Bush tells UN: Iraq is ours
This is what colonialism looks like
By Fred Goldstein
During his trip to Syria, Secretary of State
Colin Powell made a telling remark--one he assumed everyone
would take for granted, but which should be given a second
look.
According to the May 18 Al Ahram Weekly, Powell "made clear
during his recent visit to Damascus that Syria must take
account of the 'new strategic environment' following the
collapse of the Iraqi regime. Powell said he told the Syrians,
'What you're really going to be looking at is, you are in a new
situation with your neighbor. It is going to be a very
different kind of regime ... it is going to be a very close
friend of the United States. Therefore it is in your interest
to have a better relationship with the United States.'"
Anyone who follows the propaganda of the Bush administration
about its so-called "liberation" of Iraq and its desire to
allow the Iraqi people to "choose their government" is entitled
to ask the following questions:
Would the Iraqi people freely choose to befriend a
government that has waged two wars against them; destroyed
their infrastructure twice; killed hundreds of thousands in the
Gulf War of 1991; set up an 11-year regime of sanctions that
killed over a million people--at least half a million under the
age of five; recently again bombed schools, hospitals, fuel
lines, power supplies and water systems; killed or wounded
thousands of civilians during the war and carried out massacres
of civilians after the war?
Would the Iraqi people freely choose a government friendly
to the U.S. government--which represents the biggest, most
powerful oil companies in the world and whose military
immediately secured the oil fields and the oil ministry while
allowing or carrying out the destruction of virtually every
functioning government facility in the country, including the
looting of their national museum and national library?
And finally, how does Colin Powell know-before any political
process has even been set up, let alone implemented--that the
Iraqi people will freely choose a government friendly to the
U.S.? Is Powell able to sense a miraculous future turnaround in
sentiment from the present situation of growing distrust,
suspicion and outright hatred of the U.S. occupation which is
reported daily in the media and manifested in massive
demonstrations?
Does Powell have some foreknowledge that the Iraqi people
are about to abandon their widespread, long-held, anti-colonial
sentiment en masse and embrace a power that wants to steal
their oil, privatize and dismantle their economy, force them
into a rapprochement with the hated Zionist state of Israel,
and use Iraqi military bases to further its conquest of the
Middle East?
UN resolution for colonial mandate
What Powell knows is that the Bush administration is
determined to establish itself, with assistance from London, as
the colonial power in Iraq. And colonial powers get the puppet
administrations that they want-unless the masses upset their
plans.
Consider the resolution for a U.S. and British colonial
mandate submitted to the UN Security Council on May 8.
The resolution has a long list of provisions, including the
right of the U.S. to spend the oil revenues of Iraq, the
protection of the funds from any claim for debt owed to the
other imperialist powers, mainly Russia and France, and a
definition of the U.S. government and the British government
under the unified command of the U.S. as "the Authority."
Point 6 "Calls upon the Authority to promote the welfare of
the Iraqi people through the effective administration of the
territory, including in particular working towards the
restoration of conditions of security and stability and the
creation of conditions in which the Iraqi people may freely
determine their own political future."
Iraq's oil money, including from the Oil for Food program
set up by UN sanctions as well as other Iraqi revenues, is in
the euphemistically named Iraqi Assistance Fund. Point 12
"Decides further that the funds in the Iraqi Assistance Fund
shall be disbursed at the direction of the Authority, in
consultation with the Iraqi interim authority."
Almost at the end of the 25-point document comes the punch
line, in Point 22:
"[The Security Council] endorses the exercise of the
responsibilities stated in this resolution by the Authority for
an initial period of 12 months from the date of the adoption of
this resolution, to continue thereafter as necessary unless the
Security Council decides otherwise."
While everyone was expecting this resolution to deal with
the lifting of the sanctions, so that the U.S. government, and
ultimately U.S. corporations, could get their hands on the $13
billion in the sanctions fund, Washington went way beyond
simply asking for the removal of sanctions. It asked the
Security Council to ratify its openly declared colonial
authority in Iraq.
British Mandate of 1920 warmed over
This resolution is merely a modern version of the British
Mandate of 1919-20, which legalized Britain's colonial rule of
Iraq and Palestine after British troops occupied the region
and, together with the French, divided up the defeated Ottoman
Empire.
At the time the mandate system was an innovation in colonial
rule adopted by the imperialist powers after the 1917 Bol
shevik Revolution in Russia, which called for the
self-determination of all oppressed peoples suffering under
colonial slavery. The Bolsheviks also published all the secret
treaties of the overthrown tsarist regime, including the
infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty by which the British, the
French and tsarist Russia divided up the Middle East among
themselves. The mandate system was also a concession to the
rising nationalist movement among the Arab peoples.
Prior to the mandate system, the European colonial powers
had simply annexed territories and established permanent direct
rule. It took the U.S. ruling class and President Woodrow
Wilson to understand that the policy of annexation would be
impossible to sustain in the post-war political atmosphere of
anti-colonial rebellion. He inaugurated the idea of the League
of Nations and its Covenant, which paid lip service to
self-determination and paved the way for the modification of
colonial rule.
The infamous Article 22 of the League Covenant stated, "To
those colonies and territories which ... are inhabited by
peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous
conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the
principle that the well-being and development of such peoples
form a sacred trust of civilisation ... .
"The best method of giving practical effect to this
principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be
entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources,
their experience or their geographical position can best
undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept
it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as
Mandatories on behalf of the League. ...
"Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish
Empire [Iraq, Syria and Palestine--F.G.] have reached a stage
of development where their existence as independent nations can
be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of
administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such
time as they are able to stand alone."
The British rulers voted themselves the mandate for Iraq and
Palestine and the French voted themselves the mandate for Syria
and Lebanon at the San Remo conference of the Supreme Council
of the Allies of April 1920. In the same way the U.S. and
Britain are now telling the Security Council to vote them a
mandate to determine the political, economic and military fate
of Iraq.
The mandate system was profoundly rejected by the peoples of
the countries that were supposed to be unable to "stand alone
under the strenuous conditions of the modern world." The
granting of the mandates was immediately followed by popular
uprisings in Damascus and in the entire country of Iraq. It
took the British five months to crush the 1920 rebellion in
Iraq. They used aerial bombardment and mustard gas, producing
thousands of casualties.
Neocolonialism wasn't enough
The current plan to reestablish the in ter national legality
of mandate colonialism is a further stage in the struggle of
the U.S. ruling class, headed by the Bush administration, to
establish a world empire.
The resort to colonial rule is dictated by the failure of
neocolonialist economic penetration and political manipulation
to subjugate Iraq to imperialism. The Gulf War of 1991,
no-fly-zone bombing, sanctions, economic strangulation,
subversion, CIA-financed uprisings--all failed to bring down
the regime, not because Saddam Hussein was such a popular
leader but because the Iraqi people would not willingly submit
to imperialism.
With the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. financiers and
transnational corporations went on a spree of economic
takeovers in the Third World. The IMF and the World Bank
demanded "restructuring" agreements based on privatization,
debt repayment and trade relations favoring the imperialists.
The purpose was to subjugate whole countries to the profiteers
on Wall Street.
Even after the collapse of the USSR, however, certain
regimes held out against the globalization and neocolonialist
schemes of Washington--notably Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea,
Cuba and Syria. Also, the Palestinians refused to submit to the
campaign to exterminate their national movement. The Colombian
and the Filipino national liberation movements, both on
Washington's "terrorist" list, also have refused to stop their
struggles.
Iran, Iraq and Libya held out because their regimes were
brought to power by popular national revolutions for political
independence from imperialism and had sufficient oil revenue to
withstand economic strangulation.
Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea had
undergone profound social revolutions in which not only was
imperialism ousted, but the domestic exploiting classes were
expropriated and socialist construction was begun.
The list of states not subdued by neocolonialist methods
coincides precisely with Washington's list of "terrorist
states." Iraq was the opening shot in the struggle to destroy
all those independent regimes that have not succumbed to
neocolonialism.
The Bush administration has high hopes of establishing a
puppet colonial regime in Iraq. It hopes this will pave the way
for the expansion of the U.S. empire. But, although the state
power that kept imperialism at bay for 45 years--ever since the
revolution of 1958--has been destroyed in a terrible defeat for
Iraq, U.S. big business and the Pentagon must still carry out
their program in order to permanently erase all the gains of
that revolution.
They still have to take over the oil, whose nationalization
enabled Iraq to raise the standard of living of the people
above the level of a colonized people. They still have to
dismantle the widespread institutions of state capitalism
which, while they maintained capitalist exploitation, also
served to provide social services and employment to millions of
Iraqi people. They still have to secure permanent access to
Iraqi military bases and use the U.S. victory for the benefit
of Israel.
U.S. imperialism still has the difficult task of
constructing a stable puppet state to execute its
counter-revolutionary policies.
The question is, can this be done over the long run without
igniting a renewed struggle for national liberation, not just
in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East? Can colonialism be
consolidated anew in the 21st century?
Can the Pentagon's air power and limited ground forces
subdue the 60 million people of Iran, the 300 million people in
the Arab world, and the billions in Asia and Latin America who
are the targets of empire builders in Washington? Can all the
military power of the U.S. hold back the power of the
people?
The entire history of the anti-colonial struggle of the 20th
century speaks against this.
Reprinted from the May 22, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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