At this moment on April 12th, Iraqis are holding an Amerikan named Thomas Hamill hostage in an effort to get the united $tates to back out of Iraq. Iraqis took him hostage April 9th apparently.
Let's leave out that Hamill comes from one of those ultra-crazy Crusader churches that 30% of Amerikans attend. The question is whether a truck driver in Iraq is an exploited friend of the Iraqi people or an exploiter-occupier. Is his kind there in Iraq to bring good things in solidarity with the Iraqi people or isn't he rather profiting from their misery and chosen to be an enemy of the Iraqi people through action tied to imperialism?
The phony communists in the united $tates say that people like Hamill are "exploited." They make excuses for their actions, including for those private guards guarding Halliburton and others. They say Hamill may have some "false consciousness" for belonging to one of those churches and that he has not received proper class consciousness training. We at MIM say that his actions were in pursuit of a class position that made him an enemy of the Iraqi people and we should not make excuses for people from the imperialist countries like the u$a, England, France, Japan etc.
In the Fallujah case, there is a lot of evidence that those four people killed were CIA. No one is denying that they were at least "ex-" special forces. For the sake of an argument in principle, let's just assume that Hamill is not one of those CIA or other military personnel under cover, because after all, there is so much money being spent on contracts in Iraq that probably not all the contractors are CIA. These jobs depend entirely on imperialism as a global exploiter, willing to put troops down on the ground.
In practice, the phony communists can be hypocrites and take up the MIM line for this one instance or they can more or less echo what a Southern Baptist Church reported about its church-member: "Hamill had been working in Iraq since October, according to The Clarion-Ledger, as a truck driver for KBR, a division of Halliburton. He had previously been employed as a truck driver in the United States and owned a dairy farm. When financial problems led Hamill to sell the farm, he took the job in Iraq in order to support his family, according to The Clarion-Ledger."(1)
"Last September the 43-year-old volunteer firefighter signed on to drive a fuel truck for a year in Iraq for up to $120,000, tax free," according to CNN. Hamill was working for a sub-contractor for Halliburton.(2)
The sad part is that Thomas Hamill is a microcosm of Amerika. Whether any philistines know it or not, Amerikan jobs and salaries depend on the global web of exploitation created by the monster of U.$. imperialism concretely manifested in multinational corporations like Halliburton. Amerikans are generally enemies of the Iraqi people unless they prove otherwise in action. As a truck-driver in Iraq, Hamill was making more money than 90% of the people in the world, because all Amerikans with legal working rights have an extra access to the means of production globally thanks to imperialism.
Others working and missing in Iraq include seven employees of American contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root. The plan of the Bush administration had been to have thousands of u.$. employees in Iraq carrying out billions of dollars worth of contracts.
Communists! It's time to break with your phony communist organizations and work with the only organization with a line practically opposing all aspects of the war on Iraq. Anybody oozing any sympathy for the Amerikan contractors is simply oozing sympathy for imperialism. Rather than echoing the Bush administration on the "barbarians" in Iraq, communists should take sides with the Iraqi people.
Notes:
1. http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=18041
2. http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/04/13/kidnapped.hamill.ap/index.html