by Larry Everest / May 30, 2004
ROOTS OF THE 2003 WAR
What are the roots of the 2003 war? There has been an outpouring of books criticizing Bush and his administration--his lying, his family's ties to the CIA and various dictators and tyrants, his corporate connections. This shows how deeply troubled many people, with widely divergent viewpoints, are about the Bush regime, and much interesting information has been brought to light. But we need to dig much, much deeper. This war didn't emerge from the twisted personality, corporate connections, or family history of George Bush, Dick Cheney, or some gang of neo-conservatives. It has emerged from the deep, sordid depths of the current social order. This system, and the empire it has given rise to, are rooted in the exigencies of global capitalism or imperialism--a system which demands the worldwide exploitation of markets, resources and labor, and the political-military domination of vast stretches of the globe by a handful of powerful capitalist states. This is why today, the U.S. has $5 trillion invested overseas, does $2 trillion in foreign trade a year, and operates networks of manufacturing, finance and commerce that ring the planet. Some 500,000 U.S. troops are stationed at 700 military bases in 120 of the UN's 189 member states, and the U.S. spends over $450 billion a year on its military--far more than any other nation in history. Imperialism is a system which gives rise to bitter global rivalries between major powers--as we are witnessing today in the tensions between the U.S., Russia, France, and others. It is a system of organized greed backed by weapons of mass destruction, which constantly gives rise to interventions and wars.
Where does Iraq fit in? Control of the Middle East--including Iraq--and its vast oil reserves has been key to global power for nearly 100 years.
What is this oil connection? This was an issue the Bush team carefully avoided even mentioning before the 2003 war. They came up with a veritable parade of pretexts--from anthrax to WMD to al-Qaida to liberation--so many it was hard to keep track of their "excuse du jour." Yet they would never mention the word "oil" in connection with Iraq.
In fact, control of global energy supplies was an objective in the 2003 war, as it's been a central U.S. strategic objective for decades. This is not because Americans drive SUV's or because Bush and Cheney are "oil men." Rather, the entire corporate capitalist ruling establishment are all "oil men": oil is a key instrument of their global hegemony; whomever controls the global flow of petroleum has a stranglehold on the global economy, as Dick Cheney once put it.
Petroleum is an essential economic input whose price impacts production costs, profits, and competitive advantage- -not just of oil companies, but capital generally. It is an instrument of rivalry: controlling oil means exercising leverage over those who depend on it and over the world economy as well. It's impossible to project military power globally without abundant supplies of oil. And the heart of the world petroleum industry lies in the Persian Gulf, which contains 65 percent of the world's known oil reserves, 34 percent of the world's natural gas reserves, and now accounts for nearly 30 percent of the world output of each.
This is what has driven the U.S. to maneuver, intervene, threaten, bully, wage war--even threaten nuclear war--for decades in the Middle East--no matter which party, Democrats or Republicans, sat in the White House.
This is why in the 1960s the U.S. actually supported Saddam Hussein's rise to power; why in the 1970s the Nixon administration cynically used, then betrayed, the Kurdish people, causing the deaths of thousands and the forced exodus of tens of thousands; and why during the 1980s the U.S. government was complicit in the very crimes--the invasion of Iran and the gassing of the Kurds and Iranians--it cited in 2003 as reasons for removing Saddam.
The point isn't just official hypocrisy. History shows that U.S. actions in the region have always been guided by concerns of empire, never liberation; that they have resulted in countless atrocities and enormous suffering; and that they have led to rising anti-U.S. anger and resistance. Understand this history and you'll choke with outrage whenever you hear anyone utter the words "United States" and "liberation" in the same breath.
PRELUDE TO WAR--THE 1990s
The decade of the 1990s following the first Persian Gulf war set the stage for the war of 2003, but not for the reasons you've been told.
The official narrative of both the Clinton and Bush administrations, which generally goes unquestioned in the media, is that Saddam repeatedly defied the UN, ignored UN resolutions, and flouted international law. This narrative pretty much turns reality on its head. It's not true, and it can't account for what has happened in Iraq.
In reality, the Hussein regime was desperate to have sanctions lifted, so it mostly complied with UN resolutions and disarmed--perhaps in the early 1990s, most likely by the mid-1990s. That is why virtually no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were found in Iraq after the U.S. invasion.
Yet the U.S. goal in Iraq during the 1990s was never merely disarmament or compliance with UN resolutions. It was regime change. This is why the U.S. illegally attempted to overthrow Hussein via coups, why it illegally turned UN weapons inspections into intelligence-gathering operations for assassination attempts, and why it maintained killer sanctions even after the Iraqi government was stripped of its weapons.
Let's be clear: the failure to find WMD in Iraq not only invalidates the prime justification for the 2003 war, it also invalidates the prime justification for years of sanctions which killed over 500,000 Iraqis, probably closer to 1.5 million. The victims were mainly children, as I saw on my 1991 trip there. Why aren't any of the officials and media- heads who claim to be "oh, so concerned about the Iraqi people," screaming with outrage about this!
In 2001, U.S. policymakers did not fear Saddam was a "grave and gathering" threat, as Bush put it. Instead, a vastly weakened Iraq was viewed as a target of opportunity.
Nor was the war the result of an "intelligence failure." In fact, intelligence concerning Iraq's weapons capabilities was overall quite good. In October 1998 the International Atomic Energy Commission certified that Iraq had disarmed on the nuclear front. The next year the UN Security Council's disarmament panel concluded that the "bulk of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes has been eliminated." Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote that by the mid-1990s, the UN had ascertained "a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament." All this proved to be accurate intelligence.
In short, the WMD scare was a deliberate, conscious lie. No wonder the lapdog Congress hasn't "investigated" the WMD flim flam.
So the problem by the late 1990s was not that Saddam possessed WMD. Nor was "tyranny" the problem; that tyranny over the Iraqi people had been quite useful to the U.S., which is why they had supported Hussein in the past. No, the problem was that his continued survival was eroding the U.S. grip on the Persian Gulf and creating problems for the empire.
Hussein's survival, after a decade of tension with the U.S., was an affront to America's "credibility"-- i.e., image of unchallengeable power--in the region. The toll exacted by UN sanctions on Iraqi civilians, the near constant air attacks on Iraq, Israel's step-by-step ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and U.S. support for the region's brutal tyrants were creating a host of contradictions--including a quantum leap in anti-U.S. anger across the region. Sanctions against Iraq were unraveling, and their collapse would have been a serious political defeat for the U.S. This could have increased the influence of rivals France and Russia in Iraq, thanks to the massive oil contracts both countries had signed with the Hussein government.
THE GLOBAL DIMENSION: `RESHUFFLING THE WHOLE DECK'
It is impossible to understand the 2003 Iraq war without understanding the U.S.'s post-Sept. 11 global strategy.
The problems facing the U.S. in Iraq were occurring as ruling class strategists moved to consolidate a new global strategy. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 temporarily removed a nuclear-armed imperialist rival and major impediment to U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East from the world stage, and opened up new opportunities for Washington to assert its power more forcefully around the world.
The Soviet collapse also unfroze Cold-War relations, accelerated capitalist globalization, unleashed major global economic and political shifts, and had the potential to give rise to new centers of world power. So the U.S. rulers were confronted with new openings, and new problems; new opportunities, and new necessities.
After a decade of debate within the bourgeoisie, the Bush regime took power determined to take down Saddam Hussein and assert U.S. power more forcefully around the world. Sept. 11 gave them the opportunity to do both--and to enshrine their grand strategy, made official in September 2002 with the signing of a new U.S. National Security Strategy.
What is this new grand strategy? Most people, even those who opposed the 2003 war, still don't understand how vast, sweeping and brutal U.S. aims really are--or their connection to Iraq.
Bob Avakian's "The New Situation and the Great Challenges," written shortly after Sept. 11, remains the most incisive and insightful summary of that agenda, and it's an analysis that greatly influenced my own understanding of the seriousness of U.S. plans for war on Iraq post-Sept. 11, the larger strategic canvas, and the urgency of the moment.
Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, put it like this: the U.S. rulers "have ambitions of essentially reshuffling the whole deck, reordering the whole situation--beginning with the strategic areas of Central and South Asia and the Middle East that are more immediately involved now--but, even beyond that, on a world scale. They've set themselves a very far-reaching agenda with gigantic implications."1
Think about it--"reshuffling the whole deck, reordering the whole situation" captures the enormity their goals: Iraq, after all, was only supposed to be phase two. Then--"beginning with the strategic areas of Central and South Asia and the Middle East." Where were the first two wars of the so-called "war on terror?" Afghanistan in Central Asia, then Iraq in the Middle East. What's so important about these regions? They're home to 80 percent of the world's oil and natural gas, and they're a gateway to Eurasia, where 75 percent of the world's population lives and 60 percent of the world's GNP is produced. Imperialist strategists call Eurasia the world's greatest "prize."
There are many dimensions to this global agenda, including:
preventing the rise of any rival which could challenge U.S. global or regional supremacy--which is what lies at the heart of today's tensions between France, Russia, and Germany on one side and the U.S. on the other.
the imperialists want to open up the oppressed countries, or Third World, to greater and more direct U.S. exploitation and control--in other words, globalization at gunpoint. Their first actions in occupied Iraq included privatizing Iraqi businesses, opening up the country to global commerce and investment, and pushing Iraq to join the World Trade Organization.
the U.S. seeks to assault and crush any resistance movement standing in its path. All--whether genuine revolutionaries like the Maoists of Nepal, nationalists waging just struggle against imperialism in Iraq and Palestine, or various Islamist trends with their own conflicts with the U.S.--are broad-brushed with the label "terrorist." Today the U.S. has counterinsurgency operations underway in some 80 countries around the world.
In sum, the imperialists arrogantly dream of asserting U.S. power on a whole new level. Their vision, to paraphrase the title of a recent James Bond movie: "Most of the world is not enough, we want the whole thing."
WHY IRAQ IN 2003?
Given this global agenda, why the focus on Iraq? In short, there was no one reason, but many reasons, both regional and global. Think of Iraq as a key piece on the global chessboard of empire: conquering Iraq removed a troublesome piece, seized strategic squares and opened up new lines of attack.
Saddam's overthrow was seen as a means of solidifying the U.S. hold on the Persian Gulf. It was intended to send a message of shock and awe around the world, and give further momentum to the "war on terror."
The plan was to turn Iraq into a platform for broader, interconnected U.S. objectives. Establishing a lackey regime in Baghdad would give the U.S. favored access to the world's second largest oil reserves. It would put American armed forces in the center of the Persian Gulf/Central Asia region, another link in the chain of military bases surrounding Russia and China. Post-Saddam Iraq was envisioned as a launching pad for dealing with a host of contradictions confronting the U.S. in the Middle East and for opening the region up to capitalist globalization. All these measures together were intended to give the U.S. greater control of global energy supplies and greater leverage over Russia, China, and other potential competitors.
All this is predicated not on liberating the masses, but on attempting to drown their struggles in blood and terror. Massacres in Gaza and Iraq and tortures in Abu Ghraib--this is what the U.S. government's "bringing democracy to the Middle East" looks like.
The strategic centrality of conquering Iraq explains the flood of revelations from high-ranking officials and journalists--Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Bob Woodward and others--that the Bush government was focused on Iraq from day one, and that it immediately began planning for war after Sept. 11--knowing full well that Iraq had nothing to do with those attacks. And this is why, for the imperialists, the consequences of failure in Iraq are, as Bush himself put it, "unthinkable."
In sum, the U.S. rulers seized on Sept. 11 to implement a global agenda and launch a war 10 years in the making. These are not "diversions" from the economy; they are how the imperialists intend to resolve their deep economic contradictions. They are not intended to help a few corporations, they're intended to help U.S. corporate capital as a whole. This isn't George Bush being a "cowboy"; this is U.S. imperialism being a "cowboy"--i.e., running amok, murderously scrambling to maintain and extend its grip on the planet.
UNJUST WAR, UNJUST OCCUPATION
If the war was fought for unjust, imperialist aims, how can the U.S. occupation be anything but unjust and imperialist, and how can anything good come of it?
If the U.S. rulers lied their way into war, why should anyone believe them now when they claim that want to "liberate" Iraq, or that those opposing them are "terrorists," "thugs," or Saddam "deadenders"? What, they suddenly took truth serum?
The occupation is a continuation of the war. Its goal is to radically transform Iraq--militarily, politically, culturally and economically--in order to serve U.S. regional and global objectives, not the Iraqi people. Recently, the ardently pro-war Wall Street Journal (May 13) acknowledged, "Behind the Scenes, U.S. Tightens Grip On Iraq's Future," and described how occupation authorities were attempting to make sure that: "The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval."
This is neocolonialism, not "liberation," no matter how many times U.S. officials mouth the word.
A CAULDRON OF CONTRADICTIONS
Understanding the imperialist nature of the war in Iraq and the global agenda driving it are essential to understanding why Iraq could turn into a nightmare for America's rulers.
Webster's Dictionary defines quagmire as, "A complex or precarious position where disengagement is difficult." What makes the U.S. occupation particularly precarious, and disengagement particularly difficult, is on one hand, the enormous stakes for the U.S. in Iraq, and on the other, that its spiraling difficulties are not mainly the product of poor planning or easily correctable errors. Instead, they are deeply "embedded" in the unjust aims and the brutal nature of the war and occupation.
High-level policymakers openly worry that "The strategic tide in Iraq is turning inexorably against us" ( Wall Street Journal , May 20). All this is a stunning confirmation of Bob Avakian's assessment that the U.S. rulers' grab for greater global power carries with it "the potential...for this to get wildly out of control...the imperialists have set things in motion that can't be easily reversed, and may not be easily controlled."
FOOTNOTES:
1 Bob Avakian, "The New Situation and the Great Challenges," Revolutionary Worker, March 17, 2002.
source: http://rwor.org/a/1242/larryeverest_iraq_global%20ambitions.htm