The nature of the Iraqi resistance militias was openly debated from the platform - for probably the first time in a fairly large gathering of the British left - at the Iraq Occupation Focus conference in London on 5 December.
The debate was not planned, and the conference organisers wanted to push it aside. But it happened.
The debate was opened by Sami Ramadani, author of the articles published in Socialist Worker and the Guardian to justify October's European Social Forum refusing a hearing to Subhi al Mashadani, general secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. Ramadani is an academic and a writer for the Guardian, of Iraqi origin but resident in Britain since 1965.
He claimed that only pure pacifists can have any coherent reason for refusing support to the resistance. The resistance is more Islamic than Ramadani would wish. But it is largely spontaneous. It is not sectarian. It does not include any significant element of Saddamists (as distinct from people who were "Ba'thists" in the sense of signing up under compulsion to the Ba'th party). Its attitudes on women's rights are improving. It never targets civilians. All the attacks on civilians are undercover operations by the USA and Israel.
Ramadani did not support groups like al Zarqawi's al Qaeda gang, but blamed the USA for them. They had got into Iraq, he said, only by the USA deliberately "turning a blind eye", happy to have them in because they would spread confusion.
In short, the resistance is a straightforward expression of popular revolt against foreign occupation, and its victory will straightforwardly bring freedom to Iraq.
Christian Parenti, author of the excellent new book The Freedom: shadows and hallucinations in occupied Iraq, was also on the platform, and responded sharply..
Parenti has visited Iraq a number of times and interviewed leaders of a number of resistance groups. "To oppose the occupation, I don't need the resistance to be good guys", he said; and in fact a lot of the resistance is "very ugly".
Resistance groups do target civilians. Some Sunni resistance groups are virulently anti-Shia.
The resistance is nihilistic. Unlike resistance movements elsewhere which have proceeded from positive political demands, programmes, manifestoes, to military action, the resistance operates simply to make the occupation regime unworkable, not to achieve any agreed idea of a free Iraq.
There is no sign that groups like the Mahdi Army are improving on women's rights, or subscribe to women's rights at all.
The resistance is not just spontaneous. Saddamists, including whole chunks of the old Republican Guard command structure, are centrally involved.
Parenti would like to hope that a democratic federal Iraq would work, but doubts it because of the temper of the resistance and because all the neighbouring powers now have their fingers in Iraq's chaos, aiding various of the militias (whether anti-US or collaborator).
A few exchanges between Ramadani and Parenti followed on the platform, but there was very little time for the floor to join in. One of the conference's workshops was about the resistance, but Parenti had been shoved off to a different workshop, on human rights. The resistance workshop's top table was Ramadani plus Mike Marqusee, former press officer of the Stop The War Coalition and now a main organiser of IOF, who endorsed Ramadani 100%. Ramadani improved on his previous denunciations of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions by equating it with the government-run fake unions in Spain under Franco's dictatorship (1939-76).
So, the debate did not develop much.
In his book Parenti gives some pages to the efforts of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq and the Communist Party of Iraq, but concludes regretfully that they can make little headway. He sees no feasible short-term future for Iraq other than chaos and Islamic fundamentalism; and so, from an assessment of the occupation and the resistance pretty much identical to the AWL's, he deduces a priority not for solidarity with the Iraqi labour movement but for at least shortening the agony by agitating for quick US withdrawal, in full knowledge that the outcome will be "ugly".
There was no space in the conference to develop that debate. In the plenary, no-one mentioned the Iraqi working class, labour movement, or left, other than one floor speaker who denounced the Iraqi left, saying: "The leftists in Iraq are all part of the occupation". In the workshops, only a couple of floor speakers mentioned the Iraqi working class.
There was no workshop or plenary speaker on the subject; weirdly, it is quite usual these days for a left-wing conference in Britain to consider the working class too marginal a factor for a place on the agenda.
In individual conversations and brief rejoinders in workshops, six main arguments were advanced for the pro-resistance view.
1. That the working class is much more attacked by the occupation than by the resistance. Sadr City in Baghdad, for example, is a large, poor, working-class area, and has been repeatedly attacked by US forces.
But we can oppose the resistance without supporting the occupation. And a right-wing populist movement which gains a base in poor areas and imposes Islamic law there does not become politically working-class by the fact of the poverty of the areas it dominates.
2. That the Islamist group have said nothing about wanting to crush trade unions, and some of them (the Islamist parties collaborating with the USA, in fact, though this was not said) have sponsored their own Islamist trade unions.
Of course the Islamists build their base first by proposing themselves as champions of virtue against the Americans, against alcohol, against video shops and cinemas, and against nonconformist women. The experience of Iran and other countries shows that in power they would move to other targets and crush the labour movement. There would be no space for non-Islamist unions. The Islamist unions would be developed into labour fronts for the Islamic state.
3. That there is no proof of the militias targeting civilians, and the chief US official now in Iraq - John Negroponte, the US ambassador - has a history of work with death squads in Central America.
Yes, it is as certain that the USA must be running assassination squads in Iraq as that they are reckless about killing, maiming, jailing, and torturing civilians in their clumsy efforts to control the Iraqi chaos.
But big car bombs, random assassinations of devout Shia pilgrims passing through Sunni cities, or killings of cleaners, translators, and railworkers are a different matter.
We could have hoped after the terminal discrediting of Stalinism that the left would have learned to shun the old paranoid-Stalinist myth that every evil is the secret work of an almost-omnipotent CIA. Not yet, apparently.
4. That to denounce the resistance is "Islamophobic" - tantamount to saying that all Muslims are reactionaries.
No more so that denouncing George W Bush's gang amounts to "Christophobia", seeing all Christians as imperialists!
5. The more defensive, or more thoughtful, would argue that the resistance is disparate. It contains reactionaries, but should not be judged by them.
In his book Parenti also emphasises that the resistance is made up of many groups, without central coordination. Some of the divisions are Sunni-Shia; some, between theologically harder-line Wahhabi or Salafi Islamists and more opportunist Ba'thists-turned-Islamists.
But, rightly, Parenti does not dissolve the outline into the details. The victory of the resistance - i.e. of whatever faction of it would come out on top after a civil war - would be a victory of militarised political Islam in one form or another.
A group of Sufi villagers such as Parenti has interviewed and reports on in his book, who organise a few attacks on the Americans without being particularly hot Islamists or defining any objective beyond a desire to hit back at maltreatment, do not define the political core of the resistance. Nor do miscellaneous Shia young men who attach themselves to the Mahdi Army without bothering too much about Moqtada al-Sadr's doctrines of clerical rule.
6. The final, and most defensive, argument was one put from the platform by Michael Hoffmann of the US Iraqi Veterans Against the War - that none of this matters. We simply should not discuss it. Our job, in the USA or Britain, is to denounce the occupation, and to discuss the nature of the resistance is to divide and divert us.
This line of thought, too, is one inherited from Stalinism. "To criticise the USSR is to encourage the Cold Warriors!"
Even in the narrowest optic, as Parenti pointed out, it is foolish. "We will end up in arguments with the right where what they are saying is true and we are trying to deny it".
One or another of those six arguments seems to have held most of the people at the conference. But seeds of more critical thought will be germinating in the backs of some minds.
Martin Thomas