[lbo-talk] Re: A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Nov 28 13:49:07 PST 2006


On 11/28/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 28, 2006, at 3:18 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
>
> > Point is, this offer by Sadr would seem to bolster Yoshie's
> > assessment of him. To offer such conditional support to a Sunni
> > leader in that manner is not a tactic from a nutbag bent on
> > liquidating the sunni community to install a shia theocracy.
>
> It's a constructive offer, but it still doesn't change the fact that
> he & his followers want to install a Khomeini-style theocracy.
> Speaking of which, Khomeini & Co. were generous with their rivals
> until they took power, when they killed them.

You make it sound like Khomeini & Co. killed because they were theocrats, and they wouldn't have if they had subscribed to a different ideology. Given the history of modern revolutions and national liberations based on diverse ideologies, from bourgeois to socialist, I very much doubt that.

Ervand Abrahamian says in The Iranian Mojahedin (Yale UP, 1989) that the Sazeman-e Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran (People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran), which would later become a cult but was considered to be on the Left at the time of the revolution, was "by far the largest, the best disciplined, and the most heavily armed of all the opposition organizations" and that "[a]s the main foe to the Islamic Republic, it has borne the brunt of the government crackdown, losing over 9000 members in the four years after June 1981 alone and over three-quarters of those since June 1981" (p. 1), much of the crackdown in response to the organization's attempt to destroy the newly established Islamic Republic by mass action and armed struggle. In such a context, a crackdown would have come if the sides had been reversed, with leftists in power and Islamists in opposition, as was the case in Afghanistan.

I do think, though, that a state that may eventually arise in Iraq, whether or not led by Sadr, will be worse for women than Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party rule, for at least a decade after its establishment and perhaps much longer than that (and that's if the Iraqis get lucky and manage to build a state). But you didn't support the pre-war Iraqi government either, nor the Red Army in Afghanistan for that matter. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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