No war for empire
War deeply rooted in profit system
By Fred Goldstein
Global political tensions are rising daily. Washington is
relentlessly pushing forward with its military buildup for
unprovoked aggression against Iraq despite growing opposition
everywhere to U.S. war plans. The entire world feels the
military and political pressure of the Pentagon's rapid
timetable as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld orders 62,000
more troops to the Gulf, with the aim of reaching a force of
150,000 by February.
Governments everywhere are being squeezed between the
pressure from the U.S. military juggernaut above and popular
opposition below. It is becoming absolutely clear that the
anti-war movement will have to broaden and deepen its
resistance to this military mobilization in order to tip the
balance and keep the Pentagon from bringing death and
destruction to the Iraqi people.
As the Bush administration runs into more and more political
opposition, the opportunity for decisive intervention to stop
the war increases.
The anti-war movement in the U.S. is growing faster than
anyone can count. Thirty thousand people turned out in Los
Angeles to protest the war on Jan. 11. Countless local
demonstrations are taking place around the country. Two hundred
thousand people demonstrated in Wash ington, D.C., and San
Francisco on Oct. 26.
And a massive turnout is expected in both cities for the
international day of protest on Jan. 18. At least 19 cities in
Europe, Asia and Latin America are scheduled to demonstrate on
that day.
In the wake of the half-a-million-strong demonstration in
Florence last fall and with the European movement gearing up
for a massive anti-war turnout on Feb. 15, even Tony Blair,
Washington's staunchest ally, backtracked on his unequivocal
support for an early invasion--but only momentarily.
The Bush administration has been warning that Jan. 27, the
date for the United Nations weapons inspectors to give their
so-called "progress report" to the Security Council, is going
to be the moment for Washington to declare Iraq in "material
breach" and set the stage for war.
Mass pressure shakes imperialist allies
The first sign of a rift in the Anglo-U.S. imperialist
alliance was directly caused by the heat from below. Mass
opposition pushed close to 100 members of the Labor Party to
declare their opposition. Even a member of Blair's cabinet,
International Development Secretary Clare Short, publicly said
it was the prime minister's "duty" to stop Bush from carrying
out the war.
Blair, after blinking and calling for more time for the
weapons inspectors, quickly jumped back on board and ordered
the call-up of 1,500 reservists. He also put the Royal Navy,
including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, on notice to prepare
for pre-war training in the Mediterranean.
In France, a poll taken for Le Figaro showed 77 percent of
those interviewed opposed to military intervention against
Iraq.
Yet President Jacques Chirac, in order to protect the
interests of French imperialism and not be left completely out
of a division of Iraqi oil, "told his armed forces to be
prepared for deployment, the clearest suggestion so far that
France would participate in a military move against Saddam."
(Canadian Press dispatch, Jan.7)
Washington desperately needs to use Turkey as a major
staging ground for an attack on Baghdad from the north. It has
been working on the government for permission to put up to
80,000 troops in Turkey. Yet 80 percent of the population in
this Muslim country opposes the war, the country is in the
worst depression it has seen in decades, and any war will only
intensify the economic and social crisis. (Christian Science
Monitor, Jan. 14) The repressive Turkish government has given
the Pentagon permission to send surveying teams to assess the
basing situation for U.S. troops, despite the prospect of
disaster brought about by the war.
All over the Middle East, Washington's client regimes are
trembling at the prospect of social explosions in the wake of a
U.S. invasion. The Saudi Arabian oil monarchy has been
compelled to privately assure its master that it can use Saudi
bases, but is terrified to admit that in public. And the Saudi
government is desperately trying to find some peaceful way out
of the crisis.
All this twisting and bending by powerful imperialist
governments as well as dependent but endangered regimes under
the pressure of the White House, the Pentagon and the State
Department, as well as the complete disregard by Washington for
mass anti-war sentiment, contains important lessons for the
anti-war movement. Above all, the movement should not count on
the UN Security Coun cil, weapons inspectors' reports or public
opinion to stop the war.
Only mass resistance will have an impact.
Who really make the decisions?
The driving motivation behind the war is to conquer Iraq and
seize its oil fields, with 112 billion barrels of reserves, in
order to establish U.S. military and corporate dominance in the
Middle East. It is the class interests of the rich ruling
class--led by ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, Boeing, Lockheed,
Raytheon, the military-industrial complex and the financial
oligarchy on Wall Street--that dominate and dictate the Bush
administration's foreign policy.
These profit interests override any concern about public
opinion or even the most basic democratic forms.
In a recent major article in the Jan. 12 Washington Post,
Glenn Kessler wrote about the "murky process" behind the
decision to go to war against Iraq. He said that "often, the
process circumvented traditional policymaking channels as
longtime advocates of ousting Hussein pushed Iraq to the top of
the agenda by connecting their cause to the war on
terrorism."
He concluded that "the decision to confront Iraq was in many
ways a victory for a small group of conservatives" who
outmaneuvered the so-called moderates after Sept. 11.
But Kessler and all those who complain about foreign policy
being hijacked by the right wing fail to explain this: Just how
does a "small group of conservatives," i.e., Dick Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and hawks like Richard Perle, who is
on the Defense Policy Board outside the official government,
corral the entire ruling class to get behind their policy?
Indeed, this small group did go too far for its own class
base in its disregard of diplomacy and its failure to put
enough effort into lining up the imperialist allies and U.S.
clients.
But as to the substance of the policy--conquering Iraq--the
entire ruling class is for it. This comes through as a solid
wall of pro-war propaganda. Whether it's ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN,
Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, Time magazine, News week, Business Week or any
other major instrument of U.S. ruling-class propaganda, they
all have been spouting anti-Iraq lies ever since the Bush
administration began its campaign in earnest.
And not one significant capitalist politician in either
party came out against a war on Iraq.
Every so-called "opponent" supported the war but conditioned
it on the U.S. achieving a broad coalition or on getting UN
Security Council support. And these politicians answer to the
billionaires and millionaires who put them in office.
This is because the right wing of the Bush administration,
methods aside, appealed to the exploiting, looting class
interests of the giant monopolies that rule the U.S.
Politics and method may separate many of them from Rumsfeld,
Cheney, Wolfowitz and Co., but the lust for oil booty, military
profits and world domination brings them together in practice
for war. It was the "moderate" Colin Powell who engineered the
15-0 vote in the UN Security Council, which gave the U.S. a war
resolution it could live with. And it is Colin Powell who is
now preparing public opinion for war regardless of what the
weapons inspectors say.
Of course, this wide support for the war in the ruling class
may grow shaky as the combat approaches. War, which suddenly
poses the prospect of destabilization of U.S. political and
corporate interests abroad, will inevitably produce fear and
nervousness in the establishment.
But this fear and nervousness will have nothing to do with
concern for the Iraqi people, who will have to face death and
destruction. The UN is estimating 500,000 casualties in the
war. It is of no concern to the ruling class here that their
military forces will bring Iraqis the terrorism of U.S. bombing
raids followed by the prospect of a full-scale invasion and a
possible military occupation.
Getting rid of Bush not enough
It is Bush's war. But not Bush's war alone. A big segment of
the bosses and bankers who might have been wary at first have
now been swung firmly behind the Bush administration's
initiative. It has become a war of, by and for the entire
ruling class and its political leadership in both parties,
supported by its entire propaganda apparatus.
This speaks to an issue that has been raised in the anti-war
movement in this country. Many have called for "regime change"
in Washington. It would certainly be in the immediate interests
of the Iraqi people and the world in general if the Bush
administration were set back and ousted precisely because it
was waging a criminal war.
But in the long run, without Bush, there would still be
ExxonMobil, Chevron Tex aco, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Gen
eral Electric, General Motors, Chase Morgan, Citibank, Goldman
Sachs, AT&T and all the other profiteers that need
worldwide Pentagon enforcement and expansion to sustain their
worldwide empire.
For over a century, these monopolistic forces of aggression
have prevailed in the decisive areas of both foreign and
domestic policy. They are responsible for John Ashcroft and his
racist roundups of peoples from the Middle East and South Asia.
But they were also behind the Palmer Raids and mass
deportations of radical immigrants after World War I and the
internment of the Japanese-Americans in World War II.
Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sent U.S.
troops into the war in Vietnam, and Republican Richard Nixon
kept the war going until the bitter end. Democrat Jimmy Carter
began the revived U.S. military buildup after the Vietnam War,
which was then escalated by Republican Ronald Reagan. Reagan
also invaded Grenada and Lebanon. George Bush senior waged the
Gulf War. Clinton went to war to dismember Yugoslavia and
carried out the bombing of Belgrade and other Yugoslav
cities.
So "regime change," as a popular slogan, should not be
limited to its political aspect alone. In order to deal with
the fundamental problem of war, the social and economic regime
of capitalism must be rooted out. The war in Iraq is for
profit. The military buildup is for profit.
Fifty thousand corporate lobbyists occupy Washington, D.C.
They come and go from corporate offices to government offices
to be sure the will of the ruling class is implemented on a
daily basis. The working class and the oppressed peoples of
this country are completely shut out of the real policy-making
process of the capitalist government.
That is why the richest country in the world has 43 million
people without healthcare--and rising. Why millions are
homeless. Why states and cities are in growing debt while the
Pentagon thrives. Why unemployment grows steadily and workers
have to live in fear of layoffs. Why tens of millions live in
poverty while financiers and corporate moguls live in
unfathomable luxury.
What is needed in this country is not "regime change" but
system change. We need a mass struggle to stop the war. But
that struggle, to be ultimately successful, must be a struggle
to get rid of a system that runs for profit. It must replace it
with a social and economic system where the economy is owned,
not by a tiny group of billionaires, but by society as a whole
and is run for human need. The billionaires don't like it, but
that system has a name: socialism.
Reprinted from the Jan. 23, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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