Down With the UN Starvation Embargo!
U.S. Hands Off Iraq!

Correction Appended

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 786, 6 September 2002.

SEPTEMBER 3—The war drums are beating ever more loudly in Washington. After months of “leaked” invasion scenarios and strident ultimatums for a “regime change” in Baghdad, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week declared the obvious: the Bush cabal is openly charting a course for war against Iraq. In response to widespread expressions of unease or opposition from imperialist allies, Near Eastern client regimes and even Republican stalwarts in the U.S., the White House arrogantly declares that it will press ahead with or without Congressional “debate,” international support or a United Nations fig leaf.

Some 200,000 U.S. and British troops are already in the region, including thousands just across the border from Iraq in Kuwait. Faced with Saudi Arabia’s opposition to the use of bases there, the Pentagon is massively expanding and equipping its air base in the tiny emirate of Qatar. Washington is mollifying opposition to the use of critical military facilities in Turkey with a $4 billion aid deal, down payment for future services rendered. On August 8, 5,000 Turkish troops reportedly joined a large number of U.S. Special Forces commandos already in place in the imperialist-controlled Kurdish area of northern Iraq to attack the Hurriyet airfield, located near Iraq’s main oil fields.

Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. are itching to “finish the job” they began under Bush Sr. in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when then-Defense Secretary Cheney ghoulishly autographed a “bunker buster” bomb of the kind that incinerated hundreds of civilians crammed into a Baghdad air raid shelter. That war began with the bombing of a baby food factory and ended with the massacre of tens of thousands of Iraqi troops, literally shot in the back as they retreated along the infamous “highway of death.” The U.S. deliberately targeted water sewage and treatment systems, devastating what had been one of the most developed societies in the Near East. In the years since, thousands of families have seen their loved ones buried or homes demolished under U.S. and British bombs. A million and a half more have fallen victim to the more “civilized” terror of the United Nations starvation blockade, among them an estimated 5,000 children under the age of five who die every month from malnutrition and lack of medical care.

The war propaganda being churned out to justify another round of imperialist mass murder is breathtaking in its cynicism. The wealthiest, most powerful purveyor of terror in history fulminates against tinpot ruler Saddam Hussein as a menace to the world, “another Hitler.” Britain, which gassed insurgent Kurdish villages in Iraq in the 1920s, joins the U.S., which saturated the jungles of Vietnam with Agent Orange and CS gas, in denouncing Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the 1980-88 war with Iran. The U.S. ought to know: it was secretly aiding and militarily advising Iraq at the time. The Pentagon “wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,” recalled a veteran of that covert aid program. “It was just another way of killing people” (New York Times, 18 August).

Washington rants about purported “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq while providing Zionist Israel with fighter jets and helicopter gunships to kill Palestinian kids and wreak mass destruction in the Occupied Territories. And the war-crazed Zionists could well nuke Baghdad should a single Iraqi missile land on Israeli soil. The Pentagon’s “Nuclear Posture Review” allows for a “pre-emptive” nuclear strike against Iraq, among other countries. Coming from the ruling class that A-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, this is no idle threat. Now Cheney ludicrously claims that Iraq, whose only nuclear reactor was bombed by the Israelis in 1981, is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. The truth is the U.S. wouldn’t so readily contemplate an attack if Iraq did have a nuclear arsenal, which remains about the only real guarantor of national sovereignty in today’s world.

War is the continuation of politics by other means. Imperialist war is the concentrated expression of the “normal” workings of the capitalist system, which daily condemns countless numbers of people around the world to death by malnutrition, lack of medical care and industrial “accidents.” As always, imperialist terror abroad will mean further repression and regimentation at home.

Wielding the bodies of the thousands slaughtered in the World Trade Center attack, the Bush administration declared an open-ended “war on terror” against all perceived enemies, foreign and domestic. The cry of “national unity” was used to mobilize the population behind a murderous military adventure in Afghanistan. In the U.S., it has meant anti-immigrant witchhunts and racist dragnets of Near Eastern and South Asian immigrants, increased surveillance and spying, draconian attacks on democratic rights and new laws targeting the rights of organized labor in particular. Now the government has met the possibility of a West Coast port strike with threats of everything from Taft-Hartley injunctions to a military occupation of the docks.

Against the “national unity” promoted by the bosses and the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats, we counterpose the class unity of the proletariat internationally. If the working class is to defend its interests against the capitalist exploiters, it must stand in solidarity with the neocolonial victims of American imperialist depredation. In the face of impending imperialist war, we strive to inculcate in the working class and antiwar youth the Marxist understanding laid out by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in the 1930s:

“The struggle against war, properly understood and executed, presupposes the uncompromising hostility of the proletariat and its organizations, always and everywhere, toward its own and every other imperialist bourgeoisie....

“The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A ‘neutral’ position is tantamount to support of imperialism.”

— “Resolution on the Antiwar Congress of the London Bureau” (July 1936)

For class struggle at home against the U.S. capitalist rulers! Defend Iraq against imperialist attack! Down with the UN starvation blockade! U.S., UN and all imperialist forces out of Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Near East!

Nuclear Cowboys on the Loose

Launched as the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy was undergoing terminal degeneration, the 1991 Gulf War was billed as the “first post-Cold War war.” Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state, was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution, an unparalleled defeat for the international proletariat that was hailed by the imperialists and cheered as well by liberals and many self-styled “leftists.” The end of the Cold War did not usher in a promised new era of world peace. Rather, as we warned at the time, the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to U.S. imperialism would lead to a far more dangerous world. The decade following the Gulf War was marked by one American military adventure after another, from Panama, Somalia and Haiti to the Balkans and Afghanistan. At the same time, with the imperialists no longer united around an anti-Soviet consensus, rivalries among the major powers have sharply intensified.

Wielding its economic predominance and, above all, its unchallenged military might, the “world’s only superpower” asserted its right to ride roughshod over the planet. The American bourgeoisie has grown dizzy with success from a series of easy wins. And the current administration, with its bellicose “unilateralism,” gives particularly demented expression to that imperialist triumphalism. The Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal includes rabid “neo-conservative” Richard Perle, a former Reagan aide and adviser to the ultra-Zionist Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Their perspective of “regime change” extends far beyond Iraq, as revealed in a recent think-tank report which denounced the Saudi monarchy, longtime client of the American oil monopolies, as an enemy and urged an American military takeover. As they plot one military adventure after another, these types act as if they truly believe that they are on a mission from the god of their choice.

With the exception of Zionist Israel and a deeply divided Britain, not one of America’s allies has endorsed an invasion of Iraq. With the Near East already seething over the U.S.-backed Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan, a number of pro-Western Arab regimes fear they could be swept away in the social turmoil provoked by an American invasion of Iraq. Turkey has also refused to line up behind Washington, concerned that if the Kurds in Iraq were to break away following Saddam Hussein’s downfall this would strengthen separatist tendencies among the deeply oppressed Kurdish national minority in Turkey.

In Europe, France’s right-wing president Jacques Chirac has denounced any American action taken without a United Nations mandate, and polls show that three-fourths of the population oppose a war against Iraq, with or without a UN mandate. The front pages of the French press, which in the aftermath of 9/11 proclaimed, “We are all Americans,” are now filled with stories of American complicity in the massacre of Afghan war prisoners. In Germany, Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor Gerhard Schröder denounces an invasion as an “adventure” and warns that Germany will not contribute a penny and will withdraw its elite “bio-terror” unit from Kuwait in the event of a war. Schröder’s right-wing challenger Edmund Stoiber also opposes a war against Iraq.

In Britain, Labour prime minister Tony Blair, widely reviled as Bush’s “poodle,” faces a split within his own cabinet over support to a U.S. war. If Blair were forced to pull out of a war against Iraq, this would leave the U.S. without even the most threadbare “coalition.” The Trades Union Congress is expected to adopt an antiwar resolution at its annual conference later this month, reflecting both widespread popular opposition to war and a resurgence of labor militancy which threatens the government with a number of major strikes in the coming months.

A demonstration called by the Stop the War Coalition for September 28 in London is expected to bring out the largest numbers in years. But the aim of the protest organizers, chiefly the reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), is to channel opposition to U.S. war moves into support for a wing of British imperialism less beholden to American interests. The SWP goes so far as to lionize the new Archbishop of Canterbury for his antiwar stance, enthusing that his “appointment is one more sign of a new turn in British politics” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 3 August). The Spartacist League/ Britain and other sections of the International Communist League in Europe fight to win militant workers and antiwar youth to the program of class independence and proletarian internationalism.

At one level, the European (and Japanese) imperialists fear that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would further tighten America’s grip on the Near East oil spigot. More broadly, the American administration is seen as a gang of nuclear cowboys who tear up treaties and flout established rules of international diplomacy and commerce with abandon. An article in Die Zeit (1 August) by former SPD chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the elder statesman of German politics, was headlined: “Never before was American foreign policy so imperial. Europe must live with that—but shouldn’t subjugate itself.” As though in response to Cheney’s ravings that neocolonial Iraq is out for “domination of the entire Middle East,” a UN Security Council diplomat remarked: “The issue is no longer how threatening is Saddam Hussein, but how dangerous for the rest of the world is what the United States is planning to do to Saddam Hussein.”

Concerns over a go-it-alone invasion of Iraq are also fueling unease within U.S. ruling circles. What happens to Iraq—divided among a ruling Sunni minority, a Shi’ite majority and a distinct Kurdish population—after Saddam Hussein is brought down? Despite a relatively sparse occupation force in Afghanistan, anger against the U.S. “liberators” there is already running so high after a series of American atrocities that the country could well erupt. And an occupation of highly urbanized Iraq would be fraught with considerably more danger for U.S. forces.

Notably, it is not liberal “doves” who are the most vocal critics of Bush but rather leading elements of the Republican right, including Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under Bush Sr. and key architect of the 1991 war, and (in a more muted form) James Baker, secretary of state at the time. In a prominent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (15 August), Scowcroft warned that “an attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken” and result in a “very expensive” occupation. Who pays is no small matter. In 1991, the U.S. got its coalition allies to foot 80 percent of the $80 billion (in 2002 dollars) bill. The next military adventure will undoubtedly be at least as costly, and the bill will come due in the midst of a spiraling economic downturn.

As for the Democrats, they have done little more than mumble about the need for Bush to “make his case” for war before Congress, while focusing their Congressional campaign efforts on the worsening economy. This is not just a matter of short-term electoral calculations; the Democrats are at least as hawkish as the Republicans on Iraq and Israel. It was the Clinton administration which bombed and starved Iraq for eight long years, and it was Clinton’s UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, who intoned when asked what she thought of the death of half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions, “That is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” Down with the two imperialist war parties!

For Class Struggle Against Imperialist War!

War is a litmus test for professed socialists, demarcating revolutionary Marxists from every variant of reformist and centrist opportunism. From the start of the U.S. military buildup in the Gulf in 1990, we fought for a perspective of proletarian opposition to the imperialist war machine. In an article headlined “Break Blockade of Iraq!” (WV No. 509, 7 September 1990), we declared: “Working people in this country must stand on the side of Iraq against the warmongers and union-busters in Washington. And that means waging the class struggle at home.” We denounced the “UN fig leaf brigade” of liberals and leftists who promoted imperialist economic sanctions as an “alternative” to war and we declared that sanctions were themselves an act of war. We called for military defense of Iraq against imperialist attack, making clear that this could not entail any political support to the anti-working-class, anti-Kurdish regime of Saddam Hussein, who had himself earlier been a favorite of the American imperialists.

Today, rad-lib MIT professor Noam Chomsky tours the campuses decrying the murderous sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people. But in 1991, Chomsky urged the imperialists to use “the peaceful means prescribed by international law: sanctions and diplomacy” to get Iraq out of Kuwait (Z Magazine, February 1991). Some years later, Chomsky opined, “Occasionally, the population has compelled the state to undertake humanitarian efforts,” citing as a “real example” the “protection zone that the Bush administration reluctantly extended to the Kurds in northern Iraq” following the 1991 war (Boston Review, December 1993-January 1994).

Another left-liberal luminary, Boston University historian and self-described pacifist Howard Zinn, today writes that “an attack on Iraq would constitute an attack on the Charter of the United Nations” (Boston Globe, 19 August). In fact, the UN Charter has been a cover for one imperialist slaughter after another, from Korea in 1950-53 to the continuing starvation sanctions against Iraq. Zinn then immediately suggests that a U.S. war against Iraq might at some point be justified: “Let us suppose that international law should not stand in the way when extraordinary circumstances demand immediate violent action. Such circumstances would exist if there were, in the language of our own Supreme Court, a ‘clear and present danger’ represented by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.” So the professed “anarchist” Chomsky praises the potential beneficence of the imperialist state, and the pacifist Zinn allows that imperialist war may be justified! Even when sincerely held, the doctrine of pacifism—i.e., opposition to the use of force in principle—is an obstacle to a genuine struggle to rid the world of imperialist militarism.

With left-liberals such as Chomsky and Zinn echoing the aims of the imperialists, avowing the need to punish Saddam Hussein, the so-called “socialists” take on the garb of pacifism. Thus, at the time of the Gulf War the reformist Workers World Party (WWP) and International Socialist Organization (ISO) threw themselves into building antiwar coalitions limited to nearly identical appeals to “bring the U.S. troops home” and to shift government spending from war to social services. The WWP formed the “Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East” while the ISO endorsed the “National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East.” The ISO declaimed that “in the case of the blockade and in the event of an actual war, we are on the side of Iraq” (Socialist Worker, October 1990). But that line went no further than the fine print in its paper. In fact, neither of the “antiwar” coalitions called for defense of Iraq against the American imperialist behemoth, and the one backed by the ISO explicitly called for UN sanctions as an “alternative” to war (see “Liberal Mask Is the Real Face—ISO in the Antiwar Movement,” WV No. 520, 15 February 1991).

Today, WWP leader Deirdre Griswold writes: “The only course away from disaster is an independent, anti-war fightback. It cannot rely on old warhawks of either capitalist party” (Workers World, 29 August). This is a statement that WWP can find no “antiwar” Democrats to suck up to, for now. But its whole history is one of building coalitions aimed at appealing to “progressive” capitalist politicians, and that has not changed. A flyer by WWP’s latest antiwar coalition, ANSWER, for an “Emergency Response Protest” in the event of war conspicuously avoids the call for defense of Iraq and is limited to the same butter-not-guns pacifism that characterized its previous antiwar fronts, centered around such demands as “Money for jobs, housing, healthcare & education—Not for war!”

WWP, ISO et al. argue that only by limiting the struggle to the most minimal pacifist-reformist demands can a movement be built based on the broadest possible unity. What they mean by this is not the broadest unity of the working class and its allies internationally on the basis of class struggle, but class-collaborationist unity with capitalist politicians. The call to end war and allocate money for jobs and all the other things that working people and minorities need begs the question of how. Exploitation, unemployment, racism and imperialist war are intrinsic to the capitalist profit system.

The only way to put an end to them is for the working class to overthrow the capitalist order through a socialist revolution. At bottom, the reformists share and promote the lie explicitly propounded by liberals like Chomsky, that the existing capitalist state can act in the interests of the oppressed through mass pressure. In doing so, they serve to disarm and divert militant workers and leftist youth from the struggle against the capitalist system that breeds war.

Defend Iraq! For Permanent Revolution!

While tailoring its politics to “progressive” Democrats in the U.S., Workers World simultaneously promotes the “anti-imperialist” credentials of Third World nationalist regimes, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Thus Griswold lauds “the continued defiance by the Iraqi leadership of U.S. efforts to roll back their independence, won in 1958 by an anti-colonial revolution, and bring their country under the total domination of U.S. oil companies.”

Taking a diametrically opposed tack is the Progressive Labor Party (PL), which equates imperialist and neocolonial states because they are all capitalist, a notion shared by some left-wing anarchist youth. This ultra-“revolutionary” posture is a cover for crass capitulation to U.S. imperialism, preaching neutrality in wars between the imperialist oppressors and those they oppress. Thus, as the U.S. and its imperialist allies were terror-bombing backward Afghanistan, PL declared in an 8 October 2001 statement: “When bosses fight among themselves, workers must never choose sides among them.” Contrast this with what Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin wrote in Socialism and War (1915): “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be ‘just,’ ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great’ Powers.”

It is instructive to look at the attitude of Trotsky’s Fourth International to the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s. When Japanese imperialism invaded semicolonial China in 1937, the Trotskyists advanced a policy of revolutionary defensism toward China, then under the rule of Guomindang butcher Chiang Kai-shek, hangman of the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution. In a resolution titled “The War in the Far East and the Revolutionary Perspectives” adopted at its 1938 founding conference, the Fourth International declared:

“The defeat of Japanese imperialism will not only open roads to the revolution in China and Japan but will encourage fresh waves of revolt in all the colonies of the imperialist powers.... Revolutionary support for China’s struggle does not, however, mean that revolutionists must furnish cover for the bankrupt Kuomintang regime and the Chinese bourgeoisie.... China’s national liberation, and the emancipation of the Chinese masses from all exploitation, can be achieved only by the Chinese masses themselves, in alliance with the proletariat and oppressed peoples of all the world.”

Likewise today, the mobilization of the Iraqi masses in struggle against an imperialist assault must be combined with the struggle to overthrow the bloody regime of Saddam Hussein. In the 1950s, Iraq had a powerful proletarian movement under the leadership of the Communist Party (ICP). The overthrow of the British-backed monarchy by a military coup in 1958 opened up a revolutionary situation in which the proletariat could have seized power had the Stalinist ICP leadership not subordinated the struggle to the nationalists. This betrayal paved the way for a bloodbath of workers, Kurds and Communists by the bourgeois-nationalist Ba’ath Party, in which Saddam Hussein was then a rising star, with the CIA providing lists of those to be murdered. This is what Workers World describes as an “anti-colonial revolution.”

From the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 to the Iraqi Revolution of 1958, the Stalinist program of “two-stage revolution,” subordinating the proletariat to a supposedly “anti-imperialist” national bourgeoisie, has meant bloody defeat for the workers. From Egypt to Iraq and Iran, bourgeois-nationalist regimes act as local enforcers of imperialist subjugation and backwardness. Despite formal independence, the semicolonial bourgeoisies of the Near East remain dependent on the imperialists and fearful of any challenge to their class rule by the proletariat and the oppressed.

It is necessary to forge Trotskyist parties based on the perspective of permanent revolution: the chains of imperialist subjugation can only be broken through a workers revolution that shatters bourgeois rule as part of the struggle for worldwide socialist revolution, especially in the imperialist citadels. Only within a socialist federation of the Near East can the national rights of all the many peoples of the region be achieved, from the Palestinians to the Kurdish population, which is divided among Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

To a man, the reformists and centrists promote the liberal lie that imperialism is just a policy which can be changed through pressuring the capitalist state. But as Lenin stressed in polemicizing against similar views advanced by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, imperialism is the “highest stage of capitalism,” marked by the concentration and domination of finance capital, the pre-eminence of the export of capital and competition among the advanced capitalist countries to control markets and spheres of exploitation. War is a necessary product of the capitalist system.

The International Communist League adheres to Lenin’s injunction in Socialism and War that revolutionaries “not deceive the people with admitting the idea that a peace without annexations, without oppression of nations, without plunder, and without the embryo of new wars among the present governments and ruling classes, is possible in the absence of a revolutionary movement.” We fight for socialist revolution in the U.S. and internationally as the only way to put an end to war and imperialist oppression. This requires building revolutionary working-class parties like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, in the U.S. and around the world, as part of reforging Trotsky’s Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

In our article "U.S. Hands Off Iraq!" (WV No. 786, 6 September), we wrote: "The decade following the Gulf War was marked by one American military adventure after another, from Panama, Somalia and Haiti to the Balkans and Afghanistan." In fact, the U.S. intervention in Panama occurred in 1989, more than a year before the start of the Gulf War. (Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 793, 13 December 2002.)