WHAT'S NEW IN U.S. AGGRESSION AGANST IRAQ?
By Brian Becker
After the bombing, what is next?
Will there be a new war against Iraq? Will the genocidal
sanctions be kept on indefinitely?
What is the next stage in the ongoing U.S.-Iraq conflict
likely to produce?
It is obvious that there is turmoil inside the U.S. ruling
class about its Iraq policy. Yes, the Pentagon did a lot of
damage when it struck the country with 415 cruise missiles
and at least 600 other bombs Dec. 16-19. But the Clinton
administration is being pilloried in the U.S. media for not
having an effective follow-up plan to bring down the Iraqi
government.
Moreover, this criticism suggests that the Iraqi people's
vast suffering from economic sanctions will ultimately
result in more and more sympathy for Iraq, especially from
the people of the Middle East.
So what options are open to the imperialists? More brazen
aggression? A retreat into some kind of rapprochement with
the Iraqi government?
First, a quick assessment of the military situation. The
Iraqi government does not appear weakened by the latest
bombing. In fact, since Dec. 19, Baghdad has declared it
would now fire on U.S. and British planes that have
patrolled Iraq's air space since 1991--which it has done.
Until now Iraq had been unwilling to confront these planes
in the no-flight zone, although it certainly had the legal
right to do so.
Declaring the no-flight zone was an incredible act of
imperialist interference and aggression. In 1991 and 1992--
long after the Gulf war--the U.S. and British governments
declared that they would shoot down any Iraqi aircraft that
ventured into its own air space in southern or northern
areas of the country. This was not a United Nations
decision.
Washington claims the no-flight zone is designed to
protect "minority peoples" in those regions. That's a lie.
The people in the south are Shiite Moslems, the majority
group in Iraq. The people in the north are Kurds. But U.S.
imperialism supports the massacre of Kurds by its NATO ally,
Turkey, in the same region.
The truth is that Iraq's vast oil deposits are located in
the no-flight zones. This oil once belonged to U.S. and
British oil companies before the Iraqis nationalized it in
1972.
A preliminary report of non-military sites damaged or
destroyed by the U.S. and British bombing attack includes
the main cotton factory in Baghdad, a grain storage building
in Salahiddin, and hospitals in Baghdad, Salahiddin and
Basra. Apartment complexes and residential housing were also
hit, according to eyewitness observers from the United
States who visited the victims.
The Iraqi government lists more than 100 dead with many
more wounded. Some humanitarian groups, like the Islamic
Relief Organization, put the combined dead and wounded
figure in the thousands.
IRAQ & YUGOSLAVIA
So what will come next? To answer this question it is
necessary to identify U.S. imperialism's objectives and
goals towards Iraq.
The Iraqi government has clearly developed its own view on
this issue. Its spokespeople revealed this view to members
of the Iraq Sanctions Challenge delegation who were in Iraq
just days before the bombing.
The Iraqis' assessment and the sequence of events leading
up to the bombing are noteworthy.
"We will be bombed and we think it will be in the next
week," Saleh Al-Mukhtar told the delegation Dec. 9. This was
exactly one week before the bombing began.
Mukhtar spoke with great urgency about the need for peace
and for anti-war activists to be alerted about the coming
confrontation. Mukhtar chairs the Iraqi Solidarity and
Friendship Organization.
"President Clinton is going to Gaza in a few days to meet
with the Palestinian leadership in public ceremonies. [That
trip occurred Dec. 13-14.] This trip is meant to appear to
offer concessions to the Arab people. Clinton hopes to
neutralize certain Arab governments by this gesture. When he
returns to Washington from Gaza we believe that they will
begin bombing Iraq," Mukhtar told the group of 16 U.S.
residents.
The group included Ramsey Clark, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton,
representatives from the American Muslims for Global Peace
and Justice, and others who had traveled to the country
delivering $250,000 worth of donated medicine.
Mukhtar continued: "We know the U.S. game. It is part of a
long-term strategy. They want to do to Iraq what they have
already done to Yugoslavia. They want to break us up just as
they have already broken up Yugoslavia.
"That is how the U.S. and British imperialists intend to
re-conquer this region. To dismember our country, our lands
and our natural resources. That is why the United States and
Britain have divided up our country already. The no-fly
zones cut Iraq into three pieces. They refuse to allow our
planes to fly in our own air space."
Mukhtar asserted that the Iraqi government and the people
would resist U.S./British machinations to re-establish full
control and domination over Iraq, a country with 10 percent
of the world's known oil reserves. Iraq's oil reserves are
greater than those of the United States, Canada and Mexico
combined.
The next day Sa'dun Hammadi, the speaker of Iraq's
National Assembly and one of the country's very top leaders,
met with the same group. "We view our situation in a way
that is quite similar to that of Yugoslavia," Hammadi said.
"The U.S. has chosen to use its military forces and the
expansion of NATO and of NATO's role--even at the expense of
the UN--to push its agenda for domination in Central and
Eastern Europe. They are pursuing a very similar strategy
toward us in the Middle East."
Iraq's comparison with Yugoslavia is significant in
another way. In Eastern Europe it was only Yugoslavia that
resisted the U.S. takeover of the region after the collapse
of the USSR and the socialist bloc. It had a strong
military, a relatively developed economy and was resisting
the U.S.-sponsored privatization schemes for the region.
Yugoslavia had maintained relatively friendly relations
with the United States during the Cold War. Yet in the 1990s
U.S. policy makers saw Yugoslavia as an obstacle to U.S.
plans.
It became, like Iraq, a sanctioned country--a country that
was bombed by U.S. and NATO warplanes, and ripped apart by
Western powers that armed and financed ethnic armies inside
the country.
Washington's objective in both the Persian/Arabian Gulf
and in Eastern Europe is to prevent the emergence of any
regional power that dilutes its control. Any socialist
government is certainly a target. But so is any bourgeois
nationalist regime that has the power and potential to
pursue its own aims.
GOALS OF THE 1991 WAR
The goal of the U.S.-sponsored war in 1991 was not simply
to kill a great many essentially defenseless Iraqis--in and
out of uniform. No, the goal was to combine long-term
economic sanctions with the strategic military destruction
of Iraq's infrastructure to reduce Iraq to an earlier level
of modern industrial society. It was a calculated effort.
U.S. aims were confirmed in the June 23, 1991, Washington
Post. After interviews with several of the war's top
planners and extensive research into how targets were
determined, reporter Barton Gellman wrote: "Many of the
targets were chosen only secondarily to contribute to the
military defeat of [Iraq]. ... Military planners hoped the
bombing would amplify the economic and psychological impact
of international sanctions on Iraqi society."
Gellman quoted Col. John A. Warden III, who pointed out
that damage to Iraq's life-support systems would make Iraq
economically dependent on Western help: "Saddam Hussein
cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. If there
are political objectives that the UN coalition has, it can
say, `Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will
allow people to come in and fix your electricity.' It gives
us long-term leverage."
Washington would like to create a puppet regime in
Baghdad. But with or without a change in the Iraqi regime,
it wants an Iraq forced by economic and military aggression
to return to a dependent, semi-colonial relationship with
the United States and Britain. The Iraqi government, because
it is still capable of resisting this onslaught, is
attempting to find a way out of the stranglehold.
It is the obligation of all class-conscious workers and
anti-racist and anti-imperialist fighters to intensify
solidarity with the Iraqi people. This struggle is far from
over.
[The writer was a member of the Iraq Sanctions Challenge.]
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