The strength of the earthquake that created the Arab revolutions stems from the sufferings of the Arab nation and will not stop so long as those sufferings continue. Therefore we think that democracy or democratic rights in Arab countries are not only necessary but also inevitable. And despite the complexity of alliances and conflicts between regimes in the region, despite the diversity of conditions from one country to another, we think that the drive for better democratic regimes will affect all non-democratic regimes in the region, including Iran.

It is the aspirations of young people for freedom, prosperity and individual and national dignity on the one hand, and the impossibility of achieving development without democracy, dignity and liberty on the other, that are the motors of change.


Since before the invasion of Iraq, the Arab nation began to regain its self-confidence. The youth of the nation wants to live as free and as prosperous as the youth of other nations. The globalisation of information and media uncovered the poorness of the conditions of their lives. The large participation of women and the youth in the Arab Spring revolutions is unprecedented in the Arab world. They lack jobs, healthcare, real education, freedom of movement and creation, healthy relations between women and men, clean habitation and environment, respect of their individual and national identity, integrity and culture, freedom of opinion, expression and assembly in civil society organisations, associations and trade unions. And on top of this, they lack justice, justice for themselves, for their co-citizens and for their sisters and brothers in other countries, of which Palestine is their never-ending concern.

It is certain that there are many currents among the youth of the Arab nations, but as the Arab revolutions expressed well, they are bound — be they Islamists, leftists, nationalists or liberals — by an unwritten constitution that springs from their Arab-Muslim culture, history and experience.

For nationalists, retaining control of national resources to serve the general interest is sacrosanct. For leftists, opposing the international chains of imperialism and globalisation is a baseline. For Islamists, resistance to foreign occupation, as written in the Quran, is a duty. Their interest lies currently in achieving unity in struggle. They are united by their Arab-Muslim identity. They share common principles and values as follows: natural resources, material heritage, and the riches of culture and civilisation are the property of the totality of the people; the totality of citizens constitutes the people; the people are the sole source of sovereignty and of constitutional, political and judicial legitimacy; government is responsible for and accountable to all citizens; solidarity between citizens — between generations, the able and ill, the elderly and young, the orphan and every human being who finds himself in a state of weakness — should form the basis of any government’s social policy.

The general interest is the justification and basis for the operation of the state, with every citizen, free of all forms of discrimination, sharing in the fruits of national wealth and social development.

Western propaganda, leftist as well as rightist, tends to undermine the importance of the Arab revolutions in the name of the election of Islamists as a majority in parliaments. They express by this their ideology that the Arabs, because of their Islam, cannot have a liberating revolution. The reality is elsewhere. Firstly, insisting on the Arab-Muslim character is a normal response to the animosity expressed by the neoliberal imperialists and comprador regimes towards Islam and Muslims, that violate Arab rights, interests and dignity, of which supporting Israel is the crying example. Secondly, the Islamist current didn’t, until now, break the unwritten pact among existing political currents on building a civil state. Thirdly, what is democracy if not reconciling the national state with all popular cultures and trends? Fourthly, the youth is not only waging a political revolution for power; it wages, including the Islamists, a revolution for societal change.

The factors and the immediate character of the struggle for power through elections are different from the factors and the lasting character of a societal revolution. The force within power will fade if it doesn’t correspond to the societal change. Power in a transitional period is temporary; a revolution is continuous. The chaos and economic difficulties engendered by the change, or created by the enemies of change, always weaken in the eyes of electors those who appear, in reality or supposition, as working towards a tabula rasa, especially when they don’t have a clear programme for change. This is not new in revolutions: the Jacobins of 1789 in France produced Napoleon I; the Blanquists in 1848 produced Napoleon III; in Russia, the Socialist-Revolutionaries produced Stalin; and the election after the youth revolution of 1968 in France produced a rightist parliament.

Outside the distinctions of each national context, there are geopolitical factors that also play a role in the Arab renaissance. The horrors of what happened in Iraq, on the one hand, and the United States’ military, political, financial and moral suicide on the other, are factors that made the Arab nation’s youth realise that the repressive, heavily armed regimes that respond to imperial and Zionist demands are nothing but paper tigers.

Added to the similarities in conditions under comprador regimes, these geopolitical factors produced a regional synergy that is the Arab Spring of democracy.

The invasion of Iraq was not only the first genocide of the 21st century but also the peak of the curve of the West’s capacity — that began with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration — to decide the future of Arabs. The first Palestinian Intifada announced the beginning of the Arab masses taking their future in their hands without waiting for governments and leaders. This was followed by the political, civil and armed Iraqi resistance, the resistance of South Lebanon and the continuous resistance of Gaza. Increasingly, as imperial and Zionist forces tried to subjugate this rising backlash, they found themselves confronting the full force of Arab societies.

With Tunis followed by Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, we entered into a new historical transition period of change in the Arab world. Women and the youth work to achieve profound societal change. The state is reconciling with the Arab-Muslim identity of the people. Every social stratum is calling for liberty of opinion, expression and the liberty of organising itself. No maitre à penser — whether a state, a party or a person — can dictate positions anymore. The notion of a permanent entity leading the state and society has blown away with the wind. The ideology of no ideology is winning, and the solidarity among peoples too. Every aspect of liberation began to appear possible. It suffices to struggle in mass, peacefully and consciously. The future is open for the youth of the Arab world. The oppressive and neoliberal models and policies are falling. Condoleezza Rice wanted a new Middle East of pro-imperialist governments sustained by creative chaos; she got a Middle East of peoples who want to get rid of oppression, corruption, poverty and imperialist dictates.

Vive the Arab revolutions.

On 10 February 2011, in our article “Egypt: Only Democracy is Legitimate,” we tried to seize the characteristics of the then ongoing revolution. Now, a parliament with legislative powers has begun its work. This is the first step for democracy, which should be followed by others. The democratic revolution of 25 January will continue legitimately until a civil democratic welfare state is built. The Arab world needs democracy so that the people can manage their states efficiently and peacefully. It is only through democracy that the state can intervene, not only in creating the best infrastructure for the private and public sector to develop, but also to prevent capital from controlling the state, and to allow the state to direct public resources towards the fair redistribution of revenues.

The new elected parliament in Egypt has the necessary task of changing the failed neoliberal model of a police state governed by a family for the benefits of foreign powers, capital and a comprador class — one that lives not off development but from different kinds of rent — into a democratic welfare state. It is a great task that should be accomplished with tact and with the support and comprehension of all economic actors,including the private sector,so as to avoid chaos or paralysis.

Social justice shouldn’t mean only ensuring the necessary better revenues for all, as this alone would result, among other things, in inflation. It should be simultaneously inciting better and larger production. The first urgent necessity is to attempt to ensure food security in the country. The agriculture and alimentary industry should be intensively and extensively developed. To avoid inflation, aid should be better directed to the producer, so as to incite him to improve his production and not only the product. The same thing applies to other sectors, including construction, transport, energy, health, family, education, jobs, training, the unemployed and the elderly.Aid to the person gives state administration the possibility of distributing revenues according to income, of selecting the products that should be incited to be produced, and to redistribute revenues and augment production without creating inflation and black markets.Deputies should urge the government, specialists and economists to put forward plans so that all families have a revenue, and at the same time that jobs can be created, production increased, monopolies and sources of black markets and corruption suppressed, competitiveness enhanced, the environment protected, administration and public services reformed and the budget balanced by reducing the deficit and public debts through improved commerce and real development. All Arab countries have a high potential for development. They have an abundance of factors of production that could be mobilised individually and collectively. It suffices to be mobilised rationally for the benefit of all, not only the few.

Social justice programmes cannot be achieved but through legitimate, democratic, stable institutions of the state. The base of any democracy is a free individual, woman and man, and a free citizen, woman and man. International human rights standards and treaties should be ratified and applied.

The legislature should ensure that state institutions apply these standards. The state is the state of all Egyptians. Public interest is imperative. Nothing in its laws, structures, procedures, and the behaviour of its agents, should serve — or show any form of discrimination against — any particular individual, group, or ideology, even if initiated by the government in the name of the majority. Special attention should be directed to the physical and moral integrity and dignity of citizens, especially women, minorities and children, to be guaranteed and applied by all state institutions.

Arab regimes are late in the process of democratisation in the world. One of the reasons is the role played by the big powers in supporting non-democratic regimes during their Cold War: for the West, dictatorial comprador regimes; for the East, one-party regimes. While democracy is a system by which society directs its public affairs, the end of the Cold War didn’t end the culture that accompanied it. The pro-Westerns limited their criticism of dictatorial regimes and demand for change by beginning a shy criticism of regimes based on the necessity of individual liberties in individual life without criticising the neoliberal globalised structure and the comprador class enforcing and profiting from it, while the leftists continue to see and think of revolution as a putsch of an avant-garde group establishing the dictatorship of workers and poor peasants as a way to suppress the State: their model is The State and the Revolution of Lenin. American culture is a liberal ideology of less state; the leftists adopted the ideology of one party that leads the state and society. Although world political culture abandoned both neoliberalism and putschism, these two cultures continue to have their avant-gardism in the Arab world.

In Egypt, this is expressed by two positions. The first is the insistence on transferring power to some liberals before any election or constitution. The second is to consider elections as a non-event. Between these, there are reasonable positions held by varied political actors. The first is the position supporting the drafting of a constitution first. Since de Tocqueville’s On Democracy in America, political science knows the danger of a state without recognised values or a constitution that limits the risk of the dictatorship of the majority vote. The constitution is a social pact to live and manage public affairs peacefully together. In a democratic state, non-respect of the constitution in decisions is considered a putsch, even if voted by a majority. The second legitimate position is that it is the elected assembly that should draft the constitution. This position is legitimate because a constitution is not given to the people but written by the people. Although there was the suspicion that religious parties wanted to impose a religious state, agreement on the Al-Azhar Document lifted this suspicion. The third is the position of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), expressed on 23 July, in the constitutional declaration, and in the roadmap for transferring power to an elected president.

The problem with the avant-gardists is that they take their legitimacy from themselves while the only legitimacy in a democratic state is the legitimacy borne from elections. Many things limit even this legitimacy. The first is the constitution, which should contain all kind of limitations to guarantee equality among citizens and prevent the dictatorship of the majority. The legitimacy of the legislative branch is also limited by time. The legislature should be re-elected periodically. Electing a deputy is not giving them the absolute power to decide everything in the life of electors.

It is only delegating to them while keeping the right to pull from them their powers, in the next elections and even before. The third limitation comes from the impossibility for the legislative and executive branches to direct social life in its detail. From this springs the role of the media, expressions of public opinion such as demonstrations, strikes, art, expert research, publications and statements, universities and research centres, freetrade unions, local elections and institutions, and specialised non-governmental associations. The fourth limitation comes from the several other elected bodies: the senate, the president and local administration. Each has its prerogative and legitimacy. The fifth limitation is the institutions of the state and its cultural heritage, because laws even voted will not be enforced efficiently without their acceptance and the possibility that the institutions concerned have faith in them. The opposite is a crisis in the work of the administration that should be addressed.

One problem in the thinking of the avant-gardists is the idea that the revolution is one act to install on the top of the state people that issue revolutionary laws. These laws would have no effect if not supported by the people. Society and the state apparatus and the country’s geopolitical relations make this thinking subjective, impossible to realise and in some aspects dangerous, even if it springs from a real thirst for liberty and progressive aspirations. In Egypt, in their slogans against SCAF, the avant-gardists didn’t present a workable alternative. All society appreciates their role in sparking the January 25 Revolution, but their slogans are seen as harmful, as the elections proved. Happily after one year, most of the youth have abandoned putschism and return to affirming, in group work and outlook, the importance of peaceful change, preparing already for future elections, after the success of the recent elections. No one can deny them this right and appreciated role, or attack it.

In a democratic state no group has a special political privilege. But in all states, democratic or not, the armed forces have a special functioning different from other institutions of the state. In all Third World countries, as in some capitalist countries, the military draft was not only to ensure capacity to face war, but also to develop strategic research and studies, industrial and civil infrastructure, train workers, to administer the public sector and to guarantee enforcement of the law and a civil state. It is to the constitution to decide, calmly and scientifically, the way the army works as an institution of the state, without harming national security and the national economy. In this domain we can say that as Egypt is targeted as a power, despite the absence of a state of war, the army should be prepared to defend national security in all domains of the state. Egypt is not living in a peaceful environment so as to reveal its military plans and budget publicly, although these plans and budget should be inspected and ratified by the deputies of the people.

A heavy responsibility lies on the shoulders of political groups, the elected of the people, and the government of Egypt. The more rapidly and transparently they apply necessary changes, the more the future of Egypt will shine. We are sure the love of the people of Egypt for their country and their confidence in its capacity will make this heavy task easier.

A year on from the outbreak of protests that eventually toppled a reviled dictator, his wife, sons and cronies, an oppressive regime that had dragged near every Egyptian into the dirt of depression and impoverishment, has the revolution been won, and if not can it still be won?

Much has changed, but more remains the same. Perhaps it was inevitable that this, the saddest lesson, would be played out: loss of hope from such a high of euphoria, borne of the unprecedented collective consciousness that appeared to grab the masses from nowhere — those beautiful 18 days in which no mistakes were made.

What a contrast to the catalogue of mistakes made in the days and months — indeed hours — that followed the departure of Mubarak. That is, as soon as the leaderless revolution needed leaders.

Many perhaps regret the indulgent celebrations held in Tahrir Square for weeks following 11 February, including handshakes and baby photo-ops with military soldiers who soon would be clearing the square by force, torturing artists with zeal, and subjecting the women of the revolution to virginity tests. And this was just the beginning. Some, too, might regret the lost time, and sense of buoyant surety, that led to the constitutional amendments defeat — the first and final (in that there was no revival) defeat of the revolution so soon after its supposed success.

It was in the wake of this defeat that calls gathered for a “second revolution”. The calls alone were acknowledgement of the failure of the first revolution. But even at this time most of the focus was on the “regime.” Few have been ready to understand that the problem is in the state. In this context, three incidents stand out on the sad path Egypt has taken in the last year; three incidents that perhaps cannot be outweighed by the positive changes that have survived, among which is a level of liberty of discourse unprecedented in Egypt’s modern history, prisoners of conscience of the revolution — first among which is Maikel Nabil — notwithstanding. These incidents increase in intensity and reveal something dark about the state that has survived as the former regime fell.

The first incident occurred on the first day of Ramadan. The plan to have a communal iftar in Tahrir Square was aborted as the Central Security Forces drove people out with sticks. To be sure, the stick generally is not an implement of fatal force. But there is something in the stick that is worse to the honest eye than the gun. Something representative about how the old regime thought of the people, and so gives its reappearance a particular significance. It was not 50 sticks, but 300. Some 300 sticks that had to be found, gathered from their place of storage, transported and handed out man by man, with instructions on what was coming next. It was on this day that the Muslim Brotherhood fell into line with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, for as a force they could not bring together Tahrir and Islam.

The second incident was the runaway vehicle near Maspero that literally drove over Egyptians, flattening them and killing them. Several vehicles were doing the same, but the APC that did so was several tons in weight and at no point in the video footage did it appear that it would stop. Rather, this was crowd control. The mask fell that night, 9 October. What was seen on the Corniche in the capital was really how the military regarded the Egyptian people: like sheep to be rounded up, and if necessary swept up. How heartbreaking now to see again the image of the woman who that night lost her fiancé, his face bludgeoned and distorted out of all proportion as she sat wailing, holding what the army had left of him.

The third instance is something akin to a war crime or crime against humanity: the open-air gassing of crowds of people on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. If Maspero was crowd control, Mohamed Mahmoud was pest control. It was quite a feat, indeed, to get the concentration of CS gas so high in open-air space that people died, asphyxiated. But this is what the military and the Central Security Forces clearly aimed at; testament to which is how they attacked field hospitals, killing even medical personnel there to help the helpless. It didn’t get worse than this, and heaven knows how deep and wide the economic catastrophe must be that Mubarak led the country into for the people as a whole not to simply refuse to participate in Egyptian public life after witnessing these horrid and impossible scenes.

And now here we are, a parliament full of suits. Of over 500, how many in there risked and lost? How many in there fought and won? Is it five, or is it 10? Is it one or two per cent of the whole? And so it is that when Dr Essam El-Erian, a decent man no doubt, arrives, it is the police who greet him, smiling, because we have carefully and successfully transitioned from one regime to a new regime in the making, without touching the foundations of the state itself, without touching its practices, its torture, its governmental rationality. How lost were the crowds and the intellectuals of the revolution, again in November, to call for the end of SCAF. The problem is not SCAF; it is the rationality of SCAF. The problem is not who, but how. The real issue is not taking power, but defanging power. What else, indeed, do rights really mean?

Over 1000 people died, and not for glorious nothingness. The so-called intellectuals of the secular left bear a heavy burden, if they could see it. In failing to put forward an economic plan for Egypt they allowed the people to turn against the revolution, tired and hungry.

In failing to form a solid and wide-ranging coalition they gave the revolution on a plate to the next best-organised political forces, including a newcomer that has nothing to do with the freedom of spirit, body and mind that was necessary to confront snipers and firebombs in January. And by failing to understand that a revolution must be led by its people, the people who constituted the revolution, not puppets of the like of ElBaradei, they sealed the fate of the revolution and the outcome of its last gasp, figuratively and literally: the zero political outcome that emerged from the heroic frontline resistance waged by football fans in Mohamed Mahmoud Street against the police that always brutalised them and means to continue doing so.

Same police force. Same sticks. Same rape by forced sodomy. Same tactics. Same governmental economic incompetence. Same one-party dominance. Same exceptional powers. Same bureaucracy. Same hall of mirrors. Same malaise. Same same same. The Arab Spring but an echo. Did we dream it?

Or perhaps something else can happen. Perhaps the people can start again to talk about freedom, and to practice freedom. Egyptians rose up for dignity. They refused torture. Real freedom is sovereignty of person; collective freedom is national sovereignty. Unless the rationality of the use of force is questioned it will not matter who exercises force, and it could even be a revolutionary. The idea of a social contract is that the people choose the cost of government; that is, the cost to their freedom of being governed. Political discourse in Egypt at present has accepted that replacing persons not structures and rationalities is the most important thing, and everyone in parliament is consciously or unconsciously complicit with this. But when the people called for the end of the nizam, the system, it meant more than persons; it was the violence of that system, and the costs of that government.

To SCAF: No more talk of foreign conspiracies. The Egyptian people are against the violence of the Egyptian state. They will oppose it regardless of what you pretend. Stop killing and beating the people.

To the people: It is time you took control of the mouthpiece. It is time for a completely free and cleansed media in Egypt. Otherwise you do not hear the truth of what happens; you hear what SCAF wants to you to hear, while people are fighting and dying still for your freedom.

To the politicians: Congratulate yourselves and pretend you are more respectable in parliament today than you were outside of it yesterday. But remember: the people are the greatest force in Egypt, and you cannot dictate — no more than Mubarak could — something as fundamental as the feeling of freedom.

Pundits like to say the world changed on 11 September 2001. It didn’t really. The writing was on the wall in the 1990s if you were watching the rise of the neoconservative movement, the remnants of the Cold War warriors for whom victory over the Soviet Union was never going to be enough. Under the name of the Project for a New American Century — a moneymaking defence contracting scheme that got, in the end, too much attention, and so disappeared — this cabal of rightwing business and military marketeers set out to construct a New World Order centred around their private interests. All others be damned.

Meanwhile, it is hardly as if the supposed political alternative, which was in power for two terms under Clinton, was a whole lot better. As well as being starved, Iraq was being bombed systematically throughout the 1990s, and for any pretence, including to divert attention from sexual favors offered in the Oval Office, while the Palestinians were being slowly strangled by the detailed and monolithic fascism of right and left Zionism, backed in all instances by both houses of Congress. For Iraqis and Palestinians, 11 September just brought more of the same, if only with more intensity and greater breadth, and a tad more viciousness.

The biggest change on 9/11 happened not outside the United States but within it. Once a rearguard protected by the state, the logic reversed, though until now not a single mainstream news source will say it. War that was always conducted by the US government against others was now conducted at home against Americans. Indeed, what is wrapped up as an international event is in actual fact a domestic event with a cast — until recently all dead except Osama Bin Laden — of foreign supporting actors. Now, in the capitalist world order, there’s nowhere greener than anywhere else.

Seen with the right eyes, 11 September 2001 marks the most visible crisis in the history of the capitalist-consumer model of life, and the capitalist-military state that survives off it, and reduces human life to it. The crisis has been so deep, and it’s possible impact so wide, that the step was taken to break social conventions in the realm of state actions that are so integral to the grand masquerade as to be almost untouchable. Reversing both blatantly and brutally the primary source of legitimacy of the modern state, that it would protect and facilitate the life of the people, the United States, or whoever controls it, turned against the people. The only way it could happen is because no one would believe it.

I will just give you the headlines. First, no credible evidence exists to explain how commercial airliners carrying nothing but jetfuel could bring down two of the largest man-made structures on earth. Specifically, structures designed to withstand multiple aircraft strikes. I remember standing in front of those towers. I remember the sheer size of them, and the steel encasing them, and that ran down the centre of them. No fire, ever, could have brought them down. No engineer, to date, has credibly explained how thousands upon thousands of tons of steel industry-certified not to weaken at temperatures far exceeding the burn temperature of kerosine not only gave way but gave way at freefall speeds.

Second, no one has explained the multiple explosions survivors, including firefighters, heard as those buildings came crashing down. And no one has explained at all how Building 7, which wasn’t even hit, collapsed late in the afternoon of 11 September, supposedly from simple fire, that otherwise has never taken down any steel structured building in history. And with these two points we’re just scratching the surface. It is horrible, because nearly 3000 real people, with families, children, wives, brothers, sons, daughters, and mothers, died that day. But the reality is that these were controlled demolitions, and no foreign entity — and in my view not even a foreign state — could have pulled that off, with all the detailed planning, access and execution that it would necessarily entail.

One million or more Iraqis would die in the next nine years following that day, and as a direct consequence of that day, and the lies spun up around that day. One million Iraqis out of an entire country — including its leadership — that had nothing to do with the events of that day. But even a million dead, which is near impossible for the mind to imagine, is not even the limit of the mendacity visited upon the world on that day, including on all Americans: 250 million people sent into a zone of panic, fear, paranoia, and ideological indocrination unfolding on a scale, strictly speaking, never seen before. Imagine that in some parts of Afghanistan, when so swiftly the carpet bombing began, people had never heard of 9/11.

Meanwhile consider the impact on the whole world of the attack of the US government, parts of it, or some linked to it, on the American people. Billions of lives if not dashed then limited. Not a place on the planet where you could walk with real freedom because of it. Governments worldwide falling in line with the Orwellian language and practice of a war that Dick Cheney promised would never end. Pause on that. A global war that would never end. For most people, globally, it was the candour of the announcement that was different: they were already living it. But for the American people, they became the wager in this: the support mechanism and the guarantee of it. Imagine that. Not only did the US government kill nearly 3000 Americans directly on 11 September 2001, it also made all Americans complicit in the genocides that would follow based in the self-serving and utterly false notion that the elite had an interest in protecting the American people.

So why did the US government attack its own people? It’s simple and it’s profound at the same time. Practically, it needed to send a message to all oil producers that no one could tamper with either the supply of oil to the United States, or the currency with which oil sales globally would be transacted. And so Iraq was always the target, but so too all the Arab world. But the next level down is where the real answers lie. What is energy policy ultimately about?

It is about that obscure matrix of control — political, economic, ideological, technological, material — that keeps nations on the wheel, and that constitutes a complex mechanism of protection in an era of mass society for a narrow class that actually owns the world, including all its people, having made from private property a system of global slavery. Yes. The capitalist class in America, probably in full knowledge of the capitalist class globally, bit off a chunk of its own people, to keep the system going as a whole, and to protect their own position. Because if and when the oil runs out, if there are no other distractions, they’re finished.

This is all context that fills in but the barest outlines of our shared lives in the last 10 years of world history. In a few paragraphs here, I can barely reveal the real substance or the real depth. It’s like me saying, “Think of an elephant.” You think of an elephant, and you see it. But if I led you into a room with an actual elephant, it’s something different. The actual reality is that there is an elephant, and we’ve been living in the shadow of it for 10 years.

If we imagine, however, alternatively that this elephant is stood at the centre of a labyrinth made of walls, sheilding us from the truth of its existence, it is also true that these walls have started to fall down. Last night, Egyptians literally tore apart one such wall with hammers and their bare hands. This is the wall in the Arab Republic of Egypt that Mubarak had constructed around the strategic standing of Egypt vis-a-vis Israel and its occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands. Elsewhere, across the Arab world, the uprisings of the people against US-sponsored dictators are disassembling scores of other walls, far greater than that outside the Israeli Embassy in Giza. The persistence of the Syrian people, and the Yemeni people, is now testiment to an unstoppable wave. No false regime will withstand the force of the Arab Spring.

And globally, Tahrir will be everywhere. The Arab uprising is a calling to the entire global South. It cannot not be heeded. The calling for something better than global slavery is a matter of situation for millions, if not billions, of people. Meanwhile, it is time for the left to actually give thought to the American people. From these people, it is true, have come armies. And from these people, it is true, have come economic predators. And from these people, it is true, have come advisers in cleaner methods of torture. And from these people, it is true, have come ideologies that have destroyed indigenous cultures. But it is a fact, too, that barely any people on earth were more betrayed than the American people. And most Americans are not even yet aware of the level of this betrayal. Who that has experienced it really envies Americans the catastrophic commercialisation of their common life?

We know now that the Reichstaag was burned by the Nazis. We know now many things in history that were not known to the people who lived through the events. One day, and it may be soon, the truth about 11 September 2001 will start to appear. Cracks have already opened. We are coming into a time of truth. The trickle becomes a stream, and the stream a river. The flood is around the next corner, and it will come from all of us. On that day, I hope, a real global solidarity can be born. Because the final truth is that, so far, we are all victims of the global capitalist class machine. But, we are billions, and the real conspiracies are tied to the few. Ten years on, they want to keep pretending that the world is full of threats. It isn’t. It is full of injustice that we can remedy. The world didn’t really change on 11 September 2001, but it can change now. There is a new air. It is all of ours to breathe. Theirs is unhealthy. Spit it out.

We said on 18 January in our article “The Arab Spring of Democracy” that all Arab states share the same characteristics, and from this deduction that the same conditions will produce the same results. On 25 January, following the Tunisian revolution, the Egyptian uprising began. Since then, popular uprisings are spreading like wildfire in the Arab world. It is the Arab Spring of democracy. It is a new era full of hope and aspirations that will change the balance of forces in the Middle East, and maybe the world. No Arab country will be spared.

The Gaddafi regime does not differ in essence — while it is worse in practice and barbarism — from any other dictatorial Arab regime, such as those of Ben Ali or Mubarak, which consist in a family that rules through a police state, and an increasing integration of the local economy into global financial and market capitalism and associated policies. It is singular in its use of the “Green Book” to prevent, by law, any independent thinking and consequently any civil society groups, equating them to treason punishable by death. Gaddafi’s last attempt to suppress dissent was his attempt to block the possibility of an independently elected bar of lawyers, alongside his attempt to put the local police under the control of the military regiments of his sons.

The general Libyan youth uprising, echoing Tunisia and Egypt, and the rapid defection of his ministers and ambassadors, express the hollowness of Gaddafi’s regime. Because he has no popular support anymore, he decided to use ruthless force against the youth uprising, thinking that he risks nothing from the West after having accorded licenses for extracting oil to their companies, his agreements on fighting terrorism, the arms contracts, the expertise in military and police methods given to him by the US, Britain and other countries, and the lobbies he bought to strengthen his rule and ameliorate his image in the West and Africa.

Aborting the Arab Spring

If there had not been an uprising, the West wouldn’t be against Gaddafi. This was well expressed in the hesitation and the difference in position between the US and France and other countries towards whether to support the Libyan revolution. Since his reconciliation with the US began by abandoning the nuclear option, Gaddafi struck a calm cooperation with Ben Ali and Mubarak, imitating them in their cooperation with the West, and in their war against terrorism aligned with the West. In oil, armaments, services and strategic Arab questions, Gaddafi satisfied all Western countries and Israel, using this relation to silence criticism of his dictatorship and to reinforce his grip on power.

We consider the West’s military intervention as an attempt to abort, deform and control the general uprisings in the Arab world. Following Mubarak’s ouster, the Arab regimes, the West and the Arab intellectuals know well that the time of suppressing the Arab youth by force is gone, and that force will not stop the fire from spreading. While the Arab democratic forces supported the Libyan revolution against Gaddafi and demanded to aid it through the Arab League, the West and the Arab Gulf regimes preferred — for different reasons and to different degrees — that change comes from Gaddafi’s inner circle via Western military intervention, to discredit both Gaddafi and the revolution.

It is the Arabs and the Arab League that wanted to aid the Libyan revolution. The West aborted the Arab League’s attempt by taking the responsibility of the intervention and giving it to NATO. The Libyan revolution refused Western intervention firmly in the beginning, and continues to refuse any presence of foreign troops, hoping that the aid comes from Arabs and progressives around the world. We should recognise now that the US media’s manipulations, the Gaddafi supporters bought by money to ameliorate his image, the failure of the Arab League to act independently, the failure and the hesitations of progressives to defend the democratic Libyan youth, enabled Gaddafi to use force and advance until Benghazi. The content of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 expresses well this situation.

It is true that an intervention based on UNSC Resolution 1973 is different from the intervention in Iraq, but it doesn’t change that it is a Western military intervention that aims not to help the revolution, but rather to abort it and guarantee Western interests. It became a war against Libya to impose Western interests that the revolution cannot oppose without risking elimination. But we should realise that the interests of the West are different and conflicted too. This finds reflection in the ambiguity of UNSC Resolution 1973, which does not prevent Gaddafi from attacking cities or permit direct action to get rid of him, nor does it really protect the civilian population, nor aid the youth revolution. It is as if it gives permission to destroy Libyan armaments and infrastructure and wait that they be bought again or restored by Gaddafi or whoever will replace him.

The hypocrisy of humanitarian intervention

The NATO military intervention in Libya is to guarantee its economic and strategic interests, but above all to prevent profound cooperation between Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Such cooperation between three democratic adjacent Arab countries would constitute an efficient means to struggle against imperialist strategy in the Arab world. The Gulf Arab regimes, meanwhile, hate Gaddafi as he spent his 42 years in power conspiring against and attacking them.

The Western leftist discussions of Resolution 1973 express the same thing as their governments. They all forget that the circumstances of the resolution consist in a democratic uprising that is being suppressed by force. The majority appealed to their governments to interfere, instead of providing political help to the youth through recognition of — and aid to — the Transitional National Council (TNC), France being the exception that recognised the TNC rapidly for its own reasons. Some omitted any possibility of aiding the revolution because they consider Gaddafi’s regime a socialist regime that therefore has the right to suppress the revolution even if it is composed of all the people. Some refuse US and NATO intervention and reduce the Arab democratic uprising to a CIA and MI6 conspiracy. Some condemned the Western intervention without supporting the democratic uprising, which equals allowing Gaddafi to suppress the uprising by force.

All humanitarian intervention discussions, whether for or against, are based on hypocrisy: they avoid calling a cat a cat: i.e., there is a democratic popular Arab uprising that should be supported. Instead of recognising this, they discuss military intervention as if it is an ideological quarrel that is taking place in the West. To avoid taking a position, some in the left propagated Gaddafi and US propaganda to discredit the uprising. In discrediting the uprising, they reinforced Western attempts to control it by imposing its men and conditions. Happily, there is a minority in Europe as well as in the US that stand against the intervention but with the uprising, putting themselves in agreement with the overwhelming majority of Arab progressive intellectuals and currents, and saving the honour of the left.

Four conflicts in one

Western manoeuvres and military intervention did harm to Libya, to the Libyan people and to its revolution. But it cannot stop the revolution from achieving an independent democratic Libya in cooperation with its neighbours. The task may be harder now, but it continues to be achievable.

The Western strategy of divide and conquer began to crumble. Failing to see this is the same ignorance and ethnocentrism of the West when it touches Arab questions, the most well known of which is the Palestinian question in 1948 and after. Some in the West continue to think that Arabs cannot have a democratic revolution without Western leadership. Foreign powersdo not control the Arab uprisings that have marked the opening weeks of 2011: indeed, their agendas are the first victimsof these uprisings.

The war waged by Gaddafi against the Libyan people, denying them human rights and democracy, has given birth to four conflicts. The first is a war waged by Gaddafi against the people. The second is the one that began with the Western military intervention against Libya. This conflict cannot hide the third, which is competition concerning the Libyan future among the aggressors themselves. This is the reason the aid to the revolt became an aggression on Libya by the allies, opening the way to the fourth conflict. Now the Libyan revolution should struggle not only against Gaddafi but also against the forces trying to occupy Libya.

Despite the complication of the situation, progressives and peace loving people cannot but support the Libyan revolution, which would bring democracy and independence to Libya and back and reinforce the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. The Arab youth has decided to take its future, and the future of its respective countries, into its hands by building a civil democratic state to have liberty, justice and dignity. It may take years, but it is now certain and inevitable. It is the failure of the globalised model of a family governing through a police state and comprador elites. Libya is but one variation of this model.

The Tunisian uprising is nothing but the natural result of the failure of the globalisation model and the impasse affecting the entire world. Indeed, as soon as an economy opens up to foreign capital and one gives the local economy and services over to market forces, the state’s role is automatically undermined and remains only to protect the model itself. By consequence, whether in Tunisia or elsewhere in the developing world, it resulted in a contradiction between the people’s interests and the class created to protect foreign capital.

In the Arab countries, the model of globalisation consisted of abandoning the Arab-Muslim character of the state, responsible for providing wellbeing to its society. It entailed the cancellation of the notion of the national state that emerged following World War II and the independence movement, and whose legitimacy is based on the notion of progress and of the wellbeing of its citizens. It also entailed the cancellation of the socialist aspirations of the people based on their desire for a welfare state and the provision of public services.

The model of globalisation implemented in the Third World, at times by force, like in Iraq, or by economic pressure, like in Egypt or Indonesia, or by its adoption in rich countries, like the oil producing states, led everywhere to the emergence of a comprador class, submitting to or wilfully participating in the integration of national economies into the global economy, leading to a state whose sole role is policing and protecting comprador regimes and the status quo for the sole interests of foreign and local capitalism. In parallel, everywhere, including in developed economies, this model serves to enrich the rich, impoverish the middle class and marginalise and alienate the poor.

In Tunisia itself, the illusion that this model seemed to be working very well was based on the authoritarian character of the regimes ruling the country since its independence. However, the result, like elsewhere, was an impoverished and marginalised people, both economically and politically, and a governing police state class getting richer, careless of the wellbeing of the local population and severely repressing any dissent in the name of market forces. But in our modern era, society is not an organisation that one can indefinitely repress nor an ideology that one can ban, but rather a living creature. No one can control it but itself.

If in the past the educated classes had the choice to migrate to other countries and participate in their development, the global economic crisis and the stagnation of Western economies and their allies have limited this possibility. The result of this situation is an army of educated and technically skilled unemployed youth in developing countries. Normally, they are the builders of the national economy, the guardians of the wellbeing of their communities, and aspire to their own fulfilment. The current political and economic situation in all Arab countries pushes this youth, which thinks profoundly that it has the right to live like anyone in a similar situation in the world, to revolt and at times despair.

After 1973, building on their victory, Arab governments thought they could open up to the West and that this process would bring peace and prosperity. Sadat’s economic liberalisation and the welcoming of US and Western corporations for investment signalled the end of the welfare state in the Arab world. Since then, the dream of self-development was abandoned and replaced by opening all Arab countries’ markets to foreign interests, although to varying degrees. This policy of liberalisation became a condition for receiving American blessings, first with Reaganism and Thatcherism, followed by world trade negotiations, and World Bank structural adjustment policies.

As Iraq refused, to some extent, to be integrated into this global neoliberal economy, it was obliged by conquest and force, and through the Bremer Laws, to privatise its oil industry and hand Iraq’s future over to foreign corporations. In order to open Iraq’s economy and free it of any obstacle to outside forces, whether economic, political, cultural or military, the occupation resorted to the physical destruction of Iraq’s capacity of self-development, both of its infrastructure and human resources. As proven by the Iraqi experience, foreign capital does not aim at real development of the economy but rather to destroy all existing capacities for self-determined development processes. Under the phase of imperialism’s finance capitalism led by the United States, the Third World is the last to profit from world progress and the first to pay for capitalist crises. Even Dubai’s financial institutions, which were portrayed as an example of what these policies could achieve, faced with the financial crisis were threatened with bankruptcy if other Emiratis didn’t come to their rescue.

All the illusions of progress that animated older generations since 1973 — like socialism, Arab unity and renaissance, Pax Americana in Palestine and integration of Western models, or Islam as the solution — have now proven unfruitful and unachievable, in spite of the determined struggle of Arab political currents for these ideals. The socialist model collapsed and was put on the shelf; Arab unity is no more on the agenda of governments; Islam as the solution brought only division and sectarianism, as in Iraq; the Pax Americana in Palestine did not stop Israel, while the integration and opening of local markets to the capitalist economy didn’t bring investment or solutions for the unemployed and the poor. It didn’t make the people, as they have the legitimate right to, participate freely in the public affairs of their country, nor benefit from the richness of their land and national economy.

Although the Arab youth might not be opposed to the grand dreams of older generations, still defended by various local political currents, and although these currents continue to have their influence, the Arab youth wants immediate change. The new generation is disillusioned. In Tunisia, it took its destiny in its hands and wants change now, and real change. As an Arab country, and living in a state in permanent exchange with its Mediterranean environment, the people of Tunisia realised that the model of globalisation is simple usurpation. No promise of wellbeing and development, liberty or democracy was fulfilled, and the system can be resumed to a generalised oppression, corruption and theft: a comprador governing class, a police state, and submission of the country to imperialist policies and interests.

The collapse of Ben Ali and his government is not only the collapse of an authoritarian regime, but rather of the globalisation model of finance capitalism and imperialism for Third World countries. The situation in other Arab countries, including oil-producing states, does not differ in last analysis. Maybe the situation is influenced by local economic, geographic and demographic composition of this or that country, but all know that integration into neoliberal globalisation did not and will not result in progress and development, but rather the enriching of some and the impoverishment of the majority, and the abandoning of the national interest to the interest of global capitalism.

We are certain that all Arab regimes, which share the same situation although with different ingredients, are now shaking because the same situation will produce the same results. We are also certain that all Arab regimes, all imperialists, all revolutionaries are now studying the causes of the success of the Tunisian experience. They all ask themselves, why did the Tunisians succeed in evicting their government while other similar uprisings failed? It is our point of view that everywhere in the Arab world there is the same situation and the same desire to change and to get rid of this model; the only difference is that the Tunisian revolt was spontaneous and non-ideological. It was not a conflict between one political organisation and another, but rather inspired by the consciousness and spontaneity of its youth realising that the conflict is between a dominant class against the people and the people against this dominant class. It is a revolt for dignity, freedom, democracy and wellbeing against a failed model of development. By experience other countries will arrive to the same situation.

Indeed, the success of the Tunisian phenomenon lies in its unity. Similar revolts, like the uprising for electricity in Iraq in the summer of 2010, did not succeed because of ideological divisions at the political level, mostly encouraged by foreign powers to divert Arabs from their real common interests. Everywhere, the Arab youth aspires to a life in dignity, freedom, democracy and development. The ideological conflicts, like in Iraq, mask the real interests of the people. These ideological and confessional conflicts are used by the governing classes to justify their policies and to hide their real practices. But sooner or later, the reality of the conflicts between the impoverished masses and the enriched governing classes will prevail.

While all Arab governments are shaking, and think tanks are giving advice to their governments on how to suffocate similar movements in their own societies, the Arab people has already declared that the Tunisian revolt represents hope, and saluted it as an example for them. Considering the shared model and influence European countries exercise on one another, it is no wonder that there were successive uprisings throughout Europe in 1848, or in 1968. Likewise, what can one expect in the Arab world when all think they belong to the same nation and live in the same conditions? How can Tunisia not influence other Arab countries, while all these countries belong to one Arab nation, which was originally divided by colonial forces into separated states?

We know that the West tells the Arabs that they are separated and independent countries when this suits its policies best, but it treats the Arabs as a bloc when this accommodates its own interests. Maybe the adverse forces of the Tunisian people, so as to save their interests, will try to contain the movement by changing faces, but the situation will continue to be explosive until there is a reconciliation between the interest of the people and the state in which they live. This is called democracy and independence, where the people and the state are masters of their present and future.

Is this a new era of renewal for the Arab world? Will this uprising succeed in bringing real change? Will, at last, Arabs exercise real democracy and sovereignty? Will other regimes, which share the same reality, foresee their fate and opt to change their structure peacefully, or will they unite to strangle the Tunisian phenomenon and deviate it from its goals? The future will tell us, but changing persons will not change the roots of the revolt. The Arab renewal may have begun in Tunisia.

We, the undersigned, defending the right of Iraq to independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, rejecting the attempts of Iraqi puppets promoted by the US occupation to trade the national rights of Iraqis and to institutionalise via census the criminal demographic engineering they have pursued by force, declare that:

From the first day of the US-UK occupation of Iraq, the occupation began to undertake a series of measures, directly or through its local allies, to destroy Iraq as a state and a nation and to partition it along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Today, the puppet government of the occupation and its Kurdish partners are trying to hold a population census in Kirkuk province whose aim is to give a permanent legal character to the criminal social engineering, ethnic cleansing and demographic changes that have been implemented under occupation.¹ This could unleash a full blown civil war across Iraq, and potentially lead to its partition and a consequent regional war.

In addition to the death of more than one million Iraqis, the ethnic cleansing and other means pursued by the United States, United Kingdom and their allies in order to implement the process of partitioning Iraq, in its cities and regions, have caused the forced migration of 2.5 million Iraqis out of Iraq and the forced displacement of 2.5 million others from their homes inside Iraq.

The ethnic cleansing suffered by the population in the provinces of Mosul, Diyala, Salahuddin and the Baghdad area, and most notably in Kirkuk and the so-called “disputed areas” — where the population is forced by various means, including systematic assassinations, bombing civilians, collective punishment, transfer, displacement, deportation and other crimes against humanity, to migrate only to be replaced by people from other provinces or even from outside Iraq — is a clear crime of destruction and part of the intended partition of Iraq.

The United States, the United Kingdom and their allies waged an illegal war of aggression against Iraq and occupied its territory. This war in itself is a crime punishable under international law. International law, in particular The Hague Regulations of 1907, the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols, and the Genocide Convention, explicitly prohibits occupying powers from instituting changes aimed at permanently altering the foundational structures of occupied territories, including the judiciary, economy, political institutions and social fabric.²

International law considers the systematic transfer, deportation or displacement of population a crime against humanity.³ Residents of affected areas, the Iraqi national forces, the displaced, and the majority of the people of Iraq declare this census null and void. It has no binding legal consequences and cannot and should not be used to support or justify the intended partition of Iraq.

We demand that no census be conducted before the free return of all Iraqi refugees. We demand that the question of ethnicity not be used to instigate the partition of Iraq and that it be removed from any census, now and in the future. We declare as fraudulent the justification under occupation of a census on the basis of long term planning in the context of a temporary and unstable demographic situation.

We demand that the United Nations and the Arab League and all governments, personalities, organisations and institutions support the demands of the people of Iraq by not recognising the results of this census, and by not assisting in conducting it. This census is designed to reward criminals for their crimes at the expense of their victims.

The US occupation of Iraq has not only been an economic catastrophe and a political and moral disaster but also a resounding military failure. Despite its overwhelming firepower, the inequality of forces, and constant attempts to criminalise and hide the nature of the resistance the US army is facing, after six years the United States could not control Iraq, neither its people nor its territory nor its future. What are the reasons for this military defeat?

First of all, it must be understood that the Iraqi state and nation has been subject to sustained assault by imperial powers — mainly the US — for the past 18 years. The US and its allies have attempted to destroy Iraq as a state and a nation both physically, through military campaigns, and culturally, via the attempted cancellation of the concept of Iraqi citizenship and the destruction of Iraq’s unifying Arab Muslim identity. The US intended to divide Iraq into three or more weak and conflicting entities so as to ensure that Iraq could never re-emerge as a strong and unified economic, political and military power and would be rendered permanently subordinate to the United States. Iraq is a crossroads. Its land provides the necessary route for Iran to access and influence Syria, Jordan and the Mediterranean, and for Syria and Jordan as they look towards Iran and the Arabian Gulf basin. It is also the natural path from Turkey to the Gulf, and vice versa. The US goal was to control Iraq’s geopolitical and strategic median position, seize Iraq’s rich natural resources, while destroying the last remnant of official pan-Arabism so as to protect its proxy Israel whose historic role is to keep the Arab world off-balance and underdeveloped.

Before the 2003 invasion and subsequent destruction of Iraq, the majority of Iraqis sustained lives working in public institutions. Iraq was a welfare state based on the cultural understanding common to all in the Orient that the land and its riches is the property of the nation. Supported by the resources of the land, a large part of the population was employed in the education and health sectors, nationalised industries, and the national army. Since the agricultural reform of 1959, followed by the nationalisations of 1964, the middle class grew in number and expertise and guided state and society. Seventy per cent of the Iraqi population was urbanised.

The nationalisation of oil in 1971 led to the further enlargement of this middle class and elevated the living standards of the poorer sectors of the population. The US imperial plan, dating to 1990 but intensified with the military invasion, aimed at destroying this middle class, which is the inheritor of Iraqi culture, science, unity and dignity, striving for freedom, progress and development, thereupon subjugating the Iraqi people to a cabal and feudal comprador class of new and old thieves, rapists, marginal politicians, backward religious extremists, criminal gangs, and warlords that appeared or resurfaced in the situation created by the US occupation and whose interests are so conflicting that they are incapable of building a state.

It is evident that the US and its allies, even before the invasion, were running after an illusion. Why would the Iraqi people accept and welcome a plan that would deprive them of their national patrimony to the benefit of a few? The impoverished, the educated middle class, the working class that lost the benefit of nationwide services, women and the youth that suffers from unemployment and the absence of civil liberties, all reject US policy in Iraq. This is the source and base of what now and into the future will be a never-ending social struggle against the US occupation, foretelling its certain defeat and the defeat of its policies. Without the middle class, the US cannot build a functioning state. Without a functioning state there is nothing but robbery, abuse and corruption. Without building a functioning state the resources of society cannot be directed to develop its productive capacity and improve the wellbeing and the social and political force of the working classes. In attempting to destroy the Iraqi middle class, the basis of a developed, independent and unified Iraq, the US occupation put itself on a collision course with the entire Iraqi nation, not only by sentiment, but also by interest.

The illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be separated from the prior 13 years of US policies towards Iraq. Indeed it is because — despite 13 years of indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing of both civilian and military facilities, collective economic punishment through genocidal sanctions, the disarming of Iraq’s defence capacities and its international isolation and demonization — the Iraqi people could not be subjugated that the US finally resorted to direct military occupation. Upon invasion, the US dismantled the Iraqi state and its institutions and disbanded Iraq’s armed forces. It attempted to destroy all that unites Iraqis, promoting the destruction of Iraqi society that resulted in an unspeakable crime against humanity of the brutal murder of more than 1.5 million Iraqi citizens, the displacement of six million more, with millions more maimed, widowed and orphaned.

Faced by the immense inequality of forces, and the impossibility to wage a frontal conventional war, Iraq’s 400,000 strong and well-experienced national army consciously dispersed, rejoining the population in whose defence it was schooled, waging a guerrilla war and guerre d’usure to defend Iraq’s sovereignty and the interests of the Iraqi people. While the dismantlement of the state and its apparatus and the intended breaking down of law and order effectively rendered the Iraqi population immensely vulnerable, left unprotected, Iraq left with no legitimate force to defend its territory, the US in fact destroyed all intermediaries between it and the Iraqi state and nation. It was therefore faced directly with the resistant population. Soon resistance became a social movement with different expressions in which all participate according to numberless respective capacities and situations, from civil to political to armed struggle, each and all standing in solidarity as Iraqis against the foreign occupier.

The backbone of the Iraqi resistance, naturally, is the highly experienced sovereign Iraqi army that did not capitulate, sign an armistice or an agreement with the invaders. That army is the military branch of the sovereign state of Iraq, illegally invaded in 2003. It has defended and continues to defend the Iraqi people, Iraq’s territorial unity and integrity as an Arab state, since 1921, as well the unity of the Arab nation.

As an institution an army is neither affiliated to a party nor to a government. It defends the people. In resisting foreign occupation it defends their interests by definition. All other state institutions having been dismantled, in resisting foreign domination it ensures the continuity of the Iraqi state. As the sovereignty of that state emanates from the people, and given that this people’s will is expressed in its refusal to capitulate to the occupation, the population itself, supporting the resistance in all its expressions, is the continuity of the Iraqi state and nation.

Given the character of the occupation and the overwhelming firepower and resources of the US army, the armed resistance understandably resorts to a war of attrition. Its goal of immobilising the occupation via hit and run operations cannot succeed without the participation of the entire population. Faced with a determined partisan army backed by its population, the occupying forces are helpless. Demoralised, their only solution is to repress the population as a whole and attempt to break its unity. Yet in this the US occupation in Iraq faces the force and intelligence of a 5000-year-old geopolitical and geo-social reality. Naively, the US thought that it could use the richness of Iraqi society, its historic cosmopolitanism and multi-confessional basis, to divide it along sectarian lines in order to control the whole. What US war planners could not see is that Iraq has been for thousands of years composed of numerous ethnicities and religious confessions living in solidarity with each other regardless of their differences. The values of a common life in a geographical area called Iraq or Mesopotamia unifies Iraqis. Those who know Iraq, its unifying Arab Muslim identity and its history, are aware that those who wish to divide Iraq and subjugate it will face the same cohesiveness of geopolitical, economic and social interests that ensured that no two states ever cohabited the basin now called Iraq. All Iraqis, whatever their ethnicity, religion, sect or social appurtenance, are inheritors of all successive Iraqi civilisations and their history.

Any attempt to forcibly change the will and interests of this historic entity, Iraqi society, necessarily militates towards a conscious strategy of genocide as it necessitates the liquidation of the population and its history. Yet any society with such deep lines of tradition and solidarity is only enhanced when faced with the military arm of a foreign invading power. To achieve its core goals, given the impossibility of confusing the interests of an occupied people with those of the occupation, the occupation needs to kill to the last man, woman and child. This cannot be achieved, and the more the attempt is made, the more it becomes impossible; the more legitimacy is given to resistance in the face of inhuman, wanton attacks.

For those in resistance it is not a case of fighting for revenge, but of opposing colonialism, imperialism and its policies, spurred by the reality of the genocidal methods these policies make obligatory on the occupying power. But no army of occupation, no matter how large or how brutal it is, can dispossess the Iraqi people of its patriotism and its identity. No occupation can usurp the historic formation that is Iraq. Hence no occupation force can replace the Iraqi state. Indeed, no foreign power was ever able to control Iraq. Iraq is a small country with great dignity, a sophisticated ancient civilisational legacy, and a very experienced national patriotic movement.

Neo-colonial strategy presents the aggressed population with one choice: resistance or collective death or disintegration. So long as it resists, it faces massive deliberate and indiscriminate attacks or the possibility of extinction in an overwhelming genocidal campaign, while if it submits it faces conditions of life that amount to genocide of another kind. Insofar as there is no choice except resistance and survival, popular resistance wages its struggle in the hope of debilitating the aggressor sufficiently enough as to slow him down and spark unrest within his domestic population, while not overly provoking him into launching an all out campaign of extermination. This cat and mouse guerrilla war of attrition will last as long as the occupation lasts and a political solution is absent (i.e., the withdrawal of the colonial state) and so long as the political will of the resisting population remains firm. After six years of US genocide in Iraq, the Iraqi people stand their ground and are proven unbreakable.

While the new US administration admitted that the invasion was wrong, it seems it is not changing its policies towards the results of that illegal state act. All that is derived from the illegal invasion is illegal and illegitimate and cannot be made legal or gain legitimacy. Only the national popular resistance is legal and legitimate in Iraq. The Iraqi resistance in all its expressions is the legal representative of the Iraqi people in being the continuity of the state. So long as US policies towards Iraq and its people refuse to recognise this resistance, there can be no peace. Only the national popular resistance in Iraq — armed, political and civil — is empowered, both as an objective fact and under international law, to determine a path towards peace and stability in Iraq. No other player, not US-installed stooge politicians in a 10-kilometre square “Green Zone”, can speak on behalf of the Iraqi people or embodies the Republic of Iraq.

So long as the US refuses to recognise this objective reality, it will be faced with the same failures and the Iraqi people will embrace their only strategic option and chance of survival: resistance; a resistance different and inventive in forms and methods of struggle but united in line and aims. The US could not and cannot break this people’s will to live free and sovereign in its land and future, and over its resources, as all other peoples in the world. The resistance’s legality and legitimacy is enshrined in numerous instruments of international law, including foundational and peremptory documents such as the UN Charter. If the US indeed wants peace and stability in Iraq it should recognise the national popular resistance as the only representative of the Iraqi people, its armed wing as a combatant army with all the legal protections that that entails, and as the continuity of the Iraqi state. Such recognition would be proof that the US has finally departed from its unilateral and illegal policies and aims to re-establish respect for international law and peaceful coexistence among nations. Its withdrawal from Iraq should be immediate and unconditional. There is no other peaceful way forward, for power is nothing without justice, and the imposition of power can never be just.