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Iraq debacle
No easy exit for US imperialism
The war in Iraq was the single biggest factor in
the defeat of Bush and the Republican Party in November’s mid-term US
elections. What does this now mean for the future of Iraq? PETER TAAFFE
examines the present situation and the war in Iraq.
"HE DOTH BESTRIDE the narrow world, like a colossus;
and we petty men, walk under his huge legs and peep about".
(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar) Bush, decked out as a poor imitation of a
modern ‘Caesar’, did for a period bestride the globe. The leader of a
new ‘empire’ armed with unprecedented military power sought to impose
the will of US imperialism throughout the world. Now he has been humbled
in the mid-term elections, along with the neo-con cabal that surrounded
him, not by the stabbing of a gang of assassins on Capitol Hill, but by
what amounts to an electoral uprising against the catastrophic war in
Iraq. Seven million more votes went to the Democrats than the
Republicans. Larry Summers, US treasury secretary under president Bill
Clinton, writes: "Of the 16 mid-term elections since the second world
war, Tuesday’s was the seventh that could be classified as a
‘repudiation election’." (Financial Times, 9 November) And it was the
war which was repudiated, with 60% of the US population favouring the
withdrawal of US troops either immediately or ‘soon’.
This was not because of the arguments of the
Democrats – divided on the war between those like Kerry who want a
phased withdrawal and others like Hillary Clinton who are more
circumspect – but despite them. This anti-war ‘referendum’, which is
what these elections signified, means that the US people have rejected
Bush and the departed Rumsfeld’s determination to ‘stay the course’ in
Iraq. They concluded that the price demanded by Bush in blood and
treasure, both of the US and Iraqi people, was not worth paying. One
hundred and one US troops were killed in the month before the election,
one of the bloodiest since the occupation. The number of US deaths is
almost 3,000, with over 20,000 wounded, many of them with horrible
life-changing incapacities and injuries.
But this is as nothing to the suffering of the Iraqi
people. Bourgeois commentators disputed the figure of 655,000 Iraqis
killed since the invasion given by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health in Baltimore. But now Iraq’s health minister, Ali al-Shamari,
has said, "that about 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents
since the March 2003 US-led invasion… for every person killed about
three have been wounded in violence since the war started". (The
Guardian, 10 November)
And then there is the cost, with American military
spending on Iraq now approaching $8 billion a month. Ed Harriman,
writing in the London Review of Books (2 November), comments:
"Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average
monthly cost of the Vietnam war; the total spent so far has long
surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a
half months of occupation cost the equivalent of Iraq’s estimated oil
revenues for the current financial year". If the US army left the region
and if the money was, instead, handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and
child, they would each receive more than $300 a month.
Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the total
eventual cost of the Iraq war, "including the budgetary, social and
macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion". Commenting on
this, Timothy Garton-Ash, in The Guardian, states: "That would be $2,000
a head for each of the world’s poorest billion people, who live [and
die] on less than $1 a day".
Fraud & corruption
THEN THERE IS the graft and corruption. Harriman
comments: "Most of the American money never even gets to Iraq. The bulk
of it has gone to American consultants, or into American contractors’
international bank accounts. Most of the projects planned in sewerage,
irrigation, drainage and dams have been cancelled". There are countless
allegations of ‘ghost employees’ on ministry payrolls, of kickbacks,
cronyism, nepotism and fraud. The special report from the inspector
general for Iraq, a US body, reports: "Corruption is a virtual pandemic
in Iraq. The interior minister employs at least 1,000 ‘ghost employees’,
whose wages amount to more than $1 million a month. The defence
minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, has been accused of being party to
corruption involving more than $1.3 billion, and promptly fled to
London. The transport minister has disappeared. And the electricity
minister, Abdul Muhsin Shalash, is reportedly living in Jordan".
Patrick Cockburn, the most accurate reporter on the
catastrophe of the Iraq war, has pointed out that the health service is
virtually non-existent. Yet before 1991, Iraq had one of the best health
services in the Middle East. According to Harriman: "Baghdad’s doctors
and nurses provided care often comparable to that of their counterparts
in Tel Aviv or Cairo". Of course, UN-imposed sanctions undermined this,
with a 90% reduction in the health ministry budget under Saddam Hussein,
but the invasion and war have catastrophically reduced it further. A
whole book could be written about the rip-offs, the privatisation – Iraq
must have the biggest privatisation programme in the world – the vast
army of mercenaries, operating outside the law, which has been used by
the occupation forces to ‘supplement’ the regular armed forces. The
number of British armed security guards employed by private companies is
estimated by the charity War On Want to be almost three times the number
of British troops in the country.
This corruption, inevitable in a broken and
virtually atomised society, is breathtaking. More than 1,600 fishing
boats in Basra spirit away 15 million litres of oil a month. Everyone is
being accused of smuggling: "The Iranian-funded Shia militias, criminal
syndicates, the mayor, the Baghdad oil ministry. More than two and a
half years after the invasion, Iraq still does not meter its oil,
despite repeated warnings from the international advisory and monitoring
board".
But the ‘freelancing’ of fishermen is minor compared
to what the giant western-based oil multinationals are planning for the
Iraqi oil industry, which has the world’s second-largest proven oil
reserves after Saudi Arabia, possibly up to 200 billion barrels. The
western oil companies are demanding ‘production sharing agreements’,
which means that, given their costs of getting new oilfields up and
running, they will be guaranteed long-term access to these oil reserves.
Experts have worked out that, even at a cost of production of $40 a
barrel, the oil companies’ returns on investments would be somewhere
between 42% and 162%, representing between $74-194 billion in profits.
This is just one measure of the unmitigated and unprecedented disaster
which Iraq represents, first of all for the Iraqi people.
Military doctrine
THE MILITARY PROCONSULS of the US seek to put a
gloss on all this. Major-General William Caldwell, chief military
spokesman, the day after 49 people were found dead in Iraq, incredibly
declared: "Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is
in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture. Blobs of paint
become paintings which inspire". These comments were made to journalists
behind the fortified Green Zone! US policy in Iraq, far from being a
‘work of art’, is probably the greatest foreign policy disaster in US
history.
This is evident in the military sphere. Prior to
Rumsfeld’s ill-fated rule at the Pentagon, the ‘Powell military
doctrine’ – named after Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs
of staff – determined US military strategy abroad. Heavily influenced by
the example of Vietnam, Powell enunciated the doctrine of ‘overwhelming
military force’ in any future foreign wars. Before military action was
undertaken, he posed a number of questions: ‘Is the action supported by
the American people? Is there a plausible exit strategy?’ This military
doctrine was exemplified in the first Gulf war of 1991 with the massive
deployment of troops, which was successful in evicting Saddam’s forces
from Kuwait.
This strategy, however, was repudiated by the
ascendant neo-conservatives under Bush and even earlier by Madeleine
Albright, the secretary of state in Clinton’s presidency. The
Clintonites did restrict any military action to short, sharp police-type
interventions, as with the Balkan war. In Somalia, however, in 1993-94
they withdrew at the first ‘whiff of grapeshot’, when faced with
substantial local hostility to US forces.
It took the special ‘genius’ of Rumsfeld, who
brushed aside the CIA and the established US military leadership, to
envisage a ‘new’ military doctrine with fewer troops. This was a ‘new
American way of war’: the sending of small forces equipped with
hi-technology fire power on missions in the neo-colonial world. As
opposed to the previous reactive policies, this involved ‘wars of
choice’ intended to produce regime change. This went hand in hand, of
course, with the crushing military dominance of US imperialism which
became more pronounced following the collapse of the former Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe.
This ‘war-lite’ doctrine met with the immediate
opposition of the military establishment but has now been smashed in the
sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. The idea that even the
mighty US military machine could fight two major wars at the same time
has been shattered. One hundred and fifty thousand troops have been
incapable of keeping the Iraqi insurgency at bay. Rumsfeld has paid for
it with his job. But neither Bush nor Blair – who should be in the dock
alongside Saddam as war criminals – has as yet suffered the same fate.
Nevertheless, one crumb of comfort in all this is the spectacle of the
neo-con rats crowding the gangplank to escape from the sinking ‘SS Bush
enterprise’!
One of the most odious of this neo-con breed is
Kenneth Adelman, who regularly appeared on British television at the
time of the invasion, extolling the superiority of US forces, praising
Bush to the skies, and predicting ‘inevitable victory’. He is now
equally ‘convincing’ in denouncing Bush for the Iraq mess. Yet a new
twist is now added. The main responsibility for the Iraq disaster is
unloaded onto Blair’s shoulders. According to Adelman, Blair should have
warned Bush of the disaster in Iraq ‘on the ground’! Another of this
breed is Thomas L Friedman, a prominent New York Times columnist, who
acted as a kind of intellectual loudspeaker for Bush and the neo-cons.
He now declares, without blushing: "It is clear, nothing that Americans
will feel particularly proud of, nothing that we feel justifies the vast
expenditure of lives and treasure, is going to come out of Iraq".
(International Herald Tribune, 9 November) As to the future: "America’s
only two options left today in Iraq are ‘tolerable’ or ‘awful’. ‘Good’
is no longer on the menu".
It is very doubtful whether the first ‘tolerable’
option will be achieved even after the palace revolution among Bush’s
entourage. The replacement of Donald Rumsfeld by Robert Gates – a long
time CIA chief – will not lead to an easy way out of the Iraq impasse.
Nor will the bipartisan report of the Iraq ‘Study’ Group, under the
chairmanship of James Baker, former secretary of state and confidante to
the first president Bush, lead to an easy exit from Iraq. However, these
two developments do signify the return of the Republican establishment –
gathered around George Bush senior who, initially, opposed the war, but
then was silent when it appeared to ‘succeed’.
The retreat of Bush junior can be gauged by his
comments to Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, who asked whether he had
consulted Bush senior over the war: "You know, he is the wrong father to
appeal to in terms of strength… There is a higher father that I appeal
to". Now ‘god’ of the spiritual kind has failed Bush, he is compelled to
fall back on his ‘weak’ daddy. More importantly, there is a growing
realisation among a decisive section of the American bourgeoisie that
"the US has already been defeated" in Iraq. (Phillip Stephens, Financial
Times, 10 November)
Incredibly, at the press conference when he was
explaining the dismissal of Rumsfeld from office, under questioning from
reporters, Bush pleaded that he was open to "any suggestions" that could
extract the US from this imbroglio! Rarely, even in this era of mass
communications, has the political leader of a nation, in this case, the
strongest on the planet, confessed to such bankruptcy. The mood in
America is one of foreboding of even greater disaster if the US does not
extricate itself from Iraq. If he had not indicated a change in course,
rather than ‘staying the course’, Bush could have faced impeachment
proceedings with the control of both houses of Congress now in the hands
of the Democrats.
But the cowardly Democratic Party has promised to
save George Bush by ruling out impeachment. In fact, many of the
Democratic leaders, including some who have just been elected, are as
‘conservative’ as the Republicans who they have defeated. This
‘neo-Dems’ wing of the Democratic Party, like New Labour in Britain, has
no fundamental differences with the other capitalist party, the
Republicans. Both defend the interests of the rich in the US and abroad.
The decisive sections of the American ruling class
wish to militarily disengage, in the main, from Iraq. However, as the
Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) warned even before the war
took place, it is easy to go into a quagmire but a much more difficult
task to extricate yourself. This was shown by the disaster of Vietnam.
That led to the first military defeat of US imperialism. It also had
wide ramifications in Asia, in Laos and Cambodia in particular. On the
eve of the war we drew some parallels with Vietnam – we produced a
special book – but we also warned from the outset that the ethnic,
religious and social situation, including the consciousness of different
sections of the Iraqi people, was different to Vietnam. In Vietnam, a
movement of social and national liberation, for land by the peasants and
the eviction of imperialist military and economic interests, forced the
US out and unified the country behind one major political force, the
National Liberation Front (the Vietcong).
A divided Iraq
IRAQ, AS WE and many capitalist experts pointed out,
was immeasurably more complicated. The five million Sunni Arabs would
resist; they have formed the backbone of the insurgency against the
occupation forces. The Kurds welcomed the US invasion, and the Shia
stood on the sidelines with the Shia elite hoping they would replace
Sunni domination under Saddam with their own. The possibility of an
ethnic and national fracturing of the country was implicit in this
situation.
Not just US imperialism but some of those in the
anti-war movement in Britain, led by the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP),
completely closed their eyes to this danger. The SWP argued – and
unbelievably still does – that the withdrawal of US troops would lead
the Iraqi people to live in amity, peace and understanding. Left to
their own devices, no doubt, the Iraqi people would. But, inevitably on
the basis of capitalism, the elites in each ‘community’ seek advantages
for themselves, a greater share of power and wealth, to the disadvantage
of other ethnic or religious groups. For this reason, we have
consistently advocated that alongside the demand for an immediate
withdrawal of troops should go the call for class unity across sectarian
divisions. This was accompanied by a warning that a bloody sectarian
civil war was possible if that was not done.
Unfortunately, a near civil war now exists on the
ground. Patrick Cockburn, recently pointed out in The Independent:
"Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of
Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody
battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the
capital. As American and British political leaders argue over
responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, this country has taken another
lunge towards disintegration. Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely
surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militia to complete the
encirclement. On the other hand, Shia fighters have taken over much of
Baghdad. The Iraqi Red Crescent says 1.5 million have fled the country
as Sunni and Shia militias fight for control with no real intervention
by the enfeebled army or police". The sectarian carnage puts in the
shade the 30-year war in Northern Ireland.
In desperation even some bourgeois commentators,
like the former US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, have
suggested the partitioning of Iraq. But suggestions that Iraq could go
back to the three-province system that existed under the Ottoman empire,
through an ‘equitable divorce’, is completely utopian. As even James
Baker has pointed out: "The minute you say we are going to do that
[partition] and make three autonomous regions, you are likely to kick
off a huge civil war". The Balkans conflict shows that, with a quarter
of a million dead. On the basis of capitalism, if Iraq was divided into
three sections – the Kurds in the north, the Sunni in the middle belt,
and the Shia in the south – this would involve such a population
displacement that it would risk a repetition of the bloody partition of
the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India in 1947-48. An even
greater chapter of horrors than what has gone before would be visited on
the long-suffering Iraqi people. Moreover, the ramifications in the
Middle East region would, potentially, be even greater than the
partitioning of India. The neighbouring states with sizeable Shia
populations could face the same disintegration in the ‘blow back’
resulting from the break-up of Iraq.
If this should happen, it would be a disaster for
the Iraqi people, but also for the prestige of US imperialism, whose
reputation worldwide is already at a low ebb. It was this which
compelled British imperialism against withdrawing from Northern Ireland
despite the 30-year war with the IRA. The stakes for the US in Iraq and
the world ramifications of this are much greater than the British in
Northern Ireland. Therefore, while a forced withdrawal of the US and its
allies, as in a desperate situation akin to Vietnam, is not ruled out
for US imperialism, both its Democratic and Republican wings will resist
going down this road.
For this reason, the favoured US policy, which will
probably be reflected in the Iraq Study Group’s conclusions, would
include trying to ‘reshape’ Iraq as more of a loose capitalist
federation of predominantly-Kurdish, Shia and Sunni zones. Even this is
fraught with huge difficulties. Nuri al-Maliki, the present Iraqi prime
minister, has "run a government in name only. He could not fix a
pothole, let alone deliver electricity, a functioning bureaucracy or a
broader national strategy. His only prospective allies are Shia
militias, which have their own narrow interests". (International Herald
Tribune, 9 November)
We have witnessed not just Sunni-Shia sectarian
conflicts recently, but also battles within the ranks of the Shia
themselves. Even within the Mahdi army, controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr,
there has been conflict. Al-Sadr’s forces (looking towards Iraqi and
Arab nationalism) clashed violently with the supporters of the Dawa
Party (linked to Iran) in Shia-on-Shia violence in Amara in late
October. In this are the seeds of a Lebanese-type civil war of different
factions vying for control. It is also al-Sadr who has "long emphasised
Sunni-Shia unity against the Americans" (Financial Times) and, it seems,
he is dismayed by recent conflicts between Shia. But, on the ground, his
forces have been as brutal as the Sunni sectarians in the indiscriminate
slaughter of those from opposite ethnic or religious groups.
The Iraq syndrome
IT IS FOR this reason that Baker, again reflecting
the Republican establishment and the opinions of the most serious
strategists of capital, says that an attempt must be made to lean on
Syria and, particularly, Iran to intervene in Iraq to contain the forces
there which look towards that regime, in the interests of ‘stability’.
This represents a major volte-face for the Washington regime which only
yesterday saw Iran, in particular, as a component of the ‘axis of evil’.
The ancient Greeks had a word for this, hubris – overweening arrogance
which invites disaster – followed, in Bush’s case, with nemesis,
retributive justice!
The blunders of Bush have enormously strengthened
the regional power of Iran. We now face the spectacle of the
representatives of US imperialism out of one corner of their mouths
denouncing Iran, demanding the end of its nuclear programme, while out
of the other pleading for it to come to their assistance in a pacifying
role in Iraq. This is a measure of the desperate straits which Bush has
forced the US ruling class into. He will not be easily forgiven.
As we have commented before, it is possible that
Bush has done as much damage to the Republicans as Thatcher did to the
Tory party, finishing it for a generation. However, the ability of the
Democrats to mitigate the damage to Bush and the Republicans should not
be underestimated. They are a party of big business, tied in the final
analysis to the defence of ‘US interests’, American capitalism and
imperialism. In foreign policy – which is still the preserve of the
president – they will seek to tone down, if not completely eliminate,
the ‘pre-emptive’ policies of Bush.
But, given the power of US imperialism on a world
scale, a retreat into ‘isolationism’ is not an option for the
representatives of big business. Nor is a narrow ‘unilateralism’ likely
to be the platform on which the Democrats will base themselves.
Masquerading as a latter day ‘Wilsonian’ humanitarian, Clinton
intervened in Somalia and also in the Balkans. These incursions were not
on the pattern of Iraq, of full-scale military invasion and subsequent
occupation. But in any case, the discrediting of the Rumsfeld doctrine
has put paid to these ideas: "A case can be made that no amount of
conventional forces, using conventional tactics, can be effective
against insurgencies". (Michael Lind, senior fellow of the New American
Foundation, Financial Times, 6 November)
Just as there was a backlash against the Vietnam
disaster, which forced US presidents Ford and Reagan to exercise caution
about sending troops abroad, any US government will now suffer from the
same impediment. Bush and the neo-cons wanted to destroy the ‘Vietnam
syndrome’ and it appeared for a time that they had succeeded. The
reality of Iraq has now shattered that and, in place of the Vietnam
syndrome, the ‘Iraq syndrome’ will dominate the strategic and military
thinking of the US ruling class in the next period. This does not
preclude military-police type interventions. Nor will it mean that, even
if some kind of ramshackle, loose confederation can be established in
Iraq, and which holds the situation together for a period, US
imperialism will immediately withdraw. Its troops, at least the bulk of
them, will have to retreat. But any US capitalist government will seek
to safeguard its economic, strategic and military interests. The US
embassy in Baghdad is the largest and most expensive embassy in the
world, costing $1 billion. This does not presage an easy or early
withdrawal. The mainly capitalist forces among the elites of the Kurds,
Shia and Sunni will also seek to constrain the masses against any
tendency towards an anarchic disintegration of Iraq.
Despite all of this, however, it is not at all
guaranteed that Iraq will survive in its present form. Thomas Friedman
wails: "As badly as we have performed in Iraq, what Iraqis have done to
each other, and the little that other Muslims have done to stop them, is
an even bigger travesty". US imperialism, with those like Friedman in
tow as an apologist for its crimes, has created the ‘fires of madness’
now raging in Iraq, but now wish to cover this over by blaming the Iraqi
people themselves. Preparing for the ‘awful’ scenario, a date for
withdrawal of US troops, he states: "We need to give visas to Iraqis who
wanted to flee the madness, we need to give a security umbrella to the
Kurds so that Syria, Turkey or Iran did not invade them if we left, and
we need to protect Jordan from the spill-over".
The US, led by the discredited Bush junta, has
produced this chaos in Iraq and the Middle East, the burden of which is
not borne by them but by the workers and peasants in the region, and by
the American people. When Bush embarked on his journey of reshaping the
world in the image of the neo-cons, he was bolstered by the three
military victories before Iraq – the 1991 Gulf war, the Balkans and
Afghanistan. Many, including some who stood on the left, believed that
US imperialism could not be stopped.
The CWI said, not ex post facto but at the
time, that, on the contrary, its invasion of Iraq could be undone by the
national resistance of the Iraqi people. It would also conjure up an
unprecedented mass opposition to the war which would shatter the
foundations of the Bush regime. That seemed to be contradicted by the
last presidential elections of 2004, but these elections have vindicated
this prognosis. The US, according to an international survey – carried
out by The Guardian in Britain, Ha’aretz in Israel, the Toronto Star in
Canada and the journal Reforma in Mexico – is now seen as the greatest
threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies. North Korea
and Iran were once cited by the US president as part of an ‘axis of
evil’. Now, Bush is seen in Britain as a more dangerous man than the
Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the North Korean leader, Kim
Jong Il, and the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Only Osama bin
Laden, it seems, in these countries at least, is more unpopular.
This discontent, not just with Bush but with the
role of US imperialism and at bottom world capitalism, must be turned
into a movement of mass opposition for change. The key to a just and
democratic solution to the problems of Iraq lies not with the US,
Britain or its capitalist allies but with the Iraqi workers and
peasants, supported by the international working class. They may appear
to be scattered and atomised at the present time but that will change.
Only a socialist, democratic confederation of the Shia, Kurds and
Sunnis, the Turcomen and others, can open up a new road for the Iraqi
people. Together with the Israeli working class, in opposition to the
brutal capitalist class there, the Egyptian working class and the masses
of the Middle East, the chapter of horrors in Iraq can be put to an end
and a new socialist road opened up for Iraq and the Middle East.
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