Solidarity briefing on Iraq

Submitted by AWL on 8 February, 2003 - 1:29

Since 1997 the USA’s military spending has exceeded the total of the next nine powers
War for oil versus fight for democracy

Why is the US administration going to war?
Because they want to make the Gulf’s huge oilfields, which have over half the world’s total oil reserves, safe for global capital. They do not mind Saddam being a dictator. They mind him being a maverick dictator. They want to establish the USA as “globocop” of the new, IMFed, WTOed, world-market-oriented globe.

What about Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”?

The USA didn’t mind when Saddam was using weapons of mass destruction against Kurds and Iranians, during the 1980-8 Iran-Iraq war. In fact, the USA aided Saddam then. Conversely, any government with any autonomy can develop the fairly small-scale equipment needed to produce chemical and biological weapons, let alone provide a base to terrorist gangs, if it wants to. The only answer to that threat is political, not military.

What is the history of Iraq?

The Iraqi state was set up by the British empire when it carved up the Arab domains of the old Ottoman (Turkish) empire during and after World War 1. Iraq corresponds roughly to three provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The area around Baghdad was one of the first cradles of civilisation, and long a major wheat exporter. By World War 1 it was known that Iraq had oil, and from the 1930s oil became its major industry. Iraqi agriculture has declined, and Iraq now imports food.

Who lives there?

The north of Iraq is mainly inhabited by Kurds, a non-Arab people who were promised an independent state after World War One but cheated of it. In the south the majority are Shi’ite Muslim Arabs. In so faras Saddam’s regime has a popular base, it is among the Sunni Muslim Arabs living mostly in the centre of Iraq. There are also other minorities.

Where does Saddam’s regime come from?

Until 1958 Iraq was ruled by the monarchy installed by the British after World War 1, and heavily dominated by Britain. In 1958 a military coup with mass support overthrew the monarchy and opened up a period of lively mass politics.

Further coups by the Ba’th party in 1963 and 1968 closed politics down again. Saddam has been a powerful figure, if not the supreme despot, since 1968. In the 1970s his state became much richer and more powerful (and also able to buy a degree of popular consent) after oil prices rose and Iraq nationalised its oilfields.

Since he went to war with Iran in 1980, in a tussle for regional domination, Saddam’s rule has become increasingly totalitarian, and is now comparable to full-scale fascism or Stalinism.

What do the peoples of Iraq think about Saddam and Bush?

There is no free speech in Iraq, so they cannot say. The leaders of the Kurds, who won some de facto autonomy under US protection after 1991, favour the USA’s war plans. Many exiled Iraqis do too. Socialist Iraqis in exile, like the members of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, denounce both the US war drive and what they call the “fascist” regime of Saddam, calling for “freedom and a socialist republic” as their alternative to both. Islamic-fundamentalist groups based in Iran claim mass support for a position opposed to both Bush and Saddam from a very different angle. Possibly there are also many Iraqis who dislike Saddam but would resist US conquest as a greater danger. We do not know. We do know that no-one in Baghdad has asked to be bombed by the USA, and that what the US war drive offers them is not democracy but another Saddam, maybe milder but above all pro-US.

What sort of anti-war movement can be effective?

We need an anti-war movement based on consistent principles of democracy and international solidarity—and therefore opposed to Saddam Hussein and to Islamic fundamentalism as well as to US militarism—and one centred in the working class and the labour movement. Only the working class has the social power to stop war, and a consistent interest in stopping war.

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