Eleven years after the Gulf War
What's really behind U.S. hostility toward Iraq?
By Richard Becker
What is really behind the intense U.S. hostility toward Iraq
and its government?
The call for a new, all-out war against Iraq has been
revived inside the national security apparatus, although the
timetable for an attack is still open. Since Sept. 11, figures
like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle
of the Pentagon Review Board and former CIA head James Woolsey
have been leading the charge.
Other leading administration spokespeople like Secretary of
State Colin Powell reportedly believe that the time is not ripe
for a massive attack on Iraq. Powell is concerned about the
political repercussions in the Middle East and fears an
explosion of popular anger in the region.
Moreover, the U.S. has no proxy force similar to
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance in Iraq. Occupying Baghdad and
the oil regions of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of
Pentagon troops and the possibility of large-scale U.S.
casualties.
Powell is not "soft on Iraq," as some of his critics charge.
It should be remembered that General Powell, head of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff at the time, oversaw the 1991 Gulf War that
destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and killed more than 200,000
Iraqis. Powell helped lead that high-tech war of mass
destruction from afar, one in which direct U.S. casualties were
kept to a minimum.
Minimizing GI casualties was seen as key to minimizing
political criticism of the war at home, and was the main reason
why U.S. ground forces did not march on Baghdad in 1991.
But while there are very real and significant tactical
differences within the imperialist establishment over how to
prosecute the struggle against Iraq, there is little
disagreement about the objective: to reduce Iraq to the status
of dependent neocolony and take control of its vast oil
resources.
Of course, saying so right out loud would seem a bit crass,
so U.S. government officials and their obedient mass media
propagandize the public here with other, more moral-sounding
reasons for why we should all hate and fear Iraq.
Purely propaganda
Iraq could be developing "weapons of mass
destruction--WMD's," the keepers of the most massive array of
nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons in history tell us.
In reality Iraq is the most inspected country in history, and
even former weapons inspectors like U.S. Marine Capt. Scott
Ritter have repeatedly testified that Iraq poses no threat to
any other country.
Concerted efforts to link Iraq to the anthrax-infected
letters sent to members of Congress last fall fell flat. It
turned out that the anthrax strain involved was identical to
one used in U.S. Army laboratories, despite the fact that the
U.S. supposedly gave up biological warfare development in
1969.
That the Pentagon "fears" Iraq's so-called WMD's is a truly
laughable concept. The Pentagon budget next year will be more
than 10 times Iraq's gross national product. During the Gulf
War, when Iraq was at the peak of its military power, its air
defenses were unable to shoot down U.S. warplanes. In the past
decade, U.S. military power has increased vastly, while Iraq's
has greatly declined.
The other main selling point of the Hate Iraq campaign is
the charge that Iraq and its ultra-demonized president Saddam
Hussein have violated human rights.
The two main U.S. allies bordering Iraq are Turkey to the
north and Saudi Arabia to the south. Turkey is ruled by a
semi-military dictatorship that has slaughtered tens of
thousands of Kurdish people--the same Kurdish people the U.S.
claims to be protecting if, and only if, they live in Iraq. The
Turkish military has bombed and burned more than 3,000 Kurdish
villages in southeastern Turkey using U.S.-supplied F-15s,
bombs and tanks. (American Kurdish Information Network)
The Turkish military also harshly represses unions,
students, women, journalists and other popular forces.
Saudi Arabia, the world's number-one oil producer, is a
family dictatorship run by the al-Sauds. To have any role in
decision-making you must be a prince of the Saud family. There
is no parliament, no voting, no rights for women or workers.
But there is a big secret police force, routine torture and
frequent beheadings for such "crimes" as adultery by women or
non-princely men.
No one in the world, however, has a worse human rights
record than the United States itself. U.S. wars and CIA coups
have left behind a trail of unmatched death and destruction
from Korea to Angola, from Indonesia to Nicaragua, from Vietnam
to Iran. Nor can it be forgotten that U.S. capitalism was
erected upon a foundation of genocide against Native peoples
and enslavement of millions of African people.
And in Iraq itself, the greatest cause of death and
suffering is the U.S./UN sanctions blockade that remains in
place 11 years after the Gulf War. As former U.S. Atty. Gen.
Ramsey Clark said on the fifth anniversary of the war in 1996,
"There is no greater violation of human rights anywhere in the
world in the last decade of this millennium than the sanctions
against Iraq."
The blockade of Iraq has taken the lives of more than 1.5
million Iraqis, half of them children under the age of five
years. As is universally acknowledged, the sanctions blockade
only remains in place due to the insistence of Washington.
If the given reasons for the ongoing U.S. aggression against
Iraq are false, what is really behind the policy? To answer
this question requires looking back in history to 1958.
U.S. objective: domination
The 1950s were a time of sea change in the Middle East and
the world, with national liberation movements sweeping across
the colonized and semi-colonized countries of Asia, Africa and
Latin America.
In Washington, these movements were regarded as threatening
U.S. corporate and strategic interests.
U.S. domination of the Middle East had been a fixed
objective of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. The
Roosevelt and Truman administrations, representing the big
banking, oil and military-industrial interests, were determined
that U.S. capital would predominate in the aftermath of the
world war. Key to securing U.S. hegemony was control of the
world's critical resources, especially oil.
In particular, Washington's sights were set on taking over
the oil fields of Iran and Iraq. Both Iran and Iraq, though
nominally independent, were then part of the British empire, as
was most of the Middle East--Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Jordan,
Kuwait, Yemen.
But Britain's imperial sun was setting.
In the early 1950s anti-colonial revolutions in Egypt and
Syria led to the formation of the United Arab Republic, seen by
many as a first step toward uniting the Arab nation into one
country.
The U.S. and its by then junior partner Britain responded by
arranging the unification of two rotten monarchies, Jordan and
Iraq, into a short-lived reactionary alliance called the Arab
Union.
Washington had also set up the Baghdad Pact in 1955, which
included its client regimes in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Iraq,
along with Britain. The Baghdad Pact, also known as CENTO or
Central Treaty Organization, had two purposes. First, to oppose
the rise of Arab and other liberation movements in the Middle
East and south Asia; and second, to be another in a series of
military alliances--NATO, SEATO and ANZUS were the
others--encircling the socialist camp of the Soviet Union,
China, Eastern Europe, north Korea and north Vietnam.
Iraq, the center of CENTO, was independent in name, but was
by now a joint U.S.-British neocolony. The British maintained
their military airfields in Iraq. While the country was
extremely rich in oil--10 percent of the world's reserves--the
people lived in extreme poverty and hunger. Illiteracy was more
than 80 percent. There were only 13 dentists in the entire
country--one for every half million people in Iraq. ("Iraq to
1963," Fran Hazelton: 1986) The country was ruled by a corrupt
monarchy under King Faisal II and a coterie of feudal
landowners and merchant capitalists.
Underlying Iraq's poverty was a simple fact: Iraq owned
exactly zero percent of its vast oil reserves. Four
countries--England, France, Netherlands and the United
States--had each been allocated 23.75 percent of the country's
oil when modern Iraq was created out of the former Ottoman
Empire as a British colony following World War I. The other 5
percent was in the hands of oil billionaire Cyrus Gulbenkian,
the infamous "Mr. Five-Percent."
Iraqi Revolution shocked Washington
But on July 14, 1958, a powerful social explosion rocked
Iraq. A military rebellion turned into a countrywide
revolution. The king and his administration were suddenly gone,
the recipients of people's justice.
Washington and Wall Street were stunned. In the week that
followed, the New York Times, the U.S. "newspaper of record,"
had virtually no stories in its first 10 pages other than those
on the Iraqi Revolution.
While another great revolution that took place just six
months later in Cuba is better remembered today, Washington
regarded the Iraqi upheaval as far more threatening to its
vital interest at the time.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "the gravest crisis
since the Korean War." The day after the Iraqi Revolution,
20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. The day after
that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped into Jordan.
This was what came to be known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine";
the U.S. would intervene directly--go to war--to prevent the
spread of revolution in the vital Middle East.
The U.S. and British expeditionary forces went in to save
the neocolonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan. Had they
not, the popular impulse from Iraq would have surely brought
down the rotten dependent regimes in Beirut and Amman.
But Eisenhower, his generals and his arch-imperialist
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, had something else in
mind, as well: invading Iraq, overturning the revolution and
installing a new puppet government in Baghdad.
Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan in
1958. The sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution. The
announcement by the United Arab Republic, which bordered Iraq,
that its forces would fight the imperialists if they sought to
invade. And the emphatic support of the People's Republic of
China and the Soviet Union for the revolution. The USSR began a
mobilization of troops in the southern Soviet republics close
to Iraq.
The combination of these factors forced the U.S. leaders to
accept the existence of the Iraqi Revolution. But Washington
never really reconciled itself to the loss of Iraq.
U.S. strategy vs. Iraq
Over the next three decades, the U.S. applied many tactics
designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent
country. At various times, such as after Iraq completed the
nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 and
signed a defense treaty with the USSR, the U.S. gave massive
military support to right-wing Kurdish elements fighting
Baghdad.
The U.S. supported the more rightist elements within the
post-revolution political structure against the communist and
left-nationalist forces. For example, the U.S. applauded the
suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party and left-led trade
unions by the Ba'ath Party government of Saddam Hussein in the
late 1970s.
In the 1980s, the U.S. encouraged and helped to fund and arm
Iraq in its war against Iran. U.S. domination of the latter had
been ended by Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. In reality,
though, the U.S. aim in the Iran-Iraq War was to weaken and
destroy both countries.
Ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S.
attitude about the war: "I hope they kill each other."
The Pentagon provided Iraq's air force with satellite photos
of Iranian targets. At the same time, as the Iran-Contra
scandal revealed, the U.S. was sending anti-aircraft missiles
to Iran.
The Iran-Iraq War was a disaster, killing a million people
and weakening both countries.
Collapse of USSR
and the Gulf War
When the war finally ended in 1988, developments in the
Soviet Union were posing a new and even graver danger to Iraq,
which had a military and friendship treaty with the USSR. In
pursuit of "permanent détente" with the U.S., the
Gorbachev leadership in Moscow began to cut its support for its
allies in the developing world.
In 1989, Gorbachev went further and withdrew support for the
socialist governments in Eastern Europe, most of which then
collapsed. This sharp shift in the world relationship of
forces--culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union
itself two years later--constituted the greatest victory for
U.S. imperialism since World War II.
While proclaiming a new era of peace, Washington immediately
began preparing for new wars of aggression. At the top of its
list of targets was Iraq.
Now the U.S. leaders saw the opportunity to overturn their
stinging defeat of three decades earlier and to establish
unquestioned domination over what they regard as the most
strategic region: the Middle East and its critical oil fields.
These were the conditions that led to the Gulf War of 1991 and
the sanctions that have done such great destruction to
Iraq.
U.S. imperialism wants to turn back the clock, not only in
Iraq, but also in Cuba, Korea and around the world. But despite
all the unimaginable hardships they have been forced to endure,
the Iraqi people--like the Cubans, the Koreans, the
Palestinians--have not been defeated. Washington has not been
able to fully realize its dream.
Now, on the 11th anniversary of the Gulf War, it's time for
the anti-war and workers movement here in the heartland of
imperialism to redouble efforts to prevent a new war against
Iraq and to get the U.S. out of the Middle East.
Reprinted from the Jan. 17, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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