The US occupation of Iraq is now into its fourth year with no real end in sight. Many tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. Three thousand a month are still dying. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced into lives of intense fear and poverty. Nearly three thousand US soldiers have died, and ten times that number have been wounded. These numbers will only go up.
The anti-war movements in the belligerent countries have failed so far to call their governments to account and force a withdrawal. The US government and military, with a messianic faith in their own lies, are unwilling and unable to extricate themselves from their own failure.
The multifaceted resistance in Iraq has been unable to put forward either a political perspective to unite the majority of Iraqis who oppose the occupation of their country or a strategy based on it that could defeat the occupation.
It is a testament to the failure of United States policy in Iraq that well over three years after the "liberation" US forces are being called by the thousands back into Baghdad from the stronghold of Sunni resistance, Anbar. The fourth year of the war, and the capital city is out of the control of the occupiers and their Iraqi puppets!
The policy of fostering and relying on sectarian division in Iraq, as in so many imperial adventures before it, has become a real Frankenstein's monster. The places of relative safety in the country are daily decreasing, as neighborhoods, towns and regions consolidate on confessional or ethnic lines.
These consolidations are harbingers of bigger conflicts to come. Even now there are several major massacres a week, in addition to the daily inundation of hooded, bound and broken bodies that show up each morning in the morgues, dumps, alleys and canals of what was once the intellectual, political and cultural capitol of the Arab world.
The sectarian violence that has engulfed Baghdad and other areas with diverse populations is not simply the fault of the latest imperial attempt at divide and rule by the US.
The dissection of the region into imperialist "zones of influence" without regard to the desires and views of the people living there at the end of the last century's First World War has intensified divisions that have been held together only by force. There is no "national solution" to any of the region's problems, if "nation" is taken to mean the artificial states created by imperialism.
The unfulfilled aspirations of both Arabs and non-Arabs are a constant threat to the illegitimate power of the monarchs and despots of the countries that surround Iraq, all of whom are attempting to protect their power at home through machinations in Iraq. A full-scale civil war in Iraq would almost certainly, and quickly, become a regional war.
The road to national liberation is through a genuine internationalism that goes beyond the surface differences, even hardened surface differences, to the core economic and class interests that unite the workers and peasants. This national liberation would include uniting the Arab nation around the Arab working class and bringing together the Arab and non-Arab populations in a socialist federation that would respect the right of national self-determination.
The big international energy companies are swimming in record profits as oil reaches over seventy dollars a barrel...and the people living on top of the largest energy reserves in the world wait in line for hours to pump a ration of gas and swelter in 120 degree heat because there is no power.
Oil and the power the control over oil entails is at the heart of the conflicts in the region. It is what has sent and re-sent US (as well as British and French) troops to the area over the years. It is the prize in the imperial system. Its supply and use is at the very heart of modern capitalism.
Unless the working people of the region control the oil themselves, and for their own long-term interests, they will not have freedom. Unless the working people of the world move beyond an oil-based economy, we will have more wars and the horrors and uncertainty that wars bring, like the cloud that currently hangs over the entire Middle East.