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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.25, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Five years ago on Jan. 17, gigantic fighter bombers carrying 3,000-pound bombs started pounding the urban centers of Baghdad and Basra in Iraq.
Low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles--fired hundreds of miles away from U.S. Navy destroyers--came crashing into apartment buildings, shopping centers, schools and hospitals. Iraq's air defenses were quickly crippled.
For the next 42 days bombers from the U.S., British and French air forces bombed Iraq every three minutes. Over a six-week period, these high-flying killing machines delivered their deadly cargo--110,000 bombing runs in all.
At the end the United States had lost only 148 soldiers-- many from accidents or incinerated by missiles fired by other U.S. troops. The Iraqi side lost more than 200,000, including civilians.
The contrast in casualty figures--more than 1,000 Iraqi deaths for every American--shows that the description of this conflict as a "war" masks its true character. History should remember it for what it was: a classical colonial massacre.
A war crime.
What was this war about? Schoolchildren in the United States are fed the official fairy tale: that the U.S., British and French military formed a powerful coalition to liberate tiny Kuwait after it was occupied by Iraqis under the evil leadership of Saddam Hussein.
The true nature and purpose of the war is best revealed by the continuing sanctions against Iraq's 18 million people. According to a December 1995 report prepared by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Iraq's children-- over 560,000--have died from starvation, nutrition-related diseases and the complete absence of medicine.
In addition, U.S. fighter aircraft still dominate huge parts of the north and south of Iraq--where they will shoot down Iraqi aircraft. These two areas account for a big part of Iraq's vast oil fields.
Since the Gulf war ended, and long after Kuwait was back under the control of the criminal and decadent Kuwaiti royal family, the Pentagon has placed or kept U.S. military forces in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states, Kuwait, Turkey and Egypt's Sinai peninsula.
Washington's policy is aimed at overthrowing the current Iraqi government and replacing it with a pro-Western puppet regime like those in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
OIL PROFITS
The war's goals have everything to do with oil. Not the continued supply of oil for warming homes and running automobiles--but oil profits.
Oil profits go to the very heart of the capitalist system.
Five of the 12 largest corporations in the United States are oil monopolies. These corporations, along with a handful of British, Dutch and French oil monopolies, owned all the oil fields in the Arab world and Iran until anti-feudal revolutions swept through the region in the 1950s and 1960s.
The U.S. corporate establishment greeted these revolutions as a big threat not only to the oil monopolies but to the entire imperialist system. And it is easy to see why. Between 1948 and 1960 U.S. oil profits from the Middle East amounted to $13 billion--almost half of all U.S. corporate profits abroad at that time.
While the big oil companies have an ongoing partnership with puppet feudal rulers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other Gulf sheikdoms, they have been relatively locked out of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Yemen and Algeria.
What is the goal of the U.S. war against Iraq, the subsequent establishment of U.S. military bases throughout the region and the continuing sanctions against Iraq, Libya and Iran? It is to permanently roll back the Arab revolution and all the other revolutionary movements that have rocked the Middle East since the end of World War II.
Even though the regimes in these countries were not communist, the big capitalists refuse to tolerate the slightest degree of independence. They want old-style colonial domination that allows them to control or own the precious oil resources outright.
In addition, U.S. policy makers aim at hegemony in the Middle East with respect to their imperialist rivals in Western Europe and Japan. Controlling oil gives the U.S. monopolies a means to extort economic concessions from their competitors.
The Marxist conception of the war and the struggle against it differs from bourgeois liberalism by locating the source of the war in the nature of the capitalist system itself. Capitalism is driven like an engine in an endless pursuit of super-profits and must constantly expand in order to guarantee these profits.
In 1990 and 1991, bourgeois liberalism opposed the military side of the U.S. war against Iraq. It appealed to the Bush administration to "use economic sanctions instead." Thus, this form of liberalism--so prevalent during the Gulf war--actually aided imperialism's attempt to conquer the Middle East by seemingly "peaceful" means.
While bourgeois liberalism concentrates on opposing the monstrous "tactics" of imperialist war, Marxism exposes the imperialist goals of war--and its "peaceful" diplomacy as well.
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