Throughout the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has forced its neo-liberal policies on Iraq at the barrel of a gun: opening up Iraq's markets, oil resources, and labor to exploitation by multinational corporations. The suffering that the Iraqi working class has endured as a direct result of this illegal war is beyond words. On January 27, protesters backed by unions and labor groups will march on Washington, San Francisco, and other cities nationwide calling for U.S. troops to come home now!

With at least 650,000 Iraqi civilians—almost all from poor and working class families—now dead as a result of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, the state of Iraqi labor is in a critical condition. Paul Bremer, formerly the top US administrator in Iraq, rewrote the country's economic rules to make it a neoliberal fantasy before he left. Furthermore, the Iraqi puppet government has continued to enforce Saddam-era anti-union laws as a part of the neo-liberal agenda. These laws prohibit union organization, strikes, or disruption of any kind in a factory or other economically important enterprise. Anyone participating in a strike or union activity in Iraq is subject to arrest by the occupation authority and treatment as a prisoner of war.

Iraqi workers are not the only casualties in Bush's war. Throughout this war, the Bush administration has used the ideology of national security as a tool to justify its attacks on workers, immigrants, and minorities in the U.S. as well. Under the veil of protecting our nation's security, the administration has proposed Orwellian background check and ID card systems for port workers and employed union-busting tactics against dockworkers and airport security workers. "National Security" was also the reasoning Congress gave for last year's "immigration crackdown," saying that it would be necessary to fine, imprison, and deport millions of immigrant workers as well as build a Berlin-style wall along the southern border of the country. Racist rhetoric about Arabs and Muslims is also used by the ruling parties to divide the American working class against each other and thereby weaken us.

But disaster in Iraq is producing fractures in congress, where neither Republicans nor Democrats can come up with a strategy for success in Iraq. Bush's recent announcement of a "troop surge," or escalation of the Iraq war by over twenty thousand troops, is the latest in the list of failing tactics employed by the administration to try to revive an imperial occupation. The U.S. public support for the Iraq war is falling daily toward record lows, with polls showing that approximately 70% of Americans oppose the war. According to one Newsweek poll, about half of Americans want the troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.

This Saturday, January 27, will be an historic day for the anti-war movement as thousands of protesters will demonstrate nation-wide, demanding an end to the war. In San Francisco, protestors will rally at Powell and Market at 12 noon and march to a final rallying point of Pier 31/33. The rally will join with protesting Alcatraz ferry workers and their allies, who will be out in force to keep pressure on the notoriously anti-union Hornblower Alcatraz Cruises.

Now is the time to turn up the heat on congress and the president, with a vocal antiwar movement calling for TROOPS OUT NOW!

Editor's note - Long time ILWU Local #10 member Jack Heyman recently wrote:

Nowhere is the bipartisan nature of the “war on terror” more apparent than in the April 7, 2003 police attack on peaceful anti-war demonstrators and longshoremen in the port of Oakland in which more than 50 were injured by wooden dowels, concussion grenades, tear gas, motorcycles and rubber bullets. The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC), set up immediately after 9/11 by Democrats, Governor Gray Davis and State Attorney General Bill Lockyer, sent a warning before the anti-war demonstration that there could be violence. CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle even equated terrorists with protesters, creating a volatile atmosphere in which cops were armed with riot gear and prodded to shoot.