As the US, British and Australian governments enter their third year of occupation in Iraq, opposition and resistance to the occupation by the Iraqi people continues to steadily grow. Last October, the London Sunday Telegraph revealed that a secret poll conducted for the British Ministry of Defence had found that 82% of Iraqis are "strongly opposed" to the presence of US and other foreign troops in their country and that up to 65% of Iraqis support attacks by patriotic Iraqi resistance fighters on the US-led occupation forces.
The opinion polls taken over the last year have shown that a majority of people in Australia, Britain and the US favour the rapid withdrawal of their countries' troops from Iraq.
When Britons were asked in a Channel 5 poll in September 2005 "Should British troops pull out of Iraq?", 57% said yes.
An unprecedented poll of US troops in Iraq, released by the Zogby polling organisation last month, found that 51% of them believe the US should end its military presence in Iraq within six months, with 29% of them saying all US military forces should be withdrawn "immediately". Recent polls in the US show that these views reflect public opinion as a whole.
In February 2005, PM John Howard announced that an additional 450 Australian troops would be sent to Iraq, bringing the total to 1350. The following month, a Roy Morgan poll found that 63% of Australians were opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq and 53% wanted to "bring our forces back to Australia". A Newspoll conducted last December found that 66% of Australians were opposed to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, up from 58% a year earlier.
With support for the immediate or rapid withdrawal of the invading coalition's troops from Iraq now a majority in Australia, Britain and the US, the warmongers have begun to peddle a new argument — that without the occupation Iraq will descend into a bloody civil war.
The March 7 Los Angeles Times reported that Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, had said there was "potential" for sectarian strife between Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis to become a "full-blown civil war". The newspaper added: "Khalilzad said the US has little choice but to maintain a strong presence in Iraq — or risk a regional conflict in which Arabs side with Sunnis and Iranians back Shiites, in what could be a more encompassing version of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, which left more than 1 million dead."
When public opinion in the US shifted decisively against its war in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, US officials attempted to counter the growing calls from civilians and active-duty soldiers for an immediate or rapid withdrawal with the claim that a "premature" pull-out of all Us military forces would lead to a bloodbath in Vietnam. In reality, it was the ending of the US military presence in Vietnam that put a stop to the actual bloodbath perpetrated by the US-led foreign occupation — which between 1961 and 1973 cost at least 4 million Vietnamese lives.
There is a bloodbath already underway in Iraq. According to John Pace, the outgoing UN human rights officer in Iraq, over the last year more than 7000 Iraqis have been executed by Iraqi interior ministry death squads recruited and trained by "former" US Army Special Forces personnel.
The quickest way to put an end to this bloodbath is to end the occupation of Iraq.
Anti-war activists in at least 25 countries and more than 100 cities worldwide will be protesting on the weekend of March 18-19, the third anniversary of the US-led invasion, calling for the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq. Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly urges all its readers to join those demonstrations.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 15, 2006.
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