The Communist Party of Canada opposes the renewal of imperialism’s war in Iraq, under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State (IS), and calls for Canada’s immediate and complete withdrawal from the US‑led military intervention.
The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect is being fed to the people of Canada in order to justify a new war in Iraq. In this narrative, intervention is promoted as necessary to save the people of Iraq and Syria from IS terrorism.
But this argument obscures the fact that the main and most immediate threat to peace and to the people of the Middle East is from imperialism. It was the United States, together with its allies in NATO and Israel, who spearheaded the invasion of Iraq in 1990, and who carried out the murderous sanctions through the decade of the 1990s, and who again invaded and occupied the country from 2003 on. It is the imperialist states who have waged a terrorist war against the people of Syria, in which 100,000 people have died and millions displaced. It is imperialism that has supported Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the apartheid policies against the Palestinian people, and Israel’s repeated military strikes against Gaza.