Fire in Babylon: the imperialist occupation of Iraq

Editor's note: This article was first published in the Sheffield based newsletter 'Los Cabros del Club', of the Chilean community

Part One
Introduction

The Bush administration and US big business are preparing to reap the spoils of their victory. Their soldiers' boots are just a few feet above the largest undeveloped reserve of oil in the world; the source, they hope, of vast profits hitherto denied to them. They have Iran virtually surrounded by US bases(Afghanistan, Turkey and now Iraq). They have overcome the "Vietnam syndrome" - the legacy of 1975, when the Vietnamese people expelled the US invaders, tying their hands and making the whole world a safer place.

The Saddam dictatorship was the vile offspring of the century-long rape of Iraq by UK and US imperialism. Such an easy target! Saddam has been even more useful as an enemy than as a friend! The target was made easier still by sanctions which barred Iraq from importing anything which could have any possible military use (no matter how essential it may have been for civilian purposes), and by years of pounding of Iraq’s air defences by illegal USAF and RAF bombing raids. From the first moment of the attack, not a single Iraqi plane took to the air.

In the end, Saddam and his cohorts ran away, with as much loot as they could lay their hands on, after wasting tens of thousands of soldiers in an attempt to slow the US advance. And so, the same powers that installed and maintained Saddam have replaced his dictatorship with their own. They have conquered Saddam, but they have yet to conquer the Iraqi people.

The US and its UK satellite may have dealt big blows to rival European imperialists, they may have shocked and awed the world with their demonstration of firepower, but what have they won in Iraq itself?

The euphoria of the first few weeks has evaporated. In the midst of dozens of daily attacks and confrontations, most of which we don't get to hear about, a Financial Times (FT) editorial (June 14 2003) summed up the gathering gloom:

Two months after the Iraq war ended, it looks as though the US-led occupation authority is getting into serious difficulty... The occupation so far has been characterised by the most breathtaking improvisation... Two months in, CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] officials appear to spend most of their time locked in turf battles inside a former Saddam palace, from which they rarely venture forth to the country and populace they are presuming to govern.

"The coalition has still not been able to re-establish security or restore many basic services. At the same time, Mr Bremer and his masters in Washington have angered potential political allies by postponing indefinitely any attempt to build up a representative provisional government. ... It is all beginning to look like a huge gamble."

American soldiers facing banner Get out of our country

Ten days later and everything was worse. The FT (24 June) quoted a senior CPA official:

"The situation on the ground is definitely moving faster than we are. The situation the British faced in 1920, where momentum towards independence became unstoppable, is repeating itself... the CPA says there will be no Iraqi state until there is progress towards security and a rising standard of living. Iraqis are saying the opposite: there will be no progress until they have a state of their own."

The deaths of six UK troops on 24 June signalled the end of the phoney triumphalism of Bush's May 1st proclamation that "the war is over" (from a US aircraft carrier - he didn't dare set foot in Iraq for fear of provoking angry demonstrations). Just two months into the occupation, it is astonishing how quickly Iraqis have shown their ability to mount effective resistance, how vulnerable the occupiers now appear.

The FT reported (August 3):

"Fewer then a third of Iraqis believe the armed attacks against coalition forces in their country are attributable to former Ba'ath party operatives turned guerrilla, as US officials suggest, ... many Iraqis believe the guerrillas are a new phenomenon, fuelled by nationalism, Islamism, and revenge.

"According to the survey, by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS), an independent think-tank in Baghdad, 22 per cent of Iraqis believe the attacks are actually provoked by coalition forces' behaviour, while 25 per cent believe them to be the work of "resistance forces" - a word which in Arabic implies a degree of sympathy for the attackers."

Now, analysts argue about whether the occupiers need twice or three times the troops they've got, while Bush and Blair threaten and cajole seventy governments who have supported the invasion to send reinforcements.

Bush and Blair are trying to enlist a new colonial force, pressurising many Third World countries to place their troops under US command in Iraq. An indication of the problems they are encountering is given in this press despatch:

"The Indian government gave a resounding "maybe" to Washington's request that it send a division of peacekeepers to police part of Iraq. Washington's request was initially greeted with enthusiasm... but domestic outrage over the implicit legitimisation of the US-led invasion of Iraq has forced Mr Vajpayee [India's prime minister] to hedge his position" (FT 5 July 2003]

The combined resources of Washington's NATO allies are enough to replace less than one third of the US troops currently stationed in Iraq:

"Lord Robertson [Nato secretary-general] warned… “the number of non-US combat brigades actually available [is] some 80,000 soldiers."... [this] figure does not take into account troops deployed in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Ivory Coast and Congo, numbering 37,000. US and European defence experts are quick to blame each other for Nato's weak capabilities and its inability to gather large numbers of "deployable" troops." (FT, July 24)

Iraqi people now at centre-stage

It is impossible to think of a more combustible mix than ignorant, disrespectful and aggressive US and British occupiers and the immensely proud and dignified people of Iraq. It is impossible not to be struck by the fact that, for all their weapons and armour, the US and UK soldiers know much less about life, about death, and about war than the Iraqi people.

Even in the early stages of the conflict, it was clear that armed resistance to the US invasion was not limited to Republican Guard soldiers or supporters of the regime. Many who hated Saddam decided that their first duty was to defend their homeland. But such a rotten and detested regime was completely incapable of organising a popular resistance to the invasion. Irregular, lightly armed forces had no chance of detaining the advance of half a million tons of weaponry and armour. Those who bravely attempted to do so were exterminated.

Under Saddam, Iraqis were unable to take any action on their own behalf. The extreme brutality of the regime, combined with the economic war in the form of UN sanctions, and countless other violations of their national sovereignty closed their political space down to zero. In the space of a few weeks the people of Iraq have moved from the darkest darkness into the hottest fire, joining the Palestinian people at the eye of the spreading storm.

Five million people live in Baghdad; we never saw more than a few thousand in the crowds celebrating the US "liberation".

Of all the aspects of the war, this is surely the most notable. It indicates the extent of Iraqis' awareness of their history; they know why the US and UK are so interested in their country and are not fooled by Bush and Blair's speeches about liberation.

We must not give a millimetre to the notion that there was anything progressive about the imperialists' removal of Saddam. Everything the occupiers say is a lie, every decision they take, about who to ally with and who to disarm, about whom to appoint and who to imprison and who to kill, is a conspiracy against the Iraqi people.

It might seem that the imperialists' wisest course is to get out before it all blows up in their faces, but for London and Washington withdrawal from Iraq is unthinkable - it would deal a shattering blow to their self-confidence, a collapse in world markets and the rapid onset of world depression. So, they will stay and fight. And they will find Iraqis to be formidable adversaries.

The US imperialists are the most ruthless ruling class in history. Massacres, death squads, invasions and dictatorships are their methods they use to hold down the majority of humanity while they feed of our living labour. Many of Bush's lieutenants have already committed war crimes and crimes against humanity when coordinating the contra war against Nicaragua and the death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s.

It is clear that, not only do the occupiers possess overwhelming superiority of weapons, they are prepared to use any weapon and kill any number of people who stand in their way.

Their ruthlessness was on full display during the invasion. The New York Times reported that

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved every one of more than 50 air strikes for which commanders needed his specific clearance because they thought it likely that they would kill more than 30 civilians." (See Note i »).

Every delay in building a movement capable of forcing the US and UK to withdraw will only increase the price that the Iraqi people will have to pay with their blood to liberate their country.

We must help the Iraqi people to bear the terrible burden of ensuring the failure of the US/UK occupation!

Social class in Iraq

Virtually all of Iraq's factories were bombed in 1991, along with bridges, power stations and all the telephone exchanges in the country. UN sanctions, an extreme form of indiscriminate collective punishment, prevented reconstruction and provoked an acute economic collapse. Average household income fell by 95% reduction; twenty years was chopped off life expectancy; 1.5 million people perished, including 600,000 children less than 5 years old.

By far the biggest army in Iraq is what Karl Marx called the reserve army of labour - the vast unemployed and underemployed majority. Unemployment, according to UN pre-war estimates, was around 70%. Professionals and small property owners were almost eradicated as a social class, most have lost everything. Iraq's farmers have suffered repeated blows. Until 1990 the world's largest exporter of dates, Iraq has been prohibited from selling a single date for more than ten years. The country's poultry and livestock were wiped out because UN "weapons inspectors" dismantled their veterinary laboratories and smashed their equipment.

The number of those who sell their labour power has dramatically fallen, and what they earn for it has fallen even more. But the number of Iraqis who have nothing to sell but their labour power has increased enormously.

Outside of the capitalist elite and the tojar harb, the despised "war traders" who got rich through smuggling, there's hardly an Iraqi family that hasn't sent one or more of its members abroad to find work and send back money for food and medicine. For most Iraqi families, money from relatives overseas far exceeds wages and salaries received by those family members who have jobs. Respect this! - Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers who are not allowed to work to a man and woman will send part of their meagre social security back to their families in Iraq.

What about Iraq's capitalist rulers? To a large degree, Iraq's capitalist class was co-extensive with Iraq's state - the dictator and his family, the generals and police chiefs and heads of banks and ministries and state-owned enterprises, all used their control over different parts of the Iraqi state to accumulate their fortunes.

There are individual Iraqi capitalists - and their survival will be entirely at the grace and favour of the occupiers - but Iraq's capitalist class has been overthrown by the capitalist rulers of the US and UK.

This sharply breaks with the prevailing neocolonial model, in which imperialism cede nominal sovereignty and power to the nation's capitalist class, continuing to dominate from behind the scenes and continuing to exploit through normal economic activity. This is not an option in Iraq, whose crisis is just one of many signs that the post WW2 neo-colonial order is breaking down. Instead of setting up a neo-colonial regime, the imperialist occupiers are reverting to an older - and more primitive, more naked - form of domination. They are trying to install a protectorate regime, not even nominally independent of its imperialist patron, backed up by a permanent military occupation.

So, the class struggle in Iraq takes an extraordinary form. The working people and poor of Iraq directly confront the governments of the US and UK. When they strike a blow, they strike it directly against George Bush and Tony Blair.

Iraq's culture of resistance

"There are people with peculiar characteristics and conditions, deeply rooted cultures all their own inherited from age-old ancestors, which give them enormous capacity for resistance"

Fidel Castro was reflecting on the experiences of the peoples of Cuba and Vietnam when he said these words. That the working people and poor of Iraq could emerge from decades of dictatorship and war undefeated and uncowed, with a great spirit of unity and a determination to assert their own sovereignty, is a sign that Fidel's words apply in a special way to the people of Iraq. Even the particular ruthlessness of the Saddam regime was itself a sign - only an especially brutal tyranny could keep this people down.

What are the sources of Iraqi capacity for resistance? Some are already evident to the watching world. Iraq's high level of culture is expressed in a myriad of ways, including their veneration of books and learning - before 1991, more books were read more widely in Iraq than anywhere else in the Middle East, and more than in Britain or the USA.

Allied to this, their acute sense of their own history and of what is happening in the world.

Perhaps the most important source of strength is the powerful family and community solidarity that has sustained them during decades of dictatorship, war and sanctions. This helps account for why they are not an atomised people, bereft of dignity and values.

Another sign is that Iraq's Sunni and Shia and Kurdish peoples are not divided by mutual hatreds such as those that disfigure many countries in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Iraq does not have a history of intercommunal strife. The fault lines along which some suppose Iraq will break apart are very specific and need to be understood in their own terms and not stereotyped. We should not interpret Iraq through European eyes.

Extended families, which are themselves bound together into clans, play an important part in Iraqi society. Sunni ascendancy means the rule of an alliance of the most powerful Sunni clans, who have used their control over parts of the Iraqi state to convert themselves into a capitalist ruling class. However, Iraqi Sunnis do not have a chauvinist attitude towards the Shia majority, there is much intermingling and intermarrying; there is a strong secular tradition.

The Ba'athist dictatorship made little headway in fostering a Sunni chauvinism, which didn't square with the Ba'ath Party's secular and nationalist ideology. For most of his reign, Saddam sought legitimacy by emphasising a common Iraqi and Arab identity, at various times even proposing to unite with neighbouring countries as a step towards its dream of a pan-Arab nation.

The uprisings that followed the 1991 Gulf War swept the Shia south but did not extend to the Sunni heartlands around Baghdad. To goad his generals and Ba'ath party cadre into a frenzy of killing, Saddam incited anti-Shia hatred, accusing Shias of being agents or dupes of Iran. For most people, however, the carnage in the south provided yet another reason to loathe the regime - and to loathe the US government, who ordered General Schwarzkopf and the US Army to let Saddam's helicopter gunships fly and his Republican Guard pass through US lines on their way to putting down the rebellion.

"Divide and rule" is the stock-in-trade of occupying powers, and the US and UK are already trying to foment divisions and conflicts between Sunni and Shia - for instance by claiming that attacks on occupation forces are being committed by Sunnis hostile to sharing power with Shias. However, they will come up against the dignity and national consciousness of the Iraqi people, who will see in this yet more reason to fight the invaders.

Iraq and the Kurds

Iraq also contains part of the oppressed and divided Kurdish nationality. The land of the Kurds includes the northernmost mountainous areas of Iraq. At the moment, Kurdish leaders are riding on top of US tanks. This creates the danger of civil war between Iraqis who want an end to the occupation and a part of Iraq's Kurdish population. The peoples of the plain consider themselves to be Iraqi. They have to find the key to unlocking the Kurdish national question, something that Iraq's left and nationalist movements have failed to do in the past. Iraqi Kurds and its Arab majority need to form a fighting alliance against the imperialist occupation of their country and the carve-up of the Middle East.

Sovereignty is a property in the first place not of territory but of a people, and only through them with the territories on which they live. The unity of the people can only be voluntary, forged in common struggle against imperialism and its allies. The surest and quickest way to overcome obstacles in the way of unity between majorities and minorities within Iraq is to remove coercion from the relationship, most explicitly by guaranteeing the right of the Kurds to secede. Such a policy would inspire friendship and solidarity among Kurds and other oppressed nationalities in the region. It would recognise that Kurdish destiny is in the hands of the Kurdish people. They must freely choose to fight alongside the Iraqi people - or to be used as pawns by imperialist powers whose treachery is well known to Kurds throughout their history.

The 'national question' - how to unite the peoples of an oppressed nation in struggle against imperialism - is a make-or-break issue for all liberation struggles. There are two basic trends within antiimperialist liberation struggles, best described as bourgeois nationalism and revolutionary nationalism. My outline of the Kurdish issue expresses the revolutionary approach. Saddam's massacres and population transfers are a good example of how capitalist and landlord regimes go about "nationbuilding".

The right of oppressed nations to unilaterally secede was proclaimed by the Russian revolution of 1917; in its first years, the Soviet Union was a free association of independent revolutionary republics. Lenin described the old Tsarist regime as "the prison-house of nations"; however, with the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the policy of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was reversed and Stalin's degenerate bureaucratic regime resumed the oppression of national minorities.

The socialist and communist movement was once very strong in Iraq, and in Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, India and other countries. But they followed Stalin's line: communists should not fight to bring to power governments of the exploited and oppressed - workers' and farmers' governments - but instead working people should accept the lead of the national bourgeoisie and that their nation should take the road of capitalist development until economic development created the conditions for socialism.

One disastrous consequence was the failure of the communist parties to advance a revolutionary approach to winning unity with oppressed nationalities. Instead, they supported or even joined in governments governments that responded to the legitimate demands of oppressed minorities with violence and repression.

This course contributed to terrible defeats and discredited the formerly very popular ideas of socialism and communism. But the experience of Iraq and of other Arab countries shows that rule by the national bourgeoisie inevitably results in regimes which are subservient to imperialism and repressive towards their own population, in extremes of wealth and poverty, in a parody of democracy and sovereignty. Working people need their own governments... but to get there, they need their own policy, including towards oppressed minorities and nationalities.

US turns on its imperialist rivals

Iraq has been the crisis that has brought the rivalry between imperialist powers back into the open.

One important focus for the growing antagonism between the USA and Europe is Iraq's debt.

Iraq's foreign debt stands at $130bn, on a par with Argentina. But its gross domestic product - estimated at $32bn in 2000 - is an eighth of Argentina's.

On top of this, the UN sanctions committee has awarded over $200bn to individuals, companies and countries that claim they lost money as a result of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Although they don't call it debt, it amounts to the same thing - a claim on Iraq's wealth and future earnings.

To put Iraq's debt in perspective: the World Bank has drawn up a list of the world's most extremely indebted and impoverished countries. Their situation is so desperate that they qualify for the cancellation of some debt "in order to bring it down to a sustainable level". One of the criteria for inclusion on this very special ring-fenced list is a debt/export ratio above 150 per cent. Even if Iraq resumes oil exports at 2m barrels a day and oil prices don't fall, its debt/export ratio will exceed 800 per cent, by far the highest of any nation on earth.

The response of senior US officials has been to call on France, Germany and Russia, who are owed much of the $130bn, to "forgive" some of these debts. They have answered by firmly rejecting the idea of cancelling of a single dollar of debt. These countries have signed legally binding contracts to develop Iraq's oil and infrastructure, which are being ripped up and thrown in their face by the US/UK occupation authority. Iraqi debt is one of the few ways they can be sure to get a piece of the pie.

On the other hand, US officials have said nothing about the beneficiaries of the $200bn "compensation" forgoing any part of what is due to them. These beneficiaries include US oil companies, friendly sheiks, Israel, and even Pepsi-Cola, awarded compensation for royalties it lost because the Basra bottling plant, which Iraqis operated under licence, was destroyed by US/UK warplanes.

One thing is clear. When the US and its rivals have finished carving up Iraq between them, there won't be much left for the Iraqi people.

A lot of interest has been shown in the anti-war movement in theories that say that the US went to war to preserve the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, in face of moves by Iraq and other OPEC countries towards denominating their oil in Euros.

This often-overstated argument can lead people into thinking that it would be a good thing if the dollar was knocked off its perch by the euro, that the world should be more equally divided between the rival imperialist powers.

However, there is some truth in the theory. The confrontation between the two currencies, the Euro and the dollar, does indeed express the struggle for supremacy between the US and the disunited imperialist states that, with Ireland, comprise the European Union.

As the world economy teeters on the edge of depression, this rivalry is becoming sharper and is leading to more frequent clashes. Preserving the dollar's supremacy over the euro in the Middle East is one of the ways in which the US ruling families are piling pressure on their European rivals. The forced devaluation of the dollar is another, as aggressive in its own way as the war on Iraq.

The current account deficit in the USA requires a net capital inflow of $500 billion this year alone to balance the books - combined with unprecedented cuts in interest rates, this has produced a 35% fall in the value of the dollar since 2000. So long as this decline is controlled, US capitalists are more than happy - it means that they can undercut their rivals in world markets, boosting their own economy and exporting deflation and unemployment.

But that's not all, as was noted by US economist Desmond Lachman in the FT,June 24 2003.

"Among the more disturbing aspects of [the dollar's] recent decline has been the disparity between its large fall against the European currencies and its very limited move against the Asian currencies. ... Whereas the European Central Bank is allowing the euro to float freely against the dollar, Asia's central banks are intervening in their currency markets with the explicit objective of keeping their currencies artificially cheap and competitive.... If there are only a limited number of currencies against which the dollar is allowed to depreciate, its move against those currencies will necessarily be exaggerated. ... This could be devastating for countries such as Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, which are already on the verge of deflationary recessions."

Economic historians are already pointing out the parallels with the "beggar-they-neighbour" competitive devaluations that preceded the outbreak of inter-imperialist war in 1939.

A problem for the US is that, in the war between the dollar and the Euro, there will be "friendly fire" casualties: the economies of Italy, Spain and Holland - all of which support the Anglo-American war on Iraq - are also being hammered by the falling dollar.