12.05.2004

Imperialism out of Iraq!

The graphic exposure of the real practice and programme of the US-UK coalition that invaded Iraq in March 2004, together with the growth of genuinely mass opposition, has brought about probably the biggest crisis for US imperialism since the late 1960s.

Following on the Tet (New Year) Offensive of January 1968 was the massacre of hundreds of men, women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, a name which now lives in infamy. Though it was not fully exposed till the following year, it played a major role in tearing through the hypocritical claims of US imperialism to be fighting a 'war for freedom and democracy'. Now a similar exposure of imperialist savagery is taking place. In the post-cold war world, the sickening doubletalk, the canting claims of moral superiority over supposedly barbaric terrorists and dictators, this time in the Arab world, is once again exposed as what it really always was. Lies in the service of world barbarism.

And it certainly is something that is spreading worldwide, thanks to the Bush doctrine. From Guantanamo Bay to Belmarsh, from Baghram Airport in Afghanistan to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, 'detainees' are being held by the British and Americans. It is virtually certain that many of them are also being tortured, as in Iraq. Indeed the whole demeanour of those troops photographed torturing showed their confidence and openness - they knew full well they had the approval of their superiors. After all, these are the same superiors who regularly threaten, and not merely threaten, to hand over detainees to regimes in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen or Jordan, whose governments make no pretence that they do anything other than torture 'suspects'.

But the exposures - a product of modern digital and internet technology, together with the fact that even brutal occupying forces often have individuals in them who are repulsed by such activities and will sometimes blow the whistle if they get the chance - is now a major problem for the Bush and Blair administrations. Bush is in the middle of an election year; Blair has been in deep trouble over Iraq since even before the invasion.

The parallels between the current torture exposures and My Lai are so startling that even Colin Powell has been forced to acknowledge the comparison. The truth is that every disgusting technique employed by the little gangsters of the region, the worst torturers and killers like Saddam, the Saudi monarchy, the Taliban, etc, was only derivative. The CIA has been using, and teaching, such techniques for many decades: one recalls that in counterrevolutionary Chile, under CIA supervision dogs were specially trained to rape women as a particularly savage means of torture and degradation. All such regimes are in the end only pupils of imperialism. Saddam's torturers were trained by the CIA, and the nerve gas he once possessed was supplied to him by 'democratic' American and its cold war ally, West Germany, in order to wage proxy war on behalf of western interests, against 'revolutionary' Iran in the 1980s.

Given that the imperialists armed Saddam to massacre Iranian shia muslims at that time, their claim that they were invading in order to supposedly 'liberate' Arabic shia was always utterly fantastic. In reality, the essential purpose of imperialism's war in 2003, and indeed in 1991, was the same as when it armed Saddam in the 1980s - to enslave, to humiliate, to destroy any minimally independent state in the region with some real means of standing up to the US and its regional gendarmes, most notably, of course, Israel.

So now we see the savagery and barbarism of the United States, and its British junior partner, in glorious digital colour on the front pages of our newspapers and on television screens. We see naked men being tormented with dogs, we see men forced to engage in simulated sexual actions with each other in front of laughing and leering male and female US service personnel. We see piles of naked people being forced at gunpoint to simulate the kinds of activities one would expect to see in more extreme pornographic movies: group sex involving several men, carried out by hooded, terrified people afraid of being killed on the spot, or possibly being taken away and tortured to death. According to Rumsfeld, there is much more of this material around, including photographs and videos of savage beatings, of Iraqi men, women and children being raped by troops, and even of outright acts of murder of detainees.

Then there are the British. The authorities claim that pictures of an Iraqi detainee being beaten with a gun and then urinated on, published by the Daily Mirror, are fakes. The Mirror is sticking firmly to what its sources, two serving soldiers in the Royal Lancashire Regiment, have told them: that these pictures are just a sample of many more circulating through both the British and American contingents in Iraq. The pictures are said to be of an Iraqi detainee who was arrested for theft, savagely beaten and abused, and then thrown back on the streets in a severely injured and traumatised state so that the people who did it have no idea if he lived or died. Nor of course could they care less.

The Mirror then produced two more soldiers who were prepared to break their anonymity to the military authorities at least and tell of more beatings, torture and murders at the hands of British troops. It has now emerged that the Red Cross and Amnesty International had informed the British and American government that these kinds of systematic abuses have been going on up to a year ago: ie, going back to the very beginning of the occupation. Thus the government of Tony B Liar is just as deeply implicated in this barbarity as is the Bush administration.

The British military and its apologists incredibly cite the experience of supposedly fighting a 'clean' war in Ireland as a model for how to conduct the occupation of Iraq. Indeed, the British contingent in Iraq is behaving in exactly the manner it behaved in the north of Ireland; brutalising, torturing and terrorising the population that increasingly it regards as the enemy, just as the catholic-nationalist population of the Six Counties came to be regarded in the same way.

The difference in Iraq, of course, is that the 'enemy' population comprises the majority, whereas in the north of Ireland the British had a mass ally in the protestant British-Irish population that acted as a counterweight to the forces fighting imperialism. No such counterweight exists in Iraq, and for all the propaganda bullshit about the Brits' supposedly good relationships with the people of Basra province - the British zone of occupied Iraq - there is in fact no buffer at all between the masses and the British. Thus when, more than if, the generalised uprising that has already taken Fallujah and Najaf gets fully underway in the south, the British could face a very torrid time indeed. In fact they could face military disaster - which would be fully deserved and welcomed by all opponents of imperialism. Either that or they should simply leave Iraq - now!

The demand for troops out now is an important test of any socialist or communist tendency, particularly now that the resistance has broken out of the murky 'phoney war' phase that existed in the early stages. No more does it primarily consist of shadowy forces engaging in scattergun, spectacular actions that as often as not targeted not merely the imperialist occupiers, but also the Iraq people themselves, or institutions like the Red Cross that really are not legitimate or even intelligent targets. Now that substantial sections of the masses have become embroiled in a national revolt, it is absolutely obligatory for socialists and democrats in the west to call for the defeat of their 'own' side.

The Iraqi left, which has unfortunately been reduced to a fairly pitiful state politically by the meltdown of Stalinism, faces real problems of how to orient in the new situation that has come about as a result of the outbreak of a fully-fledged Iraqi intifada. The forces of shia islam are becoming a real power. Muqtada al-Sadr is acquiring the stature of a national leader who shows signs of being able to appeal across the confessional divide to at least part of the sunni population on a basis that is partly national, partly pan-islamist. A mass national liberation movement has already been born, has already seized important centres, and is growing and spreading across the country.

Now the British are coming under real pressure in Basra from al-Mahdi, Sadr's openly organised militia formation. The US has been forced to retreat from mainly sunni Fallujah, simply because retaking it would require a bloody confrontation that would be rather difficult for the Bush-Bremer crew to carry out at the moment, and might in any case be difficult to win even in a military sense. And Najaf is proving hard to retake also - in large measure because of the fear of the political consequences of a full-scale assault on the city that contains one of shiism's holiest sites.

It is perfectly obvious that for the Iraqi left to sit this one out and take no side, proclaiming 'a plague on both your houses' between the al-Sadr-led mass opposition and the imperialist forces, is a recipe for complete marginalisation, and hence political suicide. To declare this confrontation 'a war of terrorists', as does the Worker-communist Party of Iraq (WCPI) is simply to retreat into a private world, away from the passions that animate the mass of the people against the rapacious occupier. Fearful of the eruption of any movement that could enhance the mass influence of islamists, the WPCI has over the past period been calling for UN 'peacekeepers' to intervene in Iraq to 'stabilise' it, as an 'alternative' to the coalition occupation, and supposedly lay the basis for working class power. A dangerous illusion. Despite the opposition mounted by France and Germany to the Bush-Blair adventure, in practice the UN acts as an extension of international imperialism - above all its dominant power, the US. There is nothing benign or neutral about it.

Worse still is the rump of the Iraqi Communist Party, whose leaders have joined Bremer's governing council. In response to some fairly tame criticism of this 'tactic' in the Morning Star, the ICP recently rather plaintively complained that it could do without 'lectures'. But of course, both of these stances, completely at variance with reality, simply ensure that the followers of Al-Mahdi will have a complete monopoly over the national liberation movement. Large numbers of Iraqis at this point, according to all accounts, do not want a clerical state. But, given the horrors of occupation, they could easily become reconciled to such a thing as a lesser evil to the imperialists - and if the Iraqi left washes its hands of the national struggle due to the prominence of the ulama in it, then such an outcome becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

This in some ways is the mirror image of the illusions that led much of the Iranian left to support Khomeini in 1978-79, in the Iranian revolution that brought the ulama to power. Then the Stalinist and Stalinist-influenced left claimed to believe that Khomeini was some kind of progressive, leading the first, democratic 'stage' of a revolution that would, after a whole period of 'non-capitalist' development, proceed through subsequent stages to some kind of socialism.

They were wrong. Khomeini's islamic radicalism was in reality a mutant form of Iranian nationalism. A novel way to create a strong national state, in circumstances where the more traditional, secular Arab and related nationalisms (Persian-speaking Iran exists in an overlapping cultural environment with the Arab world) had been reduced to utter humiliation by the overwhelming imperative of US imperialism to keep a tight hold on a region containing the world's most important strategic oil reserves.

When Khomeini emulated his more conventional and secular counterpart, Chiang Kai-Shek, and massacred the Iranian left in 1980-81, just as Chiang had butchered the equally subservient and illusion-ridden Chinese communists in 1926-27, he exploded these illusions. But what has grown up on the left in the region since, particularly in the form of 'worker-communism' in Iran and Iraq, is an inverted, sectarian, almost child-like mirror-image of this opportunism. Sectarianism is after all merely inverted opportunism in fear of itself.

We see, for example, a tendency by 'worker-communists' to simply equate nationalist and islamist currents with imperialism. But this simply fails to take account of the fact that the 'radical' sentiments demagogically espoused by these forces are in fact an adaptation to deep-rooted popular discontent with imperialist domination. A sectarian, abstentionist stance when such forces lead the masses into conflict with imperialism, indeed equating them with the imperialists themselves, simply again hands over to these forces a monopoly of leadership and the means to direct this discontent, uncontested, into the dead end of renewed strongman regimes and/or theocracy.

Unfortunately in Britain we have an even worse expression of this kind of method in the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. Unlike the WCPI, the AWL does not even have the excuse of understandable reaction to the opportunism of 'third world' Stalinism, of having to face the pressures of exile at best or bloody repression at worst. The AWL's rightwing Shachtmanite evolution and background - together with its craven adaptation to the sentiments of liberals in and around the labour movement who believe in 'humanitarian' armed intervention by imperialism - leads it to bluntly express what are at bottom simply pro-imperialist prejudices. It is worth remembering, when looking at the material it produces on Iraq, that this organisation is so protective of the right of Israel to self-determination that it opposes the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper, while AWL leaders, in terms of historical analysis, regard the drive by Jewish settlers to expel Palestinians, leading to the creation of Israel in 1948, as a historically progressive war of national consolidation.

The AWL view of the current situation in Iraq is laid out starkly as follows: "No socialist or consistent democrat who knows the history of US and British imperialism will trust Bush or Blair, or rely on them to do anything positive, in Iraq or anywhere else. That is why we opposed their war. But right now, the proclaimed programme of the US-UK in Iraq and their Iraqi clients and allies - the setting-up of a viable democratic Iraqi government, and ultimate US withdrawal - is relatively progressive, and that of their armed opponents is reactionary by any measure you choose to use. Certainly the intentions of people such as al-Sadr cut radically against the interests of the Iraqi working class and the nascent Iraqi labour movement" (Solidarity April 20).

Thus the editorial concludes: "For all these reasons we condemn slogans like 'troops out now' as inappropriate to the situation in Iraq … In real politics, slogans like 'troops out now' signify support for forces like al-Sadr's in a long and very bloody war. At the very best they are grossly premature."

Meanwhile, one of the group's more vocal sympathisers, one Alan Johnson, has taken this approach a stage further. Near the end of a remarkable exposition of his own political evolution towards the politics of David Aaronovitch and other Stealth-bomber liberals, he spells out the logic of this kind of thinking - probably a bit more clearly than the AWL would like:

"A legitimate and necessary opposition to US foreign policy is being misused to minimise or deny or even to indulge the terrorist threat posed by al-Qa'eda and it is a bloody disgrace. I agree with Jean Bethke Elshtain's view that 'Organised killers with global reach now threaten all of us. In the name of universal human morality, and fully conscious of the restrictions and requirements of a just war, we support our government's and our society's decision to use force of arms against them'" (Solidarity March 18).

Johnson is not actually a member of the AWL, but is apparently something of a guru for its more rightwing elements. Thus he has some value in drawing out the logical conclusions of the AWL's political method. Unfortunately, whereas in Iraq itself this kind of logic can only lead to the left being marginalised and reduced to irrelevance, in a country like Britain it produces actual complicity in the crimes of imperialism.

It may be that, given the disgusting practices now being exposed in terms of the torture of detainees not just in Iraq, but around the world - a "new gulag", as one US politician put it - the AWL may begin to reconsider its preposterous belief in the "relatively progressive" nature of the imperialist teachers, compared to their pupils like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, etc. But that is not the only possible outcome - what is also posed is the possibility of the organisation being drawn completely into the imperialist camp.

After all, one cannot continue walking in the middle of the road forever: those that do tend eventually to get run over from one direction or the other.