--- lparissi <lparissi at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
To: <lparissi at bigpond.net.au> From: "lparissi" <lparissi at bigpond.net.au> Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:18:53 +1100 Subject: [workersliberty] Busy discussion on AWL website
There is a thread taking part on the AWL GB website, including US people, after Sean's reply to Barry Finger on the issue of the 'Troops Out Now' slogan Do others want to join in? See http://www.workersliberty.org/node/view/5265
two snippets below:
American socialist Barry Finger argues the case for calling for "troops out now" in iraq: The AWL position on Iraq is difficult to understand, and - it would seem, at least from a distance - to be fraught with genuine ideological insights intimately entangled with equally real and no less disturbing political frailties. Let me explain. The AWL is clear in its political opposition to the American occupation. It states that, while it does not call for the troops to stay and repudiates the cause they serve, that is, to secure the Gulf for American imperialism, neither does it raise the call for immediate withdrawal. It hesitates to do so for fear that such a withdrawal, prompted not by a mass popular uprising from below, but as a result of a reactionary insurgency, would likely lead to the annihilation of those very forces in Iraqi society that we look to for an alternative and revolutionary leadership in the Arab East, namely the workers' and socialist movements, feminists, and national minorities. And in truth there can be no guarantees that such a precipitous withdrawal would not lead to the very disaster the AWL hopes to forestall. Such fears can therefore hardly be dismissed as either misplaced or unjustified. The problem, and this is the rather manifest and disturbing implication from which the AWL shrinks from addressing, is that the policy organisationally advanced for getting there - for moving in the direction of a socialist Middle East - inferentially resides on a provisional and tactical military reliance on imperialism. Conspicuous by its absence, the refusal to demand the immediate withdrawal of imperialist forces blatantly suggests, even to the most sympathetic of audiences, an interim appeasement program towards the status quo on this side of the imperialist battle lines. This is based on eerily familiar reasoning: namely, that the occupation provides the forces of Iraqi democracy with the necessary breathing spell during which it can reorganise and fortify itself for the democratic task of social reconstruction, which only it can see through to fruition.
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Sean Matgamna replies to Barry Finger's On anti-war slogans: lessons from two wars <http://www.workersliberty.org/node/view/4954> (Solidarity 3-81) SHOULD WE "DEMAND" CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ? Almost all the the likely scenarios in Iraq are in varying degrees unfavourable for the labour movement. They will go on being unfavourable until a strong labour movement emerges and can create new possibilities; begin to make the working class the subject of politics and history rather than what it is now, their object and their victim. For that the Iraqi labour movement must survive and develop, organisationally and politically. Socialists do not just mechanically take our "line" even from semi-co-thinkers in Iraq. We have to make our own understanding of the situation. But we take into account what working class people in Iraq say. The Kurdish leaders want US troops to stay. The Shia alliance talked of troops out in the campaign for the 30 January elections, but the elected government (elected by a large majority, and contrary to the USA's preferences) has shelved that. In any case it was a "general position" for troops out - like ours - not a call for "Troops Out Now". Some Shia call for troops out, perhaps meaning immediately, and some do not, though in general the troops are very unpopular. The Sunni Arabs are generally for troops out, meaning now, though some differentiation may be taking place there now. Thus, outside the Sunni Arab areas, by no means a clear choice for Troops Out Now. It is left to the kitsch left to line up with the most intransigent of the Sunni Arabs and with the Al Qaeda people speculating that they would benefit out of chaos. It is left to the kitsch-left to shout: bring on the catastrophe - now! The immediate or, in Barry Finger's expression, "precipitous" withdrawal of the occupying troops would, most likely, lead to three-way sectarian (Sunni, Shia) and national (Kurdish) civil war. The Sunni-supremacists and Ba'thists at the core of the "resistance" could not again emerge as the dominant force in Iraq without conquering Shia Iraq and the Kurds. From such a civil war, Shia southern Iraq would, perhaps, emerge as a theocracy akin to and protected by Iran. The Kurds might hold their own, or Turkey might invade the Kurdish territories, as two years ago it was threatening to do. In those conditions, the nascent Iraqi labour movement - which is our central concern - would probably be destroyed.
-- Michael Pugliese