According to this logic, the fox must remain in the henhouse—for the good of the hens. The Iraqis must accept an occupying force that has bombed their cities, imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands, imposed a dictatorial regime without their consent, wrecked their infrastructure, seized their oil, and set up elections that cannot even decide the most important question facing Iraqis—the occupation itself. Indeed, it is clear that the U.S. hopes to use the elections to foster divisions between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds that will make it easier to divide and rule the country. These arguments are dangerously close to the Bush administration’s justifications for why the U.S. can’t leave.

Liberal imperialism is also offered up as a commitment to Iraqi democracy by Barry Finger, a member of the editorial board of the radical journal New Politics, writing in the journal’s Winter 2005 issue. According to Finger, the antiwar movement can only champion self-determination in Iraq if it leads to democracy. Ergo, since the Iraqi resistance aims to install an Islamic republic (what Finger refers to as a “rising tide of Islamic fascism”), self-determination for Iraq cannot be supported.

We choose to support only those movements as against the imperialist power that we realistically believe can pave the way for further and expanded struggle in the direction of socialism and popular control from below, and resolutely oppose those whose victory would be an impediment to such further developments.
…It seems sadly that the present Iraqi insurgency offers no additional avenues for the assertion of Iraqi democracy…. It appears to be a political and social dead end promising only the endless regression of society, the virtual enslavement of women…. A victory for such a resistance would be completely incompatible with any conceivable socialist understanding of self-determination.⁵

Notwithstanding his borderline racist comments about Islam that exactly mirror the statements of the Bush administration, Finger’s views have the benefit of being clear and straightforward. So long as an independent Iraq might lead to an Islamic state, he is opposed to Iraqi independence. What Finger is perhaps less clear on is the logical conclusion of his argument: Until such time as the “right kind” of resistance movement emerges, does this mean backing the U.S. military occupation? No other conclusion is possible. Either you are for the right of Iraqis to decide what kind of government they will have, without U.S. interference, or you are not. Finger, who claims to be a socialist, and makes reference to the “socialist understanding of self-determination,” would do well to go back to the ABCs of anti-imperialism, outlined by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky on the eve of the Second World War:

Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims—seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence—with such ideas as “safeguarding peace against the aggressors,” “defense of the fatherland,” “defense of democracy,” etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but on the contrary, to unmask them before the people.⁶

The U.S. now claims its overarching goal is to bring “democracy” to Iraq—in the same way that the Belgians used the slave trade in Africa to justify the colonization of the Congo, or the U.S. used “Spanish tyranny” to enslave Cuba and the Philippines. When leftists respond by saying, we can’t support self-determination in Iraq because it will thwart democracy, this places them squarely in the imperialist camp.

Another example of this position was presented on the Portside Web site by Mark Solomon (“The U.S. Left and the Iraq Election,” January 22, 2005), national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the U.S. Communist Party:

A good part of the armed resistance…in Iraq at least has nothing in common with Vietnam and other liberation struggles which openly sought and won the support of the people by clearly proclaiming their objectives. The Iraq resistance lives mainly in the shadows without a publicly declared program. Whatever is known suggests that some elements are made up of small homegrown units whose motivations are bereft of an agenda except to liberate their country from occupation. A part of the resistance is under the sway of foreign ultra-fundamentalists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi seeking to impose a reactionary theocratic order upon Iraq. [emphasis added]
But the majority clearly are former Ba’athists who in different circumstances willingly served U.S. imperial interests. They have now fallen out with their former U.S. partners, but they still remain foes of popular democratic forces who they continue to attack, terrorize and murder with a ferocity that is hard to grasp. Today they are seeking not only to end the occupation (while also exploiting it to attack their internal enemies), but to return Iraq to brutally repressive and reactionary Ba’athist domination.⁷

This characterization of the resistance seem to draw more from mainstream propaganda than from any real attempt at a fair assessment. [See the preceding article, “The Shape of the Iraqi Resistance”] However, whatever the religious and political affiliations of the different resistance organizations and groupings—and there is no doubt they are a mixture of many different forces—Solomon is forced to admit that the main goal of the Iraqi resistance—one that unites them—is to liberate their country from foreign occupation. It is precisely this agenda of the resistance that requires our solidarity.

Solomon clouds over this unifying feature of the Iraqi resistance with secondary considerations: the resistance isn’t as united as it was in Vietnam; the various forces haven’t clearly proclaimed their objectives, they are under the sway of foreign fundamentalists; and they are former Baathists who will reimpose Baathist domination and who vacillate in their relationship to imperialism.

Other opponents of the Iraqi resistance have argued a more nuanced position; one more supportive of Iraqi self-determination, but which in the end withholds support for the Iraqi resistance. Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, for example, writes:

We recognize the RIGHT of the Iraqi people to resist as a point of principle, even if we do not endorse specific resistance organizations or tactics…. We should not call for “supporting the resistance” because we don’t know who most of them are and what they really stand for… [W]e mostly don’t support their social program beyond opposition to the occupation.⁸ [emphasis added]

Bennis’s argument is better than Solomon’s, since it at least accepts the idea that the antiwar movement can identify with the opposition to the occupation in Iraq. But it remains equivocal.

Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin sometimes compared the right of self-determination to divorce (at a time when it was extremely difficult for a woman to obtain one). The right to divorce, i.e., the right of the woman to separate from her husband, he argued, does not mean we advocate divorce in all circumstances. We are not opposed to marriages that are voluntary associations. But a marriage cannot be equal if the woman is not free to end the marriage. The implications for the question of national self-determination for Lenin were clear. Unions between countries that are voluntary, i.e., not based on one forcibly imposing its will on the other, are acceptable. However, when the marriage is forced, and when the husband beats the wife, one might think support for the women’s actual efforts to secure a divorce might be in order. Likewise, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq, imposes a puppet government, massacres families, tortures, imprisons, and destroys entire cities, one might think support for the actual resistance to the occupation is called for. What else does supporting the Iraqi peoples’ “right to resist” mean in this situation?

The Left and national liberation

Solomon, as no doubt much of the Left, is guilty of romanticizing the national liberation movements of the past in order to cast a bad light on the Iraqi resistance. The “founding fathers” removed British domination but failed to end chattel slavery. North Vietnam was under the sway of a one-party dictatorship that suppressed dissent, and the Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh’s leadership murdered Vietnamese Trotskyists after the Second World War during the resistance against the reimposition of French colonialism. Many independence struggles—Algeria, Zimbabwe, and El Salvador, for example—suffered from violent divisions between warring petty-bourgeois organizations competing for hegemony. In Algeria, the conflict between competing national liberation organizations resulted in the deaths of thousands of militants. Many independence struggles have ended in the creation of quite repressive, one-party, or military dictatorships. Nevertheless, they were genuine liberation struggles that freed these respective countries from imperialism and ended the era of imperialist colonialism. Historically, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders have vacillated between opposition to imperialism and accommodation to it.

To use this as an argument for opposing self-determination misses the point. Insofar as a movement is objectively fighting for self-determination or challenging imperialism, it deserves our support, both because self-determination, like freedom of assembly and the right to vote, are basic democratic demands, and secondly because successful national liberation movements, such as what developed in places like Vietnam, weaken imperialism and make the imperialists more hesitant to impose their will around the world.

Much of the Left in the U.S. suffers from the hangover of a Stalinist approach to national liberation, which identified certain movements worthy of uncritical support because they were led by secular nationalist forces strongly identified with Cuba, China, or the Soviet Union.

The United States began clawing back after its defeat in Vietnam by justifying its military interventions under various guises—removing a “tyrant” from power (Panama, 1989), avenging an “illegal” invasion (Iraq, 1990–1991), humanitarian intervention (Somalia, 1992–1993), “restoring democracy” (Haiti, 1994 and 2004), preventing ethnic cleansing (the Balkans, 1994–). These efforts to reestablish an acceptable rationale for U.S. military intervention were successful in sowing a great deal of confusion among progressives in the U.S., in particular the interventions in Haiti and the Balkans, both of which were supported, or at the very least tolerated, by whole sections of the Left.

At the same time, for those on the Left with illusions in the USSR as a socialist state (and this includes a majority of the U.S. Left), the whole project of national liberation seemed to fade in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The Left found itself unequipped to deal with these new developments, and as a result, many of these interventions met little resistance in the United States. The only sections of the Left able to hold their ground against this development were those that understood “the main enemy is at home.” This idea, in turn, was anchored by the idea that in a world dominated by U.S. imperialism, one need not identify with the politics of a particular regime or resistance movement in order to take sides against the imperial power.

Similarly, one need not offer political support to the Iraqi resistance in order to support its main goal, driving the U.S. out of Iraq. This means rejecting the sham rhetoric of American imperialism about spreading “human rights” and “democracy.”

A variety of secondary justifications accepted by (both right-wing and liberal) pundits deny Iraq’s right to self-determination. This is precisely the Achilles heel of the American Left today. Having lost its knee-jerk opposition to U.S. imperialism, the broad Left has failed to grasp the central issue in Iraq, preoccupying itself with secondary questions that cloud, contradict, and negate the key issue: The U.S. invaded Iraq in order to advance its imperialist aims. On this basis alone, resistance to the occupation, peaceful or armed, deserves our support.

If the war is one of imperialist conquest, and the resistance opposes that conquest, then by definition the Iraqi resistance is a legitimate war of national liberation. Only if we are clear on this fundamental basis for support can we place in proper perspective our criticisms of the politics and tactics of the resistance. Put differently, in order not to play into the hands of the U.S. conquerors, we must first support Iraqi resistance before we criticize the politics or tactics of that resistance.

Trotsky made the same argument in pressing Chinese socialists to join the national revolt led by the nationalist warlord Chiang Kai-shek, against Japan:

We do not and never have put all wars on the same plane. Marx and Engels supported the revolutionary struggle of the Irish against Great Britain, of the Poles against the Tsar, even though in these two nationalist wars the leaders were, for the most part, members of the bourgeoisie and even at times of the feudal aristocracy...at all events, Catholic reactionaries. When Abdel-Karim [Moroccan nationalist leader] rose up against France, the democrats and Social Democrats spoke with hate of the struggle of a “savage tyrant” against the “democracy.”
In the Far East we have a classic example. China is a semi-colonial country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a colonial country. Japan’s struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China’s struggle is emancipatory and progressive.
But Chiang Kai-shek? We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China, just as Marx and Engels had no illusions about the ruling classes of Ireland and Poland. Chiang Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of the independence of China. Tomorrow he may again betray. It is possible. It is probable. It is even inevitable. But today he is struggling. Only cowards, scoundrels, or complete imbeciles can refuse to participate in that struggle.⁹

We have no illusions about the weaknesses and limitations of the Iraqi resistance. However, we do not make our support for the Iraqi resistance conditional upon our criticism of the resistance’s tactics and politics. U.S. imperialism has framed the battle in Iraq as if the U.S. is defending democracy against Islamic fascism or “terrorism.” We cannot fall into that trap.

Certainly there are self-defeating and even reprehensible tactics used by some resistance groups—for example, bombing civilians, kidnapping and beheading aid workers and journalists, targeting janitorial workers on U.S. bases, or ordinary Iraqis who voted in the January 30 election. These are not “collaborators,” but people merely seeking paid employment in the context of widespread poverty or seeking a political voice in a desperate situation. Such attacks are counterproductive, bolstering the Bush administration’s claim that the resistance opposes democracy. We must view in a similar way any actions by Sunni or Shiite resistance cells directed against each other on sectarian grounds. Sectarian violence divides and weakens the resistance, and as such cannot be considered legitimate acts of national resistance.

The building of a secular resistance in Iraq that unites Iraqis against any attempt by the U.S. to divide them along sectarian lines would be an immensely positive development. No doubt, the best means to unite Iraqis into a strong, democratic national movement would be on a class basis. The most significant unifying factor that can bring together ordinary Iraqis in resistance to the U.S. occupation is that the majority of Iraqis are working class, with a common interest in demanding jobs, unions, control at work, services, water and electricity, democratic rights, and rights for the oppressed. A unified national liberation movement in Iraq that linked independence with a program of fundamental social change would tremendously strengthen the struggle, and give inspiration to movements around the world.

At the same time, it is necessary to make a distinction between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed, and not denounce what are legitimate acts of military resistance against an overwhelmingly more powerful, and far deadlier, U.S. military. Almost 1,500 American soldiers have died in Iraq, hardly more than the number of resistance fighters the U.S. claims to have killed on the second attack on Fallujah alone, and certainly far fewer than the tens of thousands of civilian deaths the U.S. occupation has inflicted. Most of the tactics of the resistance movement are classic guerrilla tactics that have been used in many wars, from the American Revolution to the French anti-Nazi partisans to the Vietnamese National Liberation Front—hit and run ambushes, grenade attacks, car bombings, improvised explosives detonated by booby trap or remote control, and rocket and mortar assaults.

Last August, speaking in San Francisco, Arundhati Roy made an appeal for solidarity with the Iraqi resistance that perfectly sums up the position that sets antiwar activists in the best frame of mind to advance the antiwar movement at home:

Like most resistance movements, [the Iraqis] combine a motley range of assorted factions. Former Ba’athists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery and criminality. But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.
Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allied governments to withdraw from Iraq.¹⁰

Walden Bello makes a similar point, attributing one of the causes of the antiwar movement’s paltry levels of protest over the past months to its lack of sympathy for Iraqis who are fighting the occupation:

A significant part of the international peace movement, particularly in the United States, hesitates to legitimize the Iraqi resistance. Who are they? Can we really support them? These questions have increasingly been flung at me and other advocates of an unconditional military and political withdrawal from Iraq. The use of suicide as a political weapon continues to bother many U.S. activists who were repelled by statements such as that of the Palestinian leaders who proudly assert that suicide bombers were the oppressed people’s equivalent of the F-16. The role of Islamic fundamentalists and the possibility that, on account of the presence of a majority Shiite population, a post-U.S. Iraq could turn into an Islamic state a la Iran is also a matter of great concern.
Yet there has never been any pretty movement for national liberation or independence. Many Western progressives were also repelled by some of the methods of the “Mau Mau” movement in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, the NLF in Vietnam. What Western progressives forget is that national liberation movements are not asking them mainly for ideological or political support. What they really want from the outside is international pressure for the withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can have the space to forge a truly national government based on their unique processes. Until they give up this dream of having an ideal liberation movement tailored to their values and discourse, U.S. peace activists will, like the Democrats they often criticize, continue to be trapped within a paradigm of imposing terms for other people.¹¹

Likewise, Tariq Ali reminds us that the fundamental questions involved in this debate are not new. He wrote:

The popular resistance will continue. Many in the west find it increasingly difficult to support this resistance. The arguments for and against it are old ones. In 1885, the English socialist William Morris celebrated the defeat of General Gordon by the Mahdi: “Khartoum fallen—into the hands of the people it belongs to.” Morris argued that the duty of English internationalists was to support all those being oppressed by the British Empire despite disagreements with nationalism or fanaticism.¹²

Lenin, in arguing for the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, consistently attacked any manifestation of what he called “Great-Russian chauvinism”—the ingrained habit instilled by Russia’s imperial rulers considering it an innate right for Russia to dominate and control the Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, and other nations under the Russian yoke.

The U.S. ruling class systematically, and insidiously, instills American chauvinism. As a result, the vast majority of Americans unconsciously accept the right of the U.S. to project its power around the world and to dominate international institutions. This kind of chauvinism, and the way in which the war and occupation of Iraq has been presented, has an unstated but nevertheless unmistakable double standard when it comes to the actions of the U.S. and those who oppose it; or the value of American lives as compared to those of ordinary Iraqis. And American chauvinism is even more insidious than its Russian variant, because it comes with the ideological trappings of bourgeois democracy. America claims to be a great protector and promoter of world democracy, a “reluctant” world power uniquely possessed with benign respect for human rights and dignity.

During the 1960s this idea was exposed as nothing but a lie. A whole generation came to understand that the U.S. was not the great defender and promoter of democracy in the world. Before speaking out against injustice abroad, activists in the U.S. need to organize and speak out against their own government. “We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” Martin Luther King Jr. told an antiwar meeting in April 1967. “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”¹³

While those critical of U.S. foreign policy have begun to see through these lies, still, American chauvinism is so ingrained—even within the antiwar movement—that a continual struggle is needed to uproot it. That is why it is necessary to repeat again and again the argument that Americans have no right to make decisions about what kind of society the Iraqis will have—that decision should be up to the Iraqis themselves. “Iraq for the Iraqis”—any other position is a capitulation to chauvinism.

Many of the arguments in the antiwar movement against supporting the resistance boils down to the idea that so-called democratic American imperialism is a lesser evil to the prospects of an Islamic state. Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, rightly had nothing but contempt for such a view:

The coercive imperialism of advanced nations is able to exist only because backward nations, oppressed nationalities, colonial and semicolonial countries, remain on our planet. The struggle of the oppressed peoples for national unification and national independence is doubly progressive because, on the one side, this prepares more favorable conditions for their own development, while, on the other side, this deals blows to imperialism. That, in particular, is the reason why, in the struggle between a civilized, imperialist, democratic republic and a backward, barbaric monarchy in a colonial country, the socialists are completely on the side of the oppressed country notwithstanding its monarchy and against the oppressor country notwithstanding its “democracy.”¹⁴ [emphasis added]

There is, to be sure, a difference between the need to introduce this discussion into the antiwar movement and what kind of slogans and demands most effectively widen and deepen the reach of the movement. The antiwar movement today should have as its general watchword “Troops Out Now.” This is the most effective and clear way to make our opposition to U.S. imperialism’s right to intervene around the world, while simultaneously expressing support for the right of national self-determination—and providing a bridge to others who may not have this political position but are firmly against U.S. soldiers fighting and dying for the profit of the tiny minority who run this country.

Of course, not everyone will agree with this slogan. But it is the only basis upon which to build a movement that champions the interests of Iraqi self-determination and also makes clear that ordinary Americans have nothing to gain from this war and occupation.

We must begin the process of winning wider layers around us to the importance of support for all forms of resistance to this war and occupation—be it the resistance of the antiwar movement at home, from within in the U.S. military, or in Iraq itself. We can never lose sight of the fact that it is the resistance in Iraq, above all, that is currently driving down Bush’s popularity, is making possible the rekindling of the antiwar movement at home, and is acting as a brake on U.S. imperial ambitions elsewhere. Indeed, as Vietnam shows, without the combination of these three forms of resistance—at home, in the U.S. military, and from within the invaded country—the U.S. cannot be defeated in Iraq.

Paul D'Amato is associate editor of the ISR