An attempt to turn back history
Bush doctrine vs. self-determination
By Fred Goldstein
The Bush administration is rushing ahead with plans for its
unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq based on
unsubstantiated charges repeated over and over again by its
spokespeople. Their goal for the last year has been to
transform the shock and outrage over the Sept. 11 disaster into
a permanent state of pro-war psychology in the United States
and worldwide that can be harnessed to support a campaign of
"permanent war."
But while the White House, Pentagon and the big-business
media have managed to create this war psychology in the
Congress and win a complete capitulation of the Democratic
Party, their strategy is backfiring down below, among the
people.
Every poll shows declining support for the war. Reports from
congressional offices around the country, Republican and
Democrat alike, show emails, letters and phone calls running
overwhelmingly against an assault. A growing number of labor
unions are passing resolutions against the war.
While George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin
Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice concoct imaginary
threats to justify a war of conquest, the masses of people are
experiencing the very real threats arising out of the growing
economic crisis: layoffs, cutbacks in social services,
retirement funds vanishing in the collapsing stock market, loss
of medical coverage and growing poverty.
While Washington pours forth a continuous stream of charges
of "terrorism" and "weapons of mass destruction" against Iraq,
the world watches as the Pentagon prepares a campaign of terror
bombing that will kill thousands and assure the mass
destruction of Iraqi cities and towns.
Bush's broader purpose
With its intended war of "preemption" against Iraq, the Bush
administration is engaged in a much broader purpose: a
unilateral campaign to revamp the entire legal and political
structure of international relations in the post-Soviet period,
to reflect the absolute superpower domination of U.S.
imperialism over the world. This campaign is directed first and
foremost against the oppressed peoples of the world, but also
against Washington and Wall Street's imperialist allies/rivals
in Europe and Japan.
The Bush administration has openly stated its goal in Iraq
to be "regime change." Against all advice and pleadings, Bush
has stubbornly refused to mute or disguise this goal of his
intended military action.
No matter how much the Iraqi government extends itself to
comply with the demands of an inspections regime, the Bush
administration dismisses in advance any prospect that such a
regime could succeed. War plans are going ahead full steam.
Plans for a military occupation and the establishment of a
colonial-style puppet regime are openly discussed, even as the
so-called debates go ahead, first in Congress and then in the
United Nations Security Council.
There is a clear political purpose behind this brazen
assertion of the right to destroy the government of Saddam
Hussein. The Bush administration is determined to
demonstratively overturn the right of sovereignty,
self-determination and self-defense of former colonial
peoples.
In Washington's New World Order, these rights have no
place.
Using the cover of the so-called "war against terrorism,"
Bush is promoting a conception that is nothing less than a
brazen revival of the old rights of colonial powers. The rights
of sovereignty and self-determination are to be openly
eliminated and explicitly replaced by the superior right of
U.S. imperialism to remove any regime that will not submit to
its dictates.
The right of regime change is directly and brutally
counterpoised to the rights of sovereignty and
self-determination of colonial and formerly colonial peoples.
These rights of oppressed peoples arose out of the innumerable
struggles of the 20th century that overturned the colonial
powers' right of "regime change" at the cost of millions of
lives and rivers of blood.
To be sure, the Pentagon has overturned many governments in
the past. It overthrew Maurice Bishop in Grenada, Manuel
Noriega in Panama and Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia, to name
a few. But each one was overthrown under cover of some pretext
and without referring to any generalized principle of
Washington's right of "regime change."
Marxist view of legality
The general Marxist view of legality in class society is
that it arises out of the class struggle and reflects class and
national relations. For example, in the United States in the
mid-19th century it was illegal for three or more workers to
gather for the purposes of discussing the formation of a trade
union. Such behavior was regarded as an illegal conspiracy in
restraint of trade. Only the class struggle established the
right to organize and to force the bosses to engage in
collective bargaining.
In the same way the sovereignty and right of
self-determination of oppressed peoples became inscribed in
international conventions only after generations of
anti-colonial struggle.
The right of sovereignty of nation-states arose with the
establishment of capitalism. But for centuries those rights
belonged only to the oppressor states--feudal, capitalist and,
in the modern era, imperialist.
It was not until 1960, after many liberation and
anti-colonial movements had either triumphed or were under
way--including the Cuban Revolution, the liberation movement
against the French in Algeria, the struggles for independence
in India, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Kenya, Indonesia, Malaya,
Ghana, Guinea, Vietnam, Korea, Egypt and many others--that the
right of self-determination for colonial peoples was even
recognized.
The United Nations was finally compelled to issue a document
on Dec. 14, 1960, entitled "Declaration on Granting
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples" in which the
right of sovereignty and self-determination was raised to the
level of international principle.
How self-determination got on the agenda
It was with the advent of the socialist revolutions and the
national liberation struggles that the question of the
sovereignty of oppressed peoples made its way onto the
historical agenda. After the Bolshevik Revolution--the seizure
of power by the workers and peasants of czarist Russia--V.I.
Lenin amended Karl Marx's slogan "workers of the world unite"
to "workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite." At its
Second Congress in 1920, the Communist International reached
out to the colonial peoples in an attempt to forge ties of
solidarity and support between the workers' revolution and the
struggle against imperialism.
This congress enshrined the doctrine of an alliance aimed at
breaking the stranglehold of imperialism over the colonies,
through socialist support for national liberation. Later, after
World War II, the socialist revolution triumphed in China and
anti-colonial movements swept Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Despite many mistakes on the part of the Soviet and Chinese
leaderships relative to various national liberation struggles,
the broad alliance between the socialist camp and the colonial
and formerly colonial peoples held up, however imperfectly.
Certainly, the imperialists did everything within their power
to break it up.
The USSR and China supported the Vietnamese struggle against
the French and U.S. imperialists. The USSR gave decisive
support to the Cuban Revolution at critical junctures. The
socialist camp gave support to the struggle of the African
National Congress against apartheid in South Africa and to
other liberation fighters around the world, including SWAPO in
Namibia, the MPLA in Angola, and Palestinians fighting the
Israeli occupiers. They all relied heavily on material and
political support from the socialist countries.
Newly liberated countries suffering from centuries of
underdevelopment could get technical training, education,
commercial, financial and military support in Moscow before
Mikhail Gorbachev became Communist Party general secretary, and
in Beijing before President Richard Nixon's visit there in
1972.
When the imperialists refused to support projects of
national development, the socialist countries, despite their
limited resources and their own desperate struggle to overcome
imperialist blockade, often stepped up to supply necessary
assistance. These projects were not like the investments by
private capitalists that suck out profits from developing
countries. What they built became the property of the newly
liberated nation. The USSR helped Egypt build the Aswan dam
when the United States refused. It also built the first steel
mill in India. It tried to help the Bolivian government break
the stranglehold of U.S. mining companies by supplying a tin
refinery--an effort that was overturned by the United
States.
In general, the military prowess and material support of the
socialist camp, particularly the Soviet military and economic
power, formed a shield that limited the aggression of the U.S.,
European and Japanese imperialists against the many national
liberation struggles and newly liberated countries. It helped
them hold on to their national sovereignty in the face of the
Pentagon and the CIA.
The USSR was the first place on earth where the working
class came to power for a sustained period. This revolution
took place in the impoverished capitalist country of czarist
Russia, which in 1917 was still emerging from feudalism.
Despite its poverty, despite losing 12 million people in the
ensuing civil war and being blockaded by 14 imperialist powers,
despite losing 20 million people later in the Nazi invasion
during World War II, and despite having to face the Pentagon,
NATO and Japanese imperialism--the USSR managed to become the
second-greatest power in the world. Its tremendous development
was based on state ownership of the means of production, a
planned economy, a state monopoly on foreign trade and
production for society, not for profit.
Without capitalist bosses or private property, it managed to
inaugurate the space age, build the biggest construction
projects in world history, defeat the Nazi war machine, and
show the world that society without capitalism can make great
strides, even in an underdeveloped and impoverished
country.
But 70 years of unrelenting military, political and economic
pressure enabled the imperialist camp to bring about a
deterioration in the leadership of the USSR that resulted in
the alienation of the workers from the government and opened
the door to capitalist counter-revolution. The collapse of the
USSR and Eastern Europe, plus China's retreat from its position
of international solidarity with the oppressed peoples, removed
a mighty prop of support for the sovereignty and right of
self-determination of the peoples of the Third World.
Think they can go back to colonial era
The U.S. ruling class emerged from this historic struggle
with a massive military machine and a worldwide apparatus of
subversion and political control. The Bush administration and
the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz grouping represent those elements
within the capitalist state and the ruling class who regard
this new situation as the opportunity to go back to the old
colonial era that existed before the rise of the socialist camp
and the national liberation movements.
The concepts of "pre-emption" and "regime change" being
promoted under the guise of the "war against terrorism" are an
attempt to codify, in international legal and political
relations, the post-Soviet world relationship of class forces.
Under this new doctrine, not only is the right of sovereignty
and self-determination eradicated, but Washington retains the
absolute right to dictate the new rules of international
relations--whether in regard to the Geneva Conventions covering
prisoners of war, the United Nations Charter on
non-interference in the internal affairs of other governments,
the Kyoto Accord on the environment, or the Anti-Ballistic
Missile treaty, among many examples.
But these dreams of world domination and a return to
colonial times, like when the British imperialists decided to
create Iraq and rule it as a colonial power, are just that:
dreams and delusions. They are created in Pentagon war rooms,
in the Foggy Bottom of the State Department, and in the
right-wing think tanks.
Whatever the military outcome of the U.S. war effort, the
Iraqi people will never accept going back to the days of
colonialism. Nor will the peoples of the Middle East ever
accept such a counter-revolutionary overturn. The minds that
have conceived this plan--the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds and the
Wolfowitzes--have been shaped in an era of retreat and setback
for the socialist camp and the world liberation struggle,
beginning with Reagan.
Their entire program is predicated upon the assumption that
the masses of people, in the United States and abroad, will
passively accept this new world order without struggle and
resistance. But all of history shows that repression and
reaction breed resistance, rebellion and revolution. When
reaction is applied worldwide, resistance is bound to grow
worldwide.
Reprinted from the Oct. 31, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to
support pro-labor, anti-war news.
Email
this article
Printable
page