January 2005
Boycott Colonial Occupation Election in Iraq!
The following
statement was issued by the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the
League for the Fourth International, on January 24.
Battered by a raging insurgency that has engulfed central and northern Iraq, the U.S. imperialists are hoping that a bogus “election” on January 30 can offer them a respite. This is not in any sense a “democratic” vote, even seen through the perverted prism of bourgeois electoralism in which capitalist money men cast the decisive votes. This rigged ballot is an attempt by the American butchers of Falluja and torturers of Abu Ghraib to legitimate their bloody occupation and destruction of Iraq.
The Iraqi pseudo-election is a counterinsurgency tactic that the U.S. military has repeatedly used, from the Philippines in the 1950s to Vietnam in the ’60s, the Dominican Republic following the U.S. invasion in 1965, and El Salvador in the 1980s, where it installed a government of the death squads. The January 30 farce should be actively boycotted by all opponents of colonial rule, in an effort to smash this “electoral” façade for U.S. terrorist rule.
The Bush regime has pushed hard for this “election.” Saner minds in Washington and in Baghdad’s “Green Zone” where occupation authorities are holed up worry that it could backfire. They fear it could exacerbate tensions between Sunni Muslims and Shiite leaders thirsty for power after more than a century under the boot of the Ottomans, the British, an imposed monarchy, and the brutal Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein – installed with U.S. aid in order to slaughter Iraqi communists.
No “election” under U.S. occupation can be anything but a fraud. All the parties and candidates in the January 30 masquerade (including the phony Communists) are puppets of the imperialists. Any “transitional government” which comes out of this hoax will be a front for the Pentagon just as the “Coalition Provisional Authority” and the “Iraqi Governing Council” that preceded it. If a sectarian/communal civil war results, it will be the direct result of American policies.
What’s needed instead is a united uprising of Iraqi toilers to drive out the U.S./UK imperialists and their stooges. For workers revolution to sweep away all the theocratic, monarchical and military potentates of the Near East, along with the Zionist butchers who are a deadly menace to Arab and Hebrew working people! n
To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com