The Middle East powder keg explodes (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

President Trump probably didn’t realise it but when the United States joined Israel in an attack on Iran at the end of February he lit a fuse that caused the Middle East powder keg to explode and with it his ridiculous dream of getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, every single country in the region — Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and even, on one occasion, Egypt — has been bombed. At stake has been control of the oil and natural gas resources of the region and the trade routes taking these and their by-products out to other parts of the world.

The Carter Doctrine

In his State of the Union message to Congress in January 1980 President Jimmy Carter read out what has since come to be known as the Carter Doctrine. It was a reaction to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

He set out the reasoning behind the doctrine:

‘The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits [sic] of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.’

And concluded:

‘Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force’.

The United States had already built up, and paid for, the military power of Israel to be its proxy in the region. Following the overthrow of the self-styled Shah of Iran in 1979 in an ‘Islamic revolution’ which installed a hostile regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, Israel was the only powerfully armed state in the region that they could rely on. The US also had established a permanent military base in all the Gulf states except for Oman.

Taking out Iraq

In the end it wasn’t military action by Russia that led to the Carter Doctrine being activated. By the beginning of the 1990s the state-capitalist regime there was collapsing, on the way to the final dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. It was the action of Iraq, whose leaders decided in August 1990 to invade and annex Kuwait in order to get free access to the Persian Gulf for its oil exports. This led to the First Gulf War in which Iraq was driven out of Kuwait by a United Nations authorised coalition led by the US. The coalition stopped after driving Iraq out of Kuwait, leaving the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein still in power.

The US continued to regard the Iraq regime as a threat to its interests in the region and in 2003 decided to finish the job on the pretext that Iraq was developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’, including nuclear ones. This time they didn’t get UN support, only that of Tony Blair’s Labour government. The Second Gulf War was a walkover and Saddam Hussein was quickly overthrown. No WMDs were discovered but a regime opposed to US control of the region had been eliminated.

This turned out to have an unintended consequence. The Saddam regime, which was Sunni Muslim, had repressed the Shia majority in the South as well as the Kurds in the North. With that regime gone, the exclusion of the Shia majority in Iraq ended, opening the way for the Shia Islamic regime in Iran to gain influence there. In short, it strengthened another regime that threatened US control of the Gulf.

The current line-up

Just as the US had established a string of bases in the Middle East so in effect did Iran, made up of Shia militias in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. There are Shias in other Arab states. Bahrain has a Shia majority while Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are situated in a Shia majority area. Both dynastic regimes ruled by Sunni despots severely suppress any sign of Shia political activity.

The regime in Iran had always seen Israel as a key element in maintaining US domination of the Gulf, denouncing it as a ‘Zionist entity’ to be wiped off the map. This was couched in religious terms, but behind it were strategic considerations to do with control of the Gulf. Israel returned the compliment and regarded the Iran regime as an existential threat to be destroyed.

The scene, then, was set for any military confrontation. On the one side the US with military bases in friendly Sunni Arab states and Israel as its (unruly) attack dog and, on the other, Iran with proxy Shia militias in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Israel took the initiative in June last year when it bombed Iran, resulting in a twelve-day war between the two states, in which the US joined to bomb nuclear sites in Iran.

The pretext was that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb. That might or might not be true but, in terms of the principle of ‘might is right’ that governs relations between capitalist states, it wouldn’t be surprising if it was true. Iran would have an interest in having the Bomb just as the US would have an interest in it not having one.  A nuclear Iran would shift the balance of power in the Middle East in its favour. Trump’s claim that if Iran had the Bomb it would use it on Israel is most likely nonsense, especially as Israel is a nuclear power too. States acquire nuclear weapons not necessarily to use them but more as a deterrent and to increase their might, and so their bargaining power, in relations with other states.

Better than the Bomb

At the end of February, Israel and the US again attacked Iran for the same reason. Again, this has had an unintended consequence. Iran discovered that it has a better bargaining chip than the Bomb and one which it could actually use — the capacity to disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the trade route which, as Carter noted, vital exports for the world economy of oil and natural gas from the Gulf have to take. Which it has used to its advantage. Trump has egg on his face while Israel is frustrated and may be tempted to have another go.

Socialists have always contended that wars break out when one side considers vital capitalist interests are at stake, over control of natural resources, trade routes, markets and investment outlets and strategic points and areas to acquire or protect these. The killings and destruction in the Middle East are a textbook confirmation of this.

Adam Buick

Against all war, economic and military (2004)

From the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists appreciate that the war over Iraq has drawn many workers into a political arena hitherto seen as boring and as impossible to influence from the outside. Workers once apolitical have been stirred into action by the lies, the tricks to curtail the democratic process, and the acts of violence, murder and destruction from their leaders.  Where before, whether at breakfast, in the workplace, in a café at lunchtime or over dinner in the pub in an evening, we discussed our work, sport, TV, pop music, sex and the weather or our personal pursuits, over and above our everyday troubles in life, lately we’ve seen the war over Iraq come to figure in these discussions.  Not satisfied with these usual outlets for our feelings, many have been attending the numerous anti-war rallies around the world and writing into newspapers, radio and television.  Socialists expressed pleasure in seeing so many of our fellow workers in anti-war mood, and in such numbers. 

   

But socialists are aware that in the workplace workers, anti-war campaigners and not, are soldiers in an economic war on behalf of the generals who own the businesses where we work.  We thought it ironic that workers should be so strongly united in an anti-war outlook on a Saturday, and then, back at work on the Monday, would go to war with each other, united only in an effort to win the battle for production, sales or work over their anti-war friends engaged in a similar process for other generals. A common lament from the weary and dismayed proletarian soldiers in the American Civil War of the 19th century was, We are all Americans! We socialists have a similar cry to workers in both the commercial and military wars of today – We are all fellow workers! If non-socialist anti-war campaigners only knew it, the wars of commerce lie at the root of all the military wars.

   

Sadly not a common view among anti-war campaigners, but all the signs of war are readily available if one cares to look and reflect on our day-to-day activity for just a moment.  Do not most of us work for a business to produce or sell products or provide some type of service in competition with those produced by our fellow workers who work in other businesses in the same field of activity? The products from one worker look almost identical to products from another, are made in similar environments by similar processes by workers who perform similar tasks in similar numbers and using similar tools. These commodities, whether we make them, sell or deliver them as a service, perform the same function, serve the same need, and sell for almost the same price. It is made clear to us, no matter where we work, in a supermarket, in a car or clothing factory, in a bank or a TV station, for example, that the company we work for, and by implication ourselves, are engaged in national (and international) rivalry with similar businesses all across the world. Every one of these businesses would if they could keep the whole market to themselves, and they struggle to get as much of it as they can in a game of competition – war by another name.  And the obvious end result is that the task is overdone and thus a glut is produced. 

   

Commercial conflicts are like military ones, with resources being trashed in a war for survival.  And the ruin of products coincides with the dissipation of the human effort employed in their production as well as the squandering of the quantity of the Earth’s natural resources as ingredients for their production. Perishable commodities which cannot be sold at their intended price are jettisoned into the bargain basement saleroom and then, if necessary, churned back into the soil even before the needy workers, who produced them, are allowed to have them free. The owners of the businesses where we work care not a jot for the workers when their particular war is over and they are no longer needed, due to sickness, injury on the job, the employment of new technologies, improved methodology or bankruptcy, which brings on our redundancy and poverty.

   

War includes struggles between classes, class wars between capitalists and workers.  In 19th-century France, a short civil conflict was fought between the bourgeois French National Assembly, and Parisian workers as republicans, known in socialist annals as the Paris Commune. In Britain, a civil war was waged between a feudal class and the rising bourgeoisie in the 17th century.  A war can also involve rival sections within a particular class who compete for power, as in America, where a civil war was fought between rival members of the American bourgeois class in the 19th century. There is another type of civil war which socialists cite, where in the arena of commerce, battles are waged between corporations, assisted by their (home-based) state authorities, first within national borders then steadily growing in stature to a transnational arena.

   

The now universal culture of ‘market ideology’ is the primary influence on the behaviour of humans everywhere.  The more power or money an individual or group can secure for themselves, the better their quality of life.  To be effective in their pursuit of power and wealth, whether solely by the means of commerce, or upgrading their war to the military stage, they must be indifferent to the needs and plight of their competitors; otherwise, their ability to wage war is diminished.

   

Whether a war in society is within a nation or between nations, the causes of these wars between the protagonists are of a similar nature. While the circumstances surrounding each war may remain peculiar to the time and place (the extent of dictatorship/democracy, class structure, mode of production, laws, parochial cultures or ideas or religions etc), the pattern seems to be repeated all over the world.  The owning class of one nation possesses something which that of another nation, or groups within a nation would like to possess.  These could be land, foreign trade deals, cheap labour, talented labour and property (as businesses or complete/established industries), home markets, and a natural resource as marketable asset – oil, gas, coal, iron ore, gold, diamonds, water, etc.  These are all requirements for success in making money, and with money comes power and influence for businesses and individuals.  As no one country has been endowed with a complete set of resources, there will often be a need to plunder.

   

Wars in human society take place between nations when the dominant men and women within them (the capitalist class) pursue wealth or the means to create wealth in society, using the power of their state and their labour (workers) as battering rams to defeat their enemies, which are themselves comprised of their opponents’ state machinery and workers. And where a conflict occurs within the territory of one nation, outside influences are often brought to bear. If resources are up for grabs, the capitalist grabbing class join the fray to see what they can win.

   

Only socialists can claim to be the true anti-war campaigners. Fellow workers around the world participate in anti-war campaigns, which call for the end of military wars, but none that we know of make that connection, as socialists do, to the wider society and particularly, to its mode of production and guiding ideology which promote competition among all sections of society. In campaigning solely for an end to military wars, which are but a bloody climax to the wider commercial war, there can be no hope of addressing the problems of human society today as a whole.

William Dunn

Worse than thought: In the article on Terror last month we quoted a figure of 35,000 for the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion. Since then the medical journal, The Lancet, has estimated the number as being more like 100,000.

Lies, half-truths and weapons of mass destruction (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, September 4, 2002

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” George Bush, March 18, 2003

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.” Kenneth Adelman, US Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003

“Saddam’s removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction.” Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

In the months leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Blair regimes produced reams of documents to prove Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam could realistically fire them within 45 minutes. As they geared up for war they reiterated time and again that their intention was solely to rid Iraq of its WMD and make the world a more stable place for decent and god-fearing people to live in. They campaigned long and hard for their war – for the support of their peers in governments and for the backing of the US and British electorates and, convinced they had the mandate for war, invaded Iraq in March. Two months after the end of the fighting no “illegal” weapons have been found and the odds of finding any diminish greatly as the days go by.

The recent admission from a British security chief that the 50-page “intelligence” report on Iraq’s WMD presented by Tony Blair to Parliament on 24 September last year – and used as the Labour government’s evidence for Iraq’s illicit weapons inventory – was spiced up on the government’s instructions came as no real surprise for those who have scrutinised the unfolding of the US-UK war with Iraq and the Labour government’s desperation to be part of it. Since the transatlantic plan to invade Iraq was hatched it was apparent that Truth would again be the First Casualty of War.

For their part, the CIA and their British counterparts have tried to distance themselves from their respective governments these past few weeks, with unprecedented briefings and leaks to the press, desperate to avoid the backlash that has lead to some serious questioning in London and Washington.

On a visit to Poland on 30 May, Tony Blair told a press conference that finding the weapons in Iraq was “not the most urgent priority”. And yet, according to the claims of the dossier that he defends, Saddam Hussein “has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability” and that his “current military planning specifically envisages the use” of these weapons. For months we had the Blair government ramming the WMD issue down our throats, pleading for our support for his war with Saddam, who threatened the civilisation we cherished. Yet as Saddam and his military top brass, who presumably know about these WMD, which are yet to be found, are still on the run we are told that finding the weapons is not an urgent priority!

Also now discredited by the CIA is the evidence US Secretary of State Colin Powell eagerly displayed to the UN Security Council at the beginning of February. Powell provided explicit particulars of the key players in Iraq’s WMD programme as well as the sites that are now under US military control. Nevertheless, the biologically-armed “missile brigade”, which he claimed was situated outside Baghdad has proved to be a figment of his imagination and the weapons scientists he informed the world were afraid of talking because of Saddam’s reach have not yet disclosed any secrets. As with the alleged “poison camp” near Khurmal, its labyrinth of tunnels and complex chemical communication network, so too with the photos of twenty or so Baghdad-based al-Qa’ida members the UN was presented with. No evidence whatsoever.

In spite of every quality newspaper demanding answers from him in the wake of the secret services admission, Blair, it seemed, was learning nothing. Rather than running for cover he began blurting more lies, claiming that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the African state of Niger. The documentary evidence this fresh allegation was based on has since been confirmed as forgery by the International Atomic Energy Authority. Indeed, the Bush administration was aware that this evidence was bogus a year earlier – something Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have since admitted. Moreover, early last year Vice President Dick Cheney sent a former US ambassador in Africa to Niger look into the story. Although the latter brought back word that the documents were not genuine, this was not sufficient to prevent the use of these documents as part of Bush’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

The sorry situation becomes more pathetic. US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld has lately offered that the reason Saddam’s WMD can’t be found is because they were destroyed before the war started. In other words the US-Britain invaded Iraq to rid the region of weapons Saddam never had and indeed that Saddam claimed he never had and which the UN weapons inspectors suggested he never had. If this was the case, then Saddam could never have been in breach of the famous resolution 1441, which was the justification for war.

Critics might consider that in light of recent revelations Blair should resign and that Bush should be impeached. Surely politicians should not be allowed to lie like this! But hold on.

Lying is the trade of politicians under capitalism.

Back in 1925, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “This broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Blair and Bush are fully aware of the power of the big lie, so little wonder they thought they could get away with it. Moreover they are fully aware their support base swallows lies every living moment of the day. For the workers’ part they are lied to from the cradle to the grave: at school with distortions of history and the myth about a God up above; in the workplace, as producers, lied to by their bosses and at home as consumers bombarded with the myths perpetuated by the advertising industry.

To be sure, the entire capitalist edifice depends for its continued survival on the promotion of lies, half truths and the distortion of facts. So powerful is the capitalist distortion machine that it takes all our powers of concentration, memory recall and skills of research just to separate the simplest of lies from fantasy. This constant digest of misinformation perhaps explains the amnesia the majority of workers appear to suffer from. And what is exasperating is that in spite of all the evidence revealing the architects of war to be the conniving and scheming rapscallions we always knew them to be, it is a fair bet that many workers will again be ready to believe their lies when Iran is found to be stockpiling WMD and harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists.

It may well be that WMD will be found in Iraq – but the assumption now will be that will have been planted there by corrupt Western regimes desperate to justify their invasion. And this evidence will likely be used not only to prop up the discredited Messrs Bush and Blair but also to malign the anti-war movement – which claimed this was a war for oil – and to further strengthen their case for a continuation of the “war on terror”.

In the months ahead be careful what you swallow.

John Bissett

How We Live and How We Could Live (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

One war – which everyone knew was about oil – has just ended. Exactly when the next war will break out cannot be predicted, but nobody doubts that there will be another, and that it too will be over access to some key resource vital to Western corporate capitalism.

More and more powers are arming themselves with nuclear weapons. The trade in “conventional” arms is booming too, as rulers everywhere seek to arm themselves with the most up-to-date and destructive weapons they can afford. They have to, since, in the perpetual jockeying for a place in the sun that’s part and parcel of world capitalism, it’s Might is Right with the biggest share of profits going to the strongest states while the weakest become basket cases.

But it’s not just the destruction of wars and the waste of armaments. There’s also the artificial scarcity that is imposed by the profit system. The world could produce enough to properly feed, clothe and shelter every single person on the planet, and more, but this does not happen. This is because production is geared to making profits not meeting needs. So, production stops, not when people’s needs have been met, but well before, when what they can afford to pay for—what can be sold to them at a profit—has been supplied.

That’s the economic law of the profit system: “No profit, no production”, “Can’t Pay, Can’t Have”. In the Third World this has drastic consequences. Millions die each year of starvation and starvation-related diseases. Millions go without access to clean drinking water. Millions live in slums and hovels. Everywhere in the Third World people have to be held down by brute force lest, as happened recently in Iraq, they help themselves to what they desperately need.

It’s not so good here either

In this part of the world the effects of the economic laws of the profit system are not so dramatic but still blight our lives. Because profits come before people’s needs a whole raft of problems arise. The health service is crumbling. The transport system is in chaos. Schools have become places where kids are under non-stop pressure to “perform”. The quality of life is declining. Towns and cities are dirty and noisy places where all is rush, rush, rush. There is no real sense of community. Apathy is rife. People don’t think that anything can be done to change things or even that it’s worth trying to. We are all of us on our own, competing individually to try to do the best for ourselves and our families. Everybody feels that this is not a satisfactory way to live but can’t put their finger on what precisely is wrong.

What is wrong is that we are living in a society where to survive you must have money and where most people can only get money if they can find an employer. But employers are not philanthropists. They only employ us if there’s something in it for them – profit, a profit that we produce when we make the goods or provide the services that they sell. That’s why, at work, we are under constant pressure to work harder and to compete with each other for promotion and better pay. And there’s always the worry that we might lose our job and so be deprived of the money it brings. Which we do if our employer doesn’t make enough profits. Profits always come first. So, public services, which have to be paid for out of profits, are neglected.

We need money because we can only access the things we need if we can afford to pay for them. But those with things to sell us are not philanthropists either. They, too, are motivated by the need to make a profit. For them we’re just a market and so they bombard us all the time with appeals to “buy, buy, buy”. You can’t escape this pressure. Advertising is everywhere: on the television, on the radio, in the papers, on billboards and hoardings, as junk mail. All this turns life into one big supermarket. But, since most people can’t afford the best, most of what we do buy is cheap and nasty, gleaming on the surface but shoddy underneath, often produced to break down or fall to pieces after a carefully calculated number of years anyway.

The way out

Fortunately, there’s a way out. But it’s not that easy. Nobody can do it for us – no leader, no politician, no guru. We’ve got to do it ourselves. That means understanding what causes the problem – the profit system – and then getting together to do something about it. Not just complaining about how the system treats us and asking for a few improvements here and there. Not founding the Labour Party again. Not some amorphous “anti-capitalist” movement which is against everything but for nothing. But organising to get rid of the whole profit system and replacing it by a new and different system.

A new and different system geared to meeting people’s needs. One based on the common ownership and democratic control of the places where we work and produce what is needed – obviously, if we’re going to produce to meet our needs, the means of production can’t remain in private hands or under minority control. Here the rule would not be “can’t pay, can’t have” but “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. We’d be co-operating to produce what we needed and then we’d have free access – without money – to what we produced. This is the original meaning of the word “socialism”, before it got corrupted by the Labour administrators of capitalism and the supporters of the failed state-capitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.

We in the Socialist Party still stand by it and still say it’s the only way out, not just here but throughout the world. In fact socialism could only exist on a world scale as world problems require world solutions. World socialism is the only way to prevent further wars and end world poverty, disease and ignorance. And the only way to restore the balances with the rest of nature that the profit system has upset.

Tinkering with the present system has always failed, and always will. It simply cannot be made to serve human interests. It can’t be mended. It must be ended. What is needed is not reform but a revolution in the basis of society to make all the natural and industrial resources of the Earth the common heritage of all humanity.

Adam Buick

Greasy Pole: Short Cuts And Runs (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that the fighting in Iraq is over – and perhaps before it starts somewhere else like Syria – it is time to remind ourselves of the adage that in war the first casualty is the truth. In fact a close runner up is what might be called the vocabulary – the way words are used and what results from their misuse. So during the war we heard, as we did in the Gulf War in 1991, of “friendly fire”, a phrase designed to conceal the embarrassing fact that British and American forces were at times liable to kill each other. We grew accustomed to the concept of “collateral damage” as a term which implied that civilians who were killed were part of a necessary accident. We had Geoff Hoon who, as Minister of Defence is another of those ex-left wingers trying to expunge an inconvenient past, informing us that cluster bombs, which are murderously indiscriminate in their effect, were not only “perfectly legal” but also “highly legitimate”. (It is whispered that when the time is ripe Hoon’s career might be another casualty).

And then we had Clare Short, who trumpeted it to the world on 9 March that if Britain went to war without first getting some kind of approval from the United Nations she would resign from the government. She left no room for doubt about her intentions and for good measure she laid into Blair for being “reckless with our government, reckless with his own future position and place in history, extraordinarily reckless”. But when the fighting started and the bombs fell and the bodies piled up it turned out that the words “I shall resign” did not mean that she would leave the government. Then, after the war was over, she finally did resign.

Perhaps Short decided to gamble on the fact that resignations in the past were not always harmful to the person who fell on their sword. Aneurin Bevan recovered from leaving the Attlee government in 1951 to become a close ally of Hugh Gaitskell and, had he lived, may well have succeeded as leader of the Labour Party. Harold Wilson, who left at the same time as Bevan, shrewdly kept all his boats unburned. Michael Heseltine’s resignation in the Westland affair did him no long term harm; after the Tory defeat in 1997 he might well have stood for the party leadership – and won – but an attack of angina prevented him. Of course there are examples of the opposite effect, like George Brown, whose regular bibulous nocturnal threats to resign eventually threw him off the greasy pole – and there is Robin Cook; has anyone seen him for a while?

Like some of those people, Clare Short has a rocky history, which has not exactly smoothed her path onto the lower slopes of power. During the 1980s, in her role as a militant feminist, she upset the Sun by trying to introduce a parliamentary bill to ban the publication of pictures of topless women. This was before Blair was desperate to keep the Sun’s support; nowadays, undermining so important an outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s press empire might be seen as a sackable offence. During Blair’s early days she was not one of his most ardent supporters; in fact she voted for Margaret Beckett in the leadership contest. She changed her tune when Blair got the big job. In August 1996 she raged against the “people in the dark” for portraying the new leader as an unprincipled “macho man” when he was actually “fresh, principled and decent”. This compliment, muted though it may have been, came too late because Blair had already demoted her from shadow Transport Secretary to shadow Minister for Overseas Aid.

Some leaders are highly skilled in navigating the political waters – avoiding the shallows and the rocks, cultivating the ability to make all their mistakes appear to be triumphs of ingenuity. Clare Short is not one of them. Perhaps she has been too eager to assure herself of a place in history as a kind of feisty feminist conscience of the Labour Party. If so, she has overlooked the fact that politics has no room or time for consciences. The wars of capitalism don’t happen by accident, because people without a conscience are in power or because the passages of diplomacy have not been thoroughly enough explored. They happen because they are an essential stage in the disputes between sections of the ruling class. They are not about the freedom of people but the competitive drive to capture marketing opportunities, or vital mineral wealth like oil.

There is a lot of profit to be made in exploiting the oil of Iraq and the people there. There is a lot of profit to be made in clearing up the mess left from the war and rebuilding the cities, the industries, the financial system and the infrastructure. The Bush administration have ensured that they have the dominant say in who gets the best chance to rake in the profits. The plans were already laid, before the first American soldiers so much as picked up their rifles. The giant American energy company Haliburton has been selected to work to revive the oil industry in Iraq; the deal could be worth about $7 billion dollars to them over the next two years. Bechtel is a company with close links to the Bush administration in Washington operating in big building contracts like the Channel Tunnel. Circling greedily are some British companies like Costain, Balfour Beatty, Rolls Royce. If all goes according to plan Iraq will be a country where in the immediate future economic growth yields mouth-watering profits to those who are in on the act.

Shock and Awe

One of these is the electronics giant Sony, which makes games for computer, video and broadband. Some of these games, played addictively by children of all ages, involve virtual combat with plenty of bloodshed. Sony have been quick off the mark; within hours of the war starting they had patented the phrase “Shock and Awe” which was used by American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he promised the people of Iraq what they would experience during the war. So a game called “Shock and Awe” will be coming soon to a computer games shop near you. If you can bear to play it it will say everything necessary about that war and about the cynicism of leaders who told us that it was about freedom when it was about exploitation and oil and profit.

Ivan

Socialism Now! (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty two billion pounds is a lot of pelf in anybody’s currency. Tabloid newspapers occasionally run articles fantasising about the things their readers could spend their money on if they were rich enough. Maybe a premier division footballer or two; a re-election victory; two tickets for the sixth farewell tour of a sixties rock/pop group; a four bedroom detached house in the south-east of England; a signed Damien Hirst pickled onion; a day trip on the USS Enterprise; a decent little Middle Eastern war. Money, if you have enough of it will buy you almost anything. Many people think that if you throw enough money at a difficulty it will go away.

A Guardian journalist, Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Daily Mirror recently (9 April), identified many problems affecting a large part of the world. His intent was to contrast the high financial cost of the American and Iraq conflict with what he saw as other socially beneficial schemes deserving of similar spending. The spending of comparable amounts to £52 billion that had already been allocated toward the conflict could, he felt, be far better spent in assuaging the problems to which he alludes.

Some of his propositions are eminently sensible. For example, who does not want to make “the world a fairer, cleaner, healthier place”? Or, provide an education for the “estimated 120 million kids world-wide (who) never see a classroom”? Who would not want to solve the health problems caused by the “lack of clean water (which) causes 80 per cent of health problems in most developing countries? One in four people still can’t get a clean glass of water”. It is easy to comprehend that “a billion people go to bed hungry every night”, which is “a fact so awful you have to imagine you’re one of them to really take it in.” A straw poll on these ideas conducted almost anywhere would produce the sort of unanimity usually only found amongst ballots conducted by dictators and despots. Surely a conclusion drawn from these facts alone is that here are issues which require immediate action to resolve them? Does not this resolution require co-ordinated collective global action?

All capitalist states spend vast sums of money on ‘defence’ forces

Freedland writes of the United Nations’ targets to eliminate “extreme poverty and hunger”. As he notes, at present poorer countries are indebted to richer ones to the amount of £32 billion pounds. The United Nations Development Goals (all quotes taken from its website) notes that “the Millennium Development Goals are an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty and improving lives”. The targets include:

“Halve the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and those who suffer from hunger. More than a billion people still live on less than US$1 a day . . . Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five. Every year nearly 11 million young children die before their fifth birthday, mainly from preventable illnesses. By 2015, reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. By 2020 achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.”

While those who need ‘defending’ starve

The problems themselves are highly visible. Many individuals and agencies are dedicated to eradicating them. Many resources are expended in pursuit of a final solution to poverty, hunger and disease. But under the present social system, capitalism, this is a labour of Sisyphus.

With which remedies proposed by Freedland, by the dis-United Nations, by various charities, by non-governmental organisations, by pontificating politicians, by genuinely concerned citizens, and by those existing on a dollar a day, does the Socialist Party disagree? Answer: The supposed solution of throwing money, or rather, trickling money at the problem.

Why? Because even if the global ruling class wanted to palliate the condition of those surviving in nineteenth century conditions it has so many other things to divert and engage its attention. Things such as safeguarding energy supplies, protecting profits, and brainwashing workers into continued acceptance of a social system which perpetuates the environment which condemn so many in the world to an unfair, dirty, unhealthy place. This is not to say that some, probably many, of the capitalist class are not as appalled and angered by the plight of other human beings as anyone else. But they are, like us all, immersed in a system predicated on profit for profit, not need. There’s not much profit to be made from those unable to spend more than a dollar a day. Freedland is right, however, to call for co-ordinated global action with the immediate priority of resolving the myriad problems which capitalism creates but cannot rectify. Only world socialism can provide the framework to do that.

So the question is, when do we adopt the only rational alternative to the existing social system? Do you really want to wait until 2015 to partly ameliorate, if at all, problems caused by, and perpetuated by, capitalism?

Dave Coggan

News from the madhouse (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair and God

Tony Blair is expecting an interview – in due course – with God: he told a journalist (as the Times, of 3 May, phrased it) that “I’m ready to meet my Maker and answer for those who have died or who have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions”. This, of course, is the get-out of rulers down the ages. Rulers have always told the ruled, we will judge you here and now, and execute sentence upon you; if you ask who will judge us, it will be an old boy with a long beard in the sky after we’ve died. But if you’ve been charged with failing to pay your council tax, or parking on a double yellow line, don’t tell the judge you will answer for your actions in a few years’ time, when you have popped your clogs: he won’t wear it. Only rulers get away with that line.

Line of least resistance

People criticise Blair for his new slogan in foreign affairs: “find what George Bush wants, and do the same”. But Blair has his reasons. To start with, it simplifies matters; but also, since Blair has to do his best for the British ruling class, it may work out best for them as things stand in the year 2003. Kids at school sometimes do the same: find the biggest bully in the playground, and suck up to him.

Mortgages

“Mortgages should come with a public health warning because the struggle to keep up with payments is making millions of people sick, said the British Medical Association yesterday” (Times, 7 May). “Many who fall behind with their mortgage payments become so fearful of losing their home that they drink and smoke too much, their relationships break down and they even have more car crashes because they are so preoccupied, one contributor to the BMA report, Housing and Health, said.” While repossession is at its lowest level for years – “only” about a hundred people a week are still losing their homes – any slump in the housing market could trigger “a return to the traumas of the 1990s, when more than a million people had their homes repossessed”.

A sad commentary on what was sold to us as a “home-owning democracy”. But in every way, the present organization of society inevitably involves money worries for millions. Capitalism means the wages system, and that means that those who have to work for their living are dependent on their next pay-packet to buy in the necessary supplies – or sometimes, just to pay the interest on their credit cards, overdrafts, mortgages and all the other borrowings that capitalism imposes on its workers. The “struggle to keep up with payments”, which makes “millions of people sick”, will continue until capitalism makes enough of us sick to bring about a different system. It isn’t only mortgages that need a public health warning: it’s capitalism.

Property is death

People aren’t only made sick by capitalism, they die from it, as you can see in all the many conflicts going on at this moment round the world. But private property kills on a small scale, as well as a large. At a pawnbroker’s shop in north London, a Securitas cash box was being delivered recently. To keep this instalment of private property sacrosanct, the box was fitted with “a small explosive device”, which “released smoke and dye” if anyone tampered with the box (Times, 7 May). As a further protection, the box was handed over through an airlock. Two women assistants were in the staff-only part of the shop, where the valuables were protected “by barred windows and a locked fire exit which needed four keys to open it”. The explosive device malfunctioned, setting fire to the premises, but the women could not get through the locks and bars which surrounded them, and they both died. Firefighters couldn’t get in soon enough. The brother of one of the women called her on his mobile phone, and had to listen helplessly as she choked to death. The inquest jury were told how one of the women put her hand through the bars of the customer’s window, and a fireman held her hand until she died.

Why do people go on supporting capitalism?

Letter: WOMD (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

WOMD

Dear Editors

The two big lies which Blair and Bush used to “justify” the destruction of Iraq’s civilisation and infrastructure and the slaughter of thousands of its citizens are now for all to see.

Lie number one was possession of weapons of mass destruction (WOMD) by Iraq.  Before the war, the regime couldn’t win.  Complying with demands to destroy stocks of WOMD would “prove” it had been in breach of UN resolution since 1991.  Non destruction of alleged stocks would “prove” it continued to be in defiance.

Now it is Blair’s and Bush’s turn to be hanged by their logic.  If after invading and occupying Iraq, there still cannot find WOMD, then what shocking, disgusting deceit have they spun.  If they do find any evidence of WOMD, then lie number two is also torn to shreds, that Saddam’s regime was a dangerous threat to its neighbours and even to Britain and America.  If ever they were going to be used, it was when the life of the regime itself and the  capital Baghdad were under threat from the new crusaders.  They were not.

However, I would not at all be surprised to learn of a little “gardening” activity by the occupation forces in the next few days or weeks and the “discovery” of suspicious munitions, workshops and documents.  Watch out too for the next big lies that most of the evidence was slipped out to Syria, alongwith much of the Iraqi leadership, as part of the softening up process for preparing the public for the next stage of this permanent murderous war.

The real possessors of WOMD are the ruling elites of Britain and America.  They not only have them, they are using them to inflict agonising pain and suffering and carnage on ordinary working people.  We too need to declare a war on such people and their weapons, but a class war, a real war of liberation, a war for emancipation, a war for socialism.

Andrew Northall,

 Isham, Northants

Editorial: The Middle East: capitalist powder keg (2024)

Editorial from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The tit for tat rocket attacks between Israel and Iran have brought to the surface the real issue in the Middle East — whether the US and its allies should or should not control the fossil reserves and the trade routes in the area, which are vital to the operation of capitalism in their parts of the world.

The US position was clearly spelt out in 1980 by President Carter in his State of the Union message:

‘An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force’.

This wasn’t just words. In 1991 the US waged the Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait and in 2003 the Iraq War that led to the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime there. This allowed the US to establish bases in Iraq to add to those in the Gulf states. The civil war in Syria allowed it to establish one there too. Its main asset in the region, however, has been Israel, its support for which has been ‘ironclad’ and which it has armed to the teeth.

With the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the threat to US domination has come from Iran where, in 1979, the pro-US regime was overthrown and replaced by a brutal theocracy. The economic system there remained capitalist and the new regime aggressively pursued Iran’s national capitalist interests against those of the US. Iran, too, has its ‘bases’ throughout the region in the form of ‘proxy’ militias, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Iran is opposed to Israel ostensibly on religious grounds but essentially because Israel is US’s main asset in the region that needs to be destroyed if US control is to be ended.

Israel, as a capitalist state in its own right, has its own agenda. Its present rulers aspire to protect its existence as a separate state, to establish its rule over the whole of the former Ottoman province of Palestine; which involves the permanent political repression of the non-Jewish population living there. As far as the US is concerned, this is a diversion from why it supports Israel and undermines Israel’s usefulness to them.

In this sense Israel’s savage war of retaliation on Hamas and the whole population of Gaza for Hamas’s massacre of Israeli citizens on 7 October is a horrific sideshow.

Where all this will end is unclear. But one thing is not. The Middle East is a powder keg as a result of a conflict between capitalist states over who shall control raw material resources, and the trade routes to transport these out of the region. Capitalism’s competitive struggle for profits breeds such conflicts. Wars, the threat of war, and the waste of armaments will exist as long as capitalism does.

Iraq in Chaos (2007)

From the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to reports in the papers and on the television, Iraq is now falling apart. Why?

After the September 11 2001 attacks on several American targets, it was obvious that someone was going to suffer. America had been involved, victoriously, in two world wars, virtually without enduring any damage at home. The US is now easily the world’s most powerful country, and it had been openly attacked. It is all reminiscent of what happens in the school playground. The biggest bully is hit, accidentally or on purpose, by a stray football, and therefore loses face; so he has to get back his status as a tough guy by beating up the first shivering youngster he can catch.

From an American point of view, the obvious targets were Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan was run by sympathizers with the extreme brand of Islam which had just produced the attacks on America, so an invasion could be justified by those who support American capitalism. The argument about Iraq was much harder. Saddam Hussein was an appalling tyrant, but he was what is called a secular Muslim. He hated fundamentalists. Anyone suspected of al-Qaeda leanings Saddam simply butchered, along with any other opponents he could get his hands on. But America had been much criticized for calling off its last invasion: it feared that to overthrow the Saddam regime would make Iran too powerful in the Middle East, and so it stood twiddling its thumbs while Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam, believing that at last help was coming, rose in force, and were brutally slaughtered.

If Bush seriously wanted allies, friends, and helpers, against al-Qaeda, Saddam was a leading candidate. But Bush had lost face, someone had to suffer, and Saddam was so revolting that no one could feel sorry for him. And, of course, Iraq has tremendous reserves of oil, second only to those of Saudi Arabia. So Iraq became the target. The awkward fact that many Iraqis would be slain could be ignored as irrelevant. (According to various estimates the dead are “only” 30,000, or perhaps 150,000, or 650,000 – but who’s counting? Certainly there are very many more than the 3000 killed in the September 11 attacks on the US) The fact remained that America had been openly assailed, so someone had to pay.

When it became clear that Bush and Blair were determined to invade Iraq, anybody who wondered what on earth was happening could have found out by getting a book out of the library. The country called “Iraq” had been invented by Britain at the Versailles Conference after the 1914-18 War, to put together the bits of the Turkish Empire which (since the Turks had been on the losing side) had fallen to Britain’s share. (It was called a “mandate”, but in effect the new country was incorporated into the British Empire; and it had the long-term effect that as Saddam’s thugs tortured, maimed, and killed, at home, or crashed into foreign countries, the required military wear was reminiscent of impeccable British uniforms.)

Britain had earlier promised to create “Kurdistan”, a homeland for the Kurds, since after all it was claimed that the 1914-18 War had been fought to protect the rights of small nations, such as Serbia and Belgium; but finally Britain decided that it wanted some of this Kurdistan for itself, so forgot the promise. At Versailles Britain’s bit of Kurdistan (with its oil wells) was put together with a Shia area further south (with more oil wells) along with a Sunni area in the middle which joined them together, and the resulting dog’s dinner was called Iraq.

This new creation ignored nearly 1400 years of Muslim history. In the new faith of Islam, religious leaders were so powerful that they controlled, or owned, everything of importance, and were therefore the ruling class. When Muhammad died in 632 A.D. a conflict broke out between his companions and his relatives for the future leadership of the movement, and thus the supreme power in the area now subject to Islam: one party favoured Muhammad’s best friend, Abu Bakr, the other party favoured his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. The rewards of leading the new movement were so great that much fighting and bloodshed followed. The Sunni faction won, beating the Shia faction, but the contest had created much bitterness. Since then the two sides have hated each other with a venom in comparison with which Ian Paisley and the Pope are old chums.

In the Muslim countries, either there is a large Sunni majority and a small Shia minority, or a large Shia majority (as in Iran) and a small Sunni minority. In both cases the minority keeps its head well down and makes sure it presents no threat to the power of the dominant belief. That is how those countries have survived without civil war. But in Iraq, which was only cobbled together to suit British interests, there is a large Sunni minority – 20 percent, while the Shias are only 60 percent, since another 20 percent are Kurds (and other small minorities such as the Assyrians and Turkmen). Figures like those are a recipe for disaster. Not only is there the Sunni-Shia chasm, but since both parties are Arabs, the Kurds (consisting of often-persecuted minorities in several countries) hate them both almost as much as they hate each other.

Iraq was kept in order, and could only be kept in order, by a non-democratic regime. For the first part of its existence the British Empire provided the necessary autocracy: a rebellious movement in the early 1920s was settled by dropping bombs on dissident villages (which was where the young airman called Arthur Harris, later Bomber Harris, was converted to the virtues of area bombardment from the air – though of course the rebel Iraqis had no fighter aircraft or anti-aircraft weapons, so it was really a Sunday school outing, so to speak, for the bombers).

Britain then established a line of client kings, who were given a spurious “independence”. The last of the these client monarchs, Feisal II, was murdered with his whole household in July 1958, while his Prime Minister, attempting to escape from Baghdad dressed as a woman, was also captured and executed. Abdul Qassim, who led the rebellion, was similarly executed at the next coup in 1963. Then came a succession of dictators (sometimes supported by Britain, sometimes overturned if they got out of line), produced by vicious gang warfare among the strong-arm boys. The last one was perhaps the worst of them, Saddam Hussein, who like Stalin established himself firmly in power by murdering thousands of opponents in his own party and outside it.

None of this, though all of it is easily discoverable at the nearest public library, was apparently known to Bush or Blair. After the first excuse, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, was found to be false, the next claim was that the invaders were going to establish a united democratic Iraq. It was clear from the beginning to anybody who had a library ticket that the invaders could have a united Iraq if they wanted it, or they could bring democracy to the Iraqis if they wanted to, but what they could not have was a united democratic Iraq. The beginning of Iraqi democracy would also be the end of Iraqi unity. The hatred felt since Muhammad’s death between Sunnis and Shias had been exacerbated (if that were possible) by the fact that Saddam was a Sunni, and favoured Sunnis in his rule; so the detestation felt by Shias for Sunnis was redoubled. Clearly removing the iron grip of the tyrant Saddam would let loose all this desperate acrimony – and, of course, it has done. It is strange that none of the many high-powered advisers who surround Bush and Blair could work this out.

The net result of all the soldiers’ blood, Treasury billions, and hatred throughout the Muslim world, which the invasion has brought America and Britain, is that the Islamic fundamentalists (who lasted in Iraq only until Saddam could drag them to the gallows) are now triumphant. Men not wearing beards and women not wearing veils both risk being attacked. The education of women is now taboo. The Sunni and Shia “militias” – armed gangs – routinely slaughter victims from the opposite community. Arabs and Kurds raid each other. The Christian minority is under threat. (Paradoxically they apparently think they were much better off under Saddam than they are now.) The handful of Jews left in Baghdad (137,000 Iraqi Jews left or were driven out after the establishment of Israel) were able to worship in their one remaining mosque under Saddam; since the invasion, they do not dare to do so.

The allegation of Bush and Blair that they were driving Islamic fundamentalism out of Iraq is now shown to be exactly mistaken; they have succeeded only in bringing it into Iraq. Capitalism cannot even succeed in bringing about all the results that the capitalists want – even the strongest capitalist state in the world cannot achieve all its aims; so what chance has capitalism of bringing about the results that the rest of us want?

Alwyn Edgar

Voice From The Back: The Futility Of Reformism (2009)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Futility Of Reformism

“One result of Ethiopia’s dreadful famine in 1984, when at least 1m starved to death, was the invention of celebrity activism on behalf of the world’s most miserable. Band Aid, then Live Aid, then even more sophisticated networking and the airing of starving children on television helped persuade rich countries’ governments to double aid to Africa as part of a wider set of promises to meet the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals laid out in 2000, the first of which is to ‘eradicate extreme poverty and hunger’ by 2018. Despite progress in setting up early-warning systems, better procurement methods and the rapid delivery of nutrition in the form of foil packets of plumpy nuts, the Horn of Africa has remained a hunger zone. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says the present drought is the worst there since 1984. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is usually slow to press the panic button, says it may be the tragedy of the decade. At least 17.5m people, the agencies reckon, may face starvation.” (Economist, 30 October) This is typical of the futility of a policy of reformism, many well-intentioned people spend an enormous amount of energy and time in trying to patch up capitalism only to find that instead of a million starving to death they now have over 17 million threatened with the same fate. The only way to solve this awful problem is to abolish the system that produces it and bring about world socialism.

The Cost Of War (1)

Many workers in the USA believe that with the election of a new president all their troubles are over, but the realities of capitalism will soon shatter that illusion. The US must compete in the world-wide struggle for markets and raw materials and to do so they need an immense military budget. How immense was recently revealed. “As President-elect Obama plans for his first budget early next year, the Pentagon is asking for a record amount, according to a senior Pentagon official. The official said the Pentagon’s baseline request being sent to the White House will be $524 billion for fiscal 2010, $9 billion more than last year’s $515 billion baseline request.” (CNN.com, 19 November)

The Cost Of War (2)

When governments count the cost of war they use dollars and pounds and figure what strategic gains or losses have been made, but workers have a much more brutal and realistic way of accounting. Here it is. “As of Monday, Nov. 17, 2008, at least 4,200 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes eight military civilians killed in action. At least 3,392 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers. The AP count is the same as the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Monday at 10 a.m. EDT. The British military has reported 176 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one death each.” (Associated Press, 17 November)

Dole Queue Dictionary

Everyday you can read about the mounting figures of unemployment. This used to be called “getting the sack”, “getting the bullet” or in Scotland getting “your jotters”, but we live in more sophisticated times so they sugarcoat it with terms like “being surplus to requirements” or some such business-speak. We think that Nokia must take the prize though. “Is your firm experiencing a ‘synergy-related headcount restructuring‘? This, probably the most ghastly euphemism yet encountered for mass sacking, has been invented by Nokia. Indeed, so proud of it are they that they repeat it, or different versions of it, nine times in a comparatively short announcement.” (Times, 22 November) As a worker I have been sacked, screwed and sent down the road but “headcount restructuring” sounds even more painful.

A Dog’s Life

Two recent news items illustrate how distorted human values have become inside capitalism. “A wealthy female surgeon has commissioned a £1.4 million kennel for her two Great Danes, next to her second home on the exclusive Lower Mill Estate, near Cirencester. The kennel has a Jacuzzi, a plasma screen TV, thermostatically controlled beds, a £150,000 music system and a security gate with retinal scanner.” (Times, 26 November) “Fears are being raised there could be a jump in the winter death toll. An Age Concern poll of 2,300 people found many over 60s were worried about being able to heat their homes because of soaring energy prices. And with a one of the coldest winters for some years predicted, the charity said the death toll could rise. It comes after figures for England and Wales suggested there was a 7% jump in extra deaths last year despite a relatively mild winter.” (BBC News, 27 November) A pampered life for dogs but no thermostatically controlled beds for shivering old workers, that is how capitalism operates.

Material World: The End Of National Sovereignty? (2008)

The Material World Column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Globalization versus National Capitalism

In 1648 the first modern diplomatic congress established a new political order in Europe, based for the first time on the principle of “national sovereignty.” This principle drew a sharp dividing line between foreign and domestic affairs. Each “national sovereign” was given free rein within the internationally recognized borders of his state. No outsider had any right to interfere. Recognized borders were inviolable. The “sovereign” was originally simply a prince; later the term was applied to any effective government.

National sovereignty facilitated the undisturbed development of separate national capitalisms – British, French, German, American, and so on. Interstate boundaries were stabilized. Governments were able to take protectionist measures to defend home manufacturers against foreign competition.

Even today the principle of national sovereignty is far from dead. It is enshrined in the United Nations Charter: Chapter VII authorizes the Security Council to impose sanctions or use armed force only in the event of a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.”

National sovereignty undermined

But in practice national sovereignty has been deeply undermined – first of all, by the emergence of a global economy dominated by huge transnational corporations. International financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and IMF have largely taken over economic policy making. Indebtedness leaves many states with merely the formal husk of independence.

Some groups of states have “pooled” part of their sovereignty in supranational regional institutions. The prime example is the European Union.

The old interstate system has also been destabilised by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the USSR into 26 new states, four of which lack international recognition. The decision of the West to recognize the independence of Kosovo from Serbia has set a precedent that makes it easier to carve up other states. Of course, the “independence” of Kosovo – occupied by NATO forces, governed by officials from the European Union, its constitution drafted at the US State Department – is purely notional. Russia has now retaliated by recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Although this will encourage secessionist movements inside Russia, blocking Georgia’s accession to NATO is evidently a higher priority (see September’s Material World).

Legitimising aggression

National sovereignty is not only undermined in practice, but also contested in theory.

Thus, in recent years the United States and its closest allies have sought to legitimise their military attacks on other states. True, such attacks are nothing new. What is new is open advocacy of the principle of aggression. The main rationales used are the prevention of nuclear proliferation, counter-terrorism and humanitarian intervention (see August’s Material World).

It is instructive to compare the Gulf War of 1991 with the current war against Iraq. The Gulf War, at least ostensibly, was launched in defence of the principle of national sovereignty, violated by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The elder Bush resisted pressure to “finish the job” – occupy Iraq and throw out the Ba’athist regime – out of concern that it would lead to the breakup of Iraq and, in particular, a new Kurdish state that would destabilise the whole region. Such considerations have not deterred his son.

Globalisation of capital, fragmentation of states

Paradoxically, the fragmentation of states is a natural corollary of the globalisation of capital. From the point of view of the transnational corporations, states no longer have important policy-making functions. It is enough if they enforce property rights and maintain basic infrastructure in areas important for business. Small states can do these jobs as well as large ones. In fact, they have definite advantages. They are more easily controlled, less likely to develop the will or capacity to challenge the prerogatives of global capital.

Global versus national capitalism

All the same, there is nothing inevitable about globalisation. It has lost impetus recently, and may even have passed its zenith. One sign is the disarray within the WTO. Another is Russia’s change of direction: in contrast to the Yeltsin administration, which was politically submissive and kept the country wide open to global capital, the Putin regime reasserted national sovereignty, expelled foreign firms from strategic sectors of the economy, and ensured the dominant position of national (state and private) capital.

Global versus national capitalism has emerged as an important divide in world politics. This divide exists, first of all, within the capitalist class of individual countries. Thus, even in the US, the citadel of globalisation, some capitalists – currently excluded from power – are oriented toward the home market and favour national capitalism. And even in Russia some capitalists support globalisation.

Nevertheless, the pattern of political forces differs from country to country, and as a result the global/national divide is reflected in international relations. Here the “globalisers,” led by the US, confront in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China and the Central Asian states) an embryonic alliance of national capitals bent on restoring the principle of national sovereignty to its former place in the interstate system.

A different perspective

This context clarifies the difference between our perspective as socialists and the attitude of anti-globalisation activists. Being against capitalist globalisation is not the same as being against capitalism in general. We have ample past experience of a world of competing national capitalisms – quite enough to demonstrate that there is no good reason for preferring such a world to a world under the sway of global capital. The main problem with the movement against globalisation is that it can be mobilized so easily in the interests of national capital, whatever the intentions of its supporters.

To be fair, some anti-globalisation activists are aware of this danger. Acknowledging that humanity faces urgent problems that can only be tackled effectively at the global level, they emphasize that they are not against globalisation as such: they are only against the sort of globalisation that serves the interests of the transnational corporations. This then leads them to explore ideas of globalisation of an “alternative” kind. These ideas at least point in the right direction. Socialism is also an alternative form of globalisation – a globalisation of human community that abolishes capital.

Stefan

Greasy Pole: The Thick of It (2010)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundant evidence of how a grateful nation unstintingly cares for its military heroes as they return, too often less than complete, from the battlefields has been supplied by Defence Minister Kevan Jones. Anyone who in combat in Afghanistan is unlucky enough to lose their penis – shot off, blown to pieces, burnt away – can put in a claim for compensation which might amount to £9,000. As expected of a properly prudent minister of the crown, Jones made it clear that such generosity applies only when the entire organ is lost; in cases of lesser damage, when “partial use” remains, the payment will be something under £3,000. Naturally such claims will have to originate with the appropriate form, signed and witnessed by a suitably qualified person. No doubt supporting evidence will be required. Then the claim will be processed through an appointed panel of specialists in the regular stream of applications for council tax relief, job seekers allowance, home carers…

Cenotaphs

We have, in fact, been here before. After the guns had fallen silent in 1918 the then government did their best to live up to the infamous Lloyd George promise about post-war Britain being a Place Fit For Heroes To Live In by making payments to survivors of the horrors who had left bits of themselves out on the battlefields. Perhaps Kevan Jones learned something from this for the 1918 compensation was carefully calculated with an appropriate scale of payments – so much for a missing hand, a bit more for an arm above the elbow, more again for above the elbow and the same kind of arrangement applying to missing legs. It was thought prudent to make an exception for anyone with a mangled head or face – nothing would be paid for any damage above the neck. This was done in accordance with regulations made in the safety of the Commons to be implemented by bureaucrats in their offices; in neither place was anybody likely to lose any limbs. It conformed to sound actuarial principles, taking into account that a lot of injuries “above the neck” would effectively deprive a potential claimant of any lasting interest in compensation, or of the need for any recognition of their plight other than a place on the local war memorials which were already being designed up and down the country (Edwin Lutyens had quickly drawn on the back of an envelope a rough sketch for a temporary Cenotaph, made of wood and plaster, for London). But never mind – it was, after all, the thought that mattered.

Chilcott

A natural response would be, in bewildered rage, to consign the episode to a file marked Madness. Except that this does nothing towards unravelling the matter. We are compelled to deal with a social system which does not just tolerate the insanity of war but actually nurtures it as the most rational available way of purging itself of certain problems. As the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war – there have already been two others, both of them predictably unrewarding and dishonest – is already informing us, capitalism needs to be a society of conflicts, driven by a momentum of its own which is lubricated by a disregard of inconvenient facts. Infuriatingly, we need to accept that the mass of capitalism’s people – who fight in the wars, willing to be maimed and killed – readily comply with and justify the entire disreputable chaos. It is almost as if nothing more is expected of a system which shows itself capable of massive human progress were it not hampered by the priorities of property; all that is demanded is that the dead are disposed of with due ceremony and the wounded are compensated according to an official scale.

Government

And for all of this there is always the essential machinery of government – that organ which millions of its subjects vote for under the impression that thereby they are ensuring a benevolent eye will watch over their welfare. Supposedly fulfilling this function are the ministers and secretaries of state on one level after another down to the achingly ambitious bag carriers and beyond, whose function persuades them to be in love with the protection of their protocol, its systemic committees and pressure groups where back-stabbing is an essential way of life. One who was until recently employed in the service of this odious machinery – so devotedly that when he retired he was rewarded with a gleaming medal to hang on his chest from a dazzling ribbon – needs very little encouragement to lift a corner of the shrouded mysteries of what is called democratic government. A minister’s special adviser by trade, he recalls that if his boss was being harassed by too persistent a straggle of complainants his confidential advice would be to surprise them with an offer of a personal hearing when he could make any needful promises, to be ignored once the other side had gone trustingly on their way. This kind of tactic is possible because a government has a more enduring energy than the most stubborn of protesters, whose pre-occupation must be with getting their living.

Tucker 

Some flavour of this nauseous brew was the theme of the recent TV series The Thick Of It – the conflicting ambitions, the manipulation, the treachery…We should not be unduly influenced in our response to the series by it being too flagrantly a caricature, particularly in the odious spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (who will probably end up in the House of Lords).Tucker had to learn to communicate through unrelenting abuse to defend and assert himself and his career; it was just that he was more determined, more colourful, than the others. The affairs of capitalism must be conducted to meet its nature as a society – as abrasively as demanded by the privileges of class monopoly. It is in this process that predators such as Malcolm Tucker come to the surface.. And a lot more – the wars, the contemptuous treatment of the victims, the deception and cynicism with which it is all defended. Nothing can compensate us for this.

Ivan

Guerrilla war in Iraq (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

During a recent visit to Baghdad, US hawk Paul Wolfowitz, the brains behind the US invasion of Iraq, told a press conference that the “main problem was that there were too many foreigners in Iraq”. For many in Iraq there are indeed “too many foreigners”. Over 134,000 of them are wearing US combat uniforms and their casualty rate is growing in the world’s newest guerrilla war.

The US is keen to put down the idea that this is in fact a guerrilla war, that there is real resistance to the US occupation. However, according to Iraqi sources there are some 40 plus organisations resisting US occupation, from Baathists and “Communists” to out-and-out nationalists and religious factions. Moreover it is not the work of Islamic jihadists crossing the borders of Syria and Iran in the name of Allah, but appears to be largely indigenous, comes from all levels and sections of society and is very much de-centralised – and this, military experts tell us, is the first stage of a guerrilla war

One military intelligence spokesman in Iraq has suggested there are 50,000 insurgents in Iraq. Another Washington military analyst, having received a copy of the recent internal CIA document ‘Appraisal of the Situation’, described it as a “bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger.” The report, he claims, suggests “we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course. There are thousands in the resistance – not just a core of Baathists. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that.” (Guardian, 13 November).

In early November, guerrilla forces brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing sixteen soldiers and two weeks before that successfully destroyed two M1 Abram tanks. On 12 November a suicide bombing of a military base in Nasariya left 25 dead, including 18 Italian troops. Classic ingredients of your run–of-the-mill guerrilla war.

Oil pipelines are beings sabotaged almost on a daily basis and it is becoming a full time job for the authorities in Baghdad to massage the statistics and hide the reality of the oil pipeline attacks from the outside world. Apparently it is only when a camera crew actually captures such sabotage on film that it is reported.

Robert Fisk, commented in the Independent on 7 October on the serious concerns the US has for dwindling revenues from oil flowing north, said:

“The cost of making it flow could produce an economic crisis in the US. And it is this – rather than the daily killing of young American soldiers – that lies behind the Bush administration’s growing panic. Washington has got its hands on the biggest treasure chest in the world – but it can’t open the lid. No wonder they are cooking the books in Baghdad”.

The Bush administration promised this would be a quick war and that Iraqis would be dancing in the streets celebrating their liberation. In truth, there have been far more US troops killed since the since the war “officially” ended than were killed during the combat phase itself, and those Iraqis dancing in the streets do so around smouldering US helicopters and tanks.

In recent weeks there has been a move in the US to focus attention away from the Iraqi quagmire and onto domestic affairs – whilst the latter is also a dire cause for concern, it is less a disaster than the operation to “liberate” Iraq.

Chief US civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, remarked at the beginning of November, rather pathetically it would seem, that life in Baghdad is back to normal. By all accounts life under US occupation is is at least as bad as under Saddam. There is little, if any, tangible reconstruction and mass unemployment except for the re-recruitment of Iraq’s previous Baathist security forces to help maintain law and order. According to the Ministry of Labour out of a population of 25 million, 12 million are now looking for work.

There were initially plans to bring in Indian and Pakistani troops to help police Iraq and speed up the “liberation” process, but those countries then expressed doubts and declined. Turkish troops were proposed, but the Turkish government, faced with domestic resistance to the idea, also demurred. Poland may send troops, but it is to be bore in mind that opinion polls (no pun intended) show there is much opposition to the idea. Even Italy may even reconsider its position now in light of the recent attack upon its own forces.

A present Washington strategy for the malaise is “Iraqification” (after Vietnamisation), or in other words the training of 170,000 Iraqi soldiers, police and border guards and dropping the sorry mess in their laps. But even this has its problems as such forces have already been attacked as “collaborators” and there is a tendency for guerrillas to recruit from within such security forces, making them extremely vulnerable. Furthermore, would Iraqi soldiers shoot, or detain their fellow Iraqis on behalf of US capitalism plc?

Of course invading armies have met such resistance throughout history – whether it be the British, French or Americans. The attacks upon US troops in Fallujah in recent weeks are no different to those suffered by the French at the hands of Algerian guerrillas and the US conscripts in the jungles of Korea and Vietnam. The US response at the moment is to retaliate with heavy air strikes and armoured assaults on suspected guerrilla targets, a move that some fear will only heighten support for the insurgency and further destabilise the region.

If anything, these past seven months since Bush announced his victory in Iraq have revealed that oil is not priced in US dollars, but in human blood. It casts its shadow of death indiscriminately, sparing none – women and children, UN worker and Red Cross worker, Iraqi policeman or US soldier alike. Washington believed the US take-over of Iraq would be easy and that the petro-profits would soon be flowing stateside. What they did not count on was having to fight a drawn out guerrilla war to secure Iraq’s black gold.

John Bissett