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01/06/2006:
"IMF Occupies Iraq, Riots Follow"
Bad enough that the U.S. military is occupying Iraq.Now the IMF is occupying the country.
In December, the International Monetary Fund, in exchange for giving a loan of $685 million to the Iraqi government, insisted that the Iraqis lift subsidies on the price of oil and open the economy to more private investment.
As the IMF said in a press release of December 23, the Iraqi government must be committed to “controlling the wage and pensions bill, reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products.”
The impact of the IMF extortion was swift and brutal.
“Since the Dec. 15 parliamentary election, fuel prices have increased five-fold, mostly because the outgoing government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari has cut subsidies as part of a debt-forgiveness deal it signed with the International Monetary Fund,” the Los Angeles Times reported on December 28.
“The move has shocked Iraqis long accustomed to hefty subsidies of gasoline, kerosene, cooking gas, and other fuels.”
Iraqis are getting a nasty taste of the IMF’s medicine. “Over the summer, gas was selling for about five cents a gallon,” the LA Times noted. “Now it’s about 65 cents, and at the end of the price increases, gasoline will cost about the same in Iraq as it does in other countries in the Persian Gulf, about $1 per gallon. The prices of kerosene, diesel, and cooking gas have seen similar or steeper increases.” The price of public transportation has also gone up significantly.
Not surprisingly, these enormous price hikes have led to riots around the country, with police firing on 3,000 protesters in Nassiryeh, according to an account on Daily Kos. www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/20/11119/029,
Iraq’s oil minister quit to protest the government’s capitulation to the IMF. According to Daily Kos, Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum asked, “Is this how we repay the Iraq citizens who risked their lives to participate in the elections, by raising fuel prices in this way?”
progressive.org
Anger as Britain admits it was wrong to blame Iran for deaths in Iraq
MPs and soldiers' families have demanded an explanation from the Government after a U-turn over claims that Iran was complicit in the killing of British soldiers in southern Iraq.
Britain has dropped the charge of Iranian involvement after senior officials had repeatedly accused the Tehran regime of supplying sophisticated explosive devices to insurgents. Government officials now acknowledge that there is no evidence, or even reliable intelligence, connecting the Iranian government to the infra-red triggered bombs which have killed 10 British soldiers in the past eight months.
whoops
The Iranian Left & the Iraq War
A glance at websites and newspapers of many Iranian "left" groups residing outside the country, gives one little impression that Iran's neighboring country, Iraq, is in a state of war and occupation by the US Empire. There seems to be little concern among Iran's traditional left about the United States' intentions to take over and control Middle East's oil resources. The neoconservative "Project for the New American Century (PNAC)" signifies little (if anything) to many of Iran's left groups (1). Some, even, under the pretext of fighting fundamentalist Islamists(2), indirectly cheer the American incursion into Afghanistan and Iraq. In reality, however, Iraq is a mirror reflecting the many flaws and shortcomings of the left in the Middle East.
Some in the Iranian left might be evasive on the issue of their silence about the US imperialism's crimes in the region, but the Iraqi left's direct collaboration with the Bush administration is undeniable. As part of the Iraqi Governing Council, the Iraqi Communist Party (with the exception of the breakaway faction) and the Kurdish forces headed by Jalal Talebani and Masoud Barezani, collaborated with the US occupation forces, not just in the arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of Iraqi insurgents, but also in the process of building a neo-liberal state that will sell out the future of Iraqis (Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites alike) to the capitalist institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and such transnational corporations as Halliburton, Bechtel, etc. In their impotent (if not incompetent) quest against Saddam's regime, they have ended up collaborating with a colonial power to topple a secular government, only to replace it with a fundamentalist, theocratic regime in a landscape leaning towards civil war. Do they really think they will have any following among the people of Iraq when the present puppet government is gone?
The same unfortunate parallels can be drawn with respect to the Iranian left. Instead of questioning their tactics and strategy as a result of which the Mullahs, not the left were able to take power after the fall of the Shah's dictatorship, at a moment of ultimate debility, the Western-cultured leftists seem to be waiting for the overthrow of Iran's Islamic Republic regime in the hands of the US imperialism without the slightest concern over (or understanding of) what will pursue in the aftermath.
Before disputing any of the above assertions, these intellectuals would have to explain their disregard, silence, or cheerleading for a number of issues, some of which are listed below:
