FRFI 196 April / May 2007
The spate of reports and critical debate in the US has defused mounting pressure on the Bush administration, allowing it to escalate the violence in Iraq under the guise of one last push either to total victory or withdrawal. But the US has no intention of pulling out of Iraq. Withdrawal would not simply be a sign of failure and defeat in Iraq but a major blow to the US strategy of global domination through the use or threat of overwhelming military force. The US relies upon this military power to keep in check political challenges from imperialist rivals such as the EU and Japan, from rising powers such as China and Russia, from opposition movements within allied and puppet regimes and from so-called ‘rogue regimes’. Political hegemony bolsters the US against growing economic threats: for the US ruling class the key issue is control over Middle East oil. JIM CRAVEN reports.
In January, near Najaf, 263 people were killed and another 210 wounded when US aircraft launched an intense aerial bombardment against Shia pilgrims. The only warning was leaflets dropped from a helicopter saying, ‘To the terrorists, surrender before we bomb the area.’ The pilgrims were members of groups opposed to the Iraqi government who only took up arms after their disabled leader, his wife and driver were assassinated by Iraqi puppet forces. Local tribesmen and residents were among those killed in the massacre. The attack set the tone for the new offensive ordered by President Bush. When the first of the 21,500 extra troops began their assault in February they attacked Haifa Street in the heart of the poorest quarter of Baghdad, indiscriminately destroying buildings. Children were among the victims.
In mounting pressure on Iran the US sent a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf in January. Vice President Cheney said it was ‘a strong signal that we have significant capabilities and that the US is in the region to stay and deal with the Iranian threat’. When asked about air strikes against Iran he refused to speculate but reiterated President Bush’s assertion that ‘all options are on the table’. The US maintains Iran is supplying weapons to the Iraqi resistance despite intelligence reports to the contrary. In February Bush said that any Iranians in Iraq deemed to be a threat to US personnel could be killed. Eight US helicopters took part in a raid on Iranian offices in Erbil, Northern Iraq, in January. Five Iranian officials were arrested. In the same month, Iranian diplomat Jalal Sharafi was kidnapped by Iraqi security forces acting under US command.
The US will not withdraw
Most of the criticism levelled at Bush’s policy in Iraq from sections of the US ruling class stems from fear that the difficulties being encountered in Iraq are threatening wider interests of US imperialism. The resistance to US and British occupation by the Iraqi people has given political space for the defiant stands of North Korea and Iran over nuclear arms. It has inspired the renewed resistance movement in Afghanistan. It has blunted possible imperialist responses to the election of Hamas in Palestine and to the victory of Hizbullah against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It has given the opportunity to develop the Cuba-Venezuela-Bolivia anti-imperialist front in Latin America. In February, President Bush reversed his refusal to talk with Syria and Iran as proposed by the Iraq Study Group and invited them to join a ‘neighbours’ meeting on stabilising Iraq, which met on 10 March.
The US’s difficulties have also provoked criticism among European imperialist rivals. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin dismissed as ‘absurd’ the idea that an enlarged US force would bring peace to Iraq and insisted, ‘We need a clear horizon for the departure of foreign troops and the return of full sovereignty to Iraq’. Most EU members of NATO have rebuffed Bush’s call to increase their troop commitments in Afghanistan. The Belgian Prime Minister called for NATO to withdraw. In February, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned when his coalition government split over retaining Italian troops in Afghanistan and expanding a US military base in Vicenza in northern Italy. Russia has objected to US plans to site missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic and threatened to target its own missiles on the Polish and Czech bases.
Era of perpetual war
Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to President Carter in the late 1970s, expresses the fears held by sections of the US ruling class. He cites two scenarios that could drag the US into open conflict with Iran and outlines diplomatic measures to avoid this and to extricate the US from Iraq. Brzezinski proposes the US should confirm its determination to leave Iraq and set a timetable in discussion with leaders of every section of the Iraqi community. The US should invite all Iraq’s neighbours and other Muslim countries to discuss peace and stability in the region and have wider discussions with the EU, China, Japan, India and Russia. He also proposes a major effort to solve the Palestine problem.
Brzezinski cites as the correct model of diplomacy that used by the US after the Vietnam war. What he ignores is that in the 1970s the US was undisputedly the leading imperialist nation. The EU was still in its infancy. Neither China nor Russia posed any economic challenge. The capitalist crisis of investment and expansion was at a much lower stage. True, the Soviet Union deterred US imperialist expansion, but this applied to the US’s rivals as well. Now the EU countries combined have more than twice the US’s foreign investment. Japan and Germany are re-arming. The economies of China, Russia and now India, all nuclear powers, are growing rapidly. The competition for profitable investment, energy resources, raw materials and markets is escalating. These competitors would take advantage of any US retreat. US forces are not going to withdraw. We face an era of perpetual imperialist war.
US digs in
The US has built four massive military bases at strategic points throughout Iraq. It is also building the world’s biggest embassy in Baghdad, four times the size of the United Nations in New York, with walls 15 feet thick and self-sufficient in supplies and services. These are not the actions of an occupier intending to leave.
US and British plans to seize Iraqi oil are also moving ahead. Iraqi oil reserves are the second largest in the world. A law facilitating their exploitation by foreign companies is in its final stages. The law was drafted by representatives of the Iraqi government and the major oil multinationals, including BP and Shell, under the supervision of US management consultants and with assistance by the British Foreign Office. It allows foreign multinationals to arrange Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) that could effectively give them control of 87% of Iraqi oil for 30 years or more, with profits between 42% and 162% guaranteed for 25 years. Members of the Iraqi parliament only saw the law when it was leaked on the internet.
PSAs will mean the theft of up to $200 billion from the Iraqi people. The IMF had insisted the law be passed by the end of 2006 but objections from the oil-rich Kurdish north delayed it. The latest draft has removed references to PSAs leaving an Iraq Federal Oil Council which includes ‘executive managers from important related petroleum companies’ to decide the matter. Since the rules could permit these oil multinational representatives alone to form a Council quorum, the outcome is not in doubt. The Council will also decide the fate of earlier contracts signed with French, Chinese and Russian companies.
Iraqi workers are, however, preparing to defend their oil. Head of the Federation of Oil Unions Hassan Jumaa said, ‘We strongly warn all foreign companies and foreign capital in the form of American companies against coming into our lands under guise of PSAs.’ The General Union of Oil Employees, which booted Halliburton out of oil refineries after the invasion, called an anti-privatisation conference and two-day strike last summer. The US and Iraqi governments promptly froze its bank accounts and arrested and fired union members. At least two of their leaders were assassinated. Saddam’s law banning unions remains in force. Paul Bremner, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, declared unions illegal in 2004.
War budget
The Bush administration’s budget requests for 2008 includes $145 billion for the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan for the year beginning October 2007, plus a further $93 billion emergency fund for this year, bringing the total spent on the two wars to $662 billion. The amount so far spent on the Iraq war alone is greater than all the money ever spent anywhere on cancer research. These requests are on top of a record $481 billion budget for the Pentagon: 10% up on last year and 62% greater than in 2001, not the sort of spending to suggest a run-down of US military action. If the Pentagon were a country its budget would rank just behind the Netherlands in 16th place. To pay for the war the US government plans to slow growth in Medicare spending and cut the Social Security pension programme. Overall spending on non-security matters will be cut in real terms year on year.
Shadow Democratic opposition
The supposed opposition to Bush’s plans that enabled the Democratic Party to win control of both houses of Congress last autumn has come to nothing of consequence. The Democrats have no plans to stop Bush’s budget requests. Their main concern is to deflect criticism for their own culpability for the war. The House of Representatives passed a motion opposing the extra troops for Iraq only because it knew the Bush administration would ignore it. Most Democrats originally supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold admits ‘If Congress doesn’t stop the war, it’s not because it doesn’t have the power. It’s because it doesn’t have the will’.
Britain has announced that it will withdraw 1,600 troops over the next few months with possibly another 500 in the summer, claiming the security situation has improved and Iraqi forces are now able to take over. This is complete nonsense. Security specialist Andrew Cordesman points out that the British had lost control of Basra by the second half of 2005. A Washington Institute for Near East Policy report says: ‘By September 2006 British forces needed to deploy a convoy of Warrior armoured vehicles just to ferry police trainers to a single police station and deliver a consignment of toys to a nearby hospital.’ The remaining 5,000 British troops will stay until at least 2008. Because of the deteriorating security situation they will abandon the British consulate in Basra and withdraw to Basra air station outside the city, only patrolling the airport and giving support to Iraqi forces. The British plan to hand over Maysan Province to Iraqi control in the next two months but this has already been put off several times.
In January 2003 the Labour government justified the impending invasion with a vision of post-war Iraq as ‘a stable, united and law-abiding state … providing effective representative government to its people.’ By February 2007 the Ministry of Defence had reduced such ambitions to achieving ‘a manageable level of threat from insurgents.’ Blair still denies the occupation is unpopular and the cause of armed resistance, but Richard Cobbold of the Royal United Services Institute said, ‘Things are not getting better. The British are aggravating tensions by just being there’ – a point echoed by Basra politician Salam Al Maliki, a supporter of Moqtada Al Sadr, who said, ‘When the occupiers go, all the violence here will end’.
Who is behind the ‘sectarian killing’?
The prime target of the US ‘surge’ is the Mehdi Army, supporters of the Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, who has consistently opposed the US occupation even though his supporters form an important bloc in the Iraqi coalition government. The US has said they will either kill or capture Al Sadr. The Mehdi Army has fought major battles with occupying forces on several occasions. The US and Britain blame the Mehdi for many of the attacks on Sunnis, but Al Sadr has repeatedly called for the unity of the Iraqi people, saying that those carrying out the attacks were members of the Iraqi security forces which had infiltrated the Mehdi.
Certainly, many of the killings are carried out by the Iraqi police. Shia militias were enrolled by the imperialist forces in the early days of the occupation and soon came to dominate the Iraqi security forces. There is even unconfirmed evidence that British forces were responsible for some bombings in Basra. This would be consistent with tactics employed in other counter-insurgency operations: divide the opposition and terrorise the civilian population.
Private security firms continue their operations. They include Armor Group whose chair is ex-Conservative Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind. These ‘private military contractors’ were given immunity from prosecution in Iraq alongside the occupying forces. There are at least 48,000 such mercenaries in Iraq, possibly up to 100,000. Nearly 21,000 of them are British. They have been seen firing indiscriminately at Iraqi citizens while driving down the streets.
Meanwhile, there is no end to the suffering of the Iraqi people. Latest figures from UNHCR show two million people out of a pre-war population of 25 million have now fled the country, with a further 500,000 expected to join them by the end of the year. Another 1.7 million Iraqis have been displaced within their country. UNHCR says that women and children are being forced into prostitution and child labour in order to survive.
