Greg Muttitt - Fuel On The Fire
Come hear Greg Muttitt, author of Fuel On The Fire: Oil And Politics In Occupied Iraq.
Fuel On The Fire is the first book to tell the story of how trade unionism returned to Iraq in 2003 - in spite of, rather than because of the 'liberation'. We meet some of the worker activists who began organizing just days after Saddam Hussein fell. We see some remarkable successes as they defended their members' rights through collective action, and as they grew rapidly in the early years of the occupation. We see attacks on the unions by the Iraqi government, with the complicity of its US backers, while solidarity efforts by the US labor movement help defend their Iraqi colleagues. It is the Iraqi unions who started a grassroots movement to oppose US attempts to impose an oil privatization law, largely through George W Bush's 2007 surge of troops. Through the workers' stories, we begin to see a very different Iraq from the one our newspapers have told us about. In light of the Arab revolutions, the war in Libya, and renewed threats against Iran, Fuel On The Fire provides a vital guide to the lessons from Iraq and of the global consequences of America's persistent oil addition.
