U.S. crisis in Iraq: can’t stay in, but won’t get out

The following is excerpted from a talk given by Fred Goldstein — Workers World newspaper contributing editor and Workers World Party (WWP) Secretariat member—at a Jan. 12 WWP forum in New York. A podcast of the entire speech, which also included an analysis warning about the threat of a U.S. war against Iran and about the Pentagon intervention in Somalia, is available for listening at www.workers.org.

I can’t resist opening up about something that seems so obvious: capitalist democracy is democracy for the imperialists.

Everybody knows that the vast sentiment of the people in the election was to get the troops out of Iraq. That’s how the Democrats swept in. But apparently the majority of the ruling class has not come to that conclusion yet. So in spite of the fact that the latest polls show that 67 percent of the people are against sending the troops in, this escalation, and 30 percent of the people are strongly against it, it’s proceeding as the Bush administration is planning it.

That’s why Lenin said that capitalist democracy is the best shell for hiding the capitalist class. It allows the people to have the feeling that they have a say in the matter when actually it’s the capitalists and the imperialists who pull all the strings.

I would like to read to you something about Bush’s troop escalation announcement by an eminent imperialist strategist—Zbigniew Brzezinski—who is a reactionary, an anticommunist in every cell of his body, and who was the architect of the Afghanistan counter-revolution.

In an [op-ed column] in the Jan. 12 Washington Post entitled, “Five Flaws in the President’s Plan,” he wrote, “The speech reflects a profound misunderstanding of our era. America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating. That is the fatal flaw of Bush’s policy.”

Well, it’s rare when we agree, not only with the substance of what an imperialist strategist says, but with the formulations. It’s very rare that someone like this speaks truth, class truth, to say this is a colonial war.

There’s a lot more he didn’t say: It’s a war for oil, for bases, for strategic position. But the fact that he would say something so stark shows a level of fear and desperation on his part—high anxiety, you might say.

This phrase is meant to throw a block in the way of Bush and his grouping and say, “Stop, stop.” But Bush isn’t about to listen.

It is the agony of imperialism, U.S. imperialism, that they cannot leave and they cannot stay.

But the temptation is to take another shot at it, to find a way to keep from having a huge strategic defeat. What the Bush administration is doing is buying time. We don’t know if they have a plan for a lot more troops. They’re fully committed and they have something up their sleeve.

All the Pentagon commanders in Iraq were required to watch the movie “Battle of Algiers” in the early stages of the war, because it showed that no amount of torture, military repression, kicking down doors, going into neighborhoods, isolating them, worked once you lost the population and they were ready to fight to the end on an anti-colonial basis.

The Pentagon had the same experience in Vietnam. They had “pacification” programs, strategic hamlets, tiger cages, torture. They had the Phoenix Program where they assassinated 15,000 cadres, presumably of the National Liberation Front. But they lost the population because they were fighting a colonial war.

The new commander in Iraq, Gen. [David] Petraeus, is the great hero of the military establishment because he brought “counterinsurgency” up to date. He wrote the post-Vietnam manual for Iraq. Some of the things he wrote sound good on paper, like that the number one mistake is overemphasizing killing and capturing the enemy, rather than securing and engaging the populace.

Yet only the other day, the Pentagon sent F-16s and Black Hawk helicopters right into Baghdad and pulverized a neighborhood. And they’re about to send soldiers into 22 neighborhoods to break down doors. They have A-10 fighter planes that shoot 5,000 rounds [a minute] that they used in Fallujah and in Baghdad.

What happened to Petraeus’s doctrine? They already tore it up. They’re planning to succumb to the temptation of going in after having been straight-jacketed by Rumsfeld—this is the way they look at it. Rumsfeld was fired because he wanted to stay in Iraq and he didn’t want to escalate the war.

Factions in the military who were straining at the bit to send in more troops have regained some of their command authority. These are the forces that Bush is relying on. He’s got very little support elsewhere.

[Sen. John] McCain, an arch-militarist, is supporting Bush. McCain’s father, an admiral, was a commander in the Pacific. John Warner, [the ranking Republican on] the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is giving tepid support. [Sen.] Lindsey Graham is supporting Bush all-out. These are the arch-militarists. They are aligned with the factions in the military who wanted to escalate with more troops.

This is an overthrow of the Rumsfeld doctrine, which says, “Shrink the ground forces.” The defeat of the Rumsfeld doctrine is very important, because he was trying to use the most modern technology available to reduce the necessity for large drafted armies to fight oppressed peoples. If he could have succeeded, it would have been a great boon to imperialism.

Rumsfeld was a student of the Vietnamese war, and the conclusion he drew was, “We must be able to win from the air, from the sea.” But it didn’t work out. He held on to his doctrine to the end, and he had to be fired.

Now the Pentagon’s misfortune is that they can’t put another 50,000 troops in there—they haven’t got them. So the rules have suddenly been changed. It used to be that the most reservists could serve was 24 months in five years. That restriction has been lifted. And every unit that’s been to Iraq is now subject to recall.

That’s a sign of desperation. The U.S. imperialist military is vulnerable because the reserves didn’t sign up for this. So while the military hawks got their way, they have limited forces on which to draw.

But Bush is going ahead. If you saw the Senate hearings yesterday with Condoleezza Rice, Republicans and Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee, they were aghast. They’re capitalist politicians. However, merged with personal ambition and politicking was a genuine dismay at the plan.

Some of these politicians are senior politicians—like [Joseph] Biden, [Chuck] Hagel and so on—who are in the upper echelons of the political establishment and circulate in the ruling class. They’ve been to Iraq, and back and forth in the advising; they’re close to the situation. They’re aghast.

The Democrats are in a position to do something to stop the war, but they haven’t made any move. They act as though their hands are tied. Part of this is political strategy for the year 2008: Be against the war, but make sure that you look like you’re not anti-military, and don’t do anything that looks like it’s going to hurt the troops.

But what makes that political strategy acceptable to the ruling class? It means that there’s no significant coming together of any section of the big bourgeoisie that is confirmed in its conviction that this has got to stop now to cut its losses. That’s what the vacillation of the Democrats means.

When the Vietnamese Tet Offensive took place in 1968, the big bourgeoisie said, “We’ve got to find a way to end this.” The Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF)—which was a guerilla peasant army that started out shooting bows and arrows at U.S. aircraft in the 1950s—marched into Saigon after having infiltrated the whole city. They smuggled weapons in and at the command everybody stormed Saigon and the U.S. Embassy. When the imperialists saw that, they said, “We better rethink this situation.”

So they sent Clark Clifford, a big corporate lawyer and one of the “wise men” of the establishment, as an emissary to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic president, to tell him: “You can’t run for president again.” And he resigned.

The big bourgeoisie was saying, “We gotta get out of here.” There was a lot of maneuvering. Nixon came in and decided to take the U.S. troops out, keep the air war going and supply the puppet troops. But that wasn’t going anyplace either. So finally they voted to cut the funds in 1973. The puppet regime fell apart and the NLF, within two years or less, actually marched in and took over the country, drove out the final remaining imperialist forces and took over the country.

So, if the bourgeoisie decides that they want to cut their losses, you’ll see the Democrats suddenly getting a backbone. But they’re not there yet.

Practically nobody remembers the Iraq Study Group. For two months they were the headline; they were the saviors. “The Iraq Study Group is coming!”

The Iraq Study Group was a prestigious political grouping of bipartisan imperialist politicians and political operatives, headed by James Baker, who was an aide to Bush’s father. He was the architect of the stealing of the 2000 election in Florida.

When they came, Cheney ate them for lunch.

It’s clear now that while the ruling class was hoping that they would come up with some magic solution, there is none. That became apparent when they made their report, and the bourgeoisie saw that.

It’s not true that they can’t fold and withdraw. They certainly can. And they will have to do that, eventually. It has to get worse for them before they will begin to contemplate it seriously.

When Bush floated his plan to send 20,000 or 30,000 troops to Iraq, Brent Scowcroft had an op-ed piece in the New York Times in favor of sending additional troops to Baghdad. Scowcroft was the national security advisor of Bush’s father. He is a general in the Air Force and a consultant in a big bourgeois consulting firm for giant corporations. Scowcroft was so much against this war that Bush Jr. would not let him in the Oval Office, wouldn’t even talk to him. But the other day, Scowcroft said it would be an unparalleled strategic defeat if the U.S. was to be pushed out of Iraq.

The faction of the military that is with Bush plays a role in this. Actually, Bush was desperately trying to find the military grouping that would support him. He had a lot of trouble with [Gen. John] Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command there; he had a lot of trouble with [Gen. George W.] Casey, who was in charge of the troops; and probably a lot of others. You remember the parade of retired generals who went a few months ago saying this is a disaster? So there were many sections of the military who felt that they were pushed into a really bad situation, and they wanted out of it.

It’s not like the military to want to leave and take a loss. They always want to fight—that’s what they do. That’s the division of labor in capitalist society between the ruling class and the capitalist state. The military, part of the capitalist state, is not the same as the ruling class. They have their own role in capitalist society, which is to be aggressive in pursuit of imperialist interests, and not to be troubled and burdened so much by political constraints.

Now some of them think it’s too late in Iraq. But there’s plenty who want to go and see what they can do.

U.S. imperialism spent 13 years in Vietnam trying to hold the communists back from taking over. But it was also at a time when they were trying to destroy the Chinese Revolution. Their presence in Vietnam was to some extent an attempt to set up a beachhead against China. It was part of a broader strategic idea of conquering Asia, which they have never, ever forgotten.

General [Douglas] MacArthur, the commander of the Pacific during World War II, had warned them after the Korean War—when they were fought to a standstill—never to fight another land war in Asia. But they did it anyway, because the temptation of super profits and the beachhead against China was pulling them in as a class—their great dream of conquering one-quarter of the human race.

But after the Tet Offensive, they gave up the idea—for the moment.

Here’s the difference with Iraq: [While] Vietnam never “belonged” to them, the Middle East, as far as they’re concerned, is their “property.” [Anglo-U.S.] imperialism has been there for 150 years.

Iraq once belonged to British imperialism. The Iraqis threw them out. Now the U.S. imperialists went in to take it back. They yielded to the temptation of the collapse of the USSR, and they spelled it out in a doctrine that said preemptive war is permissible and regime change is the order of the day.

The neo-cons sold it to the ruling class. There wasn’t one significant dissent in the ruling class about invading Iraq. They all had misgivings about the diplomacy of it, and the alliances that were being ruptured. But when they thought they could get it back, they were all for it.

All their strategic thinking [involves] the Middle East. You control that, you control the oil flow and a good part of the economic arteries of Japan and Europe. Certainly China needs oil. You control all of this, in addition to being in a strategic military situation, to go in both directions, east and west.

So, Iraq is a strategic defeat for them. Both sides are right—the ones who say you can’t walk out and the ones who say you can’t stay there. That’s their problem. That’s their agony.

We’ve no confidence in any imperialist politician to stop this war. The ruling class doesn’t even want to stop it. Only the mass of the people can stop this war, and that’s the only ones we have any faith in.