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Desert Slaughter: The Imperialist War Against Iraq

Preface
Copyright 1991

Millions of words have already been written about the Persian Gulf war. But only in this volume will the critical reader find a coherent analysis of the gulf crisis at every stage of its development, from the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait on August 2, 199O to the genocidal air and ground assault mounted by US military forces in January and February 1991, and the postwar explosions in the gulf region. This assessment was not worked out after the fact. It was developed as the crisis itself unfolded, and published contemporaneously in the Bulletin, the socialist weekly newspaper of the Workers League. [The Workers League was the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party in the US].

This book, as indicated by its title, is frankly partisan. The Workers League approached the Persian Gulf war with implacable political hostility to American imperialism and to the White House criminals and Pentagon gangsters who orchestrated this slaughter of the Iraqi people. It sought to mobilize mass opposition to the gulf war, above all in the working class, on the basis of a Marxist program. Such an approach is not only consistent with rigorous objectivity but demands it. Genuine objectivity consists not in adopting a posture of being "above the battle" but in showing the social and class forces expressed in such a crisis as the US drive to war in the Persian Gulf. In its analysis, the Workers League sought to demonstrate the inevitability and objective necessity of the gulf war from the standpoint of the economic and strategic interests of the ruling class, as well as the objective necessity of active opposition to the war on the part of the American and international working class.

The material reproduced in this volume demonstrates the superiority of Marxism to the shallow impressionism or open class bias of the capitalist media. From the beginning, the media propaganda reduced the crisis to the motives and decisions of individual leaders like Saddam Hussein and George Bush. Marxism, however, penetrates beneath the surface appearance, searching out the underlying social and economic causes and tracing their development historically. The Marxist undertakes a class evaluation of all social phenomena, including so massive and complex a development as a major war.

This volume is divided into nine sections corresponding to the different stages in the development of the Persian Gulf crisis, the analysis of this crisis by the Workers League and the party's campaign against the war policies of the Bush administration. The statements and comments are reproduced as they appeared in the Bulletin between August 1990 and August 1991. They have been edited only to avoid unnecessary repetition.

The first two sections deal with the opening stage of the crisis: the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the Bush administration's decision to dispatch a massive US military force to Saudi Arabia. From the beginning, the Bulletin warned against the barrage of government and media propaganda which was aimed at concealing the preparations of the Bush administration for war against Iraq. The first Bulletin article published on the gulf crisis, on August 3, 1990, warned, "The statements by the Bush administration that it is not contemplating military action in the gulf cannot be taken at face value. Similar statements were issued before the invasion of Panama, as well as prior to US aggression in Lebanon, Libya and Grenada."

Other documents in section one record the initial political appraisal of the gulf crisis made by the Workers League, culminating in the Special National Congress, held from August 29 to September 2,1990, where the Workers League, in conjunction with its political co-thinkers in the International Committee of the Fourth International, made a detailed analysis of the origins and historical significance of the crisis and elaborated the programmatic basis for organizing an antiwar movement in the working class,

The Workers League rejected the conception that the cause of the conflict was the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Instead, the party examined the historic causes of the gulf conflict, demonstrating that it was the outcome of the deepening crisis of American imperialism and the mounting tendency of the American ruling class to use military force to offset its protracted economic decline. Already during the invasion of Panama in December 1989. the Workers League had warned that this policy was ultimately doomed: "This combination of economic weakness and military power is an explosive mixture. But in the long run, the first factor is far more decisive, and the increasing recklessness in the use of American military power means that inevitably, US imperialism is headed for a monumental debacle."

One of the most decisive elements of this analysis ¾ and one virtually absent from other contemporary commentary on the gulf crisis ¾ was to examine, beneath the surface unity of the US-dominated coalition against Iraq, the intensifying conflict among the major imperialist powers. The Bush administration sought to seize the Persian Gulf not so much because it feared Saddam Hussein, but to strengthen its position against its principal rivals. Germany and Japan, and to demonstrate that despite its economic decline, American capitalism still possessed decisive military power. The results, however, were contradictory: the Pentagon carried out the rapid annihilation of Iraq's military forces, but the United States was compelled to rely on its former World War II foes to finance the gulf war. and they in turn used the crisis as an opportunity to dispatch their own military forces overseas for the first time since 1945.

On the basis of this analysis, the Workers League Special National Congress adopted a resolution which characterized the war which was being prepared by the US government as an imperialist war against an oppressed former colonial country. This war reflected the interests of a specific social force in the United States, the capitalist ruling class, and it was a response by the bourgeoisie to its deepening economic and social crisis. In formulating its policy of opposition to the war, however, the Workers League in no way gave its support to the Baathist regime in Iraq or to Saddam Hussein's military actions in Kuwait. Rather, the party called for the defense of Iraq as an oppressed country, regardless and despite its political opposition to the bourgeois regime in Baghdad.

The second section of this book supplements the initial analysis of the gulf crisis with a detailed examination of the historical origins of the states of the Middle East, including Kuwait and Iraq, in a three-part article written by Bill Vann in September 1990. This article explains the long history of imperialist intervention and oppression, from the Ottoman Empire to British colonial rule to the present domination by the United States, which created the conditions for the events of 1990-91.

The third and fourth sections provide a running commentary on the events from September 1990 to February 1991: the buildup of US military forces in the Persian Gulf region throughout the fall of 1990, the diplomatic maneuvers involving the United Nations arid the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, and finally the war itself, from the aerial bombardment which began January 17 until the final ground onslaught and annihilation of as many as 250,000 Iraqi soldiers.

The Workers League resisted the onslaught of bourgeois propaganda which steadily intensified throughout the fall of 1990, as US troops poured into Saudi Arabia. While the US capitalist media likes to boast of its freedom and independence of state control, this claim is fundamentally bogus, since even the most critical bourgeois commentators always take as an unstated premise the interests of American imperialism. In time of crisis and war, however, the role of the press as an organ of the state becomes especially apparent. The crudest Bush administration and Pentagon lies were echoed in the media by a thousand voices. In a brief period of time, Saddam Hussein was transformed from a valued US asset (when he launched his reactionary war against Iran) into the new Hitler.

The Workers League opposed illusions that the Bush administration's drive to war would be restrained by diplomatic pressure, speeches in Congress or protest in the streets, or by the risk of substantial American casualties. War was not one of several possible options to force an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, the Bulletin warned. Rather, "The policy of the Bush administration and a substantial section of the American bourgeoisie is war."

Of exceptional importance is the statement published in the Bulletin of November 30, 1990, in which the Workers League first advanced the demand for a national referendum on the gulf war, to take the decision on war out of the hands of both the White House and Congress. Recognizing that there was massive opposition, especially in the working class, to Bush's November 8, 1990 announcement that he was doubling the US force in the gulf region and seeking an "offensive military option," the Workers League developed the referendum campaign as a means for the working class to intervene independently against all those who were responsible for the drive to war in the gulf, the congressional Democrats as well as the Bush administration.

With the outbreak of the war itself, the Workers League stood firm against the tidal wave of patriotic flag waving engineered by the government and the mass media. On January 18, 1991, as the bombing began, the Bulletin declared, "Workers, youth and students, this war is not your war! This is a war launched by the capitalist class to defend the profits of the giant oil companies and banks, to seize control of the Persian Gulf for US imperialism, to terrorize and murder your class brothers, the working people of Iraq and the other countries of the Middle East."

Every issue of the Bulletin published in January and February carried a front-page lead article condemning the war crimes of the Bush administration and calling on the working class to throw off the domination of the AFL-CIO bureaucrats who joined in the orgy of chauvinism. On March 1, as the scale of the slaughter in the ground war became clear, the Bulletin headline read, "Bush Is Guilty of Mass Murder." The leading article stated, "The US war against Iraq is among the most terrible atrocities of the twentieth century, a slaughter which future generations will look back on with shame. It has demonstrated that the ruling class of so-called democratic America is just as capable of mass murder as the Nazis."

Sections five and six supplement the week-by-week assessment of the war. Section five consists of two speeches on the gulf war, given at public meetings on January 17 and February 15 by Workers League National Secretary David North. These speeches gave voice to the outrage felt by millions of working people over the barbarous crimes of US imperialism, outlined the historical significance of the war, and presented evidence that the Bush administration deliberately orchestrated the gulf crisis, long before Iraqi troops crossed the border into Kuwait.

Section six contains selections from the Gulf Crisis Notebook, which was a regular feature published in the Bulletin from November until March. It contained brief commentaries on aspects of the crisis as well as singling out for attention important facts which were being largely covered up by the pro-war propaganda blitz. The Gulf Crisis Notebook was devoted especially to combating and exposing the mass of lies published and broadcast by the capitalist media, pointing out that the vast resources of the television networks, daily newspapers and multimillion-circulation "news" magazines were mobilized, along with planes, warships and soldiers, as part of the US war effort.

The actual press reporting on the war was the must restricted, manipulated and censored in US history. Fur the first time in any US war, military officers barred press access to rank-and-file soldiers in the field, in order to prevent the airing of their criticisms of the conduct and purpose of the war. A study published in the New York Times May 4-5, 1991concluded that the US military had not only successfully used the media to "manage the information flow in a way that supported their political goals," but that it had also set a precedent for control of the press both in peace time and in future wars. Those few journalists who attempted to maintain some independence from the pro-war propaganda, such as Peter Arnett, the CNN correspondent in Baghdad during the war, who frequently reported facts which contradicted Pentagon lies, were vilified for their efforts.

The Workers League not only analyzed the gulf war from a different political standpoint from the bourgeois media, but it sought to address a different audience and undertake an entirely different political task. When the press pundits commented on the ongoing "debate" over the gulf crisis in November 1990, they were referring exclusively to the discussion going on in leading circles of the Democratic and Republican parties, in Congress, in the executive branch, in big business think-tanks and the boardrooms of major corporations. Far more significant, however, was the widespread unease among broad layers of the American people, and their profound distrust of the machinations of Bush, the Pentagon, the oil companies and the capitalist politicians in Congress.

In analyzing the reaction of every class in American society, the Workers League rejected the media image of a unified American people, all wearing yellow ribbons and waving the flag, who wanted nothing more than the swift incineration of Iraq. The party sought to elaborate a program for the independent mobilization of the working class against the gulf war and against the capitalist system as a whole. This placed at its center the struggle against chauvinism and American nationalism, explaining to workers that the war against Iraq was not in their interests but in the interests of Wall Street, and that their true allies were the oppressed workers and peasants of Iraq and the other countries of the Middle East.

The Workers League raised the demand for a national referendum on the gulf war, pointing out that the decision on life or death for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and American youth was being taken by a handful of ruling class politicians without consulting the American people. The party constantly drew the conclusion that the working class must break with the political machinery of big business, the capitalist two-party system of Democrats and Republicans, and establish an independent Labor Party, based on socialist policies, to defend its independent class interests.

The campaign to mobilize the working class against the gulf war entailed an extensive critique of the program and class orientation of the various political groups on the left who sought to organize a protest movement based on pacifism and moral opposition to the war. Section seven examines the program of those who were in the leadership of the protest demonstrations held in Washington on January 19 and January 26, 1991 and reveals the bankruptcy of their perspective of protest to Congress and the Democratic Party. It explains the role of the AFL-CIO bureaucrats, who served as stooges for imperialism, going so far as to call off strikes in order not to interfere with the war policies of the Bush administration.

Section eight contains the reply written by Martin McLaughlin to attacks on the Workers League campaign for a referendum made by two factions of the British Workers Revolutionary Party, renegades from Trotskyism who broke with the ICFI and the Workers League in 1985-86. Published as a six-part series in April and May, this reply provided an opportunity to elaborate the history of the struggle of the Marxist movement against World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. It traces the development of the program of revolutionary defeatism, and how this was applied by Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in the campaign by the American Trotskyists for a referendum vote on US entry into the Second World War.

This critique drew important political lessons from the experience of the struggle against the Vietnam War, which demonstrated that a protest movement based on the middle class and among the students could not by itself bring an end to the war. The central question was the independent mobilization of the working class, but this was blocked in the 1960s by the middle class protest organizations themselves and above all by the reactionary bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO.

The final section contains statements on the aftermath of the war. It examines the cynical imperialist manipulation of the internal situation in Iraq, where the Kurdish and Shi'ite uprisings were first encouraged, then abandoned and crushed, and finally used as a pretext for further imperialist intervention in northern Iraq. This section includes the report given by David North on March 24, 1991. summing up the International Committee's assessment of the outcome of the war. While the war demonstrated the ability of US imperialism to inflict devastating violence on an unprepared and poorly-equipped enemy, the IC concluded, it did nothing to lay a foundation for a new political equilibrium, the "new world order" of which Bush boasted. Instead, the war was itself the product of the deepening disequilibrium within world capitalism, and marked a new stage in its downward plunge into a new period of interimperialist wars and revolutionary convulsions.

The Workers League is immensely proud that it upheld the banner of proletarian internationalism against the Persian Gulf war and confident that this book will play an important role in educating decisive layers of the working class. It will not be long before the working class, in the United States and internationally, confronts a new eruption of imperialist militarism. The purpose of this volume is to bring forward the lessons of the gulf war and provide the Marxist perspective and program which are the necessary foundation for waging a consistent struggle against imperialism and war.

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