Soula said: "That is one Hakim down and probably another to go. that is no Shiite opposition, You have got to also realise that there is a stronger Persia-Arab divide than what shiism can pull together because the Iranians in Iraq represented the aristocracy and if one were to read behind religious symbolism or the class differences then the dispute within the shia clergy over 'wilayat al fakih' is indeed an Arab-Iranian divide.. that is why sadr went it alone and that is why sadr's father also steered clear from iran."
Don't worry, I'm somewhat familiar with Arab and Islamic politics. History shows that it doesn't take many insurgents to make an insurgency. So why are we supposed to assume that Sadr represents anyone other than himself and his "vanguard"? Or that he is more significant than those explicity opposed to the "resistance"? Why is it that western liberals and leftists think they know better than the opposition parties in Iraq? "the post colonial structures in the near east especially iraq were tailor made to preserve minority interests" Do you mean political structures? A lot of us would say the same goes for all capitalist states. "the class formation in 'peripheral capitalism developing in severe crisis' is a case of disarticulation wherein economic interests are never so well formed within a class to break the old social bonds." What is a "class" without "well formed" economic interests? "if you want to know how irrelevant are communist parties in the near east just read the proceedings of one their congresses to see how they paid more attention to the SALT one and two than to the every day problems and culture of the working class. How relevant did the Russian Bolsheviks seem in 1913? This "irrelevance" sits uneasily with the Ba'ath slaughtering and imprisoning communists wherever possible. "and yes Kurds Assyrians Christians Jews did enjoy a higher standard of living in Iraq because of ghettoism." I think this is a putting the cart before the horse: i.e. ghettoes, in my opinion, are designed to reduce the standard of a living of a cultural group seen by ethnocentrists as "parasites" (or whatever) because "all of them" supposedly have a higher standard of living (not the reverse). "...something they do not want to lose pan Arabism the latter being the real enemy of imperialism because of its closeness to the grassroots" Maybe. But which pan-Arabism? There have been many failed Arab nationalisms and my observation -- from talking to Arabs, from my formal studying of Arab history and from years of reading news stories --- is that nationalisms are now far less tangible at the grassroots than the various Islamist ideologies. For better or worse. regards, Grant.
