The Left and the “Iraqi Resistance”

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

For Class Struggle Against Capitalist Rulers at Home!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 830, 6 August 2004.

What does Iraq look like since the ballyhooed handover of sovereignty? Exactly like a country under merciless U.S. imperialist military occupation with hand-picked satraps returned from exile and crowned by Washington as local “democratic” leaders. The new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is a thug who did wet work for the American CIA, British MI6 and the Ba’ath Party’s intelligence agency. Just days before becoming prime minister, Allawi personally shot dead six handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners in the courtyard of a Baghdad police station (reported by Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July). The morgue overflows with rotting corpses and as the mercury hits 114 degrees Fahrenheit, “Baghdad is a city that reeks with the stench of the dead” (Robert Fisk, London Independent, 28 July).

Ordinary citizens are blown to bits by the American military at checkpoints all over Baghdad festooned with signs reading, “Do not enter or you will be shot.” Scores more are killed by suicide bombers who make no distinction between Iraqis lining up for jobs or waiting as their documents are checked and the foreign invaders or their police lackeys. The official unemployment figure in Iraq is now 70 percent. Latest estimates of the number of civilians killed (the American occupiers don’t bother to count how many civilians they kill) range from over 11,000 to over 13,000.

Patrick Cockburn’s Baghdad “Diary” (London Review of Books, 22 July) reports:

“After the disasters of the past year the Americans know they cannot occupy Iraq, even in the short term, without the support of local allies. The problem is that most Iraqis would like Allawi and the interim government to get rid of the suicide bombers and kidnappers—and of the US occupation as well. But the US shows no sign of abandoning its plans to keep Iraq as a client state. It would have a weak army, devoted entirely to counter-insurgency. It would have no tanks, aircraft, missiles or artillery and would resemble a Latin American state of the 1960s with an army and security forces controlled largely by Washington. This was the message brought by Paul Wolfowitz when he turned up in Baghdad in June—accompanied by Kevin Tebbit, the permanent undersecretary at the [British] Ministry of Defence—just before the supposed handover of power. The US will allow Iraq to rearm, but only against its own people.”

What about areas of Iraq where the U.S. military has retreated and turned over control to former Ba’athist officers, Sunni Muslim clerics or their Shi’ite counterparts? In Falluja, women have been forced back into veils, prohibited from wearing make-up or participating in public life under the recently imposed Islamic sharia law. A street poster “decree of Allah” threatens, “We will have no pity for those who oppose Allah by their beauty or mode of dress” (Le Monde, 30 June). Houses are raided where “sinners” are believed to be drinking alcohol or listening to music other than Koranic chants. School kids with “indecent” haircuts are surrounded by mujahedin trucks, hauled off, beaten and shaved bald, dangerously branded as infidels. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (London Guardian, 25 June) writes that it’s now “Falluja versus Falluja.” The mayor handed him two letters. One warns, “Be careful, oh brothers, because the Americans and their traitor allies, the Kurds and the Shias, are planning to come after your leaders.” The other is addressed to the UN, demanding that Iraq be run by Sunni army officers. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to bomb the city with impunity.

As revolutionary Marxists, we have a side in the current situation, against the U.S., its allies and Iraqi lackeys. Our starting point is to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, and their allies. We defend the peoples of Iraq against any U.S.-led attack and repression. Insofar as the forces on the ground in Iraq aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers (including the over 20,000 private mercenaries operating in the country), we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism. Every blow struck against the imperialist occupiers is a blow struck against the enemy of workers and the oppressed all over the world.

But we do not imbue the forces presently organizing guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces with “anti-imperialist” credentials and warn that in the absence of working-class struggle in Iraq and internationally against the occupation, the victory of one or another of the reactionary clerical forces is more likely to come about through an alliance with U.S. imperialism. We are intransigent opponents of the murderous communal violence against other ethnic, religious and national populations oftentimes carried out by the very same forces fighting the occupation armies. And we condemn the kidnappings and executions of foreign civilian workers in Iraq.

We are external to the situation inside Iraq and our task at this point in time is therefore necessarily largely propagandistic, but no less crucial. While making clear that the main enemy is U.S. imperialism, a revolutionary party with roots and influence in Iraq today would mobilize against the reimposition of sharia, against communalist sectarian attacks, for organizing the vestiges of the workers movement and the legions of the unemployed on a class basis through strikes and workplace occupations against the thieving imperialist occupiers and parasitic clerics.

Equitable resolution of the democratic rights of all the peoples of Iraq, and the Near East more broadly, cannot be achieved under capitalism but only with the overthrow of bourgeois rule in the region and the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East. This is the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. This means combining the struggle against the occupation with a struggle against all manner of bourgeois nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and poses the urgent need to forge Marxist parties to lead the struggles for the working people to come to power throughout the region. International extension of the revolution to the rich centers of imperialism—the United States, Germany, Japan—is vital, or, as Marx noted, “all the old crap” will return.

Revolutionaries vs. Reformists in the Antiwar Movement

We oppose calls to cloak an American imperialist occupation in “humanitarian” United Nations garb. We oppose the liberals and ostensible leftists who argue that the way out of the Iraq occupation is “regime change” in Washington in November. The rape of Iraq was prepared by 14 years of crippling United Nations sanctions and thousands of murderous bombing sorties ordered by Democratic president Clinton. John Kerry aims to reclaim the White House for the Democrats this fall by outflanking Bush as a war candidate. A solution to the suffering of the peoples in Iraq depends heavily on class struggle at home against U.S. imperialism. We fight to instill in the American proletariat the consciousness that the same profit-lusting rulers who smash their unions, drive down wages, destroy health care and education, massacre the workers of Iraq in the interest of capital. This requires a tenacious struggle to swim against the tide of reactionary “national unity” which has been cynically whipped up and manipulated by the Bush gang, the Democrats and the AFL-CIO labor tops since September 11, 2001.

This is the perspective that the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs fought for in the Iraq antiwar movement against the reformist pressure politics of United for Peace and Justice, Workers World Party (WWP)—which recently underwent a split—and its ANSWER coalition, the Revolutionary Communist Party and its Not In Our Name coalition, and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and its various campus coalitions.

While occasionally spouting home truths about the nature of the profit-driven capitalist system and its inherent drive to war in the pages of their newspapers, these groups actively limited antiwar protests to the confines of the Democratic Party and built the rallies as platforms for the Democrats. Sure, they featured more left-talking Democrats like Jesse Jackson Sr., Al Sharpton and Barbara Lee rather than John Kerry or Edwards. But these politicians merely cover the left flank of the same party of capitalist class rule. Thus, while we forthrightly raised the call to defend Iraq—i.e., that workers and antiwar activists had to take a side against the U.S.—the antiwar coalitions refused to raise such calls, limiting their slogans to pacifist demands like “No to War” or “Stop the War,” pandering to the “peace is patriotic” Democratic Party politicians.

Today, these same reformist groups espouse a seemingly more left-wing posture of cheering resistance to the occupation. A 5 February Workers World article headlines, “Mass Resistance Hinders Neocolonial Plans,” while a 22 July article enthuses, “The Iraqi resistance is so large and has so much popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that it cannot be defeated militarily.” Under the headline, “The Right to Resist—Why You Should Support the Opposition to the U.S. Occupation of Iraq” (Socialist Worker, 2 July), the ISO writes, “If the Iraqi resistance drives the U.S. out of Iraq, it would be a major setback for Bush’s agenda and the agenda of U.S. imperialism. This would be a tremendous victory for our side—making it much more difficult for the U.S. to choose a new target in the Middle East or elsewhere in trying to impose its will.” If the U.S. were driven out of Iraq, this would certainly be a victory.

But why is it that groups that refused to side with Iraq in the lead-up to and during the war now cheer on acts of resistance against the occupation? Because every blow against the U.S. in Iraq redounds against Bush in the run-up to the November election and plays to the Democrats’ advantage. While the ISO and WWP write articles denouncing the Democrats, and in the case of WWP are running their own candidates for the presidential election, in practice they work for candidates whose purpose is to refurbish the tarnished image of the Democratic Party. Thus a 22 July editorial in Workers World endorses the campaign of black Atlanta Democrat Cynthia McKinney, calling her “Unbossed & Unbought.” As for the ISO, they’re torn over whether to support capitalist politician Ralph Nader, as they did in 2000, despite the fact that he has made it clear that the purpose of his campaign is to push the Democratic Party in a more “progressive” direction.

You can’t raise political consciousness and struggle against war while subordinated to representatives of the capitalist class waging the war! Coalitions based on this kind of class collaboration are an obstacle because they shackle antiwar workers and youth to their class enemy and promote the illusion that the priorities of the American ruling class can be shifted in the interest of working people through peace crawls. The truth is that imperialist war is not merely a policy, but the inexorable product of the drive to conquer new markets for exploitation and export of capital. That’s why only a series of socialist revolutions to overthrow capitalist rule can create a world planned economy that will put a stop to imperialist war. This is the only solution, and to achieve it requires a fight for the political independence of the workers movement and the forging of a workers party. Break with the Democrats!

Frankenstein’s Monster, the Antiwar Movement and the “Resistance”

The imperialist war against and occupation of Iraq are a direct consequence of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Although bureaucratically deformed and degenerated by Stalinist misrule, the Soviet Union was still a workers state with a planned economy and collectivized property, if not the beacon of liberation created by the October 1917 socialist revolution. We fought to defend the Soviet Union—just as we do China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba today—against any external attack by imperialism, without any a priori conditions, and against internal attempts at capitalist restoration. At the same time, we fight to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies and to implant the revolutionary internationalist and socialist program of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, as we did in the former USSR, East Germany and elsewhere. Without the Soviet Union to stay the hand of U.S. imperialism, the world has become a more dangerous place of unbridled American military intervention and increased rivalries among capitalist powers, which threaten wider conflicts, perhaps, and surely, ultimately including with nuclear weapons.

From the beginning of the Cold War, U.S. policy under Democrats and Republicans was to bolster Islamic fundamentalism and murderous, authoritarian regimes (like Hussein in Iraq and the Shah in Iran) as bulwarks against “godless communism” in the region and to ensure access to petroleum reserves. In 1979, the Soviet Red Army intervened in Afghanistan at the request of the modernizing bourgeois-nationalist government which was besieged by Islamic fundamentalists opposed to elementary democratic rights for women and reforms that infringed on the economic and political fiefdoms of the mullahs. These mujahedin cutthroats threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and skinned Communist schoolteachers alive for the “crime” of teaching women how to read. They were armed, financed and trained by U.S. imperialism. We Trotskyists hailed the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan and called to extend the gains of the Russian Revolution to the Afghan peoples. But the Kremlin criminally withdrew the Red Army from Afghanistan in an effort to appease U.S. imperialism. This marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, as religious reaction and nationalism fueled anti-Communist rollback across East Europe and to the homeland of the October Revolution.

An informative article by Juan Cole, “The Iraqi Shiites—On the History of America’s Would-Be Allies” (Boston Review, October-November 2003), notes, “Once the Soviets had fallen the Sunni radicals abandoned their alliance of convenience with Washington and turned against the United States, which they now saw as a bulwark of the secular governments that they were trying to overthrow, in addition to resenting its role in supporting Israeli expansionism. The more radical of these groups coalesced into al Qaeda and decided to hit the ‘far’ enemy rather than only the ‘near’ one.”

This history is essential in evaluating the American left and the Iraq occupation today. Claiming a “third camp” of neither Washington nor Moscow, the ISO sided with their “own” bourgeoisie by serving as the left cover for “democratic” imperialism against the Soviet Union in every conflict of the Cold War. The ISO’s Socialist Worker (May 1988) cheered: “We welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in East Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs.” With galloping cynicism, groups like the ISO, which howled against “Soviet imperialism” in Afghanistan and supported the counterrevolutionary jihad, now oppose the Iraq war they helped bring about in their own small way through their craven anti-Communism.

The Myth of the “National Resistance”

Cheerleaders for Third World nationalism, Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist Party, WWP peddles the myth of an “Iraqi revolution” which they cite as a continuous process since 1958! A 5 February article by Fred Goldstein states, “The invasion to recolonize Iraq is a new development in the history of imperialism. It is an attempt to destroy the independence of a people who have already carried out a great anti-imperialist revolution—the revolution of 1958.” Later in the article, Goldstein informs us, “In Iraq, because of the nature of the Iraqi Revolution and what it achieved for the masses, there was no such counter-revolutionary internal base for the CIA and Pentagon to work with.”

This is an outright lie. Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party were the counterrevolutionary oppressors of Iraq’s workers, Kurds, Shi’ites and other peoples, and as such were close allies of U.S. imperialism until Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. In 1958, there was indeed a revolutionary upheaval that overthrew the pro-British monarchy. There was also a mass Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) that united Kurds and Arabs as well as Sunnis, Shi’ites, Jews and Christians. It was a party with good human material but a rotten Stalinist program of class collaboration. The events of 1958 did not end in victory, but a defeat from which the working class has yet to recover, because the opportunity for socialist revolution was sacrificed by the Kremlin Stalinists and the ICP on the altar of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism and alliance with a mythical “progressive” bourgeoisie in Iraq. When the Ba’athists took power in the 1960s, they, in cahoots with the CIA, outlawed and shattered the ICP, killing and imprisoning thousands of Communists and trade unionists.

To understand what is happening in Iraq today, including the communalist violence, you have to understand what Iraq is. Iraq is not a nation, but a patchwork of different peoples and ethnicities carved up by the British imperialists out of the old Turkish Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. There are three main populations within Iraq’s borders: a portion of the Kurdish nation (a nation that also spans parts of Iran, Turkey and Syria); an Arab Shi’ite majority; and the historically dominant Arab Sunni minority. Absent the working class emerging as an independent political force in a struggle against neocolonial rule, each of these populations can only come to power by oppressing the others and in alliance with U.S. imperialism. What “resistance forces” like Moktada al-Sadr’s Shi’ite Mahdi Army are after is to rule Iraq as the local satraps for imperialism if the U.S. forces would just get out.

The struggle of the Kurdish people explodes the myth of a unitary Iraqi nation. Their fight for self-determination is a just struggle, requiring the overthrow of four capitalist states. We call for a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan! But in Iraq today—and only in Iraq—the Kurdish question has become decisively subordinated to the occupation, in the sense that the Kurdish political parties and their military forces are an integral part of the occupation forces. In fact, many Iraqi Kurds mistakenly look with favor on the American occupation as a guarantor against Arab reconquest. The struggle for Kurdish independence can only go forward through intransigent opposition to the occupation and the Kurdish nationalists who collaborate with U.S. imperialism.

The so-called “national resistance” in Iraq is a myth promoted by U.S. and Western imperialism and cynical leftists. When the American military bombed the Sunni town of Falluja and simultaneously went after Shi’ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, there were temporary instances of unity against the foreign occupier. But resistance forces led by religious clerics are by definition sectarian. There isn’t a unitary “resistance” force in Iraq but rather disparate groupings organizing guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces—and often against rival groupings and random civilians. In the present context, an award for the most asinine analysis should go to Nat Weinstein’s Socialist Viewpoint (a split from Socialist Action) whose front page in April cheered, “Iraq: The People United Can Never Be Defeated.”

Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!

The flip side of the reformist left’s pandering to liberal Democrats is the dim and pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric of Jan Norden’s tiny “Internationalist Group.” (For an exposé of their three-card-monte organization, see “IG’s Potemkin Village Idiocy Ad Absurdum,” WV No. 828, 11 June.) The IG ludicrously denounces Workers Vanguard for demanding “U.S. Troops Out of Iraq, Now!” (see the IG’s “Sink U.S. Imperialism in the Quicksands of the Near East!”, Internationalist, November 2003). Falsely claiming that our demand for the withdrawal of U.S. troops is addressed to the American rulers and not the workers movement, the IG thunders, “The imperialists must be driven out of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Zionists must be driven out of the West Bank and Gaza” (emphasis in original). What kind of idiots oppose the demand for the immediate withdrawal of imperialist troops? Answer: fraudulent “Marxists” who despair of mobilizing the American proletariat against the capitalist ruling class.

Norden’s group equates our slogans—“Down with the colonial occupation of Iraq! All U.S. troops out now!”—with the reformist American Socialist Workers Party’s “Out Now” slogan during the Vietnam War, which was designed to appeal to bourgeois politicians who wanted to cut U.S. imperialism’s losses and get out of Vietnam. Actually, our position is consistent with the Spartacist revolutionary history on which Norden falsely claims to stand. We refer readers to Spartacist No. 5 (November-December 1965), which reprints the press release “Spartacist Breaks with New York Parade Committee” wherein we state:

“The slogan ‘Stop the War in Vietnam Now’ can mean many things to many people. But given the composition of this Committee, the fact that it is dominated by right-wing pacifists and ‘liberals,’ i.e. pro-capitalist and pro-LBJ, it is clear that the slogan is deliberately ambiguous in order to avoid facing the duty to advance the only demand that has any meaning: ‘For the Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S. Troops from Vietnam!’” (emphasis added)

The IG’s polemics against us boil down to this: they say they’re for the military defeat of the imperialists and lie that we are not. Always prone to impressionism and adventurism, and willing to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood, Norden & Co. substitute fantasies of revolutionary conflagrations sweeping aside imperialism in the Near East today in the absence of the struggle to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party to bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class, glorifying social forces hostile to the proletariat. During the first Gulf War in 1991, as editor of Workers Vanguard, Norden made crazed projections of Hussein’s army inflicting serious damage to the U.S. military. When Norden broke from Trotskyism, one British comrade aptly asked, “Would it have been a capitulation to ‘smoke and mirrors’ imperialist propaganda to wake the workers of the world to the revolutionary defence of Iraq, to halt, derail, smash by class-struggle means the crushing one-sided slaughter being prepared before our disbelieving eyes?”

In short, occasional phrases to the contrary notwithstanding, the IG has no perspective of fighting to mobilize the proletariat in the U.S. and other imperialist centers to wage class struggle against imperialist war. Indeed, during the Afghanistan war in 2001, the IG explicitly denounced our slogan “For Class Struggle Against Capitalist Rulers at Home!”—a slogan raised in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the government’s reactionary “national unity” drive—writing, “The emphasis on ‘at home’ is counterposed to the call to defeat the imperialists abroad” (Internationalist, Fall 2001).

Military defeats abroad help sharpen the class contradictions of a particular country. That’s the meaning of the Marxist axiom that “war is the mother of revolution.” But it is fundamentally the working class that has the social power to accomplish this historic task. We do not raise the call for class struggle at home with the pollyannish belief that the Iraq occupation is going to end with the immediate unfolding of socialist revolution in the U.S. We raise it in order to cut through the reactionary “national unity” mongering and “anti-terror” scare of the ruling class and to bring the working class to the understanding that it alone has the power to defeat the American imperialist system through proletarian socialist revolution. Out of working-class and social struggle and through the intervention of revolutionary Marxists, the workers party essential for this successful outcome will be forged. This is the purpose to which the Spartacist League is dedicated.