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

Why is Iraq Singled Out? (1996)

From the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

“When you abuse your people and threaten your neighbours you must pay the price”

This pearl of wisdom was uttered by President Bill Clinton after the US had fired 27 Cruise missiles during the first of two attacks on Iraq by US B-52 bombers in early September.

You don’t need to be an expert in international affairs to realise how pathetic and hypocritical his statement is.

Clinton was attempting to justify the US attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein had ordered his troops into Kurdish-held northern Iraq. He seemed totally unaware that Turkey, a NATO ally has been bombing the Kurds in northern Turkey on a regular basis for years — Kurds, like those in Irbil, attacked by Saddam, who demand autonomy — and from the same air base used by the US to attack the Iraqi army.

We might well ask why such logic is not used as a pretext to bomb Indonesia, whose government ruthlessly suppresses the people there and has murdered 200,000 since the invasion of East Timor some twenty years ago. Or why the US is not currently intervening in the present 25 ongoing conflicts in which people are “abused” and neighbours “threatened”.

One would think, judging by the number of separate occasions on which the US has bombed Iraq, that it would be easier for the US to oust Saddam, as they have done to countless other world leaders in the past. Bombing raids are, after all, expensive. The Cruise missiles alone that were fired at Iraq in early September cost $42 million.

However, what should have become apparent by now is that the US does not want Saddam toppled. He is, in fact, invaluable to the furtherance of US interests for a number of reasons,

Firstly, and most obviously, Saddam, as has been the case in the past, acts as a buffer to the spread of militant Islam from Iran, which itself regards the US as the “Great Satan” and is feared by the pro-US regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Secondly, if Saddam is toppled, there is a strong chance that Iraq will break up into warring factions that will result in further regional instability.

Thirdly, so long as Saddam, the world’s number one “monster”, remains in power, he remains unpredictable and thus frightens his neighbours, who are only too willing to buy western arms and defence systems. Since 1990, the countries bordering Iraq have spent $75 billion on such hardware.

Furthermore, Saddam provides the US President and his cohorts with a timely vote-catcher. Unless you’ve been on a desert island or in a coma these past few months, you will know that the US presidential elections take place this November – elections already dragged down to gutter level by sex scandals and the like. The attack on Iraq can also be seen as a piece of electioneering aimed at a gullible and jingoistic electorate. Indeed, an ABC News poll, carried out after the first attack on Iraq, found that 81 percent of those questioned were in favour of it.

Big Game

Perhaps most importantly the US attack on Iraq should be seen as part of a larger game plan, with Saddam’s aggression not the issue at all.

By far the biggest threat to US interests in the Middle East is Iran, a country of 60 million ruled by Islamic fundamentalists who detest the US; a country with a huge army and arsenal to match and a probable nuclear capability.

The US has for years made every attempt to castigate the “mad mullahs” of Iran and turn world opinion against them, blaming them for every explosion from Saudi Arabia to the downing of an airliner 8 miles east of New York two months ago.

August had in fact brought much pressure on the US government to bomb Iran. “US prepares air strikes against I ran” ran a headline in the Sunday Telegraph (4 August) while a day later the Times reported: “Pressure grows for US raids on Iran” (5 August).

However, the Pentagon is fully aware that any attack on Iran would result in a far greater response than anything elicited from Iraq. Most certainly the bombing of the American heartland by Iranian terrorists.

With this in mind the attack on Iraq was also a message intended for Iran “mess with our interests and this is what you’ll get” — ‘a message far less costlier than any attack on Iran would be.

Again, with the US still looking for its hegemonic raison d’être, the anti-Communist passport now expired, the Middle East is still as good a place as any for the US to assert its presence on the world stage, and Saddam is as good a target as any to bully and to show anyone watching you’re still policeman of the world.

Hate and War

For a bigoted white American, the average Middle Easterner is an ideal target of hate and one that confirms the average prejudice. They are generally of a different hue. They have strange cultures and customs. They have a different religion and speak a funny language and are always staging wars. What other motives do you need to convince an already brainwashed audience (Clinton fans) that they (the Iraqis) have no place in the civilised world and that it is okay to bomb them?

It can well be argued that the Iraqi working class has more than paid the price for Iraq’s brief incursion into Kuwait back in August of 1989.

Six years of sanctions have not only crippled the economy, but have also, the World Health Organisation argues, resulted in 500,000 deaths from want of decent food and medicine. The sewage system has collapsed, disease is every-where and there are 5,000 new cases of malnutrition every month.

A plan to allow Iraq to sell $2 millions-worth of oil to buy food and medical supplies (as if this is sufficient for a population of 17 million) was supposed to come into operation at the end of September. This has currently been suspended. One thing is certain, the future looks bleak for the average Iraqi.

All of this is not to say that Saddam deserves a break and should not incur the wrath of the world, even though, he argued, he had been invited into Kurdish–held territory by Kurdish leaders. And neither do we care to imply that the US were wrong insofar as they “misinterpreted” Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991, which made no mention of justifiable attacks on Iraq or of no-fly zones.

The entire episode should reveal the desperate lengths the world’s ruling capitalist elite will go to secure their own interests and that all conflicts, when properly analysed, are the result of the desire of a minority to make a profit at the expense of the majority — whether through trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets or mineral wealth. The crisis in the Middle East actually fits all these criteria.

John Bissett

Turkey’s ambivalent elections (2023)

From the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Turkey’s modern political history is one of genocides, state-sponsored political assassinations, demonstrators machine-gunned by unknown actors or tear-gassed by police and army, and the Left arrested, executed, imprisoned en masse, or forced to flee: all under the ever-present threat of army intervention, with its military intelligence heavily exposed to the CIA.

And elections, such as this one.

Turkish political dynamics express themselves through a multiplicity of parties which then form coalitions to fight elections, which are essentially bipolar. The names of the parties shift as they fracture or are suppressed by the state: compared to European politics there is a bewildering turnover. Since 1982 Turkish courts have suppressed 19 political parties, violating the ECHR’s Convention on Human Rights in almost all cases it has reviewed, mainly for expressing Kurdish political interests. The two main reasons given are that the party is in conflict with ‘the indivisible integrity of the State with its territory and nation’, or ‘the principles of the democratic and secular republic’. This is a fair summary of the vague limits of Turkish political activity, though democracy gets shot on the court steps.

Deep state

Then there is the ‘Deep state’, a term which Turkey originated and Trump merely co-opted. This was exposed to the public in the Susurluk scandal, where a Turkish mafia assassin, his model girlfriend, the Istanbul chief of police, and a Turkish MP, were involved in a car crash (only the MP survived). But it was and presumably is a constant feature of Turkish political life: an unaccountable (except perhaps to the CIA) association of military intelligence, the criminal underworld, and enabling fascist political figures, originating as part of Operation Gladio but with its own autonomy. Its relative strength is demonstrated by its ability to slay those investigating them, including most probably a former prime minister, Turgut Özal, and avoid punishment. Its control of the Turkish heroin trade, worth more than the entire Turkish state budget at the time ($50 billion to $48 billion) accounted for much of their power, as well as their American allies in the shadows.

Closely linked with the military, and formed with its aid, are the ultra-right/fascist party, the MHP, and their youth/terror wing, the ‘Grey Wolves’. Opposing them is a strong ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ tradition, often fragmented, often suppressed, often imprisoned. Their parties form new initials as quickly as the courts suppress the old ones. Not content to merely imprison them, in 2000-2001 the authorities forced them out of dormitory prison blocks, where they practised actually existing prison communism, into small three-person cells. There were mass protests, hunger strikes and deaths.

Always there is the issue of religion, though the matter is more complex than it appears: one is reminded of the fable of the Wind and the Sun. The state was aggressively secular, and aggressively against minorities, most of whose identity was in part religious. Politically speaking, expression of religious identity was and is thus in part a matter of cultural rather than religious fervour. Also, secularism is associated with wealth, the middle class, and the western cities of Turkey. As the poor agricultural workers of the Turkish heartland migrated to the cities, religion became a defining, comforting feature of their mutual character as they lived in the spaces left to them, in gecekondus (shacks built overnight) or other poor housing.

Then there are the Kurds, Alevi and Sunni. A genocide in the 1930s killed or displaced many Alevis from their home in Dersim, which was renamed, on maps at least, to Tunceli: the very name, ‘Bronze Fist’, of the genocide operation. And there is the ongoing war against Sunni Kurds in the South East. These remain politically relevant. There are many other nationalities in Turkey, but they were brutalised long ago.

Failed coup

Recent history, since the election of Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Progress Party) in 2002, has seen several changes within this continuity. Corruption has moved to private industry, where new corporate players have emerged: especially in the construction industry, largely responsible for the Eastern earthquake calamity where their cheap and profitable buildings fell down. The army has been suppressed, with mass show trials in the Ergenekon scandal and others, more so since the failed 2016 coup. From a situation where the Army had the standing power via the National Security Council to suppress civil politics, essentially a permanent coup option, now Erdoğan, their victim in the past and now rid of them, has adopted a similar bullying role as president in lieu of restoring civil society. Fethullah Gülen, master of a ‘parallel state’, a network of civil servants and army officers, once Erdoğan’s ally in the shadow war for the deep state, is now an enemy of the state exiled in the US.

In 2017 Erdoğan strengthened the presidency in a constitutional referendum, granting him powers to appoint and sack ministers and issue executive decrees. And in 2018 the last election was carried out still under the ‘state of emergency’ declared 5 days after the coup attempt. All in the context of war at home and abroad, mainly against Kurdish aspirations but also seeking to gain from Syria’s woes. Turkey has a seat at the table in NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, and its restive place in NATO is a matter for constant Western scrutiny and cajoling, especially over the Syrian war, and purchasing Russian arms. All in the context of economically bizarre policies that have seen inflation wipe out savings and drive the population to penury. But the most important recent event is the catastrophic earthquakes of February this year, killing 50,000 and leaving 1.5 million homeless. This last was thought to set the context for the election, making Erdoğan’s general misrule an electoral focus in itself that might attract the disaffected/dispossessed right and harden support among the newly homeless in the South East.

Secular opposition

And so to 14 May 2023. There are three main electoral alliances, two standing for the presidency as well, the candidates being Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (AKP) and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (CHP). The ruling right-wing ‘People’s Alliance’ of the AKP and the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), versus the ‘Nation Alliance’ of the CHP (Republican People’s Party) and five other parties, with support from most other parties from centre-right to ultra-left. There are tensions in both camps – the MHP for example is both virulently opposed to any compromise with the Kurds, such as the current peace process, and also its Turkic ultra-nationalism clashes with Erdoğan’s Islamic dreams. As always though the right is far more cohesive than the centre and left, strange bedfellows united only in opposition: the CHP is the original party of the Turkish state, of Ataturk, and still professes the secularism, nationalism and capitalism that most of its bedfellows in some way disagree with.

The second and only other substantial party in their alliance, the İYİ Parti (Good Party) is a splinter from the MHP, professing to be civic nationalists instead of Turkic nationalists, and good followers of Atatürk: their voter base consists largely of the right wing who are disillusioned with the existing right wing, in other words a classic populist party. This ability of a fragment of the MHP to thus realign leftwards gives some idea of the complexity of Turkish politics, even though most voters will have an imperative which eventually dictates their political choice. The third alliance is the Labour and Freedom Alliance, egalitarian progressives, but almost entirely composed of HDP (Democratic Party of the Peoples) candidates expecting the state closure of their party and so standing as Yeşil Sol (Green Left) candidates. (In the aftermath of the failed 2016 coup more than 10,000 HDP members were imprisoned, including their leaders, on vague accusations of being supporters of terrorism). They are backing Kılıçdaroğlu for president rather than splitting the vote. But while wishing to see the back of the AKP and MHP, they have no reason to love or trust the CHP who when in power suppressed them just as savagely, and so are merely advising their supporters to vote for cholera instead of typhoid in the presidential election.

And the result? In parliamentary terms, Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance has a clear majority, of 322 seats against the Nation Alliance’s 212 and the Labour and Freedom Alliance’s 64. Presidentially also, it would seem that Erdoğan has survived. Neither candidate having 50 percent, the presidency goes to a second round: but with 49.51 percent of the vote to Kilicdaroglu’s 44.88 percent in the first round, the presidency seems all but his to keep. (There was a third candidate, Oğan, with 5 percent, a former contender for the MHP leadership).

The last act will be bruising. Erdoğan used his post-election speech to label his opponents as terrorists, setting the tone. And the earthquake survivors? They have to vote from their registered homes. That means that in order to vote they will have to travel back once more to those ruins from wherever they are billeted in Turkey, at no mean expense of money or time. Exhaustion, as always, tends to work for the incumbent. Time and fate is on Erdoğan’s side.

SJW

Graphic Novel (2023)

Book Review from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Blood Got Mixed. Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. By Janet Biehl. PM Press. 2022. 246pp.

‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish for ‘West’) is the name given by Kurdish nationalists to an area of Northeast Syria largely inhabited by Kurds but also home to Arabs and Assyrian Christians. It is the western part of their aimed-at state of Kurdistan, incorporating areas from Iran in the east, through Iraq and Turkey to Syria in the west, where the majority population is Kurdish-speaking. It is a de facto independent region of Syria, always threatened but not controlled by Turkey and the Syrian government. Currently it is controlled by the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), a vanguard party led by Abdullah Ocalan.

In prison in Turkey (where he still is) Ocalan read and was impressed by the ‘communitarian’ ideas of American social theorist, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who was also the long-term partner of Janet Biehl, the author of this book, developed the idea that the basic unit of society should be a decentralised, face-to-face participatory democracy, which he called ‘municipalism’, practising ‘community support and solidarity’ as opposed to the way ‘capitalism has organised society for competition and manipulation’. The PKK adopted this policy for local decision-making while keeping a firm hand on major political decisions and its militia.

Biehl explains, in a chapter entitled ‘Why I’m Here’, how she first visited the region in 2014 and was attracted to it by its claim to be putting into practice Bookchin’s ‘communitarian’ vision. She carried on visiting the region, most recently in 2019, and it is on her personal experiences and knowledge of the region that she gained over her visits that much of this book is based.

The system of district and local councils there is often held up as a model of democratic co-operative organisation by those seeking an alternative both to authoritarian centralised rule and capitalist democracies of one kind or another. The region has since been subject to aggression, sometimes savage, as by Islamic State forces, and by the Turkish military, who have effectively taken over part of the region spreading death and destruction. Despite this, it survives as a kind of communitarian experiment, but constantly teetering on the edge and, as someone has put it, ‘trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers’.

Biehl has made a brave effort to make sense of this by producing what is termed a graphic novel (though it is not a novel in the normal sense of fiction or imagined reality) which seeks to represent, in art work, commentary and ‘word bubbles’, the history, social organisation and way of living of the multi-ethnic groups that co-exist and intermingle (hence the sub-title ‘Their Blood Got Mixed’) in this small border area. She does this in a way that displays her admiration for these people while at the same time not being afraid to show the downsides, often bloody, of the path they have taken. A selection of the titles of the 15 chapters into which the book is divided gives an idea of the areas she covers: Islamic State, A Place of Refugees, Women and Men, Economics, Security, Social Ecology, Democracy, Self-Administration.

Her book illustrates both some of the most disturbing things that have happened to the people of the region, part of which she refers to as ‘the long tortured history of Kurds in the Middle East’. But she also describes, with obvious enthusiasm, some of the most positive and optimistic sides of what she considers they have established. So while, for example, on the one hand a piece of her graphic art pictures an ISIS soldier saying ‘The Koran says it’s permitted to take non-Muslim women and girls captive and rape them’, on the other she vividly brings out the joy experienced by the city of Raqqa at being liberated from the terror of the IS caliphate. She also details the suffering of the region’s people when the Turkish army invaded parts of it in 2018 but at the same time waxes rather lyrical about its system of citizens’ assemblies, committees and regional councils and extols Ocalan’s call for ‘gender equality, a cooperative economy, and ethnic and religious inclusiveness’. Yet even the positive side is complex and she is at pains not to portray it without flaws. She expresses a certain degree of doubt about the claim she hears that ‘our revolution is ecological, stateless and of women’, and it is not hard for the reader to join with her in questioning this given that without exception the women we see in her pictures are wearing hijabs, refer to those who’ve died in the fighting there as ‘martyrs’ and seem steeped in religious belief. She also wonders about the reality of the claims that ‘leadership here gets no special treatment … everyone is a link in the chain’, and recognises that the Bookchin model of a decentralised ‘face-to-face democracy’ and ‘an ecological society based on non-hierarchical relations’ may not be being followed as closely as she would like it to be.

A socialist would add that society in the region continues to use a money economy, markets (even though called ‘cooperative markets’) and buying and selling, which are the very essence of the wider capitalist system, and so does not merit the title ‘revolutionary’. So even if the author sees it as a kind of haven attempting to practice ‘communitarian’ principles, it is nevertheless trapped within the capitalist system and forced to rely on ‘protection’ from outside by coercive state regimes at war with one another. Like all other attempts to ‘go it alone’ in the capitalist world, its survival is perilous to say the least.

Small-scale attempts at establishing anything even slightly different (eg, the abolition of money and trade and ‘free consumption’ in some Republican communities during the Spanish Civil War and the ‘horizontal’ social and economic organisation of the Zapatistas in 20th century Mexico) are ultimately likely to fail. For socialists, in fact, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Howard Moss

Quiz – Ten questions to answer (2003)

From the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

All these quotations are genuine comments, made by the people named – except that we have put in a single sentence in each interview what the person did not say. See if you can guess which is the made-up sentence we have put in.

1. Jack Straw, British Foreign Minister, speaking after a suicide bomb attack in Haifa which killed fifteen people (Times, 6 March): “There is no justification for attacks on innocent civilians. Except, of course, if we carry out the American generals’ plan to send 800 cruise missiles in to Baghdad in the first 48 hours of the planned war.”

2. Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s spokesman, speaking after the same attack in Haifa (Times, 6 March): “We will continue to pursue the path of peace in the Middle East. Except, that is, when we pursue the path of war against Iraq.”

3. Prince Philip (Observer, 29 December): “If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate how much more comfortable aircraft have become; that is, unless you travel on something called economy class, which sounds ghastly. Of course, most things about the lives of poorer people are ghastly, which is why it is so surprising that so many of them turn out at each election and vote for capitalism.”

4. Senior Vatican official (Observer, 29 December): “Illness is a consequence of sin. So the Pope is going to live for ever.”

5. Tony Blair (Times, 1 March): “At some point, you have a duty if you are to offer any leadership to your country in saying why it is we believe there is a real threat from terrorism and these appalling weapons to the security of our countries and to the wider world. Unless, of course, we had Socialism, when neither Iraq nor America nor Britain would have any appalling weapons, and there wouldn’t be any ‘leadership’ either, since people would be able to think and act for themselves.”

6. The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of Westminster, head of the Catholic Church in Britain (Times, 20 February): “It is vital, therefore, that all sides in this crisis engage through the United Nations fully and urgently in a process, including continued weapons inspections, that could and should render the trauma and tragedy of war unnecessary. An even better way to render not only this planned war but all future wars unnecessary – in fact, impossible – is to establish Socialism.”

7. President Bush (Eastern Daily Press, 19 February): “The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security – in this case, security of the people. And if you don’t like leaders, taking decisions which may kill thousands of innocent people, you could always get rid of them by having Socialism.”

8. In an opinion poll, 65 percent of people questioned in the UK (Times, 12 February) said that “although it is right in principle to accept genuine asylum-seekers, we have now accepted our fair share, and cannot accept any more. It is not as if any British people have ever gone to live in other countries, like Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on.”

9. The Pope (Times, 10 February): “One cannot do nothing in the face of terrorist attacks, but equally we cannot be idle in the face of the threats now on the horizon. War is not inevitable. But even if we avoid this war, there are plenty of violent conflicts round the world now as I speak, and there will be a lot of wars in the years to come – you will have to establish Socialism if you really want to make war impossible.”

10. Rezan Fakhraden, a woman badly gassed at the age of five, when Saddam Hussein dropped poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing over 5,000 civilians and injuring many more (Times, 22 February): “I cannot climb more than ten stairs. I cannot run. Sometimes my lungs bleed. I cannot stop coughing and I am often sick. I don’t trust Britain or America at all. They have said nothing about our plight due to the gases for fifteen years. They even supported Saddam then. We have received no medicines from Britain or America in all that time to help us, and now we have no more protection against chemical attack than we had then. Yet we may be the first to get struck. But, of course, hypocrisy is an essential characteristic of all capitalist politicians, including those now using the Halabja gassing to justify attacking Iraq.”

Answers: We have made up the last sentence, and only the last sentence, in each of these statements. All the other quotations on this page are genuine.

Score: 1 – 9: Keep trying. 10. You must have read the Socialist Standard before.

Alwyn Edgar

Letters: No opposition worth mentioning (1995)

Letters to the Editors from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

No opposition worth mentioning

Dear Editors,

Politics is the art or science of administration of affairs; and not the art or science of government as most people think, because the whole concept of government is thrown overboard by all serious students of politics ever since the law of social change was discovered in the middle of the last century.

The concept of "unfolding of productive forces" stands today unchallenged and unassailable; that is: factories, mills, workshops and farms in every country in the world are waiting ready to produce all we need abundantly; in other words, we have a potential plenty today. This is not at all a controversial issue; but only a fact acknowledged by all experts in the field of science and technology.

But why can’t we unfold these productive forces and produce all we need abundantly, and then distribute all over the world?

The real barrier to the unfolding is the lack of knowledge of a new alternative on the part of working people all over the world, and not the opposition of the owners of those productive forces as most people think. That was an old idea held by many in the early stage of the present economic set-up. in the last century, because democracy as we see it today had not developed then, i.e. universal franchise, freedom of speech, and the separation of the executive and the judiciary. After the development of democracy in its full form, it was taken for granted that any minority will be compelled to leave the scene on the emergence of a new majority, with any new idea.

In those days some groups, here and there, held that even an armed conflict is likely between working people and those owners of productive forces in order to defeat them. Now we are in an entirely new situation where we tragically fail to realise the simple truth that there is an alternative to the present way of living. Once this alternative is widely grasped by people everywhere, there is no question of any opposition worth mentioning.

Each and every reader is cordially invited to think over this matter very deeply on the line of discovering any new concrete proposal, which can be implemented in present-day society, through which we can break new ground from where we shall straightaway drive into a new set-up without buying and selling. and producing only for use. 

M. J. Panikkar, 

Kerala, India

Cardboard cut-outs and “collateral damage”

Dear Editors,

Remember the bellicose drum-beating of the Tory cabinet in the Gulf War; or the cheapjack nationalism of their lackeys in the right-wing press; or the American general like some grotesque cardboard cutout from MASH, talking of "collateral damage” in the bombings of women and children?

Of course it was in the interests of all those people in the UN to show illiteracy of our historical culpability in this region. This war was all about oil and less about justice: the little Mussolini still remains, savaging his own people—the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs.

The early 1920s and the British Empire reigns supreme. My late father recalled as a boy, after the First World War, the maimed and blinded veterans of the trenches begging in the streets of Watford. As one of a poor family with eight children, he enlisted at 18 in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. That was in September 1923. Scores of young men in towns throughout the land would have done the same—to face a life of harsh discipline, gruelling 25-mile route marches and abysmal pay of two shillings a day. to escape the crippling unemployment of those times.

In November 1924, the Bedfords were despatched to Iraq, the men travelling like cattle for two days in open trucks, with the bitter desert cold, arriving at the largest British aerodrome east of Suez.

Oil was being discovered in large quantities in Iraq and British military operations were being carried out with a planned and ruthless precision. Patrols of 60 men would guard the huge airfield and Rolls Royce armoured cars would race though villages, with rocks being hurled by the angry local people. In 1925 a Company of the Bedfords (2nd Battalion) became the world’s first airborne troops, when they were flown up to Kurdistan in Vickers Victoria bombers. Here they occupied a ruined fort captured from the Turks in World War One.

One day an order came to despatch a platoon of 36 men into the hills to punish a remote Kurdish village. The Desert Police who dressed like arabs and were a sort of archetypal SAS had alleged that the villagers had shot down a small bi-plane and tortured its geologist pilot to death. My late father was a heliograph signaller in this small punitive force, which by dawn on the third day’s march from the fort surrounded the village. No real resistance was made: yet the village was burned to the ground, hidden underground stores of grain and water destroyed, some men in the village were hung and women, children and old men were driven out into the hills. It was October 1925, with winter coming on. Back at the fort, a brigadier had been flown up from his safe office job and congratulated the platoon on their return, ending with the words: "in three months, that village will cease to exist”.

Those who dispute the authenticity of this engagement will doubtless find it documented in the archive material of the "Bedfords" regiment. More importantly, those who boast about the Gulf War might digest and reflect on with a little humility the incidents described here. As our historical stupidity in Ireland formed a security platform for the IRA, so former arrogance and greed in Iraq, aided by subsequent collusion in arms sales, sowed the seeds for the bullying rise of Saddam.

The incident described here is an extreme and nasty example of the sort of militarism which must have been commonplace enough throughout the colonial Empire—an unwholesome collusion between the thuggery of emerging multi-nationals and right-wing politicians—with the soldiers "at the sharp end" doing their dirty work for them. It is this same rapacious greed— fuelled by "market forces" thinking—which is allowing the extermination of indigenous peoples and millions of acres of rain forest. treasure houses of irreplaceable bio-diversity beyond mere price, which must be checked by sane people at the present day. 

John Sears, 

Egremont, Cumbria

Reply:

One point. It was not us workers who were responsible for bombing the Kurds. It was our ruling class. So it's their "historical culpability" not "ours".

Editors

Ernie rides again?

Dear Editors,

In reply to the Scavenger’s “Bimbos for Christ's sake!”, (February Socialist Standard) please would you print the following: "Scavengers for Christ’s sake!

Beer bellies and bald heads are currently the fashion for those men who give slobs a bad name. But now sexism is becoming fashionable too.

Men like Benny Hill and "The Scavenger" (still reactionary after all these years) have embraced a few dodgy assumptions and bared a few prejudices in their time. But now, apparently, they are embracing misogyny and baring their ignorance as well. Let's face it, it’s got to be true if the bigots believe it.

Veronica Clanchy, Kate Rigby, Ann Rigby,

Poole, Dorset

Reply:

We can assure you that The Scavenger is not a Benny Hill loving misogynist.

Editors

Watching the war go by (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalists have never gone to war to promote Justice and they never will.

Last year The Most Dangerous Man In The World was Saddam Hussain. Pronounced Sadaaam Hoosayn by the plastic propagandists employed to spin the latest line for CNN. There had never been a nastier dictator than the Evil Saddaaam and that was why forces of the American Empire—sorry, NATO—had to “go in there and kick ass”. Any resemblance to a gangland settling of scores should be ignored. After all, that upright defender of virtue, Slick Willy Clinton, had cast himself as Batman against the Iraqi Joker, with wee Tony doing his best to look like Robin.

But let us not distract ourselves with nostalgia. That was yesterday’s war. Now, in the world of CNN-speak, an even more demonic evil has come to threaten the stability of the globe. Plucky little Kosovo must be defended. Think not of the fact that nine out of ten Americans had never heard of Serbia, let alone Kosovo, until CNN told them about it fifty times a day. The threat to the New World Order has been identified. Milosevic must be banged to rights. The propagandists, using a script uncannily similar to Wag The Dog (a fictional account of a sleazy US President saving his reputation by a bogus war against Albania), invite us to shout and curse against the crimes of the Belgrade regime.

And, blinded by the light of the TV screen, large numbers of decent people are weeping for the oppressed Kosovars and cheering NATO as it drops its bombs on Serb towns and villages. Because most people are decent and they hate to see injustice against a defenceless minority, so they are sucked in to the drama of war.

But there are some other defenceless minorities whose plight is not shown on CNN. There are some defenceless minorities for whom NATO would not so much as fire a shot from an air gun. In fact, the NATO states are the very ones which have sold the weapons by which these defenceless minorities are oppressed. For example . . .

There are the Kurds in Turkey. Between 1990 and 1994 about one million Turkish Kurds were driven from their homes. Over 40,000 Kurds have been killed. And in 1994 Turkey became the biggest single importer of US military equipment and the world’s largest arms purchaser. Turkey is a member of NATO. Its troops are currently part of the NATO forces in Yugoslavia. Why is NATO attacking Serbia and not Turkey? The US administration justifies Turkish state atrocities on the grounds that they are defending “law and order” against Kurdish terrorists. The Serbian regime uses precisely the same logic: that it has only slaughtered people and burnt villages to the ground in a war against Kosovar terrorism.

Within the past month 10,000 people were killed in a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are countless refugees. When did we hear about this on the TV News? Where are the calls from those incorrigible humanitarians, Albright and Cook, to send aid to these refugees and to stop the fighting? Since 1994 820,000 have died in Rwanda. Since 1986 a million and a half have died in Sudan. Where was CNN?  

What about East Timor? Conduct a simple experiment. Go on to the streets of Kansas City or, for that matter, White City in London and ask people what they think about the slaughter of the Timorese people. Most will never have heard about East Timor. The propagandists have forgotten to tell them about that atrocity because that one is a NATO-armed assault on a defenceless minority. East Timor was taken over by Indonesia in 1975, since when one third of its population has been killed—that’s 200,000 people. Since 1975 the USA has sold over $1 billion of weapons to the Indonesian dictatorship. The other main arms suppliers are Australia and Britain. Just as the NATO troops were whizzing off to knock the shit out of Belgrade, Indonesian militia entered a church full of people in East Timor and slaughtered them. Reports have not made it on to the CNN News, perhaps because the reporters are too busy congratulating the West upon its humanitarian campaign to help oppressed minorities.

There is something deeply disgusting about the pretence that bombing is a civilising mission. The people who drop bombs from the sky upon towns and villages are bullying cowards and deserve no respect from anyone. The people who give them the orders to drop their bombs are self-serving hypocrites whose concern for the safety of Kosovar refugees is about as genuine as their domestic concern for single mothers, the unemployed and the disabled. The minority who own and control the world—the Directors of USA Inc and UK Plc—are ruthless, exploitative thieves whose primary interest is in the fast buck and protecting what they imagine their interests to be. The capitalists have never gone to war to promote justice and they never will. Indeed, the notion that justice can be furthered by violence can only make sense when you have a social system that is rooted in violence and plunder.

We will no doubt be told that by opposing the military escapades of Clinton and Blair we are siding with those who are committing unspeakable acts against defenceless Kosovars. Socialists side with no state, for all states are merely organised forces of national coercion. We are opposed to the lot of them and support the interest of the oppressed, not selectively, but wherever they are. In time of war we refuse steadfastly to be deluded by the crass propaganda of any section of the ruling class or to become entrapped in the rhetoric of militarist terror.

Instead of taking sides between this nation or that, we oppose all nationalism. Workers have no country. None to live for. None to die for. Workers should refuse to fight, for every drop of working-class blood shed in battles within capitalism is wasted.  

CNN’s viewing figures have gone up since the war in Yugoslavia started. What exciting pictures the explosions make. What a terrific diversion from thinking about the poverty of life under the profit system it is for wage slaves to be presented with 24-hour live coverage of Clinton’s Heroes. CLOBBER SLOBBA, says the Sun, ever eager to find new depths of banality, illiteracy and tastelessness by which to woo its prey. So, we sit at home and we watch the war and just occasionally we might wonder how much it cost to build the US bomber planes (more than the total GDP of Albania, as it happens) and what kind of world we might live in if those resources were not used to produce ever more sophisticated weapons of death, but libraries, homes and hospitals for all.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: A Simpler Truth (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Simpler Truth

In the month that has seen the parasitical pigs fighting round the ITV trough to see who can win the fattest franchises, the state-funded BBC announced that it will lay off 104 workers in its News and Current Affairs section so that it can slash its budget by £2 million. The BBC's new Funding The Future policy statement states that there will be a £75 million cut in BBC expenditure by 1993. This will be paid for by laying off workers, making cheaper programmes and selling off the big-audience productions to commercial companies who can pump them for profit. (For example, BBC's Question Time is to be sold off — just as all the leftists who appear on it have sold out.) The future of British TV, dominated by big-money outfits who are to buy up the deregulated commercial channels and a cut-price, game-show dominated BBC, will consist of more televised Ratners for the proles while the bosses entertain themselves in the casinos and opera houses on money they have acquired by robbing us.

Speaking of robbery, The Simple Truth concert (BBC2, 12 May, 8pm - 1 am) is worthy of comment. The concert, to raise money for the Kurds and other victims of "disasters" (for which read "every day occurrences of the profit system), was the brainchild (to refer to the parentage loosely) of top Tory, Jeffrey Archer. Young Jeff, it will be recalled, is a pretty generous sort of guy: prostitutes who have never met him before have only to drop him a line requesting £200 and it's in the next post. Archer hoped that the concert would raise £10 million. Viewers were urged to phone in with £5 donations. £10 million — a lot of money, eh? Until you start to think that

• The daily cost of the bombs dropped on the Kurds in Iraq during the recent Gulf war, which Archer proudly supported, was far greater than the amount collected by the concert.
• The daily rate of interest required from African states, where millions are dying, is greater than the money collected by the concert.
• The proportion of weekly income of an average British worker which £5 constitutes is a thousand times greater than £5 out of the weekly profits obtained on the basis of working-class robbery by Archer, the multi-millionaire creep.

Their Music

Another thing about The Simple Truth timewasting was the chronic irrelevance of nearly all of the music to any kind of real social change. The five hours of the concerts were filled with melodies to make us moronic. From the talentless drivel of super-hyped New Kids on the Block to the sub-Sinatra tripe of Whitney Houston, the whole show had nothing to say about what is actually going on in the world. The following Sunday your reviewer was at the Levellers' Day commemoration in Burford and heard the superb Peggy Seeger singing songs of real class awareness. She is not the only one writing and singing such material; there is a huge growth of singers, writers and bands coming out of and reflecting the experiences of the working class. What they have to sing about relates to the profit-caused problems of the Kurds, the starving Africans and Bangladeshis. But you don’t find the likes of Archer or the state-run BBC giving exposure to them. They might make the wage slaves think too much.

The Worst Show on Earth

Neighbours (BBC1, whenever you switch on) is in no danger of making the wage slaves think too much. A prerequisite for following the events of this implausible load of old tosh is that you do not think at all. Last month junior Education Minister, Michael Fallon, called for the programme to be banned, saying that it dulls peoples's senses. His Labour opposite number. Jack Straw, said that it was "a pretty trashy programme". Quite why a Tory Minister should object to workers’ minds being dulled (how else could they win an election?) or a Labour leader should object to trash (who but a collector of such would read the lie-a-minute Labour manifesto?) we do not know. We do know that the BBC, representing the true voice of the ruling class, put out a statement saying that Neighbours was a good programme because it offers moral education to its audience. Funny that: when this column exposed the predecessor of Neighbours, Crossroads for being a vehicle for just such moralistic propaganda we were atttacked by an article in The People newspaper suggesting that our claim was the loony delusion of deranged Marxists

Steve Coleman

Voice From The Back: Who armed Saddam? (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who armed Saddam?

Advocates of a bombing campaign speak as if they had just discovered Saddam’s lethal potential. America has known about his chemical and biological weapons for a generation. In 1975 an American corporation, Pfaulder of Rochester, New York, sold Saddam the plans for a chemical weapons factory that he built at Akashat for $78 million. In 1983 Saddam first deployed chemical gas against Iran, killing 45,000 Iranian soldiers over the next five years in clear violation of international law. In 1988 Saddam sprayed mustard gas and sarin on the Kurdish village of Halabja to murder at least 5,000 civilians. A few months later, in January 1989, ABC News uncovered details of Saddam’s germ-warfare programme at a facility south of Baghdad. The State Department, which now issues briefings on the same site at Salman Pak, denied its existence at the time. Despite the use of chemicals and clear evidence of Saddam’s development in the 1980s of anthrax, tularaemia and cholera, the US and Britain increased their export credit guarantees to his regime . . . All the time Saddam was massacring his citizens and invading his neighbour, Iran, the American Karkar corporation supplied him with communications for his Ba’ath party spies. The CIA gave him reconnaissance pictures of Iranian troop positions. British Aerospace, Westland Helicopters, Dassault of France and Karl Kolb of Germany were adding to an Iraqi arsenal already over-supplied by the Soviet Union. New Statesman, 20 February.

Squandered resources

A staggering £250 million a year is wasted in the National Health Service on food patients don’t eat. Half of the food served is unpalatable or unwanted, threatening patients’ health and recovery because they don’t get the nutrients they need. A study of nine wards for the elderly, and of medical and surgical cases in four hospitals in London and the South-East found that 23 percent of food served for breakfast and around 40 percent of food provided for midday and evening meals was thrown away. When food was served on the ward from a trolley almost 60 percent was discarded. Mail on Sunday, 7 December.

This new capitalism’s a load of . . .

Employees at a large state farm in Vlogda, northern Russia, have not taken kindly to the cash-strapped government’s policy of remunerating workers with agricultural goods in an effort to compensate for months of unpaid salaries. Instead of receiving chickens and vegetables, they were paid last month with piles of manure. Special trucks were laid on to deliver “salaries” to the workers’ doorsteps, prompting vigorous protests from neighbours about poor air quality. Sunday Times, 19 October.

Looking both ways

Poor people are much more likely to be knocked over on the roads than people living in affluent areas, according to a study of road accidents in Edinburgh and the surrounding Lothian region. It is the first detailed analysis of the link between road accidents and social deprivation. The researchers . . . found that young children from the 15 percent most deprived areas of the region were almost eight times as likely to be knocked over as children living in the richest 15 percent. Accident Analysis and Prevention, vol 29, p.583.

Child labour

Forty years after it joined the European Community, and more than a decade after it overtook Britain in the league table of national wealth, Italy still has almost 300,000 child workers . . . The biggest concentration of under-age workers is thought to be in and around Naples, where their wages average about 70,000 lire (£26) a week. Guardian, 8 January.

World Wide Web

When I go online to engage in human interaction, I log off feeling energised. When I search databases or shop in online malls, I leave the experience feeling drained and alone. The former involves communicating with other living beings, while the latter concerns only machines and their information. Douglas Rushkoff, Guardian Online, 8 January.

Globalisation

Competition, so admired by champions of capitalism, is being rapidly eradicated by—competition. “Before many more years, there will be one or at most two global companies per industry, trampling over a fluctuating number of local suppliers living off their personal connections and/or niche services,” wrote William Kay, the City Editor of the Financial Mail on Sunday on 8 February. “The process is nearly complete in sectors as diverse as alcohol and accountancy . . . The trouble is that what counts as duplication from the suppliers’ point of view is good old competition as far as the customers are concerned . . . When the customers in question have been mere individuals, their interests have been at best only hazily defended.”

Gulf Hypocrisy (1998)

From the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Saddam Hussein story is one that will dominate news reports for some time to come, as has indeed been the case since the Gulf War of 1991. Not least because the Gulf has been an issue the US—still anxious to find some hegemonic raison d’etre in the post-Cold War era—has been desperate to force as an international issue. And in place of the old “communist” menace, Saddam is as good a bogey man as the US can find to protect us from.

Few of us took President George Bush’s notions of a “New World Order” seriously after the events of 1989. If anything, the New World Order meant little more than that the US would seek every opportunity to maintain its dominant position in the world and, as was demonstrated in the Gulf in 1991, that the world was to be ruled by force and intimidation.

Saddam, who certainly replaced the USSR as the official US bogeyman in 1990, has had more than his fair share of criticism. However, Saddam’s transgressions, which we’ve highlighted many times in the past, are not the concern here. The real issue is the utter hypocrisy of the US and Britain over the Gulf crisis and the hidden agenda their cant conceals.

For instance, Saddam is lambasted for stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, chemical, weapons in particular. But isn’t it the case that the US, Britain and many other countries hoard the same? And wasn’t it the US who were themselves providing Saddam with anthrax not ten years ago, a poison weapons’ inspectors have been charged with tracking down? Moreover, when Saddam exterminated 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in the town of Hallabjah in 1988, who was more silent than Washington? As for Britain, the RAF have used mustard gas on Iraqi Kurds on several occasions in the past, in response to their demands for a homeland.

Saddam is often ridiculed as another Hitler, an unpredictable madman, a ruthless dictator. Yet these same opprobrious remarks come from the same people who armed him during a 10-year war with Iran, who tipped him off about a coup attempt days before he invaded Kuwait and who were sending weapons shipments to Iraq one month before Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border.

Indeed, these same accusers leant their support to Pinochet and Galtieri, Trujillo, Marcos and Duvalier.Amin, Bokassa, Mobuto and Haile Selassie. The simple fact is that you’d be hard pressed to find a “madman” the West has not sponsored in the past 50 or so years.

Let’s get one thing straight; and this we have reported on numerous occasions. The Gulf War of 1991 had nothing to do with toppling Saddam and neither has any subsequent US attack on Iraq. This was recently made clear by UK Defence Secretary George Robertson who announced: "We are not in the business of toppling Saddam. This will be a job for his people” (Guardian, 3 February).

Washington is all too aware of the dangers a fragmented Iraq could pose the Gulf region were Saddam to be ousted. The country could easily split into three—a Kurdish north, a Sunni middle and a Shi'ite South—or into a plethora of warring factions, as was the case in Libya in the 1980s and Somalia 10 years later. In any event a further crisis would pose a greater threat to US hegemony and Gulf oil profits. It is, after all, no coincidence that the US State Department refers to the Gulf’s oil as "a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history”. Hence, the Western desire that Saddam stays where he is.

What is obvious is that the US and Britain are defending no moral high ground in the Gulf. Saddam’s disregard for the UN and world opinion in general reflects that of the US itself on many occasions, and the crimes and atrocities attributed to his regime fall well within the scope of similar atrocities the US have themselves deemed acceptable since 1945.

The present Gulf crisis should reveal at once the lengths the US and its sidekick, Britain, are prepared to go to secure the interests of their respective corporate elites. It also reveals just how obsessed the US is with the concept of “global leadership".

That millions in Iraq continue to suffer in the name of profit is a scathing indictment on the politics of power and its consequent rewards.The sad truth is that we will enter the 21st Century no wiser for the conflicts that saw the 20th Century close. The next century offers no end to the madness until workers begin to tear away the thin veil of conceit capitalism cloaks itself in and see at last the system in all its hideous nakedness, as the monster it always was, and will be.

John Bissett

Bombing people in Iraq, to protect oil supplies, has long been a part of Labour's "ethical foreign policy” going back to the first Labour government in 1924, as the extracts, below, from the Socialist Standard of the time show:

Labour Rules The Empire With Bombs and Bullets.

The repeated use of bombs in Mespot by the Air Force since the Labour Government came into office is another item in their black and brutal record. It shows how willing they are to do the dirty work for the capitalists in maintaining their ownership and control. Under the Conservative Government bombs were frequently used to aid in compelling payment of taxes, but, of course, that was "the dirty method of the Capitalists.” How similar the rule of the Labour Party is was admitted by Mr. Leach, the Labour Minister, in the House of Commons in answer to a Tory question. He said:-

We had communicated with our military and air headquarters in Iraq in regard to the whole situation in bombing operation, and I cannot honestly say that we have made any change in the policy of the late Government .-(Parliamentary Debates, June 30, column 925.)

The "pacifist" minister defends bombing as a humane method and tells the Daily Herald (July 15) that it is "a great saving to the taxpayer," as military forces cost more! In the language of an Empire Builder, he talks of the necessity to stop the tribesmen fighting, so that the land of oil annexed to "our Empire" shall be a sweet land of peace and profit. Therefore, the Labour Government is suppressing all attempts at rebellion by the kindly and Christian use of bombs.

This rule of force in the interests of Capital is shown also by the shooting down of Indians under this Labour Government. 

(Socialist Standard, August 1924.)

How Labour Ruled Mespot. The Truth About The Slaughter.

When it became known the bomb-dropping was regularly used by the Labour Government as a means of peacefully persuading Irak Tribesmen that British capitalism had a better right in their country than they had themselves, many simple supporters of the Labour Party were shocked. They had supposed that Empires can be built on love and maintained by soft words, and they were greatly relieved when Mr. Leach explained the whole matter away.

Mr. Leach accounted for British occupancy of the territory by saying that it was a point of honour to remain and fulfill “our" pledges; and he was able to give the assurance that:

Under our administration British air operations have so far caused no death. Thanks to the method of warning notices, submission takes place five times out of six without recourse to bombs, and has succeeded in the remaining cases through the destruction of property and cattle.-Daily Herald, July 15th, 1924.

Now Lord Thomson, Chief of the Air Ministry, of which Mr. Leach was Under-secretary, has disclosed the real facts. It was not honour but capitalist interest in oil which kept the Labour Government in Irak, and with regard to the bomb-dropping Mr. Leach appears to have resorted to complete suppression of the facts.

The following quotation is from a lecture given by Lord Thomson at a meeting of the Central Asian Society on November 21st ("The Times.” November 22nd, 1924.)

After briefly tracing the route followed in his tour, Lord Thomson brought home to his audience the efficacy of bombing by describing the manner in which the recent Wahabi invasion of the Transjordan was crushed. The British forces consisted solely of aeroplanes sent out at the shortest possible notice, backed by armoured cars. The effect of our air attack was appalling. Some 700 of the tribesmen were killed and the rest, seized with panic, fled into the desert, where hundreds more must have perished from thirst. Unless some such punishment as swift and terrible as this had been inflicted, the task of restoring order would have been long drawn-out. and in the end more costly in lives and money, while the results would not have been so lasting.

(Socialist Standard, December 1924.)

Europe's new rear gunner (1995)

From the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

For years Turkish politicians and the capitalist elite they curry favour with have dreamed of entry into Europe and of the new markets that this would open up to them. Two obstacles had always stood in their way—the opposition of Greece, stemming from Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and. arguably less importantly, Turkey's abysmal human rights record.

In early March of this year Greece finally abandoned its opposition to Turkish entry into Europe, in return for a guarantee that the EU would initiate membership negotiations with Cyprus within six months of the 1996 Conference to review the Maastricht treaty.

The customs union Turkey would from now on enjoy would “benefit everyone" reported the Economist:

  "The EU would get improved, tariff-free access to a market of 60 million, with which in 1993 it enjoyed a $6 bn trade surplus. Turkey would get access to 36 7 million customers . . . Turkey would get access to 1 billion ecus ($1.2 bn) in aid blocked by Greece's veto . . . [and] ... the European Union's eastern flank would be guarded by a prospering Turkey, a NATO ally" (11-17 February, 1995).

The deal couldn't have come at a better time for a country facing economic ruin. Prices have risen by 150 percent in Turkey in the past 12 months while wages have only increased by 30 percent. Unemployment is soaring and the trade unions claim 500.000 have lost their jobs in the past year. Furthermore. Tansu Ciller's government, with the help of an IMF loan is struggling to reduce a huge national deficit in the wake of years of overspending and economic mismanagement.

Within a week, the ink on the customs union agreement hardly dry, Turkey sent 35,000 troops across its border with Iraq in pursuit of the separatist rebels of the PKK and into the Kurdish “safe haven" set up by the allies after the Gulf War.

It was a move that immediately brought international condemnation from European governments, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and from the International Committee of the Red Cross. While international law was cited as having been breached, the Turkish government argued the invasion complied with international law because it was intended "to exterminate a threat to the lives and security of Turkish citizens" (Independent, 23 March).

Operation steel

Operation Steel, involving troops, tanks and war planes can, however, be seen in a different light. For one thing. Turkey's war against the 10,000 members of the PKK accounts for 25 percent of the national budget annually—some 315,000 troops are stationed in southern Turkey. With the country experiencing severe recession, and with the prospect of an economic boom on the horizon, the decision to invade the Kurdish safe haven can be seen as a last ditch attempt to rid Turkey once and for all of a major obstacle to recovery.

Again. Turkish intellectuals are pointing to what cognisant British workers have come to regard as the "Falklands Factor", seeing the invasion as an attempt to bolster national pride and to deflect attention from domestic ills. Indeed, the Independent (29 March) recently reported that "the sense of national pride is higher than at any time since the invasion of Cyprus in 1974".

Ciller’s attempt to crush resistance in northern Iraq can also be interpreted as a consequence of her desire to stabilise relations with Saddam. UN sanctions on Iraq have severely interfered with the flow of crude oil into Turkey, costing Turkey over $20 billion since 1991. The unsanctioned oil reaching Turkey nowadays ($800 millions-worth last year) does so by lorry via the Kurdish-controlled safe haven, from which a sizeable levy is extracted by the controlling KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party).

While the European Parliament frowned upon the invasion, threatening to block the EU customs union between Ankara and Europe if there were resultant human rights abuses, and while Germany's Chancellor Kohl was freezing a $107 million military aid package in protest, support was to be found in the good old US of A.

For the US, the Kurds, and for that matter the Turks, are but pawns in the international game of political chess (see Socialist Standard, November 1994). The Kurds have lost their interest and more importantly their strategic value to the West. For Adrian Hamilton, writing in the Observer "the reality is that the west is looking to a well armed Turkey . . . to contain both Iraq and Iran" (26 March). Ferhat Azizi was to say as much a few days later, believing that "the Americans . . . are still haunted by the 1979 Iranian revolution and are unwilling to upset an ally they see as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism" (New Statesman and Society, 31 March).

Strategic value

Evidence now suggests that Iraq is rearming and that Iran is once again flexing its muscles, massing forces on its Gulf coast. In recent weeks newspapers have run scores of headlines regarding Iran's war readiness, with alarm bells ringing all that more poignantly in the light of rumours concerning its nuclear capacity. From the West’s point of view, the Gulf states are armed to the teeth and trigger happy. Ironically it was the West that armed them when the Gulf War ended, providing $55 billions-worth of military hardware. Turkey, therefore, is ideally situated from a strategic point of view. Not solely because of its close proximity to unpredictable Middle East regimes. but increasingly lately because it also straddles the Balkans and the Caucasus—further potential flashpoints of Islamic fervour.

Neither can Britain claim to have merely a passing interest in Turkey's affairs. It is now no secret that the RAF has provided Turkish military chiefs with aerial photographs of the Kurdish safe haven taken by allied warplanes. Nor that allied warplanes based in Turkey suspended their policing of the safe haven while Turkish bombers took off from the same bases to bomb PKK positions twenty-five miles south of the Turkish border.

Britain and the US know only too well the debt Turkey, a NATO ally, will owe the West should Turkey become a full European member. In the meantime they make their hackneyed token protests while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses, while Turkey allows itself to become a bastion against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, guarding capitalist Europe's eastern flank like a rear gunner with a full swing on the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Gulf region where "ignorant armies clash by night". None of which surprises the socialist, all too aware of the hidden agendas, the corruption and barrel-scraping stunts capitalism must continue to pull in its endless pursuit of profit.

John Bissett

Muslims at War (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war between the capitalist ruling minorities of Iran and Iraq is now in its fourth year. Both parties are able to buy as much military weaponry as they require — invariably from the same sellers. Neither side is prepared to compromise; both are determined to carry on fighting until the other accepts its terms and conditions of cease fire. The war could continue for years; so far it has cost the lives of more than a million workers -many of them youths — who have no interests at stake whatsoever. Poison gas has been used; civilian targets have been hit by long-range rockets and fighter planes are dropping napalm bombs. The war is now a testing laboratory for new means of destruction.

The origins of this conflict can be traced back to before the First World War, when Britain, France and Russia agreed secretly to divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves so as to expand the market for their commodities into the heart of the Middle East. After World War One Iraq became a part of the British overseas colonies. Then, in accordance with the principle of Divide and Rule, the whole political map of the Middle East was redrawn, with Iraq showing a majority of people of the Shiite faith. Shiite is an Islamic sect and the official religion of the Iranian ruling minority. Geographically, northern Iraq included a part of Kurdistan, as does Iran. The rich lands along the eastern side of Shatt Al-Arab fell within southern Iraq, but the Iranian ruling class objected to this and attempted to occupy all of the eastern side of the waterway. Iraqi territory was then under British protection, so the Iranian ruling class was impeded in its efforts.

When the map was redrawn Iraqi government fell into the hands of Arabs whose faith was, and still is, Sunni — another Islamic sect. Shiism and Sunnism are conflicting Arab faiths; only a minority of Iraqis are Sunnis. Iraq has never enjoyed political stability because it has constantly suffered from the territorial ambitions of the Iranian ruling class, who lost no opportunities to attack their Iraqi counterparts. Since the 1930s there have been groups existing within the mountains of Kurdistan in Iraq who have rejected the authority of the Iraqi government. As well as the Kurds, the Shiite majority in Iraq has resented Sunni government, feeling that they have been humiliated and discriminated against by the Iraqi ruling minority. In fact these divisions are rooted in economic and political interests and only take the form of religious conflicts. The Iraqi ruling minority was selected at the outset by the British government and have been used as a fist of iron to rule on behalf of capital, including the substantial overseas investments in Iraq. The Iraqi government has machine gunned demonstrators on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi towns. They sent the RAF on bombing raids against the villages of Kurdistan and Arab tribes saw no reason to give up their ways of living and submit to the central authority of Iraq.

As a result of the widespread unpopularity of the government Iraq became a paradise for political opportunists, whose policy was to establish a new government claiming to represent all Iraqi people (not just the Sunnis) and claiming to be committed to individual freedom. In reality, extreme nationalism was the common characteristic of all of them and in the long-term they helped to make the situation-in Iraq even worse. At the head of each of the opportunist parties was an individual or elite drawing support mainly on the basis of tribal loyalty or by bribery and pressure. Each party aimed to capture political power, often using unscrupulous and undemocratic methods such as the infiltration of the Iraqi army. As a result of these tactics, one military coup followed another; the one which brought the present Iraqi ruling elite, the Socialist Arab Baath party, occurred in 1963. Within twenty four hours of the Baath coup the new rulers eliminated their opportunist rivals, so establishing a dictatorship.

The Socialist Arab Baath Party took power with a policy of rigid nationalism and Arabism. They tolerated no opposition, although Baathist ideology was out of touch with the mainstream of Iraqi society. Firstly, more than one quarter of Iraqis are not Arabs and therefore opposed Baathist Arabism. Secondly, most Iraqi Arabs opposed Baathist ideology and openly opposed it as an alien idea. The Baathists responded in extreme terms: they started deporting people of Iranian origin to Iran; they attempted to "Arabise” Kurdish villages and towns; they organised an aggressive military campaign against anti-government forces. The Baathist policy gave the Iranian ruling class a chance to revive their old territorial claims east of Shatt AI-Arab, using the political situation in Iraq as a pre- text. The Baathists refused the Iranian demands, claiming that it was an insult to the Arab nation. Iran used military force to take over eastern Shatt AI-Arab and sent military supplies to anti-government forces in Kurdistan. The Iraqi government in- creased its pressure on the anti-government Iraqi Kurds and, after a hard military campaign, it seemed that the Iraqi government were losing. As a result, Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi dictator, went to Algeria in 1975 to meet the Shah of Iran in order to persuade the latter to stop supplying anti-government forces with military aid. In return the Shah, and the class which he represented, was officially granted eastern Shatt AI-Arab. After this the anti-government forces in Iraqi Kurdistan ceased to exist, but it was a deep humiliation for the Baathists. Another Iranian score needs to be mentioned at this point: in the 1960s the Iranian ruling class gained control of three small islands in the Arabian Gulf which had previously belonged to Britain. The Baathists were resentful about this, believing that these three islands should belong to “the Arab nation”.

The acceptance of Iran’s territorial claims left deep scars on the Iraqi Baathist regime, but they were saved by the fact that hard currency started to rain on them as a result of massively increased Iraqi oil revenue in the mid-1970s, caused by the increased demand by the world’s industrial capitalists. The Baathists devoted a substantial portion of this revenue to buying arms, which were only too readily supplied by the capitalist superpowers. Meanwhile, in Iran the old regime of the Shah collapsed as a result of popular discontent and was replaced by a dictatorship consisting of the followers of Ayatollah Khomeni. The new regime demoralised the Iranian army by executing its officers and dismantling many of its units in an attempt to prevent a counter revolution. This gave the Baathists the opportunity they had been waiting for to take military action against Iran and win back what they had lost. The Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, was started by the Baathists in the belief that it would be won within a few months. It is a continuation of an old struggle over control of territory and natural resources.

The war in Iran and Iraq is not in the interest of the working class, who are slaughtering each other so that their rulers can expand their spheres of ownership and control. Very few members of the Iranian or Iraqi ruling classes have been killed in the war over the past four years. It is workers — over half a million (more than Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki added together) — who have had to do the dying.

Rahman A. Ahmad