By Huey Dessalines

January 1, 2019

BAGHDAD: Militants laid siege to the US occupation embassy in Baghdad for two days beginning on New Year’s Eve, remaining firm in their response to unlawful US airstrikes in Syria and Iraq claiming to target “Iran backed” militants. Rocket attacks attributed to Kataib Hezbollah have been plaguing the imperialists for months now. Photographs released from sources on the ground along with imperialist media show massive damage to the embassy. Imperialist troops retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets and there has been a temporary pullback of popular forces from the embassy vicinity.

A spokesman for the organization which led the protest stated that the demands of the protest action were: “First, close the doors of the evil embassy, which we consider a spy building and an operations room to administer and sabotage Iraq’s well-being. We also call on the US to withdraw their military forces which are in Iraq illegally.” This is, according to the spokesman, a “first step” leading observers to believe that militant actions against this illegal continued occupation which has lasted nearly 20 years will continue.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the act of a desperate imperialist regime that destabilizes the Middle East as a matter of policy. A destabilized Middle East is in the benefit of the US and NATO powers. Imperialist puppet states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel carry water for Yankee imperialism to the detriment of the masses of working people of the region and are rightfully targeted by popular forces.

However, US imperialism is a tricky animal and plays one faction off the other to maintain the region in a destabilized state. US intervention in Iraqi affairs did not end with the pullout of the majority of forces in 2011. Neocolonialism and puppetism with destabilization is a much more lucrative strategy from the point of view of the corporations that own the US government and on whose behalf wars are made. The United States fears Iran coming to prominence in the region and further involvement of Russian and Chinese imperialists.

The bloody nose that the people of Afghanistan and Latin America continue to give the Yankee imperialists means that the US will become even more desperate and vicious in their desire to hold on to regions that it never really held in the first place. The Middle East in the 2020’s will undoubtedly be a zone of proxy conflict between crumbling Yankee imperialism and rising Chinese and Russian imperialisms. It is the task of the people of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and other places beset by Yankee imperialism to continue, escalate and sharpen the struggle against dying Yankee imperialism and it is the task of revolutionaries in the imperialist metropole to strike the killing blow from within the belly of the beast. Oppression and occupation breeds resistance, and it is obvious that the new decade will be one in which the Yankee Empire will continue to receive black eyes at the hands of internal colonies and the people it exploits around the world.