Last month, at the initiative of the United States, the UN Security Council extended its 15-year-old mandate of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) until May 31, 2019.

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The UNAMI's "advise, support, and assist" mission will continue to include such components as "development of processes for holding elections and referenda," "the coordination and delivery of humanitarian assistance and the safe, orderly, and voluntary return, as appropriate, of refugees and displaced persons, including through the efforts of the UN Country Team," "the coordination and implementation of programs to improve Iraq’s capacity to provide effective civil, social and essential services for its people and continue active donor coordination of critical reconstruction and assistance programs," "Iraqi, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other efforts on economic reform, capacity-building and setting conditions for sustainable development, including through coordination with national and regional organizations and, as appropriate, civil society, donors, and other international institutions," "promote accountability and the protection of human rights, and judicial and legal reform, in order to strengthen the rule of law in Iraq," "approach gender mainstreaming as a crosscutting issue throughout its mandate and to advise and assist the Government of Iraq in ensuring the participation, involvement and representation of women at all levels," "assist Government of Iraq and United Nations Country Team efforts to strengthen child protection, including the rehabilitation and reintegration of children."

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The UNAMI Mandate in Iraq violates several declarations and resolutions of the UN, including those which recognize 1) that the sovereignty of every country is an absolutely indispensable condition for the realization of the equal rights of all nations and 2) the right of oppressed peoples to rise in struggle, using such means as they deem necessary, to secure their sovereign rights.

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The UNAMI colonial agenda is "justified" by a continuous chauvinist propaganda vilifying the Iraqi people as "fanatical and backward" and extolling the "U.S. mission" to "fight the evil ones" and "civilize" the country with "American values" and "American democratic institutions."

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In fact, when the U.S. and its UNSC alliance talks of its "nation-building" Mandate for Iraq, it is admitting that it does not want to recognize the fundamental right of the Iraqi people to self-determination. It intends to keep the entire country under its thumb. The U.S. army is being used to grab economic territory for the big corporations in Iraq, to set up a "free trade" base for U.S. capitalism, and to further penetrate the Middle East.

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Since 2003, the Iraqi people have been coming out in consistent and militant struggles to reclaim their sovereignty and to demand an end to U.S. military colonialism.

By granting the U.S. and the UNAMI a Mandate in Iraq, the U.S. and its allies in the Security Council are resorting to blatant colonialism and military force in order to criminalize dissent and to impose the law of jungle – whereby it will launch military strikes at any time against anybody in the way of its domination of Iraq.

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The anti-war movement must stick to its principles and aims and demand the unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and the Middle East. The national liberation struggle of the Iraqi people is a clarion call to peoples in the U.S. and everywhere to carry through to the end the movements against U.S. militarism and U.S. imperialism.