the Iraqi election and the Ba’athists
Feb 9th, 2010 by admin
Usually I think it is a waste of time to cover any elections that is taking place under imperial occupation, even if such elections have popular participation, the resulting government will remain under the tutelage of the US, and will ultimately fail to implement anything meaningful for the occupied population. The US then uses such failure to bring forth candidates who promise their White House masters to move the occupied nation even deeper into the imperial abyss.
With regards to Iraq, the issue is far more complex than what some liberal and reactionary liberals are making things out to be, for them the banning of the Ba’athists is a sidelining of “secular Sunni and Shias” – perhaps this is so… however, this is also a very simplistic analyses, and does not take the nature of the Ba’ath party into consideration. It has become fashionable amongst western liberals to paint a picture that the Ba’ath party was just a big (mostly “Sunni”) membership club, that one had to join in order to get a job etc. Well the fact is that the vast majority of Shia’s and Sunnis were not Ba’ath party members, and the overwhelming majority of Shi’as would have never been allowed to join the Ba’athists, and would never ever have even applied for such membership. There was, and there is a class issue that is conveniently ignored, that much of this “secular Sunni” and a handful of “secular Shia” belonged to, and continue to belong to the upper liberal elite classes of Iraq. The war that the Ba’ath party waged against the vast majority of the people of Iraq was not merely sectarian, nor just a question of Saddam Hussein’s political and physical survival, rather it was a systemic attempt to eradicate cherished Islamic values. Islamic values cherished by the vast majority of Iraqis who lived in abject poverty, and who were considered by the Ba’aathists to be ignorant and superstitious and illiterate on account of their imaan.
US imperialism is not going to protect the Iraqis, and as the video below correctly points out, it is the US that wants a return of the Ba’athists (who will pledge an even greater level of allegiance to the occupiers) stoke an anti-Iran nationalism, that would benefit the Americans to further expand their empire. All the while making sure that no form of popular resistance takes root in Iraq. BUT “They plot and plan, and Allah too plans; and the best of planners is Allah” (Qur’an 8:30)
