War and Terror

By Colin Foster According to the Independent, probably the major newspaper most sharply critical of the US/UK military in Iraq, “the tide is turning”. Patrick Cockburn writes: “American forces are on the retreat throughout Iraq. “Slowly, the great American adventure in the country, which started with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, is coming to an end.” (Independent, 12 April) Jonathan Steele, in the Guardian, takes the opposite view: “The casualties go on rising… opposition is still growing… The US is failing. Most of western Iraq is out of US control. The city of Mosul could explode...

“What is demagogy? It is a deliberate play with sham values in politics, the dissemination of false promises and the solace of non-existent blessings.” Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) The history of the movement against the war in Iraq has yet to be written. No doubt an enterprising student somewhere is already busy reconstructing the story of how it happened and why. Such an account would be extremely valuable, given the numbers that have been involved and the movement’s continuing impact on national and international politics. This book will add little to such an...

Five members of the Political Association of Iranian Refugees, who are marching from Birmingham to London to protest against the possibility of US intervention in Iran, spoke at a meeting of Oxford Labour Party on 15 March. Sara Frouzyar translated. We became involved in the anti-war movement after the invasion of Iraq, because we felt that it set a precedent for US intervention in Iran or any other Middle Eastern country. We are doing this march because it is our duty. It’s all we can do to express our protest. We want to speak out to the freedom-loving people of the world against US...

Hannah Wood reviews Hotel Rwanda Hotel Rwanda tells the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle), manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali, Rwanda, at the time of the 1994 genocide. It is the story of one man’s personal courage and determination to save as many people as he could in the face of the horrors of genocidal massacres all around him. The role of Rusesabagina is powerfully and movingly portrayed by Cheadle and doubtless this film will bring the events of April-June 1994 in Rwanda to the attention of many, many people who paid little attention at the time...

The following article, written by Lebanese socialist Ghassan Makarem, was published on Z-net before the latest (14 March) mass demonstrations in Beirut against Syrian troops, and against a government which is seen to be pro-Syrian. Under US/international pressure, which followed the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, Syria has begun troop withdrawal. Makarem argues that the opposition is very heterogeneous, and is dominated by reactionary elements, including the communal leaders of Lebanon’s Druze and Maronite Christian sects. Both resent the fact that they have lost some...

Pat Longman reviews “The freedom” by Christian Parenti, The New Press This book makes real for the reader the total chaos, brutality, madness, violence and corruption that is US-occupied Iraq. Parenti observes how the young US soldiers, “the grunts”, are completely bewildered by their role, and ignorant of Iraqi culture, language and politics. They have a seething hostility to their superiors. There are tensions between the multi-ethnic working-class ranks and the army of “freshly minted MBAs” and “self deluding zealots” holed up in the safer “Green Zone”. Parenti spent time with members of...

By Rhodri Evans According to Time magazine of 28 February 2005, negotiations have opened between the US military and at least the Ba’thist strand of the Iraqi “resistance”. In an analogy they may now regret, Ba’thist resistance leaders told Time that they were talking about a “fight and negotiate” tactic like Sinn Fein/ IRA’s in Ireland. The big victory of the Shia alliance in the 30 January election may have pushed them into considering a “political” turn, just as the obduracy of the Northern Ireland Protestants pushed the IRA into politics. The Ba’thists told Time that they would accept a...

By Yassmine Mather The re-election of George Bush was followed by a barrage of threats against Iran’s Islamic Republic. In December 2004 Donald Rumsfeld told reporters he often dreamt that he would wake up one morning to “regime change” in Iran. In the same week the Wall Street Journal urged the White House to support the “new referendum” movement (a coalition in Iran ranging from Royalists to former members of the current regime calling for a referendum on the Iranian constitution). Soon after the publication of Seymour Hersh’s article in the New Yorker (“The United States has been conducting...

In October 1917 soviets — institutions of working class democratic self-organisation — led by the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. Lenin’s Bolshevik party did not believe that socialism could be created in underdeveloped Russia. The Bolsheviks thought that the Russian workers were but the advanced guard for the German and west-European workers. They expected revolution to erupt in Europe. Indeed it did, beginning with Germany in November 1918. Soviets appeared all over Europe. In 1919 Soviet regimes ruled for a few weeks in Bavaria and Hungary before being crushed by bourgeois forces. While...