The morality of occupation and the irony of history.

So apparently it's 49 years since the Iraqi revolution that founded some basic rights and whatnot for Iraq. Interestingly, it's been championed by al-Talabani and a statue of one of the leaders of the revolution has been erected. Ironic how the burgeoise manages to get things half right.

The reports keep pouring in about the things that are done in Iraq. Even a cursory glance at the conflict is heart-rending. The numbers of casualties and injured are beyond a million, the torture, the prisons, the state of emergency are all known, the Bush regime is not even trying to cover it up anymore. The game right now is to break Iraq apart and to stop a united liberation front.

There are some good news from Iraq, of course. The secular and socialist resistance groups that have been noted here and there, the oil union strike, the movement of the Iraqi labour in general against the occupation (perhaps together with their CP eventually?). I am not going to moralize about the resistance in general however. Whatever needs to be done must be done. Every dead occupant is a victory for the resistance. A resistance that allows the Bolivarian revolution the space to develop, a resistance that is the first bulwark against an insane assault against Iran, a resistance that is the focus point of modern liberation struggles.

There is only one thing that is truly disheartening about the rising death toll of the occupants. That their officers and their leaders aren't the ones littering the streets or getting blown to pieces inside their APC's. Instead, poor people from across the land of the brave are killed in back alleys of Kirkuk and the streets of Baghdad.

War has everything to do with morality. With what happens to people who torture, and are told that they should torture. About what happens to those who are forced to watch what little they have be destroyed, their friends and family murdered, the arbitrary arrests, the lies, the destruction of the lives they lead, the stories they are told about themselves and the world. Yet, what is more of a moral stance than to resist?

49 years ago was a revolution of some kind, then. Now the oppressors are back, some who speak with the same British accents as they did then. The Yankees, however, are proving more than capable heirs to the imperialist throne they ascended after Britain slipped back into a second-rate welfare state with it's ruling class faded dreams of imperialist glory. Morality, if it can ever be understood, cannot be anything but the ordinary Iraqi who is one day fed up - not because of Islam, or because of a Ba'ath party membership, or because he hates our freedom - but because he cannot abide his situation anymore and grabs his kalashnikov or a bomb belt, and starts to resist. Like the unknown thousands, millions, billions who have throughout the ages fought, bled, died and celebrated in their struggles against patricians, knights, lords, imperialists, vice roys, capitalists and others from the upper class they remain entitled to our respect.