance_, i.e. nationalism (if not xenophobia), religious fanaticism, particularism, etc. In that sense I don't believe that the resistance is more progressive; i.e. I believe the forces of global capital are more likely to enlarge the Iraqi proletariat and enhance class consciousness within it, a "role" which - as Marx noted - is better suited to imperial/international capital, than to national/petty bourgeois (allegedly "socialist") political forces such as the Ba'athists, Shia Islamists and other forms of nationalism, religious ideology, etc.
"It is not at all beyond appropriate discussion to consider whether sensitivity to racism in the US war on Iraq is greater in people of color!"
Leaving aside the issues of what the original debate was about - and it had little to do with US domestic politics - and Yoshie's reasoning regarding those who disagreed with her, _if_ I believed that one had to _be_ a particular kind of individual in order to comment on particular kinds of issues, or to only agree with the relevant individuals (assuming that they really share a point of view) on those issues, I wouldn't comment on them. I don't accept that. For example I am not, at the moment, badly affected personally by pollution or environmental destruction - am I less able to comment than those who are? I am not a US citizen and have never been to the USA - does this automatically make me less-informed than US subjects on the matter of US foreign policy? I am a wage-earner and I feel able to make observations about the causes and best interests of the international working class, including the Iraqi working class, without regard to myopic, short-term, localised and/or purely ideological considerations.
"And there doesn't have to be a perfect correlation just like there doesn't have to be in any other statistical analysis."
I wouldn't insult the discipline of statistics by privileging Yoshie's observation with the name "statistics" - e.g. I strongly suspect there are "non-white" list members who do not agree with her "correlation" - but that' s just my opinion.
"For a white person to accuse a person of color of racebaiting for same is, in my opinion, racism itself."
Personally, I never accused Yoshie of racebaiting and I don't believe that was what caused her to posit that correlation.
"It is the typical racism of this period in the U.S. - Reaganite or new racism, which denies that racism still exists (including on the left)."
I take no responsibility for the views of US liberals, since I have little in common with them. If, however, you were alleging similarities between (various international) conservative views on race and the views of some contemporary Marxists or historical materialists, I would want to hear some precise reasons and/or examples.
"The repression of raising racism is one of the main forms of racist repression today."
And conversely - in bourgeois societies - as I said to Yoshie, race (and other aspects of identity) are all too often raised by capitalists and/or other members of the bourgeoisie who happen to be from ethnic/national/religious/other minorities, in the interests of networking, marketing and obtaining state assistance. None of which IMO is less objectionable than capitalist politics in general.
"To act indignant when a person of color ( especially one who has demonstrated over a period of years that she does not make careless or flippant sames ) speculates that it might be is ...racist."
I disagree and I think it was careless and insulting for Yoshie to raise the issue in the context of a debate on the Iraqi resistance.
"This might have been much better understood by white leftists in the "sixties" than now. We have lost that consciousness among many white leftists, maybe. Practice of criticism /self-criticism might help."
I certainly hope _all_ leftists have lost or are losing the 20th Century Marxist habit of simply supporting any cause which happens to appeal to subjective/popular opinion within definitely oppressed/colonised nationalities and ethnic groups. That is _not_ critical, it is populist/opportunist. IMO a real self-criticism is not something which refers dogmatically to ideas formed in quite different and often-inappropriate historical and social contexts - self-criticism needs to focus on the long term interests of the class struggle by the international working class.