[lbo-talk] the Iraqi resistance at work

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Nov 19 11:22:42 PST 2006


On 11/19/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote:
>
> > It's time for "the mass of antiwar protesters" to learn a lesson in
> > realism from the Iraq sanctions and war: the existence of a government
> > and citizens' welfare under it are not separate issues. It's the
> > government that is responsible for welfare of citizens who live under
> > it, from security to nutrition, sanitation to education, in any
> > country where a modern government exists. Destroy a government, and
> > citizens under it will suffer, deprived of what the government has
> > provided them with.
> =========================
> No, I think the Iraqis could have changed the Saddam regime for the better,
> but only from the inside.
>
> Your comments are applicable to regime change imposed on a population by
> foreign invasion and occupation.

That's what I am discussing: the duty of Americans to stop the US government from any regime change.


> It really is only for us to oppose aggression and to leave it up to the
> masses of each country to endorse or reject their own governments and
> otherwise settle accounts with them. I don't think you'd find any
> disagreement on the list about this.

A question is often asked: do we recognize Israel's right to exist? A question that ought to be asked is, do we recognize any other government's right to exist, aside from the Israeli government's, the US government's, and perhaps also the OECD governments'?

The US government's standing policy is to have hundreds of military bases around the world, spend billions of dollars annually on preparatory work for regime change (often in the name of "democracy assistance"), and put half the world under its unilateral sanctions (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060904/017045.html>) from severe to mild. Is there consensus on the broadly defined left that we must put an end to that standing policy? I don't think so. The question is how we go about creating that consensus first of all on the broad left, beyond die-hard anarchists, pacifists, and Marxists (who together may amount to about 50,000 or so). Opposing a big invasion alone won't do.

Now is a good time to take a step toward creating consensus against regime change, not just war, while Americans are still a little bit chastened by the Iraq War. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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