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CP of Britain, Stop The Predatory Imperialist War

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From: Communist Party of Britain, Saturday, April 05, 2003

http://www.communist-party.org.uk , mailto:info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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Stop the predatory imperialist war.
By Robert Griffiths, Communist Party general secretary.

The unprovoked attack on Iraq is a barbarous assault on a largely disarmed country. It is a predatory imperialist war, the consequences of which will be severe for the peoples of Iraq and the whole world. In a lecture on War and Revolution in May 1917, Lenin argued that the character of a war is determined by three main considerations: the historical conditions in which it arises, the classes which are waging the war and the aims for which they are fighting.

Present-day Iraq was shaped by the Cold War after 1945. For British and US imperialism, it was vital that the movement to modernise and democratise Iraq did not come under Communist leadership. Following the 1958 revolution which overthrew the monarchy, they therefore backed the more right-wing and corruptible elements in the Ba'ath national socialist party against the left.

But as one of their main proteges, Saddam Hussein, rose to the top of the Ba'ath Party, he made alliances with the Communists to nationalise key sectors of the economy. He also offered himself to the highest bidder in the contest between theUS and the Soviet Union. After his regime tortured and executed Communists and other progressives on an industrial scale, the Soviets begin to withdraw military assistance.

At that point, at the end of the 1970s, the chief Western powers stepped in to train and equip Iraq's military officers and bio-chemical scientists - and encouraged Saddam's regime to drown the Ayatollah's Iranian revolution in blood.

Ba'athist atrocities against internal and external enemies - including the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Halabja civilians ? were denied and then excused in London and Washington DC.

Today, some of the loudest advocates of a war for democracy are the same politicians, diplomats and pundits who defended Saddam - together with Chile's Pinochet and South African apartheid - throughout the 1980s. But Saddam's failure to defeat anti-American fundamentalism in Iran, like his hostile stance towards some pro-Western puppets in the Middle East, began to lose him his `most favoured dictator' status.

To cut him down to size, US diplomats lured him into attacking Kuwait. Thus his offensive forces were slaughtered on the road back to Basra, and his weapons of mass destruction subsequently destroyed under the auspices of the United Nations.

Saddam was not deposed in that first Gulf War because no reliable alternative had been prepared by the US. Left and progressive forces re-emerged quickly and publicly in the 1991 revolt against Ba'ath rule. So that popular movement was abandoned by the West, left quite literally to swing in the breeze as Saddam's regime re-established its dictatorship. Since then, UN sanctions have been used - by Saddam as well as the imperialist powers - to weaken still further the ability of the Iraqi people to fight for their own independent interests. Over the same period, the US has groomed the Iraqi National Congress under US resident and convicted banking fraudster Ahmed Chalabi to take over in Baghdad.

But the global conditions have also changed fundamentally since 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Treaty camp has permitted the US to launch an unfettered drive for global domination. Where this cannot progress economically or diplomatically, it will do so militarily. The September 11 atrocities merely added a moral gloss to a piratical and immoral enterprise. Never in history has a country gone to so many other countries, slaughtered so many of their citizens and constructed so many military bases on the pretext that it was acting in self-defence.

Which classes are waging this latest war in Iraq?

In the US, the most reactionary circles of monopoly capital have been planning this venture since the mid-1990s. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and their think-tank mouthpieces have extensive links with the most rapacious sections of the oil, armaments and construction industries. They directly represent those interests on a global scale.

Now that the lunatics have taken over the US asylum, their New American World Order has been revealed in a series of national security, military and energy strategy documents issued by the US administration. As a result, US war aims are the best documented ones in military history and have nothing to do with enforcing UN resolutions or eliminating phantom weapons of mass destruction. They are to gain permanent access to the second largest oil reserves on the planet, and to extend US control over some of the world's most vital trade routes.

The Gulf region is also a prime launching pad for economic, ideological and military pressure against Russia and India - two of the three potential `superpower' rivals, along with China, for markets and resources identified by the US adminstration.

In Britain, the war drive is led by the New Labour clique which has hijacked the Labour Party. It directly represents the British monopoly capitalist class including its extensive interests around the world. New Labour's calculation is that the crumbs from the table of US imperialism are bigger than a slice of half-baked cake from the EU table.

On the Iraqi side, the war is being waged primarily by the Ba'ath regime and party which has effectively merged with the depleted military-industrial complex there. For them, this is a defensive war to maintain their exploitative and corrupt rule.

Yet there are now signs that for elements of the party, armed forces and population generally - notably in besieged Baghdad and occupied towns ? this is a war against foreign invasion, in defence of national sovereignty. It is, of course, the right of the Iraqi people to take up arms in such a cause. Whether to engage in armed struggle is an assessment for the Iraqi people themselves.

Certainly, such a movement would not only resist imperialism - it could develop into one for popular sovereignty which challenges the Saddam dictatorship. His policies of plunder and oppression at home, his poses and provocations abroad, have brought disaster to the peoples of Iraq.

Can the war be stopped?

The character of the war suggests that the odds are against. But efforts to do so, and in particular to force a British withdrawal, must continue. This did not cease being an illegal and immoral war when British and US forces invaded the sovereign territory of Iraq - that is precisely the point at which it became illegal and immoral.

Nor would the removal of Saddam compensate for the death and destruction visited upon the Iraqi population - and most definitely not for the brutal expansion of US power which will undoubtedly follow. Where next: Iran, Syria, Libya, Korea, Colombia, Cuba?

In Britain, every kind of pressure must be piled upon New Labour, including mass civil disobedience and actions to weaken the war drive. In current conditions, every strike is a patriotic act because it puts the interests of working people above those of the war-mongering monopoly capitalists, their hired politicians and public-school trained military commanders. Strikes puncture the bogus `national unity' peddled by newspapers owned from North America by anti-trade union billionaires.

The anti-war movement is developing into a broad anti-imperialist alliance, which is implicitly against racism and in favour of democratic national sovereignty. But for the labour and anti-war movements to achieve their objectives, it is becoming clearer by the day that the New Labour clique must be driven from office. The only progressive alternative in forseeable circumstances is a different type of Labour government. To dismiss the significance of the struggle going on inside the Labour Party is therefore an indulgence in extra-terrestial posturing.

So too are simplistic dismissals of the United Nations. For all its limitations, it is now the only international body where a credible challenge to US imperialism can be mounted. Conflicts of interest between the imperialist powers can be utilised by progressive and non-aligned states. Our demand should be for a cease-fire in Iraq, so that the issue can return to the UN Security Council for a peaceful resolution.

Unity combined with a deeper understanding of the character of this war is essential. Lenin pointed out that the imperialist stage of capitalism means wars without end - until we build such a movement, nationally and internationally, that breaks the power of monopoly capital itself.

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Communist Party
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