The reason why . . . (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The reason why we will shortly have to go to war with Iraq is not to free Kuwait, though that is to be desired, or to defend Saudi Arabia, though that is important It is because President Saddam is a menace to vital Western interests in the Gulf, above all the free flow of oil at market prices, which is essential to the West's prosperity".

— Sunday Times, 12 August 1990.

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

Capitalism, war and atrocity (2003)

From the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The various enquiries into the events leading up to the Iraq war keep showing up more of the dubious ways the government tried to get voters’ support for a war which was launched in defiance of their own international law and the United Nations. But however much Blair’s back is to the wall, he can (and does) always make the excuse that even if the actions of Britain and America are not justified in any other way, the regime of Saddam Hussein was so terrible that no one can be sorry that Bush and Blair sent their armies in and threw him out. Almost all wars can be justified by pointing out how bad the other side is. All capitalist governments do unpleasant things: that is the inescapable nature of capitalism. So whenever two capitalist powers go to war, each can make a strong case against the other, by alleging how shocked they are about all the repulsive things the enemy has done.

When hostility ripens into open warfare, each side’s ruling class does even more terrible things to the other side, destroying its towns and slaughtering its people. This gives both belligerent countries even more propaganda points to make. Before long, each side is claiming that it only started fighting in the first place because (in some miraculous way) it could see what barbarous actions its enemies were going to be guilty of in the war. In other words, the propaganda of each hostile country claims that it only went to war because of the atrocities committed during the war on the other side.

The truth, however, is exactly the opposite. It is not the atrocities which lead to war; it is the war which leads to the atrocities. What happens, over and over again, is that a government, reacting to the pressures inseparable from capitalist (and other private-property) societies, treats some of its citizens very badly. Then the government gets into a war against other states; only to realize that its previous ill-treatment of this or that minority has simply provided a ready-made fifth column for the enemy. In other words, if the enemy should make a successful attack on the home territory, there are many citizens of the home country who would almost certainly prefer the enemy to win, and therefore might well engage in sabotage or guerrilla attacks on the home forces. If the war begins to go badly, the government and its supporters become terrified that they will lose and will therefore be killed (either by the enemy or by knives in the back) or at least driven into poverty and exile: terrified of such an impending fate, they turn on those whom they have previously ill-treated, and murder them.

Armenian massacres

The massacre of the Armenians, in Turkey in 1915, came about in this way. The Armenians lived in eastern Anatolia, close to the Turkish centre of the Ottoman Empire, and often showed rebellious tendencies. There were demands for independence. In addition the Turks were Muslims, and the Armenians Christians, which gave an excuse for more villainy: nothing is so bad that religion will not make it worse. The Turks treated the “disloyal” Armenians very badly, to the extent of killing many thousands of them in the 1890s. Then in 1914 the first World War broke out, and Turkey joined in on the side of Germany.

The Russians advanced into eastern Anatolia, and were helped by many Armenians, wanting revenge against the Turks; and on top of that, numbers of British and Australian troops invaded Gallipoli, in north-western Turkey, in April 1915 (after a naval attack in February). With the country being invaded, the Armenians were obviously a danger to the Turkish authorities, and action was taken to nullify that danger. Many of the Armenian men were massacred, and the women and children were sent on forced marches to the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq, robbed, raped, harassed and injured continuously, and most of them died. Estimates of the number who perished vary; the Armenians say 1,500,000 or more, the Turks say “only” 600,000. Many accounts of the massacre treat it in isolation, as if it was merely the result of Turkish (and Muslim) wickedness; in fact it started almost on the exact day in April 1915 that the Allies landed at Gallipoli. Presumably this separation of the two events is to maintain the fiction that the war was because of the atrocity, rather than that the atrocity was because of the war.

Second World War

Another horror of the same kind was what is now called the Holocaust. The Germans were treated very badly after the first World War. For many years they were execrated as pariahs who were solely responsible for the war; a continuing blockade caused much suffering, and the demand for “reparations” caused runaway inflation, so people who had worked hard for years to make small savings saw them reduced to nothing. The Nazi party gained popularity by offering someone else to blame: the Jews, who were in a minority in many countries, not having their own state, and who therefore were ideal scapegoats. Hitler was in power from 1933, and began the regular and open ill-treatment of the Jews; in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws made the German Jews second-class citizens, e.g. closing the professions to them.

Anti-semitism was not particularly frowned on in Britain at the time, and two years after the infamous Nuremberg Laws, in 1937, Churchill said that “he hoped Great Britain would have a man like Hitler in times of peril” (quoted in the Times obituary of Leni Riefenstahl, 11 September) . Besides that, Poland at the same time, under the anti-semitic regime of the dictator Pilsudski and his successor Smigly-Rydz, treated the Jews even worse (and even joined in Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938); yet Britain actually declared war in 1939 in order (it claimed) to defend this totalitarian anti-semitic state. For some time Germany seemed to be winning the war, conquering much of Poland in 1939, then Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941; but in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, and after early successes, his armies became bogged down, at the same time as America entered the war in December 1941. It became clear that Germany was in for a long and potentially disastrous struggle against many powerful enemies, in which large numbers of Jews, not only in Germany but also in the conquered countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, would not surprisingly be hoping for a German defeat.

The next step could have been forecast: the Wannsee Conference (in Berlin) of leading Nazis, in January 1942, decided on the “Final Solution” – the murder of the entire Jewish people. Probably six million Jews perished, as well as the same number of other people whom the Nazis claimed to think were inferior. This monstrous crime, carried out in the years 1942-5, is now often given as the reason for Britain’s declaration of war in September 1939. In fact it was the other way round; the conflicting interests, arising inevitably out of capitalism, of a number of European and world powers, led to the war: and the war led to the atrocity.

The third case of this kind is of course Iraq. The various conflicts in which Iraq has been involved recently, arising from the inexorable conditions of capitalism, such as the desire of each particular country’s ruling class to make the most profits from oil, and its efforts to extend the territory over which it rules, have lasted for no less than twenty of the last twenty-three years. The war against Iran raged from 1980 to 1988. Then Saddam Hussein’s attempt to conquer Kuwait in 1991 led to the first Gulf War, which ended with the first President Bush leaving Saddam in power, for fear that his overthrow would lead to a much greater role in the Middle East for Iran, which the US regarded as a greater threat than Iraq. But the war and the deaths resumed in a slightly different form, by means of continuous air patrols over Iraq territory and by economic sanctions, which UNICEF thought had brought about the deaths of nearly half a million Iraqi children under five.

All these hostilities, including this second Gulf War of 1991 to 2003, however much they might be blamed on the then Iraqi leadership, resulted in those leaders having the same mindset which has been discussed above: the fear of disaster for their regime, and death for themselves. This frame of mind leads automatically to atrocious behaviour from rulers, and Saddam Hussein has been no exception: jailing opponents, a ubiquitous secret police, the torture and murder of suspects.

Saddam Hussein has been just as bad as many other rulers across the world (including many with whom Britain and America are allied). But for Blair now to claim that he went to war because of this behaviour is putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. The horrendous regime of Saddam Hussein was a by-product of the two Gulf Wars of 1991-2003, not the other way round. If you want to have done with barbarous dictators like Saddam Hussein, it’s a waste of time to go to war: others will spring up everywhere. Get rid of capitalism, the fertile soil which produces endless numbers of dictators and atrocities.

Alwyn Edgar

Editorial: Yet another war for oil? (2002)

Editorial from the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again, in an attempt to protect Western control over Middle East oil supplies, the titular head of US corporate capitalism, George W Bush, has presented the world with the vision of well-known bogey-man Saddam Hussein building up weapons of mass destruction.

No doubt, in this world where “might is right”, the Iraq regime would like to arm itself, just like any other state, with the most destructive weapons it can afford, and it would not be at all surprising that it was trying to develop them. In Iraq’s case this would be so as to be able to throw its weight around more in the Middle East. But this is precisely America’s aim too. Hence the clash of interests. Bush and Blair want the Saddam regime out of the way because they see it as a threat to Western capitalism’s continued domination of the Middle East and its oilfields. It’s as simple as that. For them too, might is right, as they are itching to prove.

Some of America’s allies are not convinced that a war with Iraq won’t endanger rather than protect their oil supplies or political stability. Aware of this, Bush is now pursuing his campaign via the UN, clearly hoping that Iraq’s failure to comply with requests from UN weapons inspectors will provide the pretext he needs to justify an attack upon Iraq. He cites Iraq’s refusal to comply with UN resolutions as evidence of Saddam’s contempt for the world. Yet that US ally, Israel, is in breach of as many UN resolutions as the errant Iraq. And the US itself has refused to accept a ruling from the International Court of Justice condemning its “unlawful use of force” during its terrorist war against Nicaragua, and for which it was also ordered to pay substantial reparations. Dismissing that particular ruling and refusing to pay, the US went on to intensify that assault.

That the US is concerned with the chemical facilities Iraq might have is understandable. Saddam certainly has the technological know-how. It came courtesy of the US when they sponsored Saddam in his war with Iran. Back in 1994, the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War. It concluded:

“The United States provided the Government of Iraq with ‘dual use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including: chemical warfare agent precursors; chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings…chemical warhead filling equipment; biological warfare related materials; missile fabrication equipment; and, missile-system guidance equipment”.

We can further observe that the country with the biggest nuclear arsenal on Earth and the biggest stockpile of chemical weapons, and which has a proven track record of having used them, is the United States. Clearly, America doesn’t object to the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction as such. It just wants it and its allies to have a monopoly of them, not in the interests of world peace but in the interests of its world domination.

There can be no other reason for the US obsession with Iraq than continuing control of Middle East oils supplies. What remains imprecise is the US game plan: to use Iraq as a springboard to capture Iran and thus secure a shorter and cheaper route to Gulf ports for Caspian oil, or maybe to get a tighter grip on Saudi oil lest there be an Islamic fundamentalist blowback resulting from the “war on terror”? You don’t think so? Then ask yourself if there’d there be so much US concern if the Middle East just supplied dates.

Someone who has seen through the current charade is Mo Mowlam, once a member of Blair’s cabinet, who has written:

“This whole affair has nothing to do with a threat from Iraq – there isn’t one. It has nothing to do with the war against terrorism or with morality. Saddam Hussein is obviously an evil man, but when we were selling arms to him to keep the Iranians in check he was the same evil man he is today. He was a pawn then and he is a pawn now. In the same way he served Western interests then, he is now the distraction for the sleight of hand to protect the West’s supply of oil” (Guardian, 5 September).

Capitalism is a war-prone society in that built-in to it is perpetual conflict between rival states over markets, raw material sources, trade routes and investment outlets, for the profit-seeking capitalist corporations they exist to protect. You can’t have capitalism without wars, the threat of war and preparations for war.

So if you’re just demonstrating against war, then take our advice and invest in a sturdy anti-war banner, for if you are prepared to oppose war without opposing the very system that gives rise to it, then you’ll be demonstrating for quite some time to come. Alternatively you can join the movement which believes that to end wars we must first put an end capitalism. An uphill struggle? Less than campaigning to end war against the backdrop of the profit system.

We must unite to establish a world community without frontiers where all the resources of the planet would be at the disposal of all the people of the planet. Then we could use them to end world poverty, hunger and preventable disease once and for all and rapidly move towards applying the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, ensuring that no man, woman or child anywhere on Earth goes without adequate food, clothing, shelter or other amenities. A world where wars and weapons of mass destruction would be things of the past. This can be done. So let’s do it.

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

Caught In The Act: Oil and carrots (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oil and carrots

Some time ago Ken Livingstone said that anyone who enjoyed being in Parliament was in need of psychiatric care. But he was in a minority; almost every other MP is convinced that parliament is an essential contributor to our safety and welfare and that without its debates the nation would be like a ship without a rudder. So it was that as the crisis in the Gulf developed there were many people who thought that in so grave a situation nothing less would do than the immediate recall of parliament.

The government agreed (Margaret Thatcher takes only brief holidays in any case, and then grudgingly) and the Members selflessly left the grouse moors and the sun-soaked beaches to hurry to London. After a couple of days of well-publicised talking they resumed their holidays, leaving us with the question what was it all about? Was it worth it?

Tyrant

At the end of the debate the Commons voted, more or less, in favour of Britain going to war with Iraq — to go to war, in other words, over a border dispute between two other states — something which, when it suits them, government will decline to do. Of course tho Members were excited by the sudden discovery that Saddam is a brutal tyrant, after all those years when he had been our friend for whom we could overlook one or two minor aberrations such as his ordering the use of chemical weapons to slaughter thousands of helpless Kurdish villagers.

In fact so dose a friend was Saddam that his tyranny was sustained by armaments sold to him by Western powers (in the debate Denis Healey referred to "stuffing arms down tho throats" of powers like Iraq, although he was a member of a government which did not demur at doing just that) Any British, American or French soldiers who have to do the fighting will not be consoled by the fact that their governments supplied many of the weapons being used against them. Margaret Thatcher, who is contemptuous of history, summed up the debate when she told the house that "History has many examples of perfidy and deceit" — an unconscious warning that the Honourable Members were providing another example.

But parliament is nothing if not adaptable about these things How else could it have coped in the past with the changes in its assessment of Stalin, Ceausescu, the unity of Germany, the resurrection of Japanese power?

In tune with the times Thatcher was belligerent, Kinnock statesmanlike, Ashdown cautious in tho soldierly way befitting someone trained to kill with their bare hands. Except for a handful of MPs who put their confidence in the shaky delusions of the United Nations the House was united — Tory, Labour, SLD, SDP all jostled into tho lobby to vote for a war in which they have every reason to believe they would not be killed nor even fight.

At times the perfidy and deceit in the Commons became so intense that reality was lost sight of. Thatcher spoke as if Britain was a major factor in the crisis. She harped on the ‘legality’ of the action against Iraq as if the British and American ruling classes (or any other, for that matter) only indulge in "legal" military enterprises which meant that she had forgotten what had happened in Grenada and Panama and what the Israeli forces have been up to recently. She warned that the Iraqi take-over of Kuwait affected " . . . world security, world oil supplies and world stability" — which is either untrue or extravagant with the truth.

War fever

The real purpose of the debate, the reason which brought those MPs back from their holidays, was to gird up tho British workers for war. We have been subjected to a stream of vicious propaganda about Saddam, who is the latest bogeyman after the likes of Hitler, Nasser and Gadaffi, to provide lurid headlines in the gutter press. All these leaders, we are told, were mad along with their other personality problems — which ignores the fact that someone like Saddam needs a kind of sanity to survive in the volatile politics of Iraq

One Tory MP blustered that he wanted Saddam "politically humiliated and militarily castrated" which hints kinkily that Westminster has its personality problems as well. Once more the world is divided into goodies and baddies. Foreign Office Minister William Waldegrave drooled that "Democracies are slow to anger, but once angered they will go right to the end of the road". Again there is a general unity among tho capitalist parties that "our" interests demand that "we" go to war to remove some evil force from the world so that we can live in peace, at least until the next war

What cements that unity is the interests which are actually at stake in the Gulf. These do not include tho welfare of the people in Kuwait or Britain who, as members of the working class, are readily expendable and so not fit subjects for emergency debates in parliament. A former American Assistant Defence Secretary pointed out, as the crisis began, that if Kuwait grew carrots nobody — by which he meant no member of the ruling class — would give a damn if the place was invaded.

The crisis revolves around the fact that Kuwait is oil-rich and that Iraqi ambitions threatened to upset tho pricing structure of the world oil industry The former Labour Cabinet Minister was not talking about the world supply of carrots when he said ". . . it is a world necessity that we have access . . . at a reasonable price".

Short-term

In these kinds of situation — like Suez in 1956 — there is very little scope for capitalist powers to take other than a short term view. In 1956 a long-term assessment saw how wasteful and unproductive for the capitalist class was the assault on Egypt by the French and British forces The same view now sees that, again from the standpoint of the capitalists, there is an enormous amount to lose by going to war with Iraq, among it lasting damage to the oilfields and the replacement of Saddam by a government more hostile to Western interests. That is the logic of the situation; but even by its own standards capitalism does not always work logically

So what the emergency debate demonstrated was that at present parliament does not operate to deal with the interests of the majority who elect it. Its role is to pass the laws which are needed to ensure the most effective exploitation of the working class and the most powerful defence of the profits of the exploiting class. Occasional showpiece debates encourage us to believe that parliament is concerned for our welfare and this perfidy and deceit is called democracy

A saner way of running human affairs would not be profit-motivated and productive of social schisms. It would have neither wars nor smug politicians to urge us to die in them. It may even, if it made sense from the point of view of human welfare, shut down the oilfields in the Middle East and grow carrots there instead — which would be a neat and conclusive way of proclaiming that somebody at least gives a damn.

Ivan

Between the Lines: From the people who brought you John Wayne (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the people who brought you John Wayne

When all that stands between us and the mass annihilation of a third world war are a few hours on the clock, who will we have to turn to and find out what is going on? Who will be telling us that it is right to fight? Who will say that the enemy is satanic and must be defeated at all costs7 Who will insist that the wasted lives of war are heroic gestures? Who will scream at us from morning to night that war is noble, that 'our side' has god on its side, that 'they' will never win. even if most of us must die to stop them?

It is one of the sickest ironies of capitalism that if there is a third world war, fought over the interests of the competing millionaires and billionaires, it will be the media, which is largely paid for and almost totally ideologically obedient to those billionaires and millionaires, that will have the monopoly on explaining what is going on. The capitalists not only possess the power to blow us up, but they have the power to con us into believing that it is right and necessary that we should be blown up.

The power of the media is never more dangerous than in time of war. It is then that the lies become bigger, the audacious assaults upon our intelligence greater, the resorts to half-truths and historical distortions grosser. If the news broadcasts are always but an echo of the interests of our masters in their world affairs, in war time the news becomes a blasting verbal cannon-fire of propaganda

In this war in the Middle East the TV newsreaders have done everything but put on uniforms. They have been recruited to the task of justifying the military force of 'our side' and attacking without explanation the 'madness' of the newfound enemy, to whom Britain used to be a major arms supplier. It is like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four: four years ago Saddam was the friendly dictator who could be relied upon to kill the Iranians: now that he is the official enemy people who have never even heard of him before must be taught to hate him with a passion that only the media can whip up.

Who will the next hate figure be? What further methods will the media use to brutalise us into screaming that we want war? It is a dangerous box which workers have invited into the corners of their living rooms: it emits the poison gas of pro-war propaganda. Never mind all the reports of on links between TV violence and real violence — what about the link between news reporters who glorify war and tho widespread support for the indiscriminate slaughter of warfare which that generates? Or is that a legitimate use of TV to corrupt the minds of tho vulnerable7

Turning women into thugs

Speaking of corrupted minds and also of war — the two are closely linked — Channel Four showed a truly frightening documentary called Soldier Girls (16 August, 11pm). It was directed by Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill. (Broomfield must be one of the most powerful and perceptive makers of documentaries depicting the lunacy of nationalism and militarism) The documentary was about the training of women to become soldiers in the US army. There are few things more disgusting to see than rows and rows of women, capable of producing life, lined up with guns and idiot's uniforms, learning how to destroy life. The documentary showed with awesome clarity just how these trainee thugs are brutalised, their sense of dignity and decency is forced out of them as they learn to become nothing but unfeeling cogs in the killing machine. Those who do not conform are punished by crazed officers whom the Iraqi army could only hope to match for madness.

One trainee, Private Johnson, made it clear from the start that the lunacy of army life was not for her. The officers tried everything to push her into line. What angered them most was that she kept on smiling as they shouted at her. Soldiers are not meant to smile. They punished her, they lectured her, they verbally assaulted her, and still she smiled when she should not have done. In one part of the documentary Johnson is taken into a room by two officers for what is laughably called 'counselling'.

A uniformed female officer and a male nutcase scream and shout at her The latter tells her: "Every time I look at you, Johnson, you got that same smart-arse look on your face, that same silly little smile. And then you got the gall to tell the lieutenant that you want to stay in my goddam army — and not do a damn thing for it. That's what irks me, Johnson You don't give a damn. The troops can't stand you. I mean, even our worst troops out there can't stand you. They don't even want to be around you. You are the type that irritates people just by your presence, without oven opening your mouth. Haven't you realised, Johnson, that you have that capacity to piss someone off just by standing there? Just the way you stand radiates total apathy, complete uncaring about god, man, animal, life water . . ." Incidentally. Johnson was black and the two officers were white. At the end of the documentary Johnson is seen leaving the army; if there are medals for smiling in the face of military madness. Johnson should receive one.

The only difference between training US killers and training Iraqi ones is that the latter are more likely to be killed. Perhaps the Middle East lunatics talk more about the god who is not there; the American screwballs talk about red. white and blue rags on poles which they would die for. It is all crazy — and those who deliver its messages are crazier still.

Steve Coleman

News from the Madhouse (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics

The United States, as the most powerful country in the world, must be the world’s leading producer of statistics. But for some reason the US has been very coy about producing any estimate of the numbers of Iraqis killed during the American attack. However, others outside officialdom are less reticent, and according to a Times (10 July) report on Iraq, “a group of British and US academics said that the civilian death toll from the war was at least 6000.” But the lack of official American figures does mean that all that suffering can be brushed under the carpet. An American writer in the Times (3 June) said that the Iraqi war was “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. The 2800 people killed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre are fewer than half the probable figure of Iraqi civilian deaths. No American writer would ever describe the 11 September attack as “pretty-close-to-bloodless”. Of course, the twin towers attacks killed mainly Americans, while in Iraq it was mainly Iraqis who died. Perhaps that makes a difference.

Solitary confinement

But if you call your dead “victims”, instead of “heroes”, you may find people asking what is the point of supporting a system which results in so many dead victims. Describing them as “heroes”, or so the authorities hope, is a good way of getting people to rally behind the flag, and continue the merciless carnage which is part of capitalism. Private Jessica Lynch, for example, an American maintenance soldier, was in a vehicle at the back-end of an American convoy in Iraq, which lost its way and blundered into enemy territory. In an exchange of fire, she was badly injured, and captured by the Iraqis. She was taken to a nearby hospital in Nasiriyah, and her crushed arms and legs were put in plaster. The Americans discovered she was there, and decided the chance of rescuing a young, good-looking blonde was too good to miss. By that time Iraqi resistance was crumbling, but the desire for a propaganda coup was too strong. So special forces in helicopters, guns firing, stormed the hospital, capturing all the doctors and nurses and not really helping the patients, and triumphantly carried off Private Lynch.

According to the Times (21 June), the press was fed reports about her heroic resistance, fighting and killing Iraqis before being wounded several times herself. There are plans to make films about this exciting story. In fact, it seems, her gun jammed so she didn’t fire at all. Unfortunately, Private Lynch “has been unable to remember anything about the events which have propelled her into the public eye”, and, said the Times reporter, she is now “living in solitary confinement in the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington. Outside her door stands a military guard who prevents anyone except her medical helpers and her immediate family from seeing her. Each lunchtime Private Lynch goes to physiotherapy and works out alone.Other patients are banished from the gym for fear that the press will use them as a way to get to her.” A “hero”, kept in solitary confinement! It makes you wonder if they are helping her to remember what she has forgotten, i.e. all about her heroism. As the report said, “She is deliberately and falsely being portrayed as a hero in a war with few genuine heroes because the Americans would like to feel good about a war that has an ambiguous ending, and the entertainment industry needs to please them.”

Fishy story

In legal circles, there is a well-known story about a barrister, appearing for the defendant, who listened to the other side’s allegations, and wondered how on earth he was going to reply to them. At length his solicitor passed him a note: “No case; attack the plaintiff’s attorney.”

Ten Downing Street is acting on exactly the same principle in the aftermath of the Iraqi war. Much of the media—newspapers, radio, television—has been questioning some of the stories the government put out to justify their action in invading Iraq along with the Americans. Not having a convincing reply to many of these questions, Alastair Campbell (the Prime Minister’s main public relations adviser) decided to seize on one allegation broadcast on BBC television, to the effect that he had “sexed up” some of the information the government got from its so-called “intelligence services”, before issuing it as part of the government’s propaganda drive to persuade people of the necessity of war.

Whether this or that claim is one hundred per cent justified is of minor importance besides the government’s efforts to obscure the basic facts of the matter. America attacked and overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime because it needs to import a great deal of oil to keep its productive and distributive industries functioning. Saudi Arabia, with the world’s largest reserves of oil, is already firmly within the American sphere of influence; Iraq, with the world’s second largest reserves, was hostile to the United States, so had to be brought into line. Britain, and a few other countries, supported the United States because it is by a long way the most powerful country in the world. Some European countries have reacted to this enormous American power by stepping up their attempt to build a capitalist European federation which might in the future hope to rival the United States, and share in world leadership. Others, including Britain, think that a better bet is to go with the country which now has the leadership: in the jungle of world capitalism, the British rulers think, perhaps safety and prosperity lie in cosying up to the most ferocious predator.

Each group of capitalists, ruling in a particular country, does whatever it thinks is best for its own interests. Lots of advice is given, but the decision rests with each country’s ruling class. In Britain, there was a lot of feeling against going to war. Tony Blair, in his present role as right-hand man to the British ruling class, and administrator of British capitalism, ignored the widespread anti-war feeling, and did what he thought the British capitalist class would want him to do. So he went along with the American rulers, hoping that it would help to ensure the oil supplies which British industry needs and will need in the foreseeable future.

Whenever anyone makes an open, honest decision, he adds up all the possible reasons for and against, and arrives at a conclusion. When anyone reaches his conclusion first, and then has to make up his reasons afterwards, there are often a lot of problems. Tony Blair couldn’t announce that he was going to send British soldiers to fight in Iraq, which would involve killing and injuring Iraqi soldiers and civilians, as well as deaths and injuries among the British invading force, simply because he thought it was safer in the modern world for the British ruling class to ally with the single world superpower, and at the same time make sure British capitalism didn’t run out of oil. So reasons had to be made up afterwards. Hence the sudden discovery that Saddam Hussein is a nasty man, running a barbarous regime. Quite true, of course, but not enough to excuse a war which was almost impossible to square with capitalism’s own “international law”. The problems were, firstly, that the British government has supported and traded with this barbarous regime in the past, and, secondly, if that was the reason behind the war, Britain would have to attack many countries round the world, which have regimes just as tyrannical and murderous as Saddam’s. If only the “enemy” country would attack first, then the excuse for war would be obvious—resistance to aggression, which was trumpeted as a complete justification throughout the Second World War. But that wouldn’t do in this case, since America and Britain were going to be the ones committing the aggression. And it wouldn’t be very convincing to claim that Iraq, economically feeble after the Gulf War and the years of sanctions since then, was somehow going to get powerful enough to send an invasion fleet down the Persian Gulf and round the Arabian Sea, up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, then through the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar, and across the Bay of Biscay before finally invading Cornwall.

What could be done? So in comes the killer excuse—Saddam has weapons of mass destruction: nuclear or chemical or biological weapons which could be sent on a rocket across Europe to land on Basingstoke or thereabouts—and which would be ready for action in only forty-five minutes! (Exactly forty-five, apparently—not forty-four or forty-six minutes: or, as W. S. Gilbert put it, “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) All this is jazzed up in two official-sounding dossiers, which seek to prove the imminent danger. In due course awkward facts start to emerge—some of the material was taken from an ancient thesis which a student had submitted for his degree (and put on the internet), borrowed without acknowledgement and improved to make it more exciting; and allegations about Saddam trying to import uranium from the Niger republic in West Africa, which turn out to have been based mainly on forged documents.

When all this comes out in the newspapers and the media generally, no wonder Ten Downing Street try to defend themselves by picking out some uncertain bits of the criticism and demanding apologies. But since the Labour Party convinced millions of voters at the last two elections of the gigantic lie that they could run the capitalist system for the benefit of the working class—the great majority of ordinary people—then perhaps these other terminological inexactitudes seem to be very small beer.

Alwyn Edgar

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

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.)

US flexes its muscles (1998)

From the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we mention in our editorial, at the end of October 1997 another crisis emerged in the Middle East when Saddam Hussain banned Americans from the UN Special Commission (UNscom) charged with monitoring Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. A further conflagration threatened when Saddam promised to shoot down any US reconnaissance planes flying over Iraqi airspace.

Within days, US forces were put on alert with Britain’s Labour government offering wholehearted support.

What became clear as the waiting game unfolded, and perhaps surprisingly so for US Middle East watchers, was that the US and Britain were alone in their stand that Saddam should again have his ass kicked. Not only was caution urged by France, China and Russia (who together with the US and Britain make up the UN Security Council), but condemnation of US belligerence came from normally pro-US states such as Egypt (the second biggest recipient of US aid), Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

While Russia and France feared another US strike would jeopardise potential oil contracts and the recovery of old debts, Arab states’ reasons were two-fold.

The first had nothing to do with support for Saddam, but was more an alleged empathy with the long-suffering Iraqi people, still awaiting the lifting of UN sanctions that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands from malnutrition and disease since 1991.

The second is that many Arab rulers see the US as reneging on a post-Gulf War promise to deliver a Middle East peace settlement and because of the sanctions the UN refuses to impose on the Middle East’s other villain of the piece—Israel.

It is no secret that the US still bankrolls Israel to the tune of billions of dollars each year—a country whose nuclear arsenal is clouded in mystery—and in spite of US foreign aid legislation from 1977 barring funds to any state secretly developing nuclear weapons. Moreover, while Iraq’s flouting of one UN resolution can plunge the region into a long and protracted war, Israel is still in breach of six UN resolutions (338, 465, 476, 672, 673 and 681).

We might add that while the US is desperate to prove to the world that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, it is silent on its own chemical weapon stockpiles, and just as it can turn a blind eye to Israeli bombings of Libya in 1982 and 1996, so too can it ignore Turkey’s frequent over-the-border incursions to murder Kurds and the oppression Indonesian forces still carry on in East Timor.

All of this can be set against President Bush’s Gulf War Orwellian double-speak that “America stands where it always stands—against aggression”. Interesting words indeed from the first ever head of state to be condemned by the World Court, for “unlawful use of force against Nicaragua”.

The whole episode should make it immediately clear that the latest round of US sabre-rattling has less to do with any perceived threat Saddam poses to the present world order and rather more to do with US hegemony and US control of world oil supplies.

This is perhaps why Tony Blair could announce at the recent Lord Mayor’s banquet: “When Britain and America work together on the international scene, there is little we cannot achieve . . . we must not reduce our capacity to exercise a role on the international stage” (Observer, 18 November).

What Blair’s overt support for the US reveals is an all too common acknowledgement by the British elite that Britain can only ever move forward in America’s shadow.

Meanwhile, UN inspectors have since returned to Iraq, but with a reduction in the proportion of Americans represented. The US alleges that Saddam will have exploited the UN absence to conceal Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and insist they will not stop until all of Saddam’s weapons and related facilities are uncovered and the world is again a safe place to live in; a hollow sounding notion considering Russia and the US still have 5,000 nuclear warheads pointed at one another.

In the immediate future we can expect further military stand-offs in the region, with the working class hostage to the ongoing power struggle over control of the world’s centre of oil extraction.

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