The New Warlords - From the Gulf War to the recolonisation of the Middle East
Larkin Publications


PART ONE

The Gulf War: imperialism and militarism

1.1 Oil imperialism and the class struggle
EDDIE ABRAHAMS & DAVID REED
1.2 Imperialism plans war
EDDIE ABRAHAMS
1.3 Operation Desert Storm
EDDIE ABRAHAMS & MAXINE WILLIAMS
1.4 Premeditated murder of a nation
EDDIE ABRAHAMS & MAXINE WILLIAMS
1.5 Imperialism's 'new world order'
EDDIE ABRAHAMS
1.6 Imperialism, war and the socialist movement
ROBERT CLOUGH


Appendix: The historical background
1.7 How the Britain and the US plunder the Gulf
TREVOR RAYNE
1.8 The destruction of Iraqi communism
EDDIE ABRAHAMS



1.1 OIL IMPERIALISM AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
EDDIE ABRAHAMS/DAVID REED
FRFI 97 15 SEPTEMBER/15 NOVEMBER 1990

'...one can say that the revolutionary movement in the advanced capitalist countries will remain a myth as long as the struggles of the workers in Europe and in North America against the capitalist system are not closely united against imperialism and world capitalism with those of the hundreds of millions of oppressed people in the colonies.' (Statement from the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf, May 1969)

The recent developments in the Arab Gulf have settled one decisive question of world politics. They have swiftly demolished the claim that the defeat of the socialist bloc and the end of the Cold War would inaugurate an era of democracy and peace between nation states. The massive build up of the US war machine in the Gulf shows how militarism and war are necessary characteristics of imperialism's defence of its interests all over the world. It shows that the capitalist system cannot survive without neo-colonial oppression to safeguard imperialist access to cheap sources of fuel and raw materials.

It is no accident that the first major development after the collapse of the socialist bloc has seen the biggest US military operation since the Vietnam war, to secure control of the world's largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Far from moderating imperialism's predatory character, the collapse of the socialist bloc has now removed all restraints on its drive to carve up and redivide the world.

A second fundamental characteristic of imperialism emerging from war preparations in the Gulf is the growing clash of interests between the major imperialist powers. The lukewarm Japanese and German response to US requests for financial help with its military costs indicates their resistance to accepting unqualified US control of the Middle East and its oil. The current President of the EC Council of Ministers, Gianni De Michelis, reflected this position when he said '...there should be no taxation without representation.'

As we argued in FRFI 96 (August/September 1990), the London and Houston summits of the major imperialist powers forced the US to acknowledge the emergence of a world in which Japan and Europe, led by a united Germany, would become a challenge to the US and carve out their own sphere of influence throughout the world.

Already the new Europe's GDP is over 90 per cent, and Japan's 60 per cent, of that of the USA. Of the largest hundred companies in the world, 40 are from the EC, 39 from the USA and 15 from Japan. Of the 200 leading world banks, 65 are from the EC, 51 from Japan and 36 from the USA. The emergence of three more equally matched imperialist blocs makes new conflicts inevitable.

Under imperialism, the control of the world's oil supplies has always reflected the relative strength of the contending imperialist powers. British domination over Middle East oil began to be challenged in the inter-war years by US imperialism which by then was emerging as the major imperialist power. By the 1960s the US had achieved a dominant position in the Middle East. To safeguard their positions, Britain and the US created a system of puppet regimes throughout the region through military intervention in the Arab world: Iran (1953), Jordan and Lebanon (1958), Oman (1957-59 and 1965 onwards), Kuwait (1961), Bahrain (1956 and 1965), North Yemen (1962 and 1970), Saudi Arabia (1963).

In different periods, Zionism, Iran under the Shah, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, after its defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, have all played a critical role in defeating movements which challenged imperialism's hegemony in the region. Through repression and calculated handouts of a portion of oil wealth imperialism has succeeded in undermining the anti-imperialist movement in the Arab world.

Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait threatened to upset this strategic system of alliances in a period when the US economy, with an unprecedented foreign debt of some $600bn, was entering a recession while facing a challenge to its economic supremacy. It seized the opportunity to use its immense military might, built up in the Cold War years, to reassert its dominant international position.

The third and frequently ignored fundamental feature of imperialism exposed by the Gulf crisis is that the prosperity of the imperialist nations, embracing a significant section of the working class, is only possible through the plunder and exploitation of the oppressed nations. The resulting containment of the class struggle in the imperialist countries is dependent on this plunder and exploitation. Where labour and social democratic parties have emerged, they represent the interests of the more privileged layers of the working class. They have proved to be wholly dependent on imperialism and have been just as ready as the capitalist class to carry out imperialism's predatory actions.

In Britain, the Labour Party is continuing its long historical role as a loyal servant and agent of imperialism in the Middle East and the Gulf. When Iranian nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq nationalised the oil industry in 1951, it was the Labour government under Attlee which organised a world-wide embargo of Iranian oil and conspired to bring down the Mossadeq government. This was accomplished in 1953 by the CIA with British complicity. The brutality of the British intervention in the Gulf under Labour governments in Oman (1964 and 1974) and South Yemen (Aden, 1964-1967) is well documented.

In keeping with this record and its class interests the Labour Party has adopted a position as warlike and as militaristic as the Tory Party. The United Nations cover for Labour militarism should deceive no one. Labour's emphasis on a UN role expresses only its leaning towards an alliance with European imperialism rather than harbouring, as Thatcher does, illusions of an independent British imperialism allied to the US. Like the US and the Tory Party, the Labour Party is determined to destroy any challenge to imperialism's strategic control of the region.

The miniscule Labour left's pacifism is in reality a fig leaf for imperialist intervention against the Arab people. They want to starve Iraq into submission, to subjugate it by 'peaceful UN sanctions' instead of a war which would see 'the Arab nations solidly united against the West.'

The abject failure of the British left to build a united opposition to imperialism's war drive is comprehensible only in the context of its subservience to the interests of the official Labour and Trade Union Movement.

The British left have refused to place demands for Kurdish and Palestinian self-determination at the centre of their work even though this would enable them to build alliances with the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Kurdish, Arab and Turkish workers in this country. Such unity could become a focus for drawing oppressed workers in Britain into organised political struggle. Instead they still harbour the illusion that the Labour Party and the official Trade Union movement are the instruments for political change in Britain. This reflects the petit bourgeois class character of these organisations which have always unequivocally refused to take the side of the oppressed in Britain or internationally.

The economic and political consequences of US imperialism's intervention in the Gulf will exacerbate inter-imperialist tensions. The near doubling of the price of oil and the cost of this military adventure threatens to send the world into a severe recession with devastating consequences for the oppressed nations. Political opposition to imperialism in the Arab nations will become a focus for opposition elsewhere, especially in the Third World. The social and economic consequences of a recession in the imperialist countries offer the prospect for a renewal of class struggle. The opportunity exists to unite the struggles of workers in Europe and North America with the hundreds of millions of oppressed peoples opposing imperialism. It has to be seized. Without it, as the PFLOAG statement concludes, 'the revolutionary movement in the advanced capitalist countries will remain a myth.'

All revolutionary and democratic forces in the Middle East are opposing imperialism's war drive and the puppet governments which have welcomed and aided US forces. Communists in Britain should have no hesitation in joining these revolutionary and democratic forces. That is why the Revolutionary Communist Group advances the demands:

British hands off the Middle East!

Imperialist troops out of the Gulf!

Self-determination for Kurdistan!

Victory to the Palestinian revolution!

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1.2 IMPERIALISM PLANS WAR
EDDIE ABRAHAMS
FRFI 97/98 SEPTEMBER 1990/JANUARY 1991

The imperialist war preparations in the Gulf have nothing to do with the 'defence of small nations', 'Kuwaiti sovereignty' or with principles of democracy and national self-determination. US imperialism is mounting its biggest military operation since the Vietnam war for one purpose only - to ensure its control over Gulf oil reserves which represent a 'stupendous source of strategic power'.

The 2 August 1990 Iraqi invasion and subsequent annexation of Kuwait has upset a carefully constructed arrangement of imperialist domination. With one blow, Iraq became the possessor of 20 per cent of the world's oil reserves. With this wealth and its 900,000 strong battle-trained army it posed a threat to the staunchly pro-imperialist Saudi Arabia, the other major oil producer in the Gulf. This the imperialist powers are not prepared to accept.

Under the guise of liberating Kuwait and defending Saudi Arabia from Iraqi 'aggression' the US is commencing military operations of which the real aim is to cut the Iraqi regime down to size. A US Administration official declared that 'any withdrawal that left the Iraqi war machine intact would be unacceptable.' Thatcher chipped in to assert that Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was not enough, claiming that it was also necessary to destroy its capacity for nuclear and chemical warfare. While Saddam Hussein remains a vicious anti-working class tyrant and one-time partner of imperialism, he is not a reliable ally. He represents a faction of the Iraqi ruling class which displays independent and imperialistic ambitions. He must therefore be crushed.

That the whole affair is about the defence of imperialist privilege and wealth was expressed frankly by President Bush:

'our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries (would) all suffer if the control of the world's great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein.'

On 13 November Secretary of State Baker, defending the US's military mobilisation, said:

'The economic lifeline of the industrial (ie imperialist) world runs from the Gulf. If you want to sum it up in one word it is jobs.'

Imperialism and Gulf oil

Current imperialist intervention in the Middle East is only the latest in a long line of interventions. Indeed the history of the region this century has to a large degree been shaped by imperialism's efforts to suppress the Arab nationalist movement and working class in order to control the region's oil reserves which constitute a critical political and economic foundation for imperialism. The Middle East and the Gulf contain at least 66.3 per cent of these reserves! In comparison the US has only 4 per cent. Saudi Arabia has estimated reserves of 252,000m barrels. The US has 35,000m.

The major imperialist powers consume 49.1 per cent of all oil produced, the United States alone guzzling a massive 25.6 per cent of world output. Without a constant supply of Gulf oil, their economies and profits would suffer heavy blows. The United States imports more than 45 per cent of its oil, 25 per cent of it from the Gulf with 10 per cent from Iraq and Kuwait. Japan imports all its oil, 45 per cent of it from the Gulf with 10 per cent from Iraq and Kuwait. Germany, the other major imperialist power, imports 97 per cent of its oil with at least 40 per cent from the Gulf.

Is it any wonder then that imperialism willingly spends between $2-3bn a month and deploys anything up to 700,000 troops in the Gulf, in addition to 45 warships and hundreds of its most modern and deadly fighter and bomber planes, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and a massive arsenal of other lethal weaponry? Such money imperialism never spends on democracy. Democracy is not profitable. But Gulf oil is. And in more ways than immediately meet the eye.

The international significance of Gulf oil

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threatened to undermine Gulf regimes which play a critical role in enabling imperialism to extend its influence and power throughout the Middle East, the Muslim world and Asia. The role of Saudi Arabia is a case in point. Saudi Arabia willingly does imperialism's dirty work. It was responsible for financing the Afghan counter-revolutionaries to the tune of billions of pounds; it was a conduit for money and arms to the Contras in Nicaragua and it is the main financier of reactionary Muslim fundamentalist movements devoted to the eradication of communism and socialism in the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have also tried to subvert the revolutionary character of the Palestinian liberation movement by pouring millions into the coffers of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Such funding was designed and to a certain extent has succeeded in strengthening the compromising and vacillating bourgeois wing of the Palestinian national movement and consolidating its domination of the PLO at the expense of the working class and oppressed.

The political and economic influence of Gulf oil extends well beyond the Middle East to Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere. Nearly four million migrant workers from these countries are employed in the Gulf forming 69.8 per cent of the labour force in the Gulf states. Working as servants (20 per cent), unskilled labourers in the oil and construction industry and in the public services, they enjoy none of the political and social rights of local people. In Kuwait alone there are 100,000 Sri Lankan and Filipino maids.

These workers each year send home up to $10bn in remittances. By no means sufficient to raise the mass of the population out of poverty, these sums nevertheless help keep the wheel of imperialist exploitation turning. Egyptian workers send nearly $3bn, Jordanians $1bn, Pakistanis and Indians $2.2bn and $2.5bn respectively. Sri Lanka depends on remittances for 40 per cent of its income. These remittances play a crucial role in stabilising the imperialist-controlled economies of these countries and serve to weaken the anti-imperialist movements by buying off a tiny section of the working class and the petit-bourgeoisie.

It is in defence of this vast structure of imperialist exploitation that the US's awesome military machine is being augmented by imperialist forces from Britain, France, Denmark, Italy, Canada, Netherlands, Australia and Belgium. West Germany and Japan respectively are substituting for some US forces in the Mediterranean and offering financial assistance. The bourgeois ruling classes of Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh are all committing forces too, independently or under the auspices of the Arab League.

The global context of the imperialist attack on the Gulf

However, beneath the apparent imperialist united front there are serious tensions and divisions. They are all united on the need to subjugate Third World nationalism in general and Saddam Hussein in particular. But this is where unity ends. The Gulf is emerging as a sphere for inter-imperialist conflict as each power fights for a bigger and better slice of the Gulf cake.

On 15 August 1990 George Bush declared that:

'there is no substitute for American leadership and American leadership cannot be effective in the absence of American strength.'

Japanese and German imperialism however, are not willing to accept unqualified US military domination which would allow the US an enormous lever over Japan and Germany. Despite US protests they both refuse to share a significant part of the enormous financial burden of the war. Sections of the Japanese and German ruling class go even further. Sensing the danger of US military strength, they are expressing discontent with constitutional restrictions on their own international military role. A Japanese Self-Defence Force lieutenant complained that Japan was 'being left outside the international political scene while other major industrialised countries are forming united forces to prevent the Iraq-Kuwait crisis from further escalating.' Meanwhile a German general stated: 'The whole of society needs to be prepared, not just to accept that its troops might have to intervene in a regional crisis but also to support them. Germans have to learn that such an action is respectable.'

European and Japanese imperialism are using the hostages issue, aid and various 'peace initiatives' to distance themselves from the US stand. Adopting a less bellicose posture the French, German and Japanese ruling class are sounding out the possibilities of a new post-crisis Gulf order in which their interests will be served better by their 'moderate stand'.

Japan has committed $2bn in aid for Arab regimes suffering as a result of sanctions against Iraq. It has offered Egypt a $400m loan at 1 per cent interest. Germany too offered aid and has even sent medicines to Iraq! Senior German, French and Japanese politicians, with the full backing of their governments, are visiting Baghdad not just to release hostages but to explore possibilities of a settlement without war. The only senior politician not to receive such backing was ex-Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath who visited Baghdad and returned to popular, but not governmental, acclaim with 33 freed hostages.

German and Japanese imperialism are using the Gulf crisis as a first step in preparing for a long term challenge to the US's worldwide superiority. The only imperialist government to give unqualified support to the Bush Administration is the British. Also representing a weak and declining imperialist power, it hopes that by clinging to US military coat-tails, it too can defend its international position and its share of the Gulf cake against economically better-equipped competitors. This is why Thatcher took the initiative in imposing a military blockade of Iraq which she insisted include food and medicine.

British imperialism's 'no negotiation', 'Saddam Hussein must unconditionally surrender or be fought' position has been fully endorsed by the Labour Party. Displaying its subservience to imperialism and hoping to harvest the chauvinist vote in the next election, the Labour Party has been outflanked on the left by Tory Heath. Heath urged negotiations and warned against the 'madness of war'; the Labour Party loudly endorsed war preparations. When James Baker visited Europe to firm up a fractured imperialist alliance and get support for the use of force, he was welcomed by Gerald Kaufman, the Shadow Foreign Secretary. Simultaneously the Labour Party disassociated itself from Tony Benn's visit to Baghdad in search of a peaceful solution.

Imperialist troops out of the Gulf

The imperialist intervention in the Gulf is not directed exclusively against Saddam Hussein. It is designed as a blow against all forces capable of challenging its control of the Gulf. Understanding well what imperialism is planning for the region, the poorest sections of the Arab masses and particularly the Palestinians are rallying in defence of Iraq. The Arab masses also justifiably harbour burning hatred for the ruling classes of Gulf states. A Jordanian expressed a widely held view when he said:

'The oil rich Gulf states have allowed the US a free hand with their wealth and oil while their poor stricken Arab brethren had to go on their knees for Arab aid.'

Like the Arab masses, the British and international working class has no interest in supporting any imperialist intervention against Iraq. It is the duty of all British communists and democrats to uncompromisingly expose and oppose the Labour Party imperialists, left and right, who are supporting the imperialist campaign against Iraq and the Arab people. Unlike the reactionary imperialists of the Labour Party, we call on all working class militants, on all socialists, democrats and progressives to demand the immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops from the Gulf.

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1.3 OPERATION DESERT STORM - IMPERIALISM GOES TO WAR
EDDIE ABRAHAMS/MAXINE WILLIAMS
FRFI 99 FEBRUARY/MARCH 1991

The attempted demolition of Iraq began under the cloak of darkness at 3am on 17 January 1991. By the end of just the first day of Operation Desert Storm Iraq had been subjected to a bombardment one and a half times more powerful than Hiroshima and double that which flattened Dresden. Days of unrelenting bombing, the biggest in history, will be followed by the use of ground forces against shell-shocked Iraqi troops.

For the first time we are witnessing the full range of modern high-tech conventional imperialist warfare. Overwhelming force is the key phrase. A massive technically superior military machine is being used against Iraq's 18 million people. To ensure against the remotest possibility of defeat or heavy imperialist casualties nothing must be left to chance. Hence the over 700,000 imperialist and allied troops, the 1,650 fighter and bomber aircraft, the 3,800 tanks and 129 battleships carrying cruise missiles, and the 1,000 US nuclear warheads with British and Israeli additions held in reserve. Hence on day one the dropping of 18,000 tons of explosives in 1,300 sorties and the firing of 1,000 plus cruise missiles (each costing £lm). This onslaught was designed to rapidly and completely destroy Iraq's capacity to retaliate. It failed - US and British aircraft have been destroyed and Iraqi Scud missiles have hit targets in Israel.

The obscenity of this war is cloaked behind the computer war games jargon of 'taking out' and 'pinpoint bombing'. They have reduced the horrors of war to a carefully censored 24-hour TV spectacle without a shred of honest information. Government ministers, armchair generals and Labour hacks blandly assess the success of 'our war'. We will not see the blood, the bones, the charred bodies. The extent of devastation, injuries and deaths is not and, if the imperialists have their way, never will be, known. But we do know that Britain's role in this bloody slaughter has been second only to the USA.

What is this war about? Only fools would believe that the international gangsters of US and British imperialism have suddenly become converts to the cause of self-determination. If the Kuwaitis had no oil they could weep until the deserts bloomed before the imperialists would aid them.

This war is about imperialist power, profit and oil. When they talk of 'stability in the Middle East' they mean the subordination of the Arab masses and Arab oil to the imperialists and their obscenely rich hireling Kuwaiti and Saudi sheiks. They mean the permanently enforced balance of power that keeps their only stable and reliable ally - their ghastly offspring Israel - stronger than any other nation in the region.

The rumble of bombs in Iraq may be the prelude of greater storms to come. If the rivalry between the USA, Europe and Japan continues to grow, we or our children will see a war to redivide the world. And then those who live in imperialist countries and previously only watched wars on TV will come to understand the meaning of the term 'taking out' for themselves.

Whatever happened to the anti-war movement?

Never has there been a greater need for a massive anti-war movement. But where are the voices raised against war? Day one of Operation Desert Storm saw a packed House of Commons rallying behind 'our boys'. Hundreds of comfortable old men talked about the need for 'courage' and 'sacrifice'.

What is there left to say about Kinnock and co? Wanting to safeguard British imperialism, wanting to court votes, terrified of being deemed unpatriotic if they so much as coughed during the war debate: 'Our forces are engaged in pursuing legitimate objectives and should enjoy full support across the political spectrum...Dictators don't withdraw, they have to be defeated. Thus said Kinnock, the grammar schoolboy who knows his place, looks up to his betters, and glows warmly when they let him into their club.

In the USA, where they are fortunate enough not to have a large social democratic party, the Senate and House of Representatives were deeply divided. With black people and other oppressed layers playing afar more significant role politically, a serious anti-war movement is developing. Not in Britain.

Yet it cannot be said that it is the Labour leadership that has prevented a significant anti-war movement. They are not contenders for the leadership of anti-war sentiment, they are explicitly leading the war party. The culprits must be sought amongst those who have taken the leadership of the anti-war trends, primarily Tony Benn and the Labour left. It may seem churlish to focus on Tony Benn given that he is one of the few politicians to oppose the war. But it must be said - he and his trend have prevented the building of an enduring and effective anti-war movement.

Through the five months leading to war the Labour left's position, expressed by large CND demonstrations, was to give sanctions a chance. To starve the Iraqis rather than bomb them. A week before the war the CND, calling for more time for sanctions, organised a demonstration of 100,000. And when war came and the bombs fell, what could they say? They led the anti-war movement into a blind alley.

What does Benn's position represent? 'The consequences of the war in the Gulf could be...the Arab nations solidly united against the West.' He wants to oppose the war - for the good of imperialism! Hence his grotesque illusions in the United Nation's ability to secure a just solution. A UN which since the collapse of the socialist bloc has become an instrument of imperialist policy, and under whose flag the blitzkrieg on Iraq is being waged. With his call for sanctions and UN action what is Benn actually saying? - that the oppressed can be kept down by peaceful means rather than war, that the current world order can be defended by becoming a little more just.

This tired old rubbish persists because it has a purpose. People in the imperialist nations are faced with a choice. Many of them do no approve of the war, poverty and starvation which imperialism creates. To do something about it they would have to ally with those who, directly suffer at the hands of imperialism. Or they could become silent accomplices to imperialist oppression. The choice is there. Today it is summed up in the question: 'Are you for or against imperialist intervention in the Gulf?' Benn invents a comfortable third option: a peaceful solution via the UN. At the same time he gives the Labour Party the entirely spurious appearance of being worthy of support from those opposed to this war.

In the Gulf war there is only one position which reflects both the interests of the Arab masses and of those sections of the British population who desire peace: Stop the War! Imperialist Troops Out of the Gulf! It won't build a mass movement tomorrow. But then a mass movement that disappears when war is declared is not a great deal of use. It will however start to attract to its ranks the most consistent and enduring forces. It will provide a means of allying with and defending Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish people in Britain now under chauvinist attack. It will be the beginning of a new trend in Britain. If it is not born now, in the midst of this slaughter, the future is bleak indeed.

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1.4 PREMEDITATED MURDER OF A NATION
EDDIE ABRAHAMS/MAXINE WILLIAMS
FRFI 100 APRIL/MAY 1991

'Then this civilisation and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...A glorious civilisation, indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over'

(Karl Marx, The Civil War in France)

After 40 days of war there are not heaps but mountains of Iraqi corpses. 200,000 Iraqi people are dead or mutilated. The imperialists lost just 157. In this statistic is starkly revealed the one-sided savagery of the war. 1,000 Iraqi lives for each Western one. 28 countries, including the richest and most powerful, against one nation of 18 million people. An imperialist army of terrifying technological killing power against a conscript army equipped with second rate weaponry. An air force that could pound Iraqi towns and troops without fear of airborne challenge until pilots complained there was nothing left to bomb. Minds that are not shamed and disgusted by this spectacle have forfeited their humanity.

US soldiers dig pits that are filled with the mangled remains of the numberless retreating Iraqis burned and dismembered in that final holocaust on the Kuwait-Basra highway. Iraqi families await the return of sons, brothers, husbands and lovers who will never come back. They wait for them in devastated cities where cholera, typhoid and hepatitis seep out of the ground to kill the young. The work of decades has been reduced to rubble. 'They have bombed us back to the stone age.'

What words are adequate to describe this crime in an era when language itself has been polluted by the doublespeak of war? The frying alive of men inside a metal tank coffin is a 'surgical strike'. The systematic pulverisation of thousands of men in cars and lorries is 'a turkey shoot'. A shelter for men, women and children is a 'command and control centre'. The bombing of trucks of soldiers as they bent in prayer at the roadside is a 'fun mission'.

Military theorist Clausewitz wrote: 'The invention of gunpowder, the constant progress of improvements in the construction of firearms, are sufficient proof that the tendency to destroy the adversary which lies at the bottom of the conception of War is in no way changed or modified through the progress of civilization.' The day by day destruction of Iraq certainly revealed the limits of civilization in the West.

British bishops searched their theological vaults to discover means of calling this carnage 'justifiable'. Journalists acted as pimps and propagandists for the war machine. Warm, safe, well-fed politicians and intellectuals blithely called for sacrifice from young British men too poor, stupid or amoral to find any other trade than killing. And the Labour Movement, whose 'progressive' nature is talked of only amongst small groups of Trotskyist visionaries, clapped its hands and counted up the new jobs to be had in arms production.

Few questioned the right of imperialist nations to impose their will by force on the Arab world.

The murder of a nation

And what was the imperialist will? General Norman Schwarzkopf said: 'There is a lot more purpose to this war than getting the Iraqis out of Kuwait.' Indeed so. Saddam Hussein is the type of vicious anti-working class and anti-communist tyrant usually lovingly nurtured by the USA. But he made the fatal error of displaying independent bourgeois ambitions in a region which the USA believes it alone should control. Oil wealth and a massive army threatened to allow the realisation of these ambitions. The USA was not prepared even to contemplate an Iraq capable of dictating terms about oil prices and regional power. So on 17 January they began the demolition of Iraqi economic and military power in order to eliminate this threat. In the process the hoped to unseat Hussein himself if a safe alternative could be found.

Proof that this, rather than the liberation of Kuwait, was their aim came on at least three occasions. On the eve of war, Saddam Hussein told UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar that withdrawal from Kuwait was negotiable. This being the last thing the USA wanted to hear, it was kept secret by the UN and the bombing began. On the eve of the ground war the Soviet government negotiated a peace plan committing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The US answer was the thunder of artillery. And even after the Iraqi government accepted all UN resolutions and the decimated Iraqi forces were fleeing Kuwait, the US response was to bomb the helpless retreating men, occupy parts of Iraq and step up the bombing.

The reconquest of Kuwait did not demand the destruction of Iraq's industrial and social infrastructure. But Iraq's roads, railways, bridges, airports, electricity generating plants, water pumping and purification plants, telecommunications, oil refineries, factories, schools, health services, research institutions and government buildings lie in ruins. The estimated material damage amounts to $200bn. Reconstruction will take decades.

Also in ruins is the Iraqi army, first armed and now destroyed by the imperialists. It has lost 3,500 of its 4,200 tanks, 2,000 of its 3,000 artillery guns and 2,000 of its 2,700 troop carriers. Just as the imperialists willed at the beginning of this conflict, the costs of reconstruction and the threat of reparations will ensure that for years to come Iraq will be unable to challenge imperialism.

The outcome of this war is a devastating setback for human progress, socialism and communism. For in the murder of Iraq, the US-led imperialists have issued a warning to all the poor and oppressed nations of the world: the wealth of the world belongs only to us, dare to question this and you will be cut down as Iraq was.

The tide of reaction

Now we see the reality of the world in which the socialist bloc has collapsed. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev's pro-imperialist leadership cannot stay the hand of rich and powerful nations as they plunder the world. Our Nobel Peace prize winner, who has brought the Soviet Union to the brink of political collapse, was bribed by the imperialists to support the war. His peace effort was merely a cynical response to internal anti-imperialist pressure. Nor will the UN, however much Tony Benn et al pretend, act as anything other than the rubber stamp for the US. Although the war was fought under its auspices, the UN Security Council did not even meet during hostilities. In this war the United Nations has been the hand-wringing archbishop of imperialist diplomacy.

The new world order to which Bush and Major plan to subject the world is the bloody dictatorship of imperialist capital. It will be the world order of rich nations who live at the expense of those who have nothing. Already the imperialist plans for the Middle East are unfolding and they are grim indeed.

The spoils of war

The post-war Gulf is being shaped. The first US priority was to restore the feudal al-Sabah family in Kuwait. After kissing the soil its next act was to start shooting its democratic opponents. Palestinians in Kuwait are being tortured and terrorised. The second priority for the US is to engineer a satisfactory outcome to the violent contest for power taking place in Iraq. The US is carefully weighing its options but it is clear already from its actions around Basra and its silence on the Kurdish uprising that it would prefer a tame Baathi/army alliance without Saddam Hussein to an altogether unpredictable outcome.

And what of the Middle East as a whole? The major Middle East governments are to be compliant client regimes. Syria, clutching Lebanon as its war booty, needs US and Saudi money to survive. Egypt has long been on the US payroll. Saudi Arabia is the payroll. At a meeting of the Gulf states, Syria and Egypt agreed to provide the Arab cover for US policing of the Gulf. In return they will receive a large part of a $15bn development fund to fend off the threat of economic disintegration and revolution.

As ever, these political arrangements are designed to safeguard and multiply the mighty dollar. Hundreds of foreign firms have converged like vultures expecting to reap enormous profits from Kuwaiti reconstruction estimated at $50bn. British capital also expects a cut for services rendered. 'Prizes are still to come as far as British industry is concerned' said one businessman, especially as Kuwaiti officials 'know who their friends are.' The oil companies are now plotting to reverse the process of nationalisation of the oil industry in Arab countries and thus enhance their already giant profits.

The table is laid for the victory feast but the guests are already fighting over the choicest dishes. A French proposal for a UN conference to discuss a new world order for the next 10-15 years has been shunned by the US. It hopes to use its military ascendancy to fashion a world in which its interests reign supreme. However the Japanese and Germans are resisting these designs and threatening to withhold billions of dollars of subsidies they promised to the US. The Japanese want to use some of this money to make profits for themselves out of reconstruction contracts. With the recession biting deeper in the US and economic complications mounting in Germany and Japan there will be no easy ride for imperialism.

Palestinian and Kurdish self-determination - a different story

In his post-war speech a triumphal Bush pledged to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Such words sent a cold shiver down the spines of all Palestinians. The threat is that another generation's hopes for self-determination and statehood are to be buried. For occupying Kuwait, Iraq suffered death and destruction. For occupying the West Bank and Gaza Israel receives unwavering support. During the war it kept all the West Bank Palestinians under a five week 24-hour curfew. Human rights, like self-determination are a very flexible concept. Israel has now been advanced another $650m with another $10bn being negotiated. These funds will be used to settle hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews and will be the first step in the displacement of all Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.

During the war much was said about Saddam Hussein's suppression of the Kurds. Afterwards a deathly silence fell. Kurdistan was not to be on the agenda for the post-war settlement. As the first uprisings began in Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan, the imperialists kept a cool distance, confident that their fascist ally, the Ozal regime in Turkey, was ready to crush any potential independent Kurdish state.

Can anything stem the tide?

As the imperialist victory parade marches around the world it faces obstacles and challenges. US military dominance in the area by no means secures it against social and political upheavals whipped to exploding point by poverty and humiliation. Foremost amongst these are the decades-long struggles of the Palestinian and Kurdish peoples. They have shown a will to continue the struggle that surmounts setbacks and defeats. As the Intifada continues a new Kurdish uprising breaks out.

But isolated they face a terrible situation. The crushing of Iraq has increased the odds against them enormously. Communist and revolutionary nationalist forces have been gravely weakened. Muslim fundamentalism, funded primarily by Saudi and Kuwaiti money and cloaking its bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ambitions in the language of the poor is poised to exploit and manipulate the mass movement to its own ends. Today more than ever, the Palestinian people, like all oppressed nations fighting for freedom, need the solidarity and support of an international anti-imperialist movement. These exist amongst movements oppressed nations. In contrast: the working class in the imperialist counties has demonstrated no independent political existence from imperialist masters. In the face of the most massive assault on an oppressed nation the British working class proved itself either impotent or, worse, an enthusiastic accomplice to the imperialist crime. At all stages the Labour Party stood solidly behind the war effort. Colonel Kinnock shameless defended the Basra-Kuwait City Highway slaughter. Like the Conservative Party, the Labour Party is committed to destroying any challenge to imperialism's control of region.

Seventy years ago Lenin said that the choice facing humanity was socialism or barbarism. Imperialism has inflicted barbarism on most the world's population with the passive or active acquiescence of large sections of the imperialist nations working class. How and under what conditions any forces in imperialist countries can begin to forge a movement to undermine imperialism from within remains the great unanswered question of the epoch. Only if anti-imperialists address the question can there be away forward.

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1.5 IMPERIALISM'S 'NEW WORLD ORDER'
EDDIE ABRAHAMS
FRFI 101 JUNE/JULY 1991

The Gulf War was waged to stop Iraq from ever again challenging imperialist interests in the Middle East and Gulf region. It was an integral element of US strategy as expressed in a National Security Review on 'Third World Threats':

'In cases where the US confronts much weaker enemies, our challenge will be not simply to defeat them, but to defeat them decisively and rapidly.'

Oppressed nations who dare resist imperialist plunder will suffer Iraq's fate, a fate vividly described in a post-Gulf War UN report on Iraq:

'The recent conflict has wrought near apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanised and mechanised society. Now most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.'

The report then outlines the consequences. Approximately 90 per cent of industrial workers are inactive as the 109,876 US and British air sorties dropped 88,500 tons of bombs and destroyed factories, power plants, oil refineries, water-related pumps and chemical factories, communications systems, railways, roads and bridges. As a result hunger, disease, unemployment and lack of shelter are now features in what was one of the Third World's more developed countries. Iraq imports 70 per cent of its food. With virtually no foreign exchange and the continued enforcement of most sanctions it cannot obtain enough food. Prices have risen nearly 1,000 per cent and there, are serious shortages of sugar, rice, tea, vegetable oil, powdered milk and other essentials. Livestock farming has been devastated by sanctions and the destruction of the sole laboratory producing vaccines against cattle disease.

The report predicts massive health problems as:

'...Iraqi rivers are heavily polluted by raw sewage, and water levels are unusually low. All sewage treatment and pumping plants have been brought to a standstill by the lack of power supply and the lack of spare parts. Pools of sewage lie in the streets and villages. Health hazards will build in the weeks to come.'

Famine and disease are stalking the country. A Harvard University team of doctors warned that in 1991 alone, 'at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die' because of sanctions. Dr Eric Hoskins of the Gulf Peace Team commented:

'Iraq's civilians have been dying of starvation and disease in their thousands because of lack of basic food and medicine. Never before in history has a government been prohibited from purchasing and importing food and medicines for its own people.'

An Oxfam/Save the Children Fund report noted:

'The unavailability of powdered milk spells nutritional disaster for children...the spread of disease such as cholera and typhoid in the present conditions are inevitable.'

Deaths among children under five have quintupled. Close to a million children are malnourished and 100,000 are starving. With production in public and private industry down by anything between 50-90 per cent and real wages down by 90 per cent the situation can only grow worse. Nearly one year after the war the situation continues to deteriorate. The imperialists are well on the way to reducing Iraq to one of the most impoverished of Third World countries. Already, in real terms, Iraqi workers now earn less than agricultural workers in rural India.

The new colonialism

The post-war UN cease fire resolution accepted by Iraq on 6 April 1991 was but the judicial expression, on an international level, of the essentially colonial character of the much trumpeted 'new world order'. By means of this resolution, which only Cuba voted against, Iraq's subjugation by and dependence on imperialism was affirmed. Described as the most punitive since the Versailles Treaty, the UN, for the first time, imposed border demarcations and extended Kuwait's borders 7 miles into Iraq. This now allows the emirate to steal even more of Iraq's oil from its Rumallah fields.

To ensure that Iraq never again presents a military threat to imperialism, it is now compelled to hand over for destruction all its chemical and biological weapons, all its ballistic missiles with a range beyond 90 miles and all materials for building nuclear weapons. The Security Council has also banned all sales of conventional weapons to Iraq. Meanwhile, of course, the major imperialist powers continue to arm themselves to the hilt with even more deadly and sophisticated weapons. And they continue to supply such weapons to their clients in Israel and other reliable ruling classes. But then the Gulf War was but the first of a new round of essentially colonial wars.

Imperialism uses the Iraqi ruling class

On the anvil of imperialism's predatory and reactionary designs in the Middle East the Kurdish people and Shiites in southern Iraq are being forced to pay a deadly price. During the war Bush urged 'the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands', authorised CIA aid to 'rebel factions inside Iraq' and organised the 'Voice of Free Iraq Radio'.

A multitude of liberals, professorial socialists and media hacks who had supported the war were subsequently 'outraged' and 'horrified' that the US and British forces watched passively as Saddam Hussein turned with deadly effect against mass uprisings in Kurdistan and southern Iraq. Hussein's Republican Guards wreaked revenge, killing tens of thousands in the South and forcing millions to flee for their lives into the Kurdish mountains on Turkish and Iranian borders.

But of course imperialism had its own agenda unrelated to the sentimental and hopeless proposals from liberal and 'socialist' warmongers. Whilst destroying Iraq's capacity to challenge imperialism, its ruling class was needed to deal with internal and Kurdish democratic forces. An independent Kurdish government in Iraqi-occupied south Kurdistan could spark uprisings in Turkish, Iranian and Syrian-occupied Kurdistan and as a result gravely destabilise a region critical to imperialism.

Imperialism therefore intervened to establish 'safe havens' only after the Kurdish national uprising had been crushed and hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees were facing death by cold, starvation and disease in the mountains. However, not one iota of humanitarian sentiment animated this intervention. It was a cynically calculated political move made necessary first and foremost by the flood of refugees into Turkish-occupied Kurdistan which was seriously undermining political stability in Turkey.

Despite impressions, John Major was not the humane and wise father of the 'safe havens' concept. Turkish President Ozal, eager to find ways of keeping Kurdish refugees out of Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, was the first to suggest the plan. John Major, with the acumen inherited from the British ruling class's long colonial history, recognised more rapidly than the US its potential political benefits.

With millions of Kurdish refugees reduced to total destitution imperialist 'safe havens', food, medical and other aid appeared like godsends to avert massive tragedy. With this programme Bush and Major hope to cultivate pro-imperialist sentiment among sections of the Kurdish population. These schemes were also designed to strengthen the position of the bourgeois Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). Both oppose Kurdish independence and are presently engaged in negotiations with Saddam Hussein for 'autonomy'.

The imperialists hope that such trends, buttressed by safe havens and aid will act as an effective counter-weight to revolutionary developments in other parts of Kurdistan and to Kurdish organisations such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who fight for the independence and unity of the whole of Kurdistan. Additionally, they expect a somewhat strengthened Kurdish bourgeois force within Iraq to act as a dampener on future Iraqi ruling class ambitions.

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1.6 IMPERIALISM, WAR AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
ROBERT CLOUGH
FRFI 100 APRIL/MAY 1991

The brief span of the imperialist war against Iraq rekindled some interest in the Marxist position on war, especially as it was developed by Lenin during the first imperialist war. An understanding of the Marxist standpoint is a necessary condition for communists responding to the new wave of imperialist assault on the Third World.

The position of revolutionaries vis-à-vis any war depends on a concrete analysis of the political content or substance of that war. How do we disclose and define the substance of a war?

'War is the continuation of policy. Consequently, we must examine the policy pursued prior to the war, the policy that led to and brought about the war...The philistine does not realise that war is "the continuation of policy", and consequently limits himself to the formula that "the enemy has attacked us", "the enemy has invaded my country", without stopping to think what issues are at stake in the war, which classes are waging it, and with what political objects.'

(Collected Works (CW) Vo1 23, p33)

In other words, Marxism requires

'...an historical analysis of each war in order to determine whether or not that particular war can be considered progressive, whether it serves the interests of democracy and the proletariat and, in that sense, is legitimate, just, etc.'


(CW Vol 23, p32)

Lenin often quoted Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. In fact, he took it a step further, saying 'War is not only a continuation of politics, it is the epitome of politics' (CW Vo1 30, p224), to emphasise that it was not a break from the norm of political struggle, but quite the opposite, especially in the imperialist epoch.

Second, in analysing the substance of any war, communists need to determine what class aims are at stake.

'The social character of the war, its true meaning, is not determined by the position of the enemy troops...What determines this character is the policy of which the war is the continuation ("war is the continuation of politics"), the class that is waging the war, and the aims for which it is waging this war.'


(CW Vo125, p362)

In other words, the military and political issues involved cannot be separated.

Third, such analysis would establish that some wars - those for national liberation, for instance - were completely justifiable, and had to be supported by socialists. Lenin particularly dealt with the slogan of 'defence of the fatherland' advanced by the open opportunists of the warring imperialist powers during 1914-18. Concrete analysis determined that 'the war is being waged for the partitioning of colonies and for the plunder of other lands' (CW Vo121, p185). Further, applying Clausewitz's dictum on war as the continuation of politics:

'You will see that for decades, for almost half a century, the governments and the ruling classes of Britain and France, Germany and Italy, Austria and Russia have pursued a policy of plundering colonies, oppressing other nations, and suppressing the working the class movement. It is this, and only this, policy that is being pursued in the current war.'

( CW Vo1 21, p304.)

Hence the war was an 'unjust' war, since it was a war for the continued enslavement of the working class and oppressed nations. 'Defence of the fatherland' in this context meant the defence of the right of one imperialist power to oppress colonies at the expense of another imperialist power. However, socialists recognise the existence of just, legitimate wars, wars to overthrow feudalism, absolutism and alien oppression. Lenin again:

'I am not at all opposed to wars waged in defence of democracy or against national oppression, nor do I fear such words as "defence of the fatherland" in reference to these wars or insurrections. Socialists always side with the oppressed, and, consequently, cannot be opposed to wars whose purpose is democratic or socialist struggle against oppression. It would therefore be absurd...not to recognise the legitimacy of wars of oppressed nations against their oppressors, wars that might break out today - rebellion of the Irish against England, for instance, rebellion of Morocco against France, or the Ukraine against Russia, etc...'

(CW Vo1 23, p196)

Such wars, of the colonial, oppressed nations against their imperialist oppressors, would be completely legitimate:

'irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory "Great" Powers.'

(CW Vo121, p301)

Lastly, socialists in the oppressor nation, in siding with the oppressed, would have to fight those who supported that oppression, in particular, the privileged labour aristocracy and its political representative, the bourgeois labour party:

'The fact is that "bourgeois labour parties", as a political phenomenon, have already been formed in all the foremost capitalist countries, and that unless a determined and relentless struggle is waged all along the line against these parties - or groups, trends etc, it is all the same - there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement.'

(CW Vo123, p118)

These then are some of the relevant principles for socialists to understand if they are to adopt a principled approach to any war that 'their' imperialist power carries on.

The war against Iraq

The trigger for the war against Iraq was the latter's invasion of Kuwait. This was a dispute between two factions of the Arab bourgeoisie over the price of oil. Iraq needed a high price to rescue its economy from complete collapse, while the al Sabah family in Kuwait wanted a lower price so as not to upset the imperialist economies in which it had enormous investments. In this dispute, the war aims of either party were entirely reactionary.

However, the Iraqi invasion upset the network of alliances which US and British imperialism had established to sustain their control of the Gulf and its oil in the post-colonial era. A greater Iraq could be a threat to the Zionist state. It might provide an avenue through which Japanese or German imperialism could obtain a foothold in the Gulf and undermine the stranglehold of the US and Britain.

Hence the war aims of Britain and the US were very simple: destroy the Iraqi war machine, re-establish the al Sabah family, and use this position to reassert complete supremacy over the Arab people. To these ends, they were quite happy to bribe the Egyptian bourgeoisie and allow Syria a free hand in northern Lebanon in order to co-opt them into their designs. Democracy in Kuwait, Syria, Turkey, or freedom in Palestine or Kurdistan were completely irrelevant to their designs.

Hence socialists supported a defeat for British and US imperialism for a very concrete reason. Yet they could not by the same token extend that to a call for a victory for Iraq, because its war aims were also reactionary. Some sects fought to distinguish between a military victory for Iraq (which socialists could support) and a political victory (which socialists couldn't). But this distinction is sophistry. A military victory for Iraq was always an impossibility: even if it were not, it could only mean a political victory for Saddam, with the continued enslavement of the Kurdish people and the Iraqi working class as its consequences.

The Iraqi war aims were then the war aims of the Iraqi bourgeoisie alone. And the turn the war took proved that beyond doubt. The Iraqi army collapsed, not just because of the terrible pounding it took from the imperialist forces, but because the conscripts that made it up did not want to fight a war in whose outcome they saw no interest. 'Victory to Iraq' sounds very hollow when we see that the hatred of the Iraqi army for Saddam was much greater than for the imperialists Saddam had summoned them to fight.

As we have shown, there is another aspect to the struggle against imperialist war, and that is the fight to expose those in the working class of the oppressor nation who support the imperialist war aims - the 'bourgeois labour party' Lenin referred to.

From the outset, Labour declared its support for British war aims. They needed no encouragement; indeed, Kaufman as Shadow Foreign Secretary boasted at the Labour Party conference that he had called for Iraqi reparations fully one month before Thatcher took it up. As the economic war turned into military war, and the wider war aims of imperialism were made public, Kinnock and Kaufman did not hesitate to support them. Most despicable of all, in the slaughter of the last 24 hours, not one word of protest was uttered, as Kinnock echoed the call for an unconditional Iraqi surrender.

If Labour fulfilled its role as defender of imperialism to perfection, we must not forget the part played by the Labour left and its admirers, Lenin argued that in a period of revolutionary crisis, when the working class becomes disaffected with the 'bourgeois labour party', a trend appears which seeks to reconcile the working class to that bourgeois labour party. During the first imperialist war, Karl Kautsky, a prominent leader of the pre-war international socialist movement, was such a conciliator. Kautsky argued that socialists should oppose the war by calling for a democratic peace: that since the war was in his view was an interruption to normal politics, the fact that German Social Democrats openly defended German war aims should not be held against them, and they should not be expelled from the movement. Lenin wrote:

'Kautskyism is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum which has deserted to the bourgeoisie. But the danger of Kautskyism lies in the fact that utilising the ideology of the past, it endeavours to reconcile the proletariat with the "bourgeois labour party", to preserve the unity of the proletariat with that party and thereby enhance the latter's prestige. The masses no longer follow the avowed social chauvinists...The Kautskyists' masked defence of the social chauvinists is far more dangerous.'

(CW Vol 23, p119)

The Labour and Trotskyist left in their own small ways played this part to perfection. No matter how indignant Benn, Bernie Grant and other 'opponents' of Kinnock were, they were never going to break with the butcher's assistant. To the left, the SWP made sure that its formal commitment to 'troops out' never upset its friends in CND. As Lenin said:

'One of the common sophistries of Kautskyism is its reference to the "masses". We do not want, they say, to break away from the masses and mass organisations!'


(CW Vol 23, p119)

How many times did the SWP plead that the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf and its associated organisations were the 'broad left forces' that were the only way to a mass movement? But as Lenin argued:

'...it is not so much a question of the size of an organisation, as of the real, objective significance of its policy; does its policy represent the masses, does it serve them, does it aim at their liberation from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, the minority's reconciliation with capitalism?'

(CW Vol 23, pl19)

The Committee, with its support for sanctions against Iraq and its opposition to the withdrawal of the imperialist troops, expressed the 'minority's reconciliation with capitalism'. And the SWP? Its 'masked defence' of the Committee was no more than a pale imitation of Kautskyism. Truly the one point on which the left puts no condition is its support for the Labour butchers.

The peace is a continuation of the war. The al Sabah family has regained control of its private fiefdom. The Palestinian population of Kuwait who make up the labour force are being subjected to a reign of terror. Even the tame 'democratic' opposition is persecuted: within days of the end of the war, one had been shot dead and another wounded. Within Iraq, whilst imperialism hopes for a coup organised from within the Republican Guard to topple Saddam, the Kurds fight on for liberation.

As we have explained, the issue for US and British imperialism was how best to reassert their domination of the Arab people. They could only have been defeated by the people of the Middle East as a whole acting to prevent their rulers from supporting the war. 'Victory to Iraq' could not express this standpoint; by pretending a military victory for Saddam was not a political victory it sacrificed the interests of the Kurdish and Iraqi people. 'Victory to the workers and oppressed peoples of the Middle East', the slogan of FRFI, was and still is the only legitimate standpoint of communists, since it alone states what is the case - that it is the united mass of the oppressed who can defeat imperialism, not the unwilling conscripts of a bourgeois dictator.

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APPENDIX: The Historical Background

1.7 HOW BRITAIN AND THE US PLUNDER THE GULF
TREVOR RAYNE
FRFI 97 APRIL/MAY 1991

For 170 years the peoples of Arabia and the Gulf were slaughtered and suppressed in the interests of British imperial power. The British fleet shelled along the entire coastline of the Peninsula; British troops have poisoned wells, burnt crops, tortured and murdered Arab resistance; the Royal Air Force has bombed villages into oblivion. All of this accomplished by Conservative, Liberal and Labour governments alike with the connivance of Arab ruling classes prepared to sell their people's blood and land for gold.

Initial British interest in the Gulf stemmed from the conquest of India. For strategic purposes the frontiers of India were deemed to extend from the Red Sea to the Straits of Malacca off Malaya. Before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 there were three routes to India: around the Cape and into the Indian Ocean; overland via the north Syrian desert, the Euphrates valley and the Gulf; or via Alexandria, the town of Suez and the Red Sea. The nineteenth century British ruling class feared French, then Russian and eventually German encroachment onto these routes and the Indian colony itself. By the 1880s India contained a fifth of Britain's overseas investment and took a fifth of its exports. Lord Curzon and later Winston Churchill maintained that India made the difference between Britain being a first and a third-rate power. To maintain Britain's control over the trade routes required a combination of brute force and financial inducements - bribes.

During 1819-20 British naval forces burned down a string of coastal towns along the Arabian peninsula and sank local fleets, calling them 'pirates' for attempting to retain control over their traditional waters. Trade was seen as a threat and destroyed, along with the Omani Empire that stretched to Zanzibar. Local leaders were forced to sign a 'General Treaty of Peace with the Arab Tribes'. The effect was to secure assurances that Britain could exclude all other foreign powers from the region. Scores of similar treaties were imposed across the region over the next hundred years. In 1839 British troops sent from Bombay attacked and occupied Aden. The following year Hong Kong was taken and the Peninsular and Oriental (P and O) Steam Navigation Company was established. It rapidly became the most successful steamship company in the world converting the Red Sea into a British lake and tying together British trading operations throughout Asia. Disruptions were handled severely: when it was reported that 20 'Christians' had been killed in Jedda in 1858 the Royal Navy bombarded the town for two days until 11 Moslems were yielded up. They were beheaded. The Annual Register recorded the hope that Moslems had been given a lesson 'of the irresistible power of England, which they are not likely soon to forget'.

By the 1870s Britain controlled two-thirds of the Arabian Peninsular's coastline: from Aden, north-eastward to Muscat and Oman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Bahrain and up to Kuwait. The hinterlands were scarcely developed, there was no colonisation. Apart from the British parts the Peninsular was driven into stagnation and decay. With the decline of the Ottoman Empire British forces moved north and east to occupy Cyprus 1878, Egypt 1882, and southern Persia 1907. When oil spurted out of the Persian ground on 26 May 1908 Britain had in place a regional monopoly and network of political domination over the local feudal ruling classes that ensured an efficient imperialist exploitation of this most valuable new resource.

The US challenge to Britain

The 'lucky strike' was made by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later, 1951, BP) using Burmah Oil funds. Anglo-Persian paid £20,000 in cash to the Grand Vizier in Tehran for a concession on an area almost twice the size of Texas. With the defeat of Turkey in World War I, Britain and France started carving up her possessions. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement gave southern Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Britain, the north to France. In 1914 an Armenian businessman, Calouste Gulbenkian, used money from Anglo-Persian (BP), Royal Dutch-Shell and the Deutsche Bank to form the Turkish Petroleum Company (later the Iraq Petroleum Company). The agreement between the parties went into abeyance during the war and in 1919 the German share went to France instead. Despite US resentment the British government argued that the USA had not declared war on Turkey and should be excluded from the oil deal. After the 1922-23 Lausanne Conference Mesopotamia became the British Mandate of Iraq. The British military commander of Baghdad refused to let US oil scouts explore the territory. Consistent US economic and diplomatic pressure finally forced the British to accept US corporate participation in the Turkish/Iraq Petroleum Company. In 1928 Exxon (Esso) and four other major US oil companies gained a 23.7 per cent stake in the company. Thus the US entered into Middle East oil. Iraq was discovered to have some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

In 1931 Standard Oil of California (Chevron) struck oil in Bahrain. Two years later they bought oil concessions in Saudi Arabia for £50,000. Oil production began in 1939. King Ibn Saud rewarded the US firm by extending the concession to cover an area equal to one sixth of the USA.

At the end of World War Two US economic power gave it the means to supplant British imperialism as the dominant force in the Middle East. In 1947 when Britain announced it would have to end its aid to Greece and Turkey the US stepped in with dollars and military personnel. India gained its independence in 1947, Britain could no longer afford the costs of maintaining military forces in the Middle East sufficient to repel all challengers, the Arab rulers were growing richer and intent on wielding a greater measure of state power for themselves and Arab nationalism was on the rise. Indicative was the January 1948 Portsmouth Treaty which replaced the old British military mission in Iraq with a proposed Anglo-Iraqi Defence Board. In practice the Treaty meant that in the event of a threat to BP's interests Britain would send forces into Iraq, the RAF would have access to bases in Iraq should it wish to use them and Britain would train and, arm the Iraqi government's forces. The Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said the Treaty was 'the beginning of a new series of treaties, regularising and expressing the friendship between this country and the Arab world'. Naturally, it provoked huge riots in Iraq and the British placeman, head of government General Nuri el-Said, was forced to resign. He returned to power the following year. Nevertheless, while British imperialism was intent on holding onto its position in the Middle East it was increasingly less able to do so. The denouement came with Suez in 1956; however it was indicated in Iran in the years preceding it.

In May 1951 the new Prime Minister Dr Mossadeq, leader of the liberal bourgeois nationalist National Front, announced the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian oil Company. British Labour Prime Minister Atlee asked the Chiefs of Staff to draft a plan to occupy the main AIOC refinery at Abadan. The US opposed the plan and it was shelved. The AIOC organised a world-wide boycott of Iranian oil which was backed by a Royal Navy blockade of the Gulf.

Abadan's refinery was the largest in the world, supplying oil to the US forces in the eastern hemisphere. Forty per cent of total production of aviation fuel outside the socialist countries came from the Abadan refinery. Iran accounted for over a third of Middle East oil supplies. The loss of output that resulted from Britain's conflict over the nationalisation damaged the US military campaign in Korea. British military intelligence officers approached the CIA to devise jointly a plot to overthrow Mossadeq.

Between 1942 and 1948 the Iranian armed forces were under the command of US Brigadier General Norman Schwarzkopf (father of 'Stormin' Norman). Schwarzkopf returned to Iran and made contact with officers friendly to the USA. Several hundred US agents were activated in Tehran. Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup on 19 August 1953. The Shah was restored to the Peacock Throne behind which stood the US rather than the British embassy.

British imperialism had been too weak to act effectively alone and the dispute over nationalisation was a nuisance to the USA. After the coup the US oil transnationals joined BP in control of Iranian

During 1955 British-recruited and led forces clashed with Saudi- backed forces at Buraini Oasis on the borders of Oman and what is now the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi forces were US-equipped and fighting in the interests of the US-owned Aramco company. Accusations flew back and forth between the contending powers about bribing sheiks (the British termed them 'annual subsidies'). Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan said the oasis was 'vital to our interests'. The Saudi forces were expelled with two SAS squadrons and BP not Aramco gained two-thirds of Abu Dhabi's oil.

In October the following year British forces, with French and Israeli support, attacked Egypt, which had nationalised the Suez Canal. The British government intended to remove Gamal Abdul Nasser's government and seize back the Canal. US imperialism, alarmed at the revolt provoked by the British action that swept across the Arab nations and intent on enforcing its regional dominance to secure a steady flow of oil, acted swiftly. The US Federal Reserve Bank sold sterling and in one day a sixth of Britain's gold and dollar reserves vanished as the Bank of England tried to defend the pound. The US forced a humiliating end to the invasion: within three months British troops had departed and Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned. Although the British ruling class surrendered its dominant role to US imperialism it allied with it against the threat of Arab nationalism and communism to British-owned oil supplies.

United States global strategy

In 1950 oil accounted for 27 per cent of world energy demands while in 1973 it had reached 48 per cent. Who controls oil controls much of the world. Between 1937 and 1967 the volumes of West European oil imports multiplied thirty fold, Japanese twenty fold and those of the USA fourteen fold. In 1939 Britain controlled 60 per cent of Middle East oil, the USA just 13 per cent. By 1960 Britain had 30 per cent while the USA had 65 per cent.

In the course of World War Two the US government decided to get its hands on all the means of lifting, refining and distributing oil as an instrument of foreign policy. After 1945 the winning of sources of 'strategic materials' corresponded more than ever before to the military-strategic aims of the USA as the dominant power in NATO.

The Gulf states provide Western Europe with about 40 per cent of its oil needs, Japan 75 per cent and the highest US dependence was around 20 per cent, reached in the 1970s; it is often nearer just 10 per cent. Substantial as US domestic oil reserves are, US consumption of oil 1945-75 grew at approximately twice the rate of US domestic production. To reduce its own dependence on Middle East supplies and thereby increase its manoeuvrability in the region and power over its capitalist allies, the US ruling class diversified its oil supplies to Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria and Indonesia. In particular the Korean War accelerated US control over Canadian oil output: by 1953 the US owned 73 per cent of Canada's known oil reserves. When the Suez Crisis cut Middle East supplies to Western Europe by two-thirds, the US transnationals were able to maintain 90 per cent of normal purchases by their NATO allies by increasing output elsewhere around the world.

Middle East oil proved not only strategically important to the US ruling class but extremely profitable. Low labour costs, plentiful supplies and the terms of local concessions meant that every dollar invested in the Middle East in the 1950s generated three and a half times as much oil as each dollar invested in the Caribbean Basin. The rates of profit of US investment in the Third World reveal the following: in 1966 all industrial investment yielded an average of 17.1 per cent, manufacture 9.4 per cent, oil 25.7 per cent; in 1979 all industries 29.5 per cent, manufacture 13.5 per cent, oil 103.9 per cent. Similar figures obtain for most of the 1970s when the OPEC cartel was supposedly creating an 'energy crisis'; the reality was the super-profits of the US and British transnational corporations' cartels.

US Central Command

As the Vietnamese drove on to victory, a revolutionary wave covered 14 countries in the period 1974-80. Included among the victories which the US saw as specifically threatening its hold on oil were Nicaragua, Grenada, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Iran. Of these only Angola and Iran were oil producers but US imperialism saw its domination of the sea lanes threatened.

In 1977 President Carter announced the formation of a Rapid Deployment Force, to be prepared for instant response to events in the Caribbean Basin and Middle East. A string of forward bases (naval and air) was established in Turkey, Israel, Somalia, Oman, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Diego Garcia. By 1981 US military strength in the Indian Ocean and Gulf exceeded the defence forces of all the region taken together. Plus, nuclear weapons were moved onto Diego Garcia. From January 1983 a permanent US Central Command was established to protect 'vital US interests', consisting of over 350,000 men. Those interests are deemed as covering 19 countries from Morocco to Pakistan. The US ruling class had in place a force intended to maintain its rule over oil and dominance over the Middle East, thereby to sustain its role as the world's major imperial power.

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1.8 THE DESTRUCTION OF IRAQI COMMUNISM
EDDIE ABRAHAMS
FRFI 100 APRIL/MAY 1991

Modern Iraq is the product of a long history of British intervention in and manipulation of the borders of Middle East states. This history - and the frequently overlooked tragedy: the destruction of the Iraqi communist and workers movement at the hands of the Baath Party - is recorded well in Iraq Since 1958- From Revolution to Dictatorship by Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (IB Tauris, 1990, 346pp, £9.95)

The carve up of the Middle East and the birth of Iraq

In 1920 General Edward Spears wrote that:

'...the French and the British...satisfied each others' appetites after the First World War, by serving up strips of Arab land to each other.'

Until World War One, the Arab world fell within the domain of a decaying Ottoman empire. This oil rich area became a battleground as Germany, Britain and France fought to replace Ottoman rule. In their struggle, the French and British won Arab support with promises of democracy and independence. But in secret they concocted the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which gave Lebanon and Syria to the French whilst the British got Palestine and Iraq. With Germany's defeat and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the victorious allies were free to carve up the region.

Between 1915 and 1921 British troops 'liberated' Baghdad and Basra provinces from Ottoman rule and completed their new territorial unit by attaching to these Arab provinces the oil rich Kurdish province of Mosul. Their hopes of imposing direct rule after the fashion of the 'Indian Raj' were dashed by nationalist opposition. The British therefore altered tactics and prepared to rule indirectly. They created a dependent ruling class from among the most backward sheiks, landlords and tribal leaders.

These elements were bribed with enormous tracts of land which had hitherto been state property. They were provided with a state, a civil service, an army and, of course, a team of British 'advisers' who had powers of veto. In 1921 the British authorities engineered the election of King Faisal to lead this ostensibly Iraqi government. Anglo- Iraqi treaties ensured the safety and security of British interests both before and after formal independence in 1932. Thus was born modern Iraq.

Between 1932 and the revolution of 1958, Iraq's British-imposed ruling class ruled the roost, making massive fortunes from collaboration with British capital. They did so however amidst the increasing impoverishment of the Iraqi peasantry, a growing class polarisation and the birth of an Iraqi working class.

By 1958 1 per cent of landowners owned 55 per cent of all land held in private hands. At the other end, 64 per cent held just 3.6 per cent of all cultivated land and 600,000 rural heads of households were completely landless. Hundreds of thousands of dispossessed peasants flooded into slums circling the main cities in search of food and work. Thus grew in the construction industry, small factories and most significantly in the oil industry, a small but militant working class. And by its side a larger, impoverished petit-bourgeoisie of shopkeepers, artisans, teachers, civil servants and professionals.

The Iraqi Communist Party

Formed in 1934, the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) drew its support from these classes and became a significant force by the early 1940s. It built its influence by uniting the social struggle for better wages, conditions and housing with the national struggle against British control. It targeted for strike action numerous British-owned economic interests and oil in particular. Thus it succeeded in harnessing the ambition and anger of the urban poor- working class and petit-bourgeois. Equally significantly the ICP developed a widespread following in Kurdistan with its policy of autonomy based on self-determination. It was the first Iraqi political party to develop a progressive position on the Kurdish struggle and ICP members edited the first Kurdish political paper.

In the late 1940s, the Party came into its own during a massive nationalist upheaval against the infamous Anglo-Iraqi Treaty. The so-called Portsmouth Agreement was being renegotiated during 1947 and 1949. When the terms of the treaty, prolonging British control for a further 20 years, were announced Iraq exploded into the al-Wathba, the leap, the great national uprising. The ICP was a 'fundamental force' in a series of massive strikes and demonstrations which led to bloody street battles. Government soldiers massacred 300-400 protesters. Hundreds of communists were arrested and in 1949 two leading Party members were hanged in public. Their bodies were left dangling for several hours 'so that the common people going to work would receive a warning'.

The 1958 Revolution and the defeat of communism

For ten years these class contradictions intensified and then exploded into a massive political and social upheaval. On 14 July 1958, the Supreme Committee of Free Officers led by Generals Abd al-Salam Arif and Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the British-installed monarchy. The coup unleashed enormous pent-up social energy which almost overnight created mass organisations, trade unions, political parties and popular militias. Rapidly General Qasim became the acknowledged leader of a popular revolution.

The revolution succeeded because it was able to unite two distinct anti-imperialist forces. On the one hand the working class and oppressed whose social and economic conditions spurred them on to a social as well as national revolution. On the other hand a whole strata of the new urban bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie whose nationalism pitted them against the monarchy and the British but who remained hostile to socialism.

With its militant record, its links with the working class and its underground organisation, the ICP effectively took command of most trade unions and mass organisations. It set up its own militia to defend the revolution. It also took the leadership of the Students' Union, the Youth Federation, the Women's League and the Engineers', Lawyers' and Teachers' Unions. The masses flocked to it. In January 1959 the Party was forced to announce that it could not accept any more new members as its administrative machinery could not cope. The Party and the masses controlled the streets of Baghdad and with demonstrations of up to 500,000 began pressing for fundamental social and economic change and in particular for land reform.

The spectre of communism began to haunt the imperialists. CIA boss Allen Dulles stated that the situation in Iraq was 'the most dangerous in the world'. The threat of a genuine social revolution led to a split in the alliance which carried through the revolution. At a government level this expressed itself in the rift between Abd al-Karim Qasim who relied on communist support and Abd al-Salam Arif who unfurled the banner of Pan-Arabism and anti-communist nationalism.

Central to the programme of Pan-Arabism was the call for the political union of all Arab states. However the populist and radical rhetoric was but a cover for a systematic struggle against Arab communism. Nasser, the outstanding exponent of Pan-Arab nationalism, had by the end of 1958 launched an all out attack against Arab communist parties, and the Syrian and Iraqi parties in particular. Arif and his supporters, in calling for union with Egypt, hoped to deploy Egypt's anti-communist laws against the Iraqi Communist Party and thus strengthen the hand of the anti-communists.

But these measures promised no immediate return. The communists still controlled the streets. Something more decisive and forceful was required to stem the advance of the working class. At hand and ready to wield the cudgel for the Iraqi and imperialist bourgeoisie was the Baath Party and the less significant Nasserite and other nationalist organisations.

The Baath Party in Iraq was formed in 1951 and developed support from the anti-communist elements of the Army. It was tiny compared to the ICP, never enjoying the latter's support and popularity. It did not need any popularity, its main function being to provide the counter-revolution with a base in the army and with gangs of thugs and killers.

From late 1958 the Baath Party, with the help of the police, organised systematic murder and terror against communists. In October 1959, a gang of Baath Party assassins carried out an unsuccessful attempt on General Qasim's life. The leader of the gang was Saddam Hussein who subsequently rose to the top of the Party. By 1961 the ICP reported that 286 Party members and supporters had been murdered and thousands of families forced to leave their homes. By such means the Baathists slowly pushed the communists off the streets.

These actions however failed to eliminate the ICP or destroy the working class movement which remained a force to be reckoned with. The Baath Party therefore plotted and prepared for its total and thorough destruction. In 1963, in alliance with other nationalist army officers, it organised a successful military coup. Its single-minded purpose was to finish off the Iraqi communist movement. To quote from Sluglett and Sluglett:

'The months between February and November 1963 saw some of the most terrible scenes of violence hitherto experienced in the post-war Middle East. Acts of wanton savagery and brutality were perpetrated by the Baath and their associates...[as they] set about the physical elimination of their rivals.'

Party members were shot in the streets, or herded into concentration camps, tortured to death or executed after mock trials. For nine months during which the Baath remained in power the killing and the torture continued. In this struggle the Baath received lists of communist names from the CIA. These massacres marked the effective demise of the largest and most popular communist movement in the Arab world: a movement which could have acted as a vanguard for socialism in the entire region.


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This is Part One of the book The New Warlords: From the Gulf War to the recolonisation of the Middle East, edited by Eddie Abrahams, Larkin Publications 1994. Most of the material in the book first appeared in Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! (FRFI), the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Group.