Imperialists Gloat over Capture of Former Henchman Saddam Hussein

Iraq: U.S. Occupiers Get Out Now!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 816, 26 December 2003.

DECEMBER 16—The architects of imperialist war and mass murder in the White House and Pentagon and 10 Downing Street hail the capture of Saddam Hussein as a great day for “world peace” and “justice” while they intensify their brutal war against the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein was Washington’s bloody bastard. He was Washington’s close ally and client while he massacred tens of thousands of Kurdish people. He was a mainstay of U.S. imperialist policy in the Near East while he arrested, tortured and executed thousands of Iraqi Communists, workers’ leaders, leftists, ethnic minorities and religious opponents, and waged eight years of bloody war with predominantly Shi’ite Iran. But when Hussein slipped his leash and made a grab for Kuwait in 1990, this former ally and flunkey for U.S. imperialism in the Near East became Washington’s all-purpose bogeyman.

Now the main enemy of the world’s working people, the U.S. imperialist state—which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which butchered over three million Koreans, which burned the flesh off Vietnamese villagers with napalm, which wreaked destruction in the former Yugoslavia in the 1999 war in the Balkans—just had its Iraqi stooges set up a tribunal which will likely try Saddam Hussein. This shameless hypocrisy should steel the resolve of all genuine fighters for social justice to sweep away the whole rotting system of imperialist capitalism and its lackeys and to create societies where those who labor rule. When workers tribunals of a victorious socialist revolution in the United States try America’s capitalist exploiters for their crimes against the oppressed masses of the world, black America, labor, immigrants and the poor, and when Iraqi Kurds, leftists and workers rip the oil wealth out of the hands of the military occupiers and judge them and their former henchmen, then we can start talking about justice.

Despite the gloating, not even the Pentagon spokesmen pretend that the capture of Saddam Hussein will end the Iraqi insurgency. While presenting Saddam Hussein as their demonic poster boy and pretext for war, the bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist bigots running the brutal military occupation are waging war against the entire Iraqi people. In this conflict, we have a side—with the Iraqi people against the imperialist occupiers! This has been our forthright position from the beginning. With the onset of the U.S. rape of Iraq, the Political Bureau of the Spartacist League/U.S. issued a statement declaring: “It is in the class interest of the international proletariat to clearly take a side in defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the bloody Saddam Hussein regime. Every victory for the U.S. imperialists can only encourage further military adventures. In turn, every humiliation, every setback, every defeat they suffer will serve to assist the struggles of working people and the oppressed around the globe” (WV No. 800, 28 March). All U.S. and imperialist troops out of Iraq now!

In the fight against the imperialist military occupation of Iraq, it is crucial to maintain front and center the call to defend the Palestinian people! With the Iraq war at center stage, the Zionist rulers have tightened their choke hold on the Palestinians. The Sharon government is itself reveling in the capture of Hussein, who cynically manipulated the Palestinian cause to boost his standing among the Palestinian masses. Israel out of the Occupied Territories! Defend the Palestinian people!

Meanwhile, Israeli commando units are training U.S. special forces in “pre-emptive manhunting”—a program of infiltration and assassination of civilian populations drawn from Israel’s murderous experience in the West Bank and Gaza. Behind the facade of a tribunal drenched in rhetoric about “human rights,” countless Iraqi civilians will be getting their doors kicked in by stormtroopers and machine-gunned dead. The American imperialist butchers made clear, yet again, the kind of “democracy” they have in mind for Iraq when U.S. troops yesterday fired into a protest in support of Hussein in a town west of Baghdad, killing three people.

George Bush and his British poodle Tony Blair will milk the capture of Hussein for everything they can to further their reactionary international and domestic agendas, targeting everyone from Irish opponents of British colonial rule to Muslim immigrants in the U.S. In this regard, it should be recalled that Bush’s domestic “opposition,” the Democratic Party, was gungho behind the Patriot Act that strips citizens of elementary democratic rights and rolls back hard-fought gains for labor, blacks and immigrants under the rubric of “national security.” If the Democrats appear to be a weak domestic opposition, it may be observed that their arms are surely weary from flag-waving and saluting their commander in chief. The tepid Democratic opposition to the war was argued on the basis that it detracted from the “war on terror.” To a man, every Democratic Party presidential candidate dutifully welcomed the capture of Saddam Hussein. When a Democratic politician like “antiwar” presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich calls to “end the occupation of Iraq,” his purpose is to corral mounting domestic opposition to the war into the fold of the Democratic Party, the other capitalist party of war and racism. Neither in domestic nor foreign policy do the Democrats represent any alternative to Bush because they represent the same class interests of the capitalist rulers. We say: Break with the Democrats! Build a workers party!

European rulers and American liberals uneasy with the Bush doctrine of unilateral “pre-emptive war” to remap the globe in American self-interest salute the capture of Hussein while urging that the United Nations run the war crimes tribunal. Disgruntled with being left out of lucrative contracts to “rebuild” Iraq, the European rulers want the UN to oversee the division of the spoils. We say, no illusions in the United Nations! Twelve years of UN sanctions against Iraq killed over one and a half million Iraqi civilians while UN weapons inspections set up Iraq for the American kill. And let it not be forgotten that it was the UN “den of thieves” that exempted the American military from international war crimes tribunals!

American workers and minorities are crucial in the struggle against a U.S. “evil empire” which imposes “democracy” through military occupation, terror and destruction. The patriotic hoopla is wearing thin as the Iraqi insurgency strikes blows every day against the American forces. Workers rights are being eroded in a lousy economy, black youth are being purged from higher education with attacks on affirmative action, civil liberties are being shredded—there is accumulating social tinder which could explode. The key is to organize these discontents around a class-struggle program and against the trade-union misleaders and liberal lefts who tie the workers and oppressed to their class enemy in the Democratic Party.

We in the Spartacist League are dedicated to the task of forging a revolutionary leadership, a workers party like Lenin and Trotsky built, the party that led the workers to victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 has created a more dangerous world of unbridled U.S. military aggression. We fight to build the workers party that will bring the Russian Revolution back—to America and everywhere else around the world—through new October Revolutions! Anti-imperialism abroad means class struggle at home! U.S. and all imperialist forces out of Iraq now!