BUSH TELLS UN: IRAQ IS OURS
This is What Colonialism Looks Like


During his trip to Syria, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a telling remark--one he assumed everyone would take for granted, but which should be given a second look.
According to the May 18 Al Ahram Weekly, Powell "made clear during his recent visit to Damascus that Syria must take account of the 'new strategic environment' following the collapse of the Iraqi regime.
Powell said he told the Syrians, 'What you're really going to be looking at is, you are in a new situation with your neighbor. It is going to be a very different kind of regime ... it is going to be a very close friend of the United States. Therefore it is in your interest to have a
better relationship with the United States.'"

Anyone who follows the propaganda of the Bush administration about its so-called "liberation" of Iraq and its desire to allow the Iraqi people to "choose their government" is entitled to ask the following questions:

Would the Iraqi people freely choose to befriend a government that has waged two wars against them; destroyed their infrastructure twice; killed hundreds of thousands in the Gulf War of 1991; set up an 11-year
regime of sanctions that killed over a million people--at least half a million under the age of five; recently again bombed schools, hospitals, fuel lines, power supplies and water systems; killed or wounded thousands of civilians during the war and carried out massacres of
civilians after the war?

Would the Iraqi people freely choose a government friendly to the U.S. government--which represents the biggest, most powerful oil companies in the world and whose military immediately secured the oil fields and the oil ministry while allowing or carrying out the destruction of virtually
every functioning government facility in the country, including the looting of their national museum and national library?

And finally, how does Colin Powell know-before any political process has even been set up, let alone implemented--that the Iraqi people will
freely choose a government friendly to the U.S.? Is Powell able to sense a miraculous future turnaround in sentiment from the present situation of growing distrust, suspicion and outright hatred of the USUK occupation which is reported daily in the media and manifested in
massive demonstrations?

Does Powell have some foreknowledge that the Iraqi people are about to abandon their widespread, long-held, anti-colonial sentiment en masse and embrace a power that wants to steal their oil, privatize and dismantle their economy, force them into a rapprochement with the hated Zionist state of Israel, and use Iraqi military bases to further its conquest of the Middle East?

UN RESOLUTION FOR COLONIAL MANDATE

What Powell knows is that the Bush administration is determined to establish itself, with assistance from London, as the colonial power in Iraq. And colonial powers get the puppet administrations that they want-
unless the masses upset their plans.

Consider the resolution for a U.S. and British colonial mandate submitted to the UN Security Council on May 8.

The resolution has a long list of provisions, including the right of the U.S. to spend the oil revenues of Iraq, the protection of the funds from any claim for debt owed to the other imperialist powers, mainly Russia and France, and a definition of the U.S. government and the British
government under the unified command of the U.S. as "the Authority."

Point 6 "Calls upon the Authority to promote the welfare of the Iraqi people through the effective administration of the territory, including in particular working towards the restoration of conditions of security and stability and the creation of conditions in which the Iraqi people
may freely determine their own political future."

Iraq's oil money, including from the Oil for Food program set up by UN sanctions as well as other Iraqi revenues, is in the euphemistically named Iraqi Assistance Fund. Point 12 "Decides further that the funds in the Iraqi Assistance Fund shall be disbursed at the direction of the
Authority, in consultation with the Iraqi interim authority."

Almost at the end of the 25-point document comes the punch line, in
Point 22:

"[The Security Council] endorses the exercise of the responsibilities
stated in this resolution by the Authority for an initial period of 12 months from the date of the adoption of this resolution, to continue thereafter as necessary unless the Security Council decides otherwise."

While everyone was expecting this resolution to deal with the lifting of the sanctions, so that the U.S. government, and ultimately U.S. corporations, could get their hands on the $13 billion in the sanctions fund, Washington went way beyond simply asking for the removal of sanctions. It asked the Security Council to ratify its openly declared colonial authority in Iraq.

BRITISH MANDATE OF 1920 WARMED OVER

This resolution is merely a modern version of the British Mandate of 1919-20, which legalized Britain's colonial rule of Iraq and Palestine after British troops occupied the region and, together with the French, divided up the defeated Ottoman Empire.

At the time the mandate system was an innovation in colonial rule adopted by the imperialist powers after the 1917 Bol shevik Revolution in Russia, which called for the self-determination of all oppressed peoples suffering under colonial slavery. The Bolsheviks also published
all the secret treaties of the overthrown tsarist regime, including the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty by which the British, the French and tsarist Russia divided up the Middle East among themselves. The mandate system was also a concession to the rising nationalist movement among the Arab peoples.

Prior to the mandate system, the European colonial powers had simply annexed territories and established permanent direct rule. It took the U.S. ruling class and President Woodrow Wilson to understand that the
policy of annexation would be impossible to sustain in the post-war political atmosphere of anti-colonial rebellion. He inaugurated the idea of the League of Nations and its Covenant, which paid lip service to self-determination and paved the way for the modification of colonial rule.

The infamous Article 22 of the League Covenant stated, "To those colonies and territories which ... are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation ... .

"The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League. ...

"Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire [Iraq,
Syria and Palestine--F.G.] have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized
subject to the rendering of administrative advice andassistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone."

The British rulers voted themselves the mandate for Iraqand Palestine and the French voted themselves the mandate for Syria and Lebanon at the San Remo conference of the Supreme Council of the Allies of April 1920. In the same way the U.S. and Britain are now telling the Security
Council to vote them a mandate to determine the political, economic and military fate of Iraq.

The mandate system was profoundly rejected by the peoples of the countries that were supposed to be unable to "stand alone under the strenuous conditions of the modern world." The granting of the mandates was immediately followed by popular uprisings in Damascus and in the entire country of Iraq. It took the British five months to crush the 1920 rebellion in Iraq. They used aerial bombardment and mustard gas, producing thousands of casualties.

NEOCOLONIALISM WASN'T ENOUGH

The current plan to reestablish the in ter national legality of mandate colonialism is a further stage in the struggle of the U.S. ruling class, headed by the Bush administration, to establish a world empire.

The resort to colonial rule is dictated by the failure of neocolonialist economic penetration and political manipulation to subjugate Iraq to imperialism. The Gulf War of 1991, no-fly-zone bombing, sanctions,
economic strangulation, subversion, CIA-financed uprisings--all failed to bring down the regime, not because Saddam Hussein was such a popular leader but because the Iraqi people would not willingly submit to imperialism.

With the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. financiers and transnational corporations went on a spree of economic takeovers in the Third World.
The IMF and the World Bank demanded "restructuring" agreements based on privatization, debt repayment and trade relations favoring the imperialists. The purpose was to subjugate whole countries to the profiteers on Wall Street.

Even after the collapse of the USSR, however, certain regimes held out against the globalization and neocolonialist schemes of Washington--notably Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Syria. Also, the Palestinians refused to submit to the campaign to exterminate their
national movement. The Colombian and the Filipino national liberation movements, both on Washington's "terrorist" list, also have refused to stop their struggles.

Iran, Iraq and Libya held out because their regimes were brought to power by popular national revolutions for political independence from imperialism and had sufficient oil revenue to withstand economic strangulation.

Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea had undergone profound social revolutions in which not only was imperialism ousted, but the domestic exploiting classes were expropriated and socialist construction was begun.

The list of states not subdued by neocolonialist methods coincides precisely with Washington's list of "terrorist states." Iraq was the opening shot in the struggle to destroy all those independent regimes that have not succumbed to neocolonialism.

The Bush administration has high hopes of establishing a puppet colonial regime in Iraq. It hopes this will pave the way for the expansion of the U.S. empire. But, although the state power that kept imperialism at bay for 45 years--ever since the revolution of 1958--has been destroyed in a
terrible defeat for Iraq, U.S. big business and the Pentagon must still carry out their program in order to permanently erase all the gains of that revolution.

They still have to take over the oil, whose nationalization enabled Iraq to raise the standard of living of the people above the level of a colonized people. They still have to dismantle the widespread institutions of state capitalism which, while they maintained capitalist exploitation, also served to provide social services and employment to
millions of Iraqi people. They still have to secure permanent access to Iraqi military bases and use the U.S. victory for the benefit of Israel.

U.S. imperialism still has the difficult task of constructing a stable puppet state to execute its counter-revolutionary policies.

The question is, can this be done over the long run without igniting a renewed struggle for national liberation, not just in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East? Can colonialism be consolidated anew in the 21st century?

Can the Pentagon's air power and limited ground forces subdue the 60 million people of Iran, the 300 million people in the Arab world, and the billions in Asia and Latin America who are the targets of empire builders in Washington? Can all the military power of the U.S. hold back the power of the people?

The entire history of the anti-colonial struggle of the 20th century speaks against this.

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