GULF CRISIS
The new imperialist
The new imhar aliet crusade
Sues Ci
FOR THE SECOND TIME in three years, an imposing
EGYPT multinational imperialist armada has been concentrated in the Arab-Persian Gulf and surrounding area. The fundamental objective remains the same, that Is, to defend and consolidate imperialist domination over this region. This area Is of the greatest strategic importance, among other things, because it produces the greater part of the world's oil exports, and contains the largest share of the planet's reserves of this fuel, which remains the principal energy source in the ecologically Irrational world in which we live.
The scenario of te new imperialist crusade Is, however, different in many respects from the one in 1987. The "villain"
this time is no longer Iranian but Iraqi. The imperialist
Intervention is being carried out under cover of the United
Nations, as in the case of the Korean War, except that today - a sign of the times! - It enjoys the complicity of the USSR and
China. And, finally, this time some of the imperialists' Arab or
Muslim partners are directly involved on the ground alongside them.
SALAH JABER can SOVIET UNION
TURKEY
•Tehran
SYRIA
IRAN
Baghdad
IRAQ
ORDAN
Agaba
Dhahran
Riyach B
VAE
OMAN
SAUDI
Jeddah
ARABIA
YEMEN
•
Arabian See
Sana
Aden
ETHIOPIA
DABOUT
SOMALI imperialist mobilization is directed against a bourgeois dictatorship and not anti-capitalist forces, as was the case in
China, Korea or Indochina? In fact the imperialist rulers are no more tender hearted toward bourgeois nationalism when it dares to threaten their vital interests, than they are toward anticapitalist nationalism.
The misuse of a historical example
B ESIDES the various Gulf emirs, the imperialists allies include the Saudi kingdom, which has been transformed into a gigantic US military base; Mubarak's Egypt, which receives the second largest share of US aid, after Israel; the Morocco of Hassan II, who is not embarassed to intervene against the annexation of Kuwait, althoughhet keeps trying to annex the Western Sahara; and a Pakistan dominated by military officers linked to the Pentagon. This combination has been joined by Baathist Syria, Iraq's "brother" enemy, which is hoping to be rewarded by a substantial Saudi and Kuwaiti contribution to solving its grave financial problems.
The scenario is different, and the production's budget too has been considerably increased.! The cost of the US deployment alone exceeds a billion dollars a month. The number of soldiers sent by Washington has already reached 100,000, and the Pentagon has made preparations to send double that number. The United States has concentrated a staggering panoply of engines of destruction and slaughter in the area. None of the most recent electronic gadgets for mass murder has been left out, from the invisible bomber to the latest model tank, including the whole range of state-of the-art missiles.
Not in the last 17 years, that is, not since the US withdrawal from Vietnam, have we seen such a buildup of an imperialist expeditionary force. Thus, despite the vast gulf between the bloody bourgeois dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Vietnamese revolution, the stakes of the confrontation underway are comparable to those in Indochina in 1965-1975 in one fundamental respect — its outcome will determine the extent of US imperialism's political and military dominance over the world, especially the Third World, for a whole period.
Freed from the "Vietnam syndrome" in a world where the Soviet deterrent is weaker than it has ever been, the American empire will no longer recognize any limits. That is why it is vital and urgent for all anti-imperialist forces in the world to mobilize to prevent imperialist aggression, and if it takes place, to work to defeat it, or at least to make its political cost as high as possible. Should we be taken aback to see that this time the
MODERN history is full of examples of Third World bourgeois leaders who have been pilloried by the imperialists. Without going back very far, Argentina's Peron, the Egyptian Nasser or the Algerian FLN were also compared to Hitler in their time. More recently the Libyan Qadhafi, the Syrian Hafez El-Assad, and of course the Palestine Liberation Organization and above all Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini have been accorded such a characterization.
However, it is true that among all these cases, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is the regime most similar to bourgeois totalitarianism of the "national socialist" (Nazi) type. The tyrant of Baghdad came to power in 1968 through a counterrevolutionary putsch whose primary objective was to crush both a Che Guevara-inspired guerrilla focus in the southern part of the country and a left split from the Iraqi CP which was in the process of combining with the guerrillas.
In the following years (1969-1979), Saddam Hussein ruthlessly crushed any source of opposition to his personal dictatorship, and even the expression of the slightest independence from him. The 1. These movie metaphors are inspired by the American media's treatment of this conflict. You only have 3 to consider the theme tune used by the American network CBS, under the title "Showdown in the Gulf."
SUDAN
GULF CRISIS
Kurdish rebellion; Communists of all tendencies; and even fractions of his own party, the Baath (Party of the Arab Socialist Resurrection), were drowned in blood. Every recalcitrant group or even individual was liquidated or neutralized. The inexorable rise of Saddam Hussein had culminated in the concentration of all power in his hands before the war that he unleashed against Iran in September 1980. To top it off, he organized an official personality cult as revolting, intrusive and grotesque as all such mascarades.
### Saddam Hussein's capitalist dictatorship SADDAM Hussein's dictatorship rests on a civilian, military and police bureaucracy organized in concentric circles, based largely on family and clan ties and origins in the tyrant's native province (Takrit). This bureaucracy's privileges come from the Iraqi state's oil revenues. The latter, however, are not sufficient to meet at the same time the development needs of a country that has virtually no other source of foreign currency than oil, and which has to import the bulk of its food; the cost of maintaining a social base with various gratuities and payoffs, including the maintenance of a multitudinous bureaucracy; and a burdensome military budget made necessary by the permanent "pacification" of the part of Kurdistan under Iraqi domination and by conflicts with neighbors over territorial questions (the Iran of the Shah and then of the mullahs) or water problems (the Euphrates river question with Turkey) or political differences (Syria).
In 1974, a war of liberation was unleashed by forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, with the support of the Shah of Iran, the United States and Israel, all of which wanted to tame an Iraqi regime that was trying to outdo Egypt and Syria, its rivals for regional leadership, in anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist saber-rattling 2 The year after, the Baathist regime, which had not yet been able to take advantage of the 1974 oil boom to step up its arming, found itself within an inch of defeat.
It was forced to save itself by settling the territorial dispute (on land and in water) with Iran on the Shah's conditions. The result was the Algiers accord of March 1975. In exchange, Tehran abruptly stopped giving aid and refuge to the Kurds. Having made the mistake of choosing such unreliable and illintentioned allies, their struggle ended in a debacle.
The following years, a breathing space 4 Saddam Husseins toratitarian dictator- for Baghdad, were devoted to perfecting ship, as well as using the considerably increased oil revenues and the credit facilities they offered by virtue of the capitalist principle of "lending only to the rich." The Iraqi regime, an enlightened bourgeois despotism in the socio-economic sphere, was able to register some positive achievements - infrastructural works, investments in industry and agricultural, extension of literacy and education, improvement in the status of women and partial secularization of the society.
At the same time, Saddam broadened his social clientele by swelling the administrative, political and police apparatus. Above all, in the context of the stampede to buy both traditional and sophisticated arms in which all the oil states in the region participated (with the Shah leading the pack) he acquired considerable military means.
The sale of arms to the oil states was and remains one of the main mechanisms by which the imperialist states, as well as the bureaucratic workers' states, recycle the capital they inject into these countries in return for the imports of black gold. The arms industry is a major sector in most of the economies of both categories of states mentioned.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq supplied itself with arms mainly from those countries with the least ties to the Shah of Iran, and which had not contributed to bringing him near to defeat in 1975. They included, on the one hand, the USSR and its satellites; and, on the other, French imperialism, which after 1974 considered Baghdad its favored client in the Middle East. In the nonmilitary field, the French shared the Iraqi cake with the Germans and the Japanese.
The presence of the Iranian imperial army on its flank had both a deterrent and frustrating effect on an Iraqi dictatorship that dreamed of effacing the affront it suffered in 1975. Aware of Iran's advantages from the military point of view a population three times larger, as well as greater financial means and correspondingly superior greater military means), Iraq tried, without success, to buy Hafez ElAssad's Syria (the aborted unification project of 1979) and get itself coopted to the rank of regional Arab leader in the aftermath of the isolation of Sadat's Egypt as a result of its US-sponsored Camp David accords with Israel.
The collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979, with the ensuing disorganization of the Iranian army and above all the break in this army's ties with its main tutor and supplier, the United States, offered Saddam Hussein an unhoped-for opportunity to take revenge on his neighbor. He took the chance all the more willingly because the new regime of the mullahs mounted an intense "Islamic" propaganda campaign against the "atheistic" government in Baghdad, appealing in particular to the Shi'ites, who represent the majority among the Iraqi Arabs (while Saddam's
International Viewpoint #190 • September 17, 1990 clan is Sunni). In attacking Iran, the Iraqi despot had several objectives. The first was to reverse the consequences of his capitulation in 1975; as a prelude to the hostilities, he renounced the Algiers accord concluded with the Shah. Next, in the context of dismembering the Persian empire, he sought to take the region of Khuzistan (Arabistan), Iran's main oil-producing region which was inhabited by an oppressed Arab ethnic minority. That would have made Iraq the world's main oil exporter, considerably reinforcing its potential in all spheres. Finally, he wanted to establish his regime as the dominant regional power, getting the other Gulf oil states, which were as worried as Iraq by the Khomeini regime's subversive behavior, to finance the Iraqi war effort.
Such were Baghdad's motivations in the war against Iran — bourgeois nationalist expansionist objectives. Saddam Hussein was not moved by any intention to serve Washington's interests, according to a black-and-white vision of things held by some supporters of Iran whom we had occasion to criticize. This view cannot integrate, with any coherence whatever, either Washington's secret contacts with Iran (Irangate) or still less the present behavior of the Iraqi regime.
The Pyrrhic victory over
Iran THE gamble taken by Saddam Hussein in 1980 was very risky, even adventurist. Carried away by his megalomaniac ambitions, he seriously overestimated his army's capacities against a large country with a much greater population. He did not foresee that by arousing a Persian nationalist reaction, his invasion of Iranian land would reinforce the cohesion of the mullahs' regime and therefore its ability to resist and later to mount a counterattack. In 1982, the Iraqi army became bogged down in Iran, and then went into retreat. The war was now on Iraqi soil.
In their turn, the expansionist PersianShi'ite nationalist Iranian mullahs made the same mistakes as their enemy had before. At the cost of terrible strain on the capacities of the Iraqi population; with increased support from its financial backers and its arms suppliers in both the West and East, who were frightened by the prospect of an Iranian victory; and by an increasing recourse to the deterrent horrors of chemical weapons, the Iraqi regime was able to turn the situation to its 2. This was the period following the October 1973 Israel-Arab war, which was supposed to be one of a negotiated settlement of this conflict. 3. See "Imperialism and the Gulf War," International Viewpoint, No. 132, December 21, 1987.
favor again. In 1988, Iran was forced to accept the ceasefire that it had stubbornly rejected when it was still in a position of strength. Iraq emerged victorious from the military adventure launched by its tyrant, but at what a price! For Iraq alone, the war meant 300,000 dead and many more wounded, handicapped, widows and orphans. The overall military cost (destruction, lost earnings, the cost of the war effort) was around $250 billion, plus $60 billion in debts. It was a Pyrrhic victory in the full sense. Furthermore, the conflict with Iran was not settled, and therefore it was necessary to maintain a swollen army of a million soldiers, out of all proportion to a total population that the most generous estimates put at 17 million (that is, one in every 17 inhabitants were in the army).
Even before the war against Iran, the absorption of an important part of the Iraqi people's productive capacity in the military and bureaucratic apparatuses, as well as the lack of skilled manpower, and indeed the chauvinist policy of Arab colonization of the Kurdish areas, had led Iraq to open its doors to vast contingents of Egyptian immigrant workers (both skilled and peasants). Their numbers increased considerably during the war, reaching close to 2 million. The result was that a million Iraqis mobilized for war were replaced in production by Egyptians, with the oil emirs of the Gulf largely footing the bill.
Iraq became, to some extent, an Arab replica of the state of Israel, an overarmed state, whose place in the international (Israel) or regional (Iraq) division of "labor" was determined by its military role. However, the financing of Iraq to a degree equivalent to that of Israel would require $20 billion a year. Even subtracting Iraq's oil income from this total, Saddam Hussein would need annual financing on the order of $10 billion, without counting the enormous bill for rebuilding the country and the weight of its accumulated debt. Kuwait's oil income would just about cover the military effort and Kuwaiti capital invested in the West the reconstruction work.
Here was a terrible temptation, especially since the burden of the Iraqi regime's financial crisis was growing. The war was over. The Gulf money bags were cutting back their payments to Saddam Hussein considerably. They felt that they were caught in the trap of an endless racket, since militarized Iraq's appetite seemed
GULF CRISIS greed in exporting far more oil than justified by the real needs of their Lilliputian states, were responsible to a insatiable. They no longer had any illusions that the many "loans" to the Baathist regime would be repaid. As a result, Iraqi finances started to go under. Less and less able to pay back old debts, Iraq had more and more trouble in getting new ones. Even France, which not long ago encouraged it to buy, cut off credits and held back its deliveries.
The standard of living of the Iraqi population, maintained with difficulty during the war, started to plummet. It was necessary to "trim the fat." This took the form, not without problems, of beginning to send back the Egyptian workers. Foreseeing the growth of popular resentment, Saddam tried to gain some buoyancy in the same way as other dictatorships with statized economies - by offering facilities to the private sector and a simulacrum of multi-candidate elections (with all the candidates devoted to the despot). But in view of the gravity of the problem such expedients were no use.
The dictator tried to force the emirs to provide the funds he required by direct threats. He demanded that they officially write off Iraq's debts and pay him a substantial contribution toward rebuilding the country. From Kuwait alone, the most vulnerable because of its tiny size and common border with Iraq, he demanded $30 billion. After all, had he not fought for their interests as well? Had he not defended the "Eastern Gate of the Arab Nation" against the Khomeinite Persian menace? Was it not right that the emirs foot the bill in dollars, since Iraq had paid in human lives?
Confronted with the stubborn refusal of the Gulf princes, Saddam raised his voice to point out, for the benefit of Iran, which had an equal interest in this aspect of the dispute, that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by their unrelenting large extent for the low price of crude, and were thereby depriving other exporters and their own needy populations of billions of dollars.* In July, Saddam publicly threatened the emirs that he might resort to tough methods. Nothing happened. He massed troops on the frontier of Kuwait, but got no more results. The emir of Kuwait stuck to his stubborn attitude, encouraged by the Saudis, Great Britain and the United States, which were highly upset by the Iraqi blackmail. Saddam was left 5005198 without any other choice. It was double or quits. Either he resigned himself to the inevitable collapse of his regime by renouncing its claims to the role of regional gendarme and "trimming" his armed forces — and then having to face popular discontent and the hostility of innumerable enemies with accounts to settle. Or else he upped the ante, in the illusory prospect of a success that would solve all his problems. It was illusory, because once again his megalomania blinded him to his own limitations with respect to the scope of his ambitions.
### Hussein's Kuweiti adventure ON August 2, Iraqi troops overran the territory of Kuwait, almost as easily as if it were a routine exercise. Saddam Hussein's tendency to improvisation was once again striking. For him, like Napoleon, "you get involved and then you see." That is a valid maxim as long as you make sure you have an avenue of retreat. The characteristic feature of adventurism is neglecting this second aspect. Initially, it was announced that the Iraqi troops had intervened at the request of a Kuwaiti "revolu4. There is a wide-spread idea that Kuwait acted to bring down the oil price in the sole interest of the imperialists. This idea has some validity with respect to Saudi Arabia, but not for the state of Kuwait, which is more keen to pursue its own interests than the neighboring kingdom. In reality, if the Kuwaitis are exporting more than they need for the intangible needs of their state, it is because they are trying to maximize their profits, like any capitalist. The capitalization abroad of the income from their oil - an art in which they are past masters, for which they have won the admiration of international big capital — is much more
5 profitable than leaving the oil in the ground, where its real price is declining inexorably.
GULF CRISIS tionary" government — a detail reminiscent of certain Soviet interventions in the past. But the lack of a minimum of political preparation in Kuwait for an invasion decided on in the heat of the moment was evident.
Saddam announced his intention to withdraw in exchange for the objectives for which he had crossed the Rubicon. To this end, his close friends of recent years, King Hussein of Jordan and Yasir Arafat offered their good offices. However, at this stage giving way was still more unthinkable for the emirs, especially now that world imperialism was mobilizing to come to their rescue. The Iraqi dictatorship, no longer able to retreat without losing everything, proceeded to an outright annexation of Kuwait. For the occasion, it was recalled that Iraq had long claimed this territory on which Great Britain had established an "independent state."
With the imperialist deployment, Saddam Hussein's double or quite has reached a fateful level. He could accept compromise solutions that would leave him a financial or territorial gain. But now the stubborn party is Washington, which has taken direct charge. Bush, with the approval of Thatcher, Mitterrand and other minions, is categorical — no concessions, an unconditional Iraqi withdrawal. Caught up in the toils, Saddam Hussein is preparing for a test of strength. In view of the scope of the challenge, he had to free his hands on the Iranian front. Making yet another turnaround, he accepted all Tehran's conditions for ending the state of war between the two countries.
The 1975 Algiers accord, which was declared null and void in 1980, was reactivated. The despot has once again changed the target of his Arab nationalism. The "Christian West" has replaced the "Persians." When you aim for Kuwait, Iraq's natural outlet to the sea, you can easily cede half of the Shatt-el-Arab to the Iranians, another Middle Eastern people and brothers in Islam.
The government of the mullahs, delighted with this manna from heaven, did not need much urging to accept the offer. At the same time, Iran could savor the spectacle of Iraq in its turn suffering an even more virulent hostility from the "international community," including from those who had only yesterday armed and financed it against Iran. In tragic farcical style so familiar in Middle Eastern politics, Washington even proposed an alliance against Baghdad to Tehran, calling on the Iranians to mass their troops against the neighboring country. For the moment, they have wisely declined the offer of Great Satan, with which they have no interest in getting too implicated. Iranian president Rafsanjani, who escaped by the skin of his teeth from the Irangate affair, knows something about that.
Why has world imperialism mobilized untransent attitude? The gues to such an extent, and why is it takin tion has to be raised, because fundamentally the United States and its minions did not own Kuwait's oil any more than they do Iraq's. Some have thought this was a battle over the price of oil. But the imperialists are sharp eyed when it comes to commerce. It is clear that the only means OPEC has to affect the oil price is to cut its production.
In fact, Saddam Hussein has not annexed Kuwait to cut off the emirate's oil exports. To the contrary, he has a much greater interest than the emirs themselves in exporting as much as possible. He blamed them for producing more than they needed. But his own needs are enormous. The exporters that have a real possibility for affecting prices are those -Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the UAE - that have a wide margin for maneuver, given their excess capacity for export by comparison with the inelastic part of their needs.
The fraud of "international law" IT IS clear how much the "international law" evoked by the "international community" is worth. In the last 25 years alone, there have been so many invasions and de jure or de facto annexations that it is hard to count them. Let us take the annexations. For 23 years Israel has occupied Arab territories as populous as Kuwait, and officially annexed part of them. In 1971, the Shah annexed three Gulf islands belonging to the UAE. In 1975, Hassan II's Morocco annexed the Western Sahara. These spoiled children of imperialism have never suffered the least sanctions from their godfathers. Moreover we do not have to remind people that the imperialist great powers in the forefront in the Gulf conflict have maintained their annexations of a whole number of "overseas" territories.
As for the occupations and invasions in recent history, were the US actions from Vietnam to Panama, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, South Africa's invasion of southern Angola, Iraq's own invasion of Iran, Israel's invasion of Lebanon, or the USSR's interventions in Azerbaijan and Lithuania, carried out in accordance with "international law"? Does not South Africa's apartheid regime deserve at least the same enthusiasm for sanctions and embargoes as the annexation of Kuwait? This talk about "law" is gross hypocrisy, coming from those who trample on it everyday around the world.
What then are the imperialists real motives with respect to Iraq? Let us start with the reasons of convenience, for which the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is only a good pretext. For the United States, fol-
International Viewpoint #190 • September 17, 1990 lowed by France and Great Britain in par- Grant Daitoin in nor. ticular, it offers an argument against any demand for a substantial reduction of military appropriations. Such pressures have been very strong lately, with the need to cut budget deficits coinciding with the East-West détente and calls for disarmament. The main lesson drawn by Bush a few days after the Iraqi operation (the Baltimore speech) was the need to keep the arms appropriations untouchable and be prepared to face new threats to American interests, like the Iraqi one, which would certainly arise, despite the Soviet debacle.
Along with this, at a time when a new recession is beginning, social cutbacks are indispensable. If budgets are to be cut, it is social spending that will be sliced. Once again, it is the oil exporters who are supposed to be responsible for this crisis. Since Saddam is the new Hitler of modern times, people have to get ready to shed "blood, sweat and tears" in defense of the big principles. One can imagine what Ronald Reagan, a much better actor than Bush, could have offered by way of a show on this occasion and theme.
There are still greater stakes for Washington. At a time when the economic power of the American empire is in sharp decline against German and Japanese competition, the United States is trying to restore the balance by playing on its unchallenged military supremacy.
The message is simple: "We are the world's gendarmes, the protectors of the imperialist order. This costs us a lot, while others who profit as much as we, if not more, from the maintenance of this order are not able to contribute effectively to the effort (for example, they are more dependent on Gulf oil than we are). It is only just therefore that they help to finance for exertions, or even give us trade advantages by way of compensation". Bush said this publicly in substance on August 30.
As for the direct motives of the imperialist intervention in the Gulf, these are fundamentally of two sorts. On the one hand, there is the defense of the Kuwaiti and Saudi states (as well as the UAE). Once again, "law" has nothing to do with it.
The Kuwaiti economy in exile IN reality, for a long time, the Kuwaiti and Saudi ruling classes have been an integral part of imperialist world capital, not in the sense that their states (which have all the features of dependency) are 5. The enlightened interest of the Iranian merchants, who are the most advantaged class under the regime of the mullahs, would be to break the blockade of Iraq, at the high prices that the latter would not hesitate to pay (in oil, if necessary). 6. The Guardian Weekly, Vol. 143, No. 9.
imperialist, but in the sense that these classes have invested ("recycled") the better part of the assets accruing from their oil increases in the economies of the imperialist mother countries.
In this respect, the London Guardian recently published a very interesting article ® It listed the big pieces of the Kuwaiti state's $100 billion investments in the industrialized economies, showing that Kuwait is the main foreign investor in Japan and Spain and one of the main ones in Britain and the United States. But where this article offered an innovation was in introducing the concept of an "economy in exile" with respect to these immense assets of the Kuwaiti state, today deprived of its territory.
The ruling classes of such states own and run the state in a way that combines features of feudal lordship with the methods of the board of directors of a stock company. Their ability to do as they please with "public property" is not limited by any oversight outside their own narrow ranks. They are the state. They are multinational holding companies, for which territory is by no means essential. Imperialism defends them, as it would defend any of its big private interest groups.
Moreover, their use of their oil incomes is an integral part of the imperialist economies almost as if the money was in the hands of the imperialist companies themselves. This is all the more true in that a not inconsiderable part goes for uses that are unproductive or unprofitable for the buyers but highly profitable for the imperialist sellers, which would not be the case for ordinary private companies. For the United States, Saudi Arabia is a second Texas. For Britain, the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), which owns 10% of the Midland Bank and British Petroleum (BP) is the equivalent of a big British investment trust.
It is not Kuwaiti or Saudi ownership of the oil fields as such that interests the imperialists. Iraq does not threaten their
GULF CRISIS
HITED STATES oil supplies, because it has no other choice but to sell to them, which it has always done. What interests them is the use of the oil income, its recycling in their economies by exporter states that are rich, because they are underpopulated, with respect to their incomes.
Along with this economic motive, is a politico-military one. The imperialists cannot allow a regional power to emerge that is militarily outside their control, a state with hegemonic ambitions directly rivaling imperialist hegemony, as is the case with Iraq.
That country is not independent, because the country is structurally dependent in all spheres, aside from oil and dates. It is, notably, entirely dependent as regards arms. But it is uncontrollable, as Qadhafi's Libya can be, following a political course that the imperialists cannot predict — with the important difference that Saddam Hussein's military resources are much greater than those of Qadhafi. ®
When, on top of this, such an uncontrollable power starts to challenge the great powers' dividing up the world into states in disregard for national realities and complementarity, thereby threatening to set a contagious precedent, it is high time to slap it down. This is the name of the game today. No one should be taken in. It is only hypocrisy when Moscow and Peking, who have agreed to give UN cover to the imperialist intervention, pretend today that they have only endorsed the blockade and are opposed to a military offensive against Iraq?
The imperialist powers will not be satisfied with a simple return to the status quo ante, which would leave Iraq not only its war booty but also the possibility to prepare for new adventures. They are haunted by the idea that Iraq, which also has chemical weapons, could considerably reinforce its deterrent strength by joining the club of nuclear powers. For Bush, Thatcher and company, the watchword today is clear. Saddam Hussein is to be destroyed, as Carthage was for the
Romans.
To this end, two possibilities are envisaged. The first would be overthrowing (or assassinating) Saddam Hussein from within. This is the domain of the secret services, first of all of the CIA (certainly with the collaboration of the Israelis), the domain of covert action. But the chances here seem slight. Saddam Hussein is a specialist. He travels from bunker to bunker, with a surfeit of precautions, and his police control of the state apparatus is very tight. In fact, the CIA has already tried on several occasions to eliminate the Iraqi dictator, notably in concert with the Saudis in 1985-1986.1° It did not even manage to shake his regime.
The military option -overwhelming force THE military option remains. The imperialists know, however, that it would be very hard to get domestic public opinion to accept seeing a lot of compatriots killed in a fight for the emir of Kuwait or the Saudi monarchy — the most reactionary in the world and more repressive than the Saddam Hussein regime itself as well as far more retrograde. Nonetheless, any confrontation on the ground, whatever tactic is adopted, is going to be very costly 7. French imperialism has invested a lot in Iraq. It would like to see the Iraqi economy reflated by a reduction of military and unproductive state spending. Its interest is in seeing that this is done without too much damage, in order to maintain Iraq's capacity for repaying its debts and for importing. That is the reason it is showing little enthusiasm for a direct aggression against Iraq. 8. Qadhafi also had his Kuwait in Chad (the Aouzou strip). 9. Cuba's abstention in the UN Security Council on this question is deplorable coming from a country that has suffered so much from the American blockade. 7 10. For them it was a matter of removing an obstacle to settling the Gulf conflict.
GULF CRISIS in human lives against an Iraqi army with eight years of combat experience facing a numerically superior enemy. The main mission of the US land forces deployed in Saudi Arabia is in fact to protect the kingdom, in particular the oil fields bordering on Kuwait and Iraq
The no. 1 offensive option is air power. That is Iraq's Achilles Heel. It has a few sophisticated toys for aerial combat and antiaircraft defense, but remains in the poor house and vulnerable in this area. The Iranian airforce was in a dilapidated state, notably because of the lack of US spare parts (cf. Irangate), and Iraq has no real combat experience against a state-ofthe-art airfleet. The region's desert geography, furthermore, makes it ideal for air power to play the decisive role, as illustrated by the Israeli-Arab wars since 1967.
The Pentagon has already worked out a plan for massive destruction from the air of strategic targets in Iraq (military concentrations, arms factories, infrastructure, communications and energy facilities). The American generals are getting ready to "flatten" Iraq by carpet bombing. They are rejoicing at the prospect of finally getting a serious chance to use such murderous gadgets as the Stealth bomber, whose prohibitive cost had aroused an outcry. They are getting ready to stage Apocalypse Now, Part II, for real, as son as they get the green light. Such an action, the least costly in soldiers among the imperialists military options, would destroy Saddam's military power, if not the regime itself.
The major risks of such an operation are the consequences it could have internationally and in the Arab world, which are being carefully weighed in Washington. Some of them are warning against the risk of a generalized upsurge throughout the Arab world, a sort of Intifada on a much bigger scale, which would do severe damage to the pro-imperialist Arab regimes.
These latter, moreover, are very worried by the prospect of a large-scale military offensive against Iraq. They are trying to wash their hands in advance in front of their populations. At any rate, the imperialist military forces will only withdraw from the region after irreversibly neutralizing Iraq, with or without Saddam Husse-
The authority of world imperialism WHAT is at stake is the authority and hegemony of world imperialism.This is why we cannot hesitate, whatever aversion we may have for the Iraqi despot. Everything possible has to be done to 8 oppose the imperialist intervention, to force the withdrawal of the imperialist troops and end the blockade inflicted on the Iraqi people. This is a task in particular for anti-imperialists in the countries involved in the intervention. The cost of any imperialist aggression against Iraq has to be maximized. In any confrontation between Iraq and the imperialists, we are resolutely on the side of Iraq.
But what about Kuwait itself? While there is virtual unanimity on the revolutionary left on the need to defeat imperialism,there is a broad spectrum of positions on the revolutionary left on the question of the annexation of Kuwait. This goes from those who call for a withdrawal of the Iraqi troops from this territory and self-determination for its population to those who support the annexation or even defy the Iraqi regime not to capitulate.
It is no paradox that the Palestinian masses on both sides of the Jordan river, those in the region for whom the right of self-determination is most important, are precisely those who are most energetically expressing their support for Iraq. To be sure, they have illusions about the Iraqi regime, illusions fostered by the close ties between the PLO leadership and this regime. However, more fundamentally, they do not class the Kuwaiti state in the category of the oppressed but in the class of creations of imperialism like the Zionist state.
Is this view well founded? It is unquestionable that the Kuwaiti state owes its existence to British imperialism. Of course, you could argue that all the states in the Arab region are products of the imperialist dismemberment of the Arab realm of the Ottoman empire over the last two centuries. Nonetheless, with the exception of a few such artificial ones as Jordan, these states correspond to the Ottoman administrative units or to regions that remained free of Ottoman domination (Morocco, North Yemen), and therefore have a long continuity as states. But this is not a decisive differ-
The real difference is that these states include active native populations that for the moment accept their state framework and could surmount it in the direction of a federation union or fusion with others if they had the active will to do so. This is not the case of the oppressed national minorities such as the Palestinians or Kurds. It is not the case either of the oil mini-states of the Gulf (Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar). The latter are bases established by British imperialism with the purchased collaboration of ruling clans coming from the Bedouin tribes of the Arab peninsula.
The strategic importance of these bases for the British empire's naval dominance was increased in the twentieth century by the discovery of the oil riches lying under the soil. They became oil concessions for the imperialist companies. British imperialism therefore had every interest in making them so-called separate "states" and later "independent" ones in order to pre-
International Viewpoint #190 • September 17, 1990 serve its dominance over them and their wealth, enclaves free from the anti-
Western subversion to which the other normally populated states of the region became exposed very early.
The creation of the "state" of Kuwait at the end of the last century was done against the will of the Ottomans, who demanded the withdrawal of the British and the attachment of the area to their province of Basra, the south of today's Iraq, of which Kuwait is a natural extension leading toward the waters of the Gulf. Under a British protectorate, this state was maintained by London against the will even of its own Iraqi agents (and the Iraqi population) under the monarchy that Britain set up in Iraq in 1921.
London had Kuwait firmly under its control, with the territory's few tens of thousands of inhabitants. Alongside an Irag that would have eagerly annexed it at its birth, the state was entirely dependent on British protection. The English, moreover, were clear-sighted about the precariousness of their domination of Iraq challenged by rebellions as early as 1920. In 1958, the monarchy that they sponsored was finally overthrown by a republican, nationalist coup d'état carried out by forces openly hostile to them.
The new regime called still more forcefully on London to cede Kuwait. But with the growth of the territory's oil production, this was even less a possibility. And when in 1961, London granted an entirely formal "independence" to its protectorate of Kuwait (300,000 inhabitants at the time), a British military force had to be sent to prevent Irag from annexing it. The conflict was finally settled by Kuwait paying Irag a sum of money in return for its recognition as a state.
Self-determination for an artificial state? LIKE the other oil emirates, Kuwait owes not only its creation but its survival to imperialism, as the events under way well illustrate. Applying the concept of self-determination to territories cut out by imperialism around mineral resources in order to be able to exploit them more easily, dividing them from larger units from which they are not distinguished by any national, ethnic, cultural or linguistic features, amounts to given the privileged minorities that live in such enclaves pre11. Alarming and light-minded references have been made to the possibility of resorting to nuclear weapons in response to Iraq's using chemical ones. 12. Of the 40% of Kuwait's inhabitants who hold citizenship in the emirate, less than 10% enjoy the right to vote, which in any case remains quite formal, since the emir is free to act as he chooses and dissolve his poor excuse for a parliament, as he did recently.
emptive rights over these riches, at the expense of the overwhelming majority of those who live in the larger units of which they are a natural part. This is a total perversion of the democratic content of the principal of the right of peoples (by majority decision) to determine their own fate. The formalism of bourgeois law always perpetuates injustice by basing itself on inequalities that arose from natural circumstances or oppression.
Many states could have been created by imperialism in the Third World like the oil emirates, if the relationship of forces with the local peoples had permitted. Principalities or mini-republics could have been set up in every oil field, in every gold-mining area, where it would have been easy to find a majority of inhabitants to vote for "independence," that is, for not shar- OF THE WORLD ing the subsurface wealth with MY ALLIES. other regions of the country to MONG OF THI which they belonged. Only a WOULD HAVE genuinely distinct ethnic character of the region in question would, from a democratic point of view, justify recognizing a right to self-determination. Inversely and contrary to anti-democratic formalism, we cannot recognize any sovereignty of majorities planted on the territory of other nations or ethnic groups USA through coercive processes.
The Kuwaiti case does not satisfy even the most formal conception of majority rights. In the three oil emirates, only a minority of Kuwait's inhabitants (40%) hold citizenship and enjoy, in a very unequal way moreover, the rights and privileges to which this status entitles them!?. The great majority of the producers are excluded from this, and treated as second or third class citizens, depending on whether they are Arabs or South Asians, in the context of a system that a British journal did not hesitate to call apartheid.
It is a glaring fact that with millions of Arabs unemployed, the oil emirates imported labor power from the Indian subcontinent, or even from SouthEast Asia. Such workers were reduced to conditions close to slavery (notably the bulk of domestics). They offered the advantage of passivity, since they were anxious above all not to lose wages, which however wretched loom large in comparison with the deep poverty of their countries of origin.
These artificial states were designed to free "surplus capital" and recycle it to their imperialist protectors and tutors. In them, a minority lives in a wallow of luxury that is an insult not only to the great poverty of the neighboring populations, but also to the unenviable conditions of the vast majority of their immigrant workers. The latter, even the Arabs among them (mainly Palestinians and Egyptians)
GULF CRISIS have far less rights and social advantages than the immigrants in the imperialist countries.
The most elementary justice demands the reattachment of these emirates to the more populous regions from which they were cut off by imperialism. Moreover, given their character and composition, we cannot expect the workers who live in them to take power. These states will always have sufficient means to maintain as many well paid mercenaries as necessary to keep their wage slaves down'3 From this standpoint, we cannot, in itself, condemn the invasion of Kuwait and its annexation by Iraq. One's attitude to this question depends on the concrete political circumstances. A revolutionary regime M E
MADE IN CHINA MADE IN GERMAN GERMANY TINITED STATE: & AMERICA based on genuine democratic, popular power in Baghdad might have been led to annex Kuwait manu militari, if it had the means. Of course, it would have done so in a very different way, with the active participation of the workers living there, and in the manner of a liberation army and not an army of occupation, as Saddam Hussein's troops did. '4
Should we therefore support the annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, while condemning his methods? We cannot do that either, because Saddam Hussein is not the representative of the people of Iraq but its oppressor. We support turning over the wealth of Kuwait to those who work there and to the Iraqi people. This will not be done under the dictatorship of the despot of Baghdad any more than it was under the mini-potentate of
Kuwait, who today is in exile. Therefore, we can neither support the annexation under way or demand that it be ended. In fact, no one should be fooled. Whatever the democratic intentions those who demand Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait may have, the only real alternative today is the reestablishment of the emir.
Revolutionaries are not obliged, in this case, to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. They should take a hardand-fast position only against imperialist intervention, for the reasons already explained. On the ground, the Arab revolutionaries genuinely devoted to the interests of the proletariat should refuse to take part in any confrontation between Arab troops, whether those of Saddam, Fahd, Mubarak, Hafez El-Assad or Hassan II. The workers have nothing to defend, nothing to gain, in such a war. They should oppose the sending of troops from their countries to the area of conflict, like the heroic Iraqi soldiers and officers who have paid with their lives for refusing to participate in Saddam Hussein's new mad adventure.
It is necessary to call on the soldiers of the Arab armies to fraternize and turn their weapons on their leaders. It is necessary to put forward the perspective of a socialist sharing of all the resources of the Arab nation, opposing their current division among ruling classes sub- sion among ruling classes subordinate to imperialism. In Iraq or among Iraqis in In Iraq or among Iraqis in exile, revolutionaries must above all denounce the despot's folly, which is continually leading their country into massacres for the sake of his megalomaniac ambitions. The revolutionary overthrow of Saddam remains an urgent task; the survival of Iraq is at stake. They have to explain that the Iraqi people's right to regain Kuwait cannot be justly demanded, without at the same time demanding the right of the DANZIGER Kurdish people to selfTra Corsian Scenze ter determination and to recovery of the oil producing areas (Kirkuk) colonized by Arabs.
While it is necessary to call for lifting the freeze on Iraqi assets abroad, rejecting a method used more and more commonly by the imperialists toward states that oppose them, we cannot demand that the Kuwaiti state's $100 billion be turned over to Saddam Hussein, nor given back to the emir. Moreover, it is necessary to demand the freezing of the "private" assets of the Kuwaiti reigning family, which amount to several tens of billions of dollars! These funds should be turned over to Iraq for rebuilding the country, as soon as its people are able to freely elect their government.
These are the general lines of a revolutionary attitude based on the class interests of the proletariat. The questions are complex, and the answers have to be carefully balanced to avoid becoming identified with any of those involved in this conflict. The only simple and unqualified response is resolute opposition to the imperialist intervention. *
13. The armies of the emirates and Saudi Arabia are largely made up of mercenaries ("immigrant soldiers"
to repress immigrant workers).
14. The Iraqi despot's narrow nationalism shows up also in his inability to appeal to anti-imperialist forces throughout the world. His conception of things is reflected by the taking of Wester hostages, which nothing can justify, and which has helped to turn international public opinion against him.
I'D LIKE TO THANK THE
ARME MANUFACTURERS
GULF CRISIS
Drawing a line against the war drive
I CONFESS TO FEELINGA IT MAKES MITE DEPRESSED ABOUT ME WISH I SENDING HIM TO FIGHT COULD GO OVER THERE, BUT I'M IN HIS GETTING OVER IT PLACE
STOCK EXCHANGE BIG OIL
MOVEMENTS of protest against the US-led wardrive in the Gulf are developing throughout the world. Below we outline some of the antiwar actions that have anuwar actions inat nave taken place or are being planned, along with some information on the state of play among the major political parties, and the Impact of the intervention on the populations in different countries. The survey is both Incomplete and behind the times, but we hope to being you more information in future issues of IV.
We start with a contribution from Tom Barrett, dated August 29, on the situation in the United States. T HE spectacle of the President of the United States playing golf at Kennebunkport, Maine, as he deploys the US' largest military force since the Vietnam War, has begun to inspire distrust among Americans. In city after city antiwar activists are beginning to organize at the grassroots level, as it becomes clear there will be no early end to the Gulf Crisis.
A number of complex and contradictory factors are beginning to work against Bush as a consequence of his failure to end the crisis quickly. In a display of over-confidence after his easy takeover of Panama, (perhaps Saddam Hussein should have accused the Emir of Kuweit of trafficking in cocaine), Bush chose a strategy of military confrontation rather than compromise. Hussein might have been willing to come to an accommodation with the US in the early stages of the crisis, but the American president's insis10 tence on asserting US authority in the region has made compromise much more
DEFENSE SPENDING HITS difficult now.
After an initial rush of support from a broad spectrum of bourgeois politicians, Bush's consensus appears to be cracking - in unexpected places. Patrick Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and a spokesperson for the most reactionary sections of the US ruling class, has taken issue with Bush's policies. Jesse Jackson, on the other hand, has supported the Mideast intervention up until now.
There is a debate within the US bourgeoisie, and it is directly related to oil economics. The reason for Saddam Hussein's invasion - as he himself stated up front — was the relatively low price of crude oil, about $17 per barrel at the time. A significant section of the capitalist class in the US - including oil people, but also bankers whose revenues depend on oil-company profits — shares the view that oil prices are too low. Low oil prices are the direct cause of the economic slump in the American SouthWest, which was in turn the biggest factor in the Savings and Loan debacle. Thus there is sympathy with Saddam's desire to push the price of a barrel of oil up to $25 among this section of the ruling class.
Bush, the former president of Zapata Oil, clearly understands this point of view, and though another section of the US ruling class clearly desires lower oil prices, this is not Bush's motivation for intervening in the Middle East. His concern is to reassert US dominance in the region, which was seriously weakened when the Shah of Iran fell in 1979.
The longer the crisis continues the more the anti-intervention movement will grow. Weekly picket lines at federal buildings and oil company offices are taking place in many major cities. In New York different offices are picketed weekly, drawing between 100 and 150
International Viewpoint #190 • September 17, 1990
THAT'S WHAT WERE ALL ABOUT N PETRORELIM each time. In Minneapolis protest pickets of about 50 were held at the federal building and outside a hotel where Vice President Dan Quayle was addressing a Republican fundraising event. A protest rally combined with a teach-in was held on August 23 in Minneapolis, drawing 150 to 200 people.
Similar protests are occurring in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Kansas City and other important cities. The biggest event so far has been a demonstration of 1,000 in San Francisco on August 28. Plans are under way for a major protest meting in New York on September 13, which will feature former Attorney General Ramsey Clark among other speakers and a major protest march on October 20. More than 100 people met on August 28 to help organize thest events. Antiwar activists are attempting to come to grips with the Gulf crisis's political complexities. Saddam Hussein is, after all, not an anti-imperialist revolutionary, but a capitalist dictator. It is clear that Hussein is sending young men to die so that the price of crude oil will rise. Working people in the United States can have no sympathy for the Iraqi dictator. Antiintervention activists are understandably confused on how to respond. Correctly, the overwhelming sentiment is to focus the demands of the various coalitions on the US government, demanding that it end its military intervention in Middle East. However, many want also to express their opposition to the invasion and annexation of Kuwait by Iraq - which in its turn may lead to ambiguity on the opposition to US war moves. Under these circumstances we can expect a major discussion among US activists. The overriding factor must be maintaining a clear focus on the criminal role of the US government and the demand that it ends its intervention in the affairs of the Arab peoples. *
HE GOES FOR
PLAG AND
COUNTRY
GULF CRISIS
PLANS are under way in Britain for a demonstration against war in the Gulf on September 15 in London, sponsored by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Speakers at the demonstration are to include Labour MPs Tony Benn and Dianne Abbott, Bruce Kent from CND and Fire Brigades Union chief Ken Cameron. The basis for the demonstration is No War in the Gulf. At the same time the Campaign Against War in the Gulf (CAWG) is building an anti-imperialist contingent for the demonstration, taking up the crucial additional demand for the immediate withdrawal of US and British troops from the region. The committee hopes to build on the success of a 2,000 strong demonstration on September 2 called by the British Socialist Workers Party.
The CAWG has so far been joined by a number of Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, and by London and Kent areas of the National Union of Students, Labour Party Socialists, Women For Socialism and a range of individuals and far left groups, including Socialist Outlook, Socialist Organiser and the Socialist Workers Party. The Campaign will be distributing 50,000 leaflets calling on people to attend the demonstration and support the demand for the recall of US and American troops. * THERE is consensus among the political class over the involvement of France in the Gulf war. Noone is willing to upset President Mitterrand. The left is paralyzed, and this has allowed the far right National Front to fish in troubled waters.
Taken by surprise by Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuweit, and faced with the fait accompli of the American armada on its way to the Gulf, the French rulers had no choice but to line up behind the US. The helicopters on the French aircraft carrier Clemenceau are to be part of the forces stationed in Saudi Arabia.
The Socialist government wanted to make sure that the right could not outbid it. Mitterrand has acted precisely as he was advised by Charles Millon of the right-wing UDF: "The rise in tension can only lead France to move significantly closer to the intransigent attitude of the United States." Even so the Iraqi lobby — France has had especially warm relations with Iraq - continues to make its weight felt in the state apparatus, both at the political level and in the militaryindustrial complex. The unforeseeable consequences of the American operation on the frame of mind of the peoples of the Middle East threatens the "Arab policy" that, since De Gaulle, has allowed French imperialism to play its own game in the region.
As ex-Minister of the economy Jacques Chirac suggested, it is necessary to avert a redistribution of the cards from which only Washington would benefit. "Should we go further, as some of our partners are already envisaging? We do not believe so. Let us be quite clear. The operation must remain an international action with the aim of upholding the law and go no further." The government has dispatched a number of right-wing worthies to a series of Arab and Third World countries to explain the French position.
There has been a loud silence from the workers' movement. The Socialist Party was quick to support "the firm attitude shown by France." As for the Communist Party, the approach is to pretend that Mitterrand has not chosen military escalation. This orientation is likely to provoke tensions within the party's ranks.
The only well-known voice of open dissent thus far has been that of Le Pen from the far right. The National Front leader has revived an old theorem: each to their own nationalism. Thus opposition to the intervention goes hand in hand with the usual xenophobia. Nonetheless on the
Gulf crisis splits Italian CP
IN ITALY the sending of several warships to join the US-led fleet is yet to meet with a massive reaction from the workers' movement. Gianni De Michelis, Socialist leader and Minister of Foreign Affairs, has since the start been aiming at a military intervention to defend imperialist interests in the region, while the peace forces have been taken by surprise, and have been unable to respond However, the events in the Gulf have brought to a head the crisis in the Communist Party (PCI).
The PCI is presently divided into three main currents: an openly Social Democratic rightwing, represented by Giorgio Napolitano, aiming at the complete liquidation of the party's tradition and integration into the "European Left"; a centre current represented by the party's secretary Achille Ochetto and the present party leadership, cautiously following a few steps behind the right, thus hoping to avoid a major crisis amongst the party militants; and finally a left whose diverse components include an old leader Pietro Ingrao, ex-leaders of the far left PdUP such as Lucio Magri and Luciana Castellina and the traditional spokesperson of Moscow orthodoxy, Armando Cossutta.
During the parliamentary debate on the Gulf crisis, after the government decided to send ships to the Gulf, the PCI deputies voted in different directions. At the moment of the vote the party leadership decided to abstain on the government's policy, since it believed that it had scored a big success by getting a statement that the United Nations should play a decisive role in resolving the conflict and a vague reference to a global solution to the Middle East crisis, including recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, into the final resolution. In fact the government had decided to send the ships before the parliamentary debate, and well before the UN took any official position. Thus the PCI's abstention amounted to lining up with the interests of the great powers.
The left current publicly disassociated itself from the party's orientation, through an intervention by Ingrao in the parliamentary debate. After denouncing the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, and criticizing Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, Ingrao stated his opposition to the military intervention to defend the West's strategic interests. The left's deputies then left the chamber without voting. The only votes against were thus those of the Democrazia Proletaria, some representatives of the Independent Left (tied to the PCI) and the Green
Left. — Enzo Traverso * left, the French section of the Fourth International (LCR) has been circulating a petition of protest against the policy of the French state, and is planning a demonstration in mid-September. * SOME forty left-wing demonstrators held a demonstration at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel on September 4. The demonstrators, members of the recentlyfounded Committee to Prevent a Gulf War, carried signs reading: "Iraq — withdraw from Kuwait! US - withdraw from the Gulf!", "Negotiations — the only way to solve conflicts!","Bush, did you already withdraw from Panama!", "We will neither die nor kill in the service of the US!" and "Blood is more precious than oil".
The organizers say that they decided to take this initiative after some prominent Israelis urged the US to launch an attack on Iraq, and even to use nuclear weapons. "Such statements are a very ugly phenomenon, which constitutes a grave danger to our future. We want the American public and government to hear a sane voice out of Israel, a voice calling upon them to refrain from war and to solve the crisis by way of negotiations". * THE Spanish government is taking part in the armada in the Persian Gulf. Like the French SP, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) has stood in the front line of the warmongers. However demands for a halt to the imperialist intervention and the return of those called up, as well as the fleet, have not been long in coming. 11
The first demonstrations took place in