The United States would not withdraw because the Iraqi government and its members signed an agreement with them on withdrawal, this has been very well analyzed in articles by Salah Al Mukhtar and Awni Qalamji.
Obama wants to withdraw because the US can no longer bear the burden of the occupation’s costs for the United States. Obama may only be interested in the financial burden, which in fact is the direct cause of the th America’s economic depression and the global financial crisis. If so, he will try to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, so as to reduce costs, while maintaining the same policies as Bush, thinking that the members of the Maliki government will fight the Iraqis in place of America.
But this form of withdrawal, even if for financial reasons, has caused many members of the government to panic. The first of which are the two Kurdish leaders. They want American protection for the fragile acquisitions they’ve obtained and that are enshrined in the divisive and chauvinist Constitution. These would disappear as soon as the people of Iraq hear the news of a potential withdrawal. The Kurdish leaders want to convince the United States that they are more American than the U.S. and Israel themselves, and that the US must remain rewarded by oil concessions at the expense of Iraq and the Kurds.
The second is the Shi’ite and Sunni Islamist parties who know that their failure is a historical failure from which they will not recover. This is the reason why they want to remind America and Iran that the main enemy and threat remains the Baath Party and the Iraqi patriots, hoping to re-air the climate of the first year of occupation when the people felt that these parties through cooperating with Iran and America would end the suffering of the embargo period.
The third group, the Bush clan and the Zionist forces in America — for whom a victory of the people of Iraq and its resistance represents a historic end not only in Iraq and the region but in America itself — are trying to achieve what they call a “responsible withdrawal”, preventing their condemnation for the crimes they committed in Iraq over the past six years. This is why they insist on signing this Convention.
However history and political work are a process. Obama’s policy is but one of the active parts of this process. If Obama follows the same policies as Bush then its consequences will face the same defeat as Bush’s policy. On the one hand, not only did the United States lose money but also a military victory in Iraq is impossible. Occupation amounts to sacrificing US children for imperialist forces who do not represent the interests of the American people. And in the same way, the Bush administration engaged in an imperialist project which represents a moral suicide and a disgrace for the United States, and from which they can only recover by repairing their mistakes through effective actions and not just media propaganda.
The Iraqi resistance reports show that Iraqis want a U.S. withdrawal without conditions or manipulation and a return of justice, otherwise the resistance will continue and no doubt it will win.
The attempts to create new strife or relying on bargaining with one side or the other will not succeed because the screams of the orphans and the widows, the disabled and the hungry and the displaced persons will keep on resonating in the minds of each Iraqi patriot and will not stop unless all the Iraqi nation obtains its freedom and sovereignty over its land and wealth.
We say this not out of ideology or partisan perceptions but out of political realism that dazzles the eyes. We all want the end of the bloodshed and destruction, the death and oppression, and the torture. And we seek for an Iraq in which “each one is walking proud,” as Baghdadis say. But the crimes of the occupation have brought everyone to have the same say. Even the children say: “Either a life that pleases a friend or a death that angers the enemy”. ‘Victory is a patience of an hour or a year. That is why I advise everyone to keep off from the bargaining talk, in the name of realism or pragmatism. Because the real realism is to see the occupation’s defeat and the real pragmatism is the search of how to participate in the resistance’s victory.
The Kurdish leaders, the Islamic parties or the Zionist Bush clan know that Iraqi patriotism has awakened. They know that neither the U.S. or the Iranian nor the Kurdish chauvinist parties or religious fascism, individually or collectively, can defeat it.
Our situation now is as follows: the American imperialist project has been defeated thanks to the pride of the people of Iraq but the Iraqi resistance has not won yet and will not win definitively if it doesn’t renounce its differences and conflicts, and provide a national democratic project uniting all living forces of our beloved country Iraq.
In this regard I call upon all to forget about the past and to head towards the future because the national honor today is to participate in the liberation of Iraq. Because what drives one sad and angry is that all domestic, regional and international conditions are qualifying our people for victory, that is if the regimes, parties and currents weren’t conspiring and fighting one against the other leading to a rupture that is paralyzing all.
We should not differ because of our party affiliations because each who struggles against occupation raises his party’s esteem. We should not differ on forms of struggle because all these forms complement each other whether they are strike, demonstration, disobedience, uprising or armed struggle. The truth actually is that one form cannot be implemented without the presence of the others. We should not differ because of criticism or the canonization of the past. The past is dead so let us leave it for historians to study so as to strip it from the numerous lies and propaganda that Zionist and imperialist forces have spread.
In this regard, I appreciate all the anti-occupation Baathists, Islamists, Nasserites and leftists who proved that the nation and the people’s interests are more important than parties and ideologies and factional interests.
