Exchange on Iraq Occupation

(Letter)

This letter was received via e-mail on June 28.

Letter on Haditha: The long, low swan-song of Trotskyism?

My dear former comrades,

Well into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I wrote you with a critique of your military support for the Iraqi resistance, to which you graciously responded [see “An Exchange on the Iraq ‘Resistance’,” WV No. 847, 29 April 2005].

Your recent article on the massacre in Haditha raises some issues anew [see “U.S. Imperialism’s Massacre in Haditha,” WV No. 872, 9 June]. Specifically, the equation of US policy in the Korean and Vietnam counterinsurgencies with US policy today in invading and occupying Iraq.

Your equation of such historical phenomena to present reality conceals more than it reveals, and suggests the possibility of Trotskyism becoming, at best, a fossil, much like the DeLeonists of the US Socialist Labor Party became after the Russian Revolution, i.e., remaining correct in a way that has become so occult and needs so much qualification as to be rendered irrelevant—and that, ultimately, becomes wrong. Your slogans and orientation in the present are based on a decidedly past historical epoch, the time before the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Now, as opposed to the example of DeLeonism, I would like the opportunity to suggest another, less exotic, and more problematic eventuality that might be in store for you on your present course, which is that of a creeping centrism (a creeping ISO-ism, for example).

To say that imperialist occupations are brutal is one thing; to say (in retrospect) that the US massacred civilians mercilessly during the Korean counterinsurgency because they “hated” Koreans and not because they were attempting to fight back a social revolution, and to suggest that the US troops’ role in Iraq is primarily to kill Iraqis indiscriminately, is to substitute anger and frustration for clarity—and for politics.

In past articles on the US occupation of Iraq, you have even flirted with the idea that the US troops can no longer be regarded as “workers in uniform,” but are more akin to the cops! This was no mere gaffe on your part, but betrays appetites that flourish under conditions of political confusion and despair. At the very least, this represents a serious loss of class-struggle perspective; at worst, a craven, impressionistic (bourgeois) pseudo-radicalism.

The American rulers are not at all unwilling to put the troops’ (even their “white”) skins on the line for their policies. Racism does not motivate but it does facilitate the horrors of late capitalist society. And, frankly, what the US troops are doing in Iraq does not require them to be racist; it does not require much more than for them simply to be in the position they are in. Let us say this another way: brutal military occupations are the policy of last resort for maintaining the “law-and-order” of capitalism. If, as opposed to Bush, the more UN-oriented Democrats’ dream of a “multinational” (and not “unilateral”) invasion and occupation of Iraq had come to pass, would things look any different? —Would brown-skinned troops from nations of the semi-colonized world (say, Pakistani troops in blue helmets) act with any less brutality in the face of circumstances and forces at work in Iraq today?

Today, perhaps more than ever before, we need a political program and set of slogans that can address simultaneously and equally workers and Leftists in Iraq and workers and Leftists in the US, including the “workers in uniform” that, like it or not, are the US troops in Iraq.

Not to try to embarrass you, but, with the phraseology of your recent literature mentioned above, I would bet that you do not have even one single sympathizer or WV subscriber, let alone a bona fide member, who is actually serving in the US military, in Iraq, or anywhere else! But this is hardly the point. What ever happened to “going with one’s class” (to go to Vietnam with other workers who were drafted in that era)?

If anything, the volunteer army/poverty draft of today means the US military is even more “proletarian,” even more closely identified with the conditions of the working class more generally (for instance, it is even more non-white) than in the past. Do you have no orientation whatever to the members of a generation going through the brutalization (and not just exercising the brutality) of the present? If you can’t speak to them, then what hope is there?

Unlike in Vietnam or Korea, the (reformist) “Left” in Iraq does not call for the immediate withdrawal of US troops, let alone the defeat of the US in Iraq, nor does it even support the kind of pin-prick military attacks on them being carried out by the so-called insurgents. Please see the January 2006 statement by the Iraqi Communist Party, which opposes the occupation in principle, of course (as do I), but recognizes the practical difficulties of realizing such a politics. You would be well cautioned to pay heed to this difficulty that even the reformist “Left” recognizes—even if only by a single group in Iraq, where social reality confronts the sterility (and ultimate opportunism) of sloganeering. The dangers of disorientation are real and not rhetorical.

The reality is that the US troops in Iraq stand between the Iraqi workers and Leftists and the insurgents and Iraqi-government affiliated paramilitaries. This is indeed a paradoxical situation, uncomfortable for the Left, and fraught with problems, but real nonetheless.—John Negroponte does not have essentially the same goals in Iraq today that he had in Central America in the 1980s, other than the superficial one of maintaining US power—because he is not being opposed by the same kinds of social forces today as those represented by the Sandinistas/FMLN in the 80s. The politics of opposing US imperialism were far simpler back then. But for us to say today that opposing US power is the bottom line is to take social reality only in terms of bourgeois politics! We do not simply oppose US power, but seek to revolutionize the world!

Yes, the US, as global hegemon/cop of the world, is a primary obstacle to social emancipation today, but there are other forces at work in the world besides the US; we have other enemies, too! Not everyone who opposes the US helps us—certainly not subjectively, in terms of enlightening people politically towards emancipatory struggles, but also not “objectively.” What is “bad” for the US is not necessarily good for “us”—meaning socialist revolutionaries internationally—and might even be worse. The world has become a far more dangerous place (for any kind of socialist Left) after the destruction of the Soviet Union. Real conclusions must be drawn from this. Can Marxist revolutionaries today, throughout the world, and trying to form a revolutionary vanguard internationally, find ways towards a critical-theoretical grasp of the world, and programmatic orientation towards fundamentally changing it, that recognizes that the policies of US imperialism can be (and today are being mostly or only) opposed from the Right?

Shouldn’t Marxists, especially those consigned (supposedly by historical circumstance) to remaining an isolated propaganda group, not be oriented, first and foremost, to disenchanting and cutting through false polarities and reigning ideological appearances, while grasping material social reality, with all of its problems? What kind of legacy for any possible future Left (or even for the future of your organization) are you leaving with your slogans today, which, you must admit, are meant to be more exemplary than practical, but might end up being neither?

Your current slogans seem to be calculated, not to intersecting Iraqi Leftists and American workers—including the “workers in uniform”—to gaining an internationalist, revolutionary perspective, but rather to the petty-bourgeois rad-lib milieu (not only in the US, but also elsewhere), which shades quickly into the bourgeois “defeatism” of the Democratic Party (and even among some in the Republican Party), and which engages in the typical kinds of overstatement and downright paranoia rife in bourgeois politics (e.g., of Rep. Murtha, Cindy Sheehan, et al.).—What gives? You should know better.

When I was a youth member during the period of the destruction of the Soviet Union (and the Gulf War that was thus facilitated, setting the stage for the subsequent sanctions regime and current invasion and occupation of Iraq), one Spartacism that was most educational for me was the phrase “pseudo-Left.” Well, things are so much worse today than even 15 years ago: we would be strained today to identify even a pseudo-Left (or anything of the Left at all). I think you are flinching from this reality in your blind retention of supposed orthodoxy, and it is starting to sound more than a little desperate.

Trotsky’s political orientation and slogans in the 1930s were based on the existence of a millions-strong international working class movement and an enormous workers state (the Soviet Union) that claimed to be trying to overcome capitalism.

Such reality doesn’t exist today, and therefore calls for a different set of political interventions—and recognition of different and perhaps greater dangers. Trotsky could count on the objective reality of a Left that could be intersected by a relatively small propaganda group and potentially revolutionized that simply does not exist today—there are no larger parties that we could even theoretically split and transform into vanguards of the international working class. We have it a lot harder today than Trotsky did, and thus we have far more work to do rebuilding the Left. To this extent, the ability of our forebears like Trotsky—and Lenin—to help us has become quite limited, at least to the extent that we can simply repeat their slogans. Instead, we must struggle (really struggle!) to keep their spirit alive under changed—and worsened!—circumstances.

Revolutionaries cannot afford to recoil from sobering realities into the comforts of past certainties, not if they want to remain revolutionary. It may not be possible to resist the inexorability of the present, but I, for one, regret your veering towards becoming just another variety of pseudo-Leftism.

—Chris C.

WV replies:

As our readers will see from our letters policy, published on page 2, WV seeks to print letters we receive, publishing replies to them as we deem necessary. Chris C.’s letter reflects politics imbibing of—and in fact even to the right of—the wretched pro-Democratic Party reformist left in the U.S. Printing this letter and our reply will hopefully be a useful heuristic device for our readers, as our reply upholds elementary Leninst-Trotskyist principles against those who turn to “democratic” imperialism in the post-Soviet period.

Partaking of the “death of communism” lies of the bourgeoisie, Chris C. asserts that in the post-Soviet world workers revolution is off the agenda. He takes issue with our straightforward statement that the U.S. forces in Iraq are engaged in “counterinsurgency” bloodletting—from the Haditha massacre to the horrors of Abu Ghraib and other barbaric results of imperialist war and occupation—reminiscent of that in Vietnam or the atrocities committed during the Korean War, among others. In short, he disputes that, while occurring in a different social and political context, these crimes can be “equated” with these earlier imperialist war crimes.

Nauseatingly, he attempts to alibi the crimes of the U.S. imperialists in Iraq and writes: “The reality is that the US troops in Iraq stand between the Iraqi workers and Leftists and the insurgents and Iraqi-government affiliated paramilitaries.” He goes on to write: “What is ‘bad’ for the US is not necessarily good for ‘us’—meaning socialist revolutionaries internationally—and might even be worse.”

No! The main enemy of the peoples of the world is the bellicose, demented, racist and rapacious U.S. ruling class! That must be the starting point of any would-be revolutionary working within the belly of the imperialist beast. Whole regions of the world, not least the Near East, are composed of artificial states created by the former colonial empires and their present imperialist heirs. The masses living in these artificial creations, overseen by the imperialists’ local lackeys, are now on the murderous receiving end of the imperialists’ bloodthirsty depredations.

Chris C. paints the volunteer U.S. military (as opposed to a conscript army, such as at the time of the Vietnam War) as “workers in uniform.” He also flinches over our insistence on the simple fact that imperialist racist arrogance plays a part in the occupation of Iraq. Indeed, his position smacks of the worst sort of “white man’s burden” chauvinism. Examples of racist U.S. atrocities abound, such as the slaughter of up to half a million Filipinos between 1899 and 1902 and the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

As to the comparison to cops to which Chris C. objects, we stand by what we have written: The job of a soldier is to kill and to be killed. The job of a cop is to kill and not be killed. That the U.S. military brass feels alarm by the death of some 2,500 troops in three years of war and occupation shows that they think they can invade, conquer and occupy whole countries without suffering any consequence; it reveals a mentality that increasingly resembles that of a cop rather than a soldier. As we noted in our Haditha article: “These are not ‘our troops’! The pictures of the slaughtered in Haditha, the images of Falluja leveled, the photo of Lynndie England, dog leash in hand abusing a naked Iraqi prisoner—all are graphic reminders of the routine brutality meted out by imperialism’s military enforcers.”

Chris C. wrote, “The policies of US imperialism can be (and today are being mostly or only) opposed from the Right.” Let’s be clear: by “the Right,” Chris C. is not referring to neocons and other elements of the U.S. ruling class, but Islamic fundamentalists. At bottom, he echoes those liberals who grace the pages of the Nation and advocate an imperialist presence in Iraq to nurture “democracy” and prevent the further spread of Islamic fundamentalism.

As revolutionary Marxists, we are intransigent political opponents of Islamic fundamentalist forces, even as we stand for their military defense against the attacks of the imperialists and the Zionist Israeli state. Our article on the U.S. imperialist atrocities in Haditha also made clear that we defend Iran’s need for nuclear weapons to deter a U.S. imperialist attack, without giving an iota of political support to the mullah regime. Such a position is an elementary duty of communists.

Chris C. not only obscenely complains of the “practical difficulties” posed by the elementary demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, he has also dispensed with Lenin and Trotsky, as, in his words, their “ability to help us has become quite limited.” We communists draw our lessons from comrades Lenin and Trotsky, whose revolutionary work in theory and practice, especially their historic victory in leading the October Revolution of 1917 and founding of the Third (Communist) International, is not only relevant to but is the model for our struggle today. As for Chris C., he is indeed a former comrade who is adapting to the pressures of bourgeois liberalism and making his peace with U.S. imperialism.