by Gerard Emmett
The anti-war movement has come to a significant crossroads. Some 83% of Americans oppose unilateral U.S. military action against Iraq, a number which has increased in poll after poll. That number, as well as the large and small demonstrations around the country, have forced President George W. Bush to work through the United Nations arms inspections, against his will, and have seemingly weakened his support among the U.S. and European rulers.
Bush is nevertheless pushing forward with his war plans, which are driven by ideology as much as by pragmatic concerns. In the face of all opposition Bush is assembling a massive U.S. military machine in the Persian Gulf. He is sending over 200,000 troops, along with 1,000 tanks, and hundreds of missiles. He has sent five U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in anticipation of an overwhelming air attack that would presumably minimize U.S. troop casualties.
Bush's ally, Tony Blair of Britain, is also sending over 30,000 troops—one fourth of the entire British Army. The ongoing air strikes carried out by U.S. and British forces are already destroying Iraqi command and control installations making the war's "beginning" a somewhat moot point.
These forces have the potential to wreak tremendous damage upon the Iraqi people, who have suffered the most from Saddam Hussein's brutal rule as well as a decade of UN sanctions that have already devastated the country.
This massive employment of firepower has nothing to do with "bringing democracy" to Iraq. Rather the administration sees the overthrow of the hated Iraqi regime as a relatively easy demonstration of how the use of American military power can remake the world in the image of the bourgeoisie. He has so far deeply embarrassed the bourgeoisie.
The 12,000-page weapons declaration Iraq issued as part of the UN weapons inspection regimen listed 24 major U.S. corporations which gave substantial support to Iraq's biological and nuclear weapon and missile-building programs. The Bush administration tried to keep this aspect of the report secret even from the members of the UN Security Council. In the case of nuclear and biological weapons this kind of support was illegal since the 1970s.
The companies named in the report include Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel, Unisys and Sperry, among others, along with the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture. The Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia nuclear laboratories provided training for Iraqi nuclear scientists. Of major industrial countries, only Germany had more business ties to the Iraqi regime.
FULL CIRCLE FROM THE FIRST GULF WAR
This support for Iraq's totalitarian police state was no accident, but the recognition of a deep affinity that became even clearer after the end of the Gulf War of 1991. The recent PBS "Frontline" documentary on the Gulf War of 1991 graphically illustrated this. First, the utter defeat of the Iraqi military, including mass desertions by the conscripted troops who had no wish to fight for Hussein's regime to begin with. Then the jubilation in the streets of Southern Iraq as the oppressed Shia population rose up in rebellion, joined by thousands of army deserters.
The U.S. military held back and allowed them to be slaughtered. This was repeated in Northern Iraq in the Kurdish rebellion that sacked the regime's torture centers. Saddam Hussein's loyal military was allowed to attack the Kurdish cities, which had experienced the "weapons of mass destruction," specifically poison gas that killed thousands of Kurds at Halabja during the Iraq-Iran War. Meanwhile President George Bush distracted himself with victory celebrations.
These events form a pattern that has repeated itself with variations since then. As the January-February 1993 Editorial in NEWS & LETTERS stated: "Like Stalin, who stood outside the gates of Warsaw in 1944 while Hitler slaughtered a mass uprising, U.S. imperialism manages to come to the aid of suffering peoples only after they have been decimated by the forces arrayed against them. The 'benign imperialism' offers humanity its 'freedom' only on the day of its burial." (This was reprinted in the NEWS & LETTERS pamphlet BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: ACHILLES HEEL OF WESTERN ‘CIVILIZATION’.)
Debate over this has emerged within the peace movement over responses to Bosnia, Kosova, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor. In retrospect it should have been obvious that it was bound to be a central debate with the rise of the U.S. as the sole superpower following the collapse of Russian Communism.
In 1991 there was talk in sections of the Left about the CIA orchestrating the anti-Hussein intifada. This was completely false. The truly lower and deeper opposition to Saddam Hussein will be found now as then among the exploited workers, like those who formed shuras, or workers' councils, during the 1991 intifada, and the Iraqi women who are subjected to ever more restrictive legal codes as Saddam courts the Islamists in the Middle East.
ARRAY OF OPPONENTS
The Iraqi opposition in fact includes the vast majority of people in Iraq. It cuts across the political spectrum from monarchists to Communists, including some critical of state-capitalism. The major pro-U.S grouping is the Iraqi National Congress. Originally founded in 1992, it was at first more broadly based than now, and it includes a number of groups including the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia group; and other groupings as well as independents.
This is the "official" opposition as recognized by the U.S. Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. A meeting is planned, to be held in Iraqi Kurdistan, to name an Iraqi government-in-exile. Even in this group's debates most oppose a U.S. military government for Iraq, calling instead for some type of democracy. The Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, now associated with the INC but who has written some of the most important works on the current regime, has said that there is only a 5–10% chance that U.S. military action could bring democracy to Iraq.
A different coalition, the Iraqi National Forces, consists of groups that oppose both a U.S. invasion and the present regime. The INF formed in 2002 with the aim of deposing Saddam Hussein without outside intervention. It includes the Iraqi Communist Party, the Islamic Al Dawah Party (whose forces have previously attacked U.S. military bases, including the 1983 bombing of marines in Lebanon), the Syrian-aligned Baathists, various Nasserite Arab Socialist groups and ethnic minority groups. Still, the INF doesn't necessarily criticize the groups who are willing to work with the U.S. The Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, followers of Mansour Hekmat, do criticize the idea of working with the U.S.
Iraq is a relatively large country with a broad political spectrum. It seems elementary that the next step for the broad anti-war movement here is to bring the views of the Iraqi opposition into its deliberations. As history has proven, that opposition doesn't have the same interests as George W. Bush.
NUCLEAR WAR THREAT IN KOREA
The "axis of evil" that Bush announced was an example of his foolishness, and it has blown up in his face. In an effort to disengage himself from the Clinton administration's policy with regard to Iran, Bush's attack on the moderate Khatami was a gift to the right-wing clerics. It was a way to take the pressure off themselves.
Bush's truly heedless actions toward North Korea have threatened the world most. His belligerent language has angered people in South Korea and accomplished the seemingly impossible: it has bolstered the regime of Kim Jong Il, perhaps the purest totalitarianism that exists today, as well as a miserable, bankrupt, and slowly dying regime before now.
Bush's foolish approach was bound to backfire. First, it would cost South Korea an estimated $500 billion over the first ten years to absorb the North's failed economy in the event of the regime's downfall, a price that dwarfs the unification of Germany. The South Korean bourgeoisie is not anxious to put up this kind of money.
Even more importantly, Bush's rhetoric conjures a vision of nuclear war that is truly terrifying because it could so easily happen. Any kind of war there would assure the destruction of North Korea itself, of Seoul, South Korea, and of a large part of the 37,000-person U.S. force stationed in South Korea. A nuclear war would be far worse. Kim Jong Il's ideological mentor, Hwang Chang Yop, who defected to the South, spoke of contingency plans for "torching Japan" with nuclear weapons in the event of war.
Bush's rhetoric played right into the hands of Kim Jong Il's dying ideology, "Juche," or "self-reliance," which was never a form of Marxism as it claimed (Marx's works essentially are forbidden there) or self-reliance at all. Rather it was a philosophy created to bolster the fortunes of the North Korean ruling class, the Kim dynasty, as it maneuvered within a world in which state-capitalist rulers competed for single-world mastery, whether as the "socialist camp" against the "imperialist camp" or as the rivalry of Russia and China for domination of world Communism.
This has come down in the last decade to the cult of Kim Jong Il as a kind of earthly deity. Meanwhile North Korea is so far from "self-reliant" as to be dependent on food aid from South Korea, China, the UN, the Red Cross and Christian WorldVision.
The situation in North Korea speaks to current debates in the anti-war movement as well. Groups like the International Action Center, which can correctly denounce the genocidal sanctions on Iraq, have no problem embracing the regime in North Korea, although up to two million North Koreans have been cruelly starved to death by this regime over the last decade. This while Kim reserved food supplies for his military and government officials, as well as for Petronian feasts and spectacles held for visiting Western leftists. An estimated 25% of North Korean children are malnourished to the point of being damaged for life, while Kim spends 25% of the Gross National Product on the military and perhaps another 9% on statue-building and other manifestations of his cultish rule.
WHICH WAY FORWARD?
The effect the anti-war movement has had on slowing the pace of Bush's war drive, and of forcing him into positions he doesn't want, has been a great achievement in itself. It has taken away the sense that we must inevitably accept U.S. imperialism's drive for permanent war overseas and increased repression at home.
To go further requires going beyond simply stating what we are against, no matter how passionately, not to mention avoiding the grosser trap of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." With the experience of Bosnia, Kosova, and East Timor in mind, historian Michael Berube has suggested a formula of an anti-war movement that "would base those arguments [against war] on an appeal to internationalism, rather than on appeals to national sovereignty" (CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, 11/29/02).
Current discussions in left journals from THE PROGRESSIVE to THE FIFTH ESTATE show that many anti-war activists are beginning to search for and create a new language that could speak to people within Iraq.
The anti-war movement that has emerged in the current situation is still new, still finding its voice, as a movement akin to the anti-globalization movement that arose in Seattle. It carries within it the new experiences of the last ten years, of debates that have done much to clarify the importance of internationalism. What the movement hasn't accomplished yet is the difficult task of forging links with the forces inside Iraq that could uproot not only Saddam Hussein's regime, but also create the kind of new human relations that could open new pathways toward the future for all of us.
-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to
each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that
we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted
at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy