War on Iraq vs. 'war on terror'
The trap of a false debate
By Fred Goldstein
The Bush administration is losing credibility
day by day and its foreign adventures are bringing about
greater and greater instability in the empire. Under these
conditions, the ruling-class critics of George W. Bush have
converged with the Democratic Party electoral forces to
generate a misleading debate. The venue for it is the
congressional hearing on U.S. government conduct surrounding
the Sept. 11, 2001, disaster.
The hottest focus in the debate for both the Bush and Kerry
forces has been supplied by Richard A. Clarke, a former
national security official spanning the Reagan, Clinton and
both Bush administrations. In his new book "Against All
Enemies," Clarke claims that the day after 9/11, Bush urged him
to find an Iraqi connection, despite the fact that the CIA had
already claimed definitely that Iraq had nothing to do with
it.
The charge is that having been obsessed with Iraq from its
earliest days, the Bush administration used the 9/11 attack as
a springboard to move rapidly from a war against Afghanistan
and the pursuit of al Qaeda to focus on what had really been
its primary objective from the beginning--the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein and the conquest of Iraq. Clarke thinks that was
the wrong war.
Clarke claims that before 9/11 he had urged the
administration to focus on al Qaeda, an alleged network of
Islamic fundamentalist forces that was thought to have carried
out previous attacks on U.S. government and military targets,
but that his warnings were brushed off. Instead, says Clarke,
the administration was totally fixated on Iraq and Saddam. The
clear implication is that the Bush administration could have
prevented 9/11 if it had listened to Clarke and the CIA about
al Qaeda.
The Bush forces are trying to discredit Clarke and claim the
mantle of being the champions in the war on terrorism, while
the Kerry forces are trying to show that Bush was not tough
enough on terrorism because Saddam Hussein was not really a
terrorist threat.
The last thing the anti-war movement should do is get caught
up in what amounts to a fraudulent debate between two currents
of imperialist strategy, a debate that has converged with the
struggle over who gets the spoils by controlling the White
House.
The real "terrorists" are the ones doing the debating--the
representatives of the two imperialist parties. They have just
brought in death squads to overthrow the sovereign government
of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. They have given
$3 billion to the death-squad government in Colombia to
assassinate and torture liberation fighters, trade unionists
and progressive anti-imperialists. They are trying to overthrow
the sovereign government of Venezuela under the popularly
elected mass leader Hugo Chávez.
The Democratic and Republican leadership applauded as the
Pentagon brought down thousands of tons of "smart bombs,"
cruise missiles and "daisy cutters" on Afghanistan and fired
millions of rounds of ammunition, destroying homes, killing
countless civilians, creating millions of refugees and
occupying that impoverished country.
They all cheered the latest war in Iraq, which killed
thousands of Iraqis and brought widespread destruction. Over
10,000 Iraqi "suspects" languish in occupation detention camps
on suspicion of fighting for the sovereignty of their country
and against the imperialist occupiers. Both parties carried out
genocidal sanctions that killed over a million Iraqis.
For 55 years the Democratic and Republican leadership have
armed and financially, economically and technologically
supported the mass expulsion and occupation of Palestine by
colonialist Zionist forces and their attempts to exterminate
the Palestine national movement.
Both parties united to lead NATO in waging the criminal war
against Yugo slavia--bombing factories, hospitals, schools,
television stations and churches, and killing thousands of
civilians.
For generations they have used force and violence to
suppress the peoples of the Gulf region, imposing the torturer
Shah upon the Iranian people and propping up the feudal Saudi
monarchy and all the other reactionary feudal states of the
area.
They backed the fascist torturer Augusto Pinochet in Chile,
the military regime in Guatemala that murdered hundreds of
thousands of indigenous people, the Mar cos dictatorship in the
Philip pines and the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia that
took power through a CIA-supported slaugh ter of a million
people. The list goes on.
They waged a three-year war against socialist North Korea,
killing millions of Koreans and Chinese, and leaving every
house over two stories tall in rubble. In their 13-year war
against the Vietnamese people, who were fighting for socialism
and independence, millions were killed, cities were bombed, the
countryside destroyed and poisoned. And, of course, the U.S. is
the only government to have ever used nuclear weapons. The
Pentagon has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world
several times over.
Yet representatives of these two parties get up and claim
credit for being against terrorism.
This debate and the evidence that will come out are
extremely limited. The real debate should be about the criminal
conspiracy of the Bush administration to go to war in the first
place. An independent investigation by the people, not just in
the U.S. but in the countries that have been victimized by the
Bush administration's wars, should bring an indictment against
Washington for plotting to open up an "era of endless war," as
Bush put it after 9/11.
To begin with, they could use the book "The Price of
Loyalty" in which author Ron Suskind documents former secretary
of the treasury Paul O'Neill's experiences in the Bush
administration.
Suskind, using O'Neill's notes and documents, writes that on
Jan. 30, 2001, just 10 days after the Bush inauguration, the
National Security Council met and quickly decided to back
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Then, Bush asked Condo
leezza Rice, Condi, what are we going to talk about today?
What's on the agenda?"
"How Iraq is destabilizing the region," she replied. Rice,
according to Suskind, noted that reshaping Iraq might be the
key to reshaping the region.
At the next meeting, on Feb. 1, Secretary of State Colin
Powell was giving a presentation on strengthening
sanctions.
"But after a moment, Rumsfeld interrupted. 'Sanctions are
fine,' he said. 'But what we really want to think about is
going after Saddam. Imagine what the region would look like
without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with U.S.
interests,' Rumsfeld said. 'It would demonstrate what U.S.
policy is all about.'"
At another point in the book, Suskind recounts that "One
document, headed 'Foreign Suitor for Iraqi Oilfield Con
tracts,' lists companies from 30 countries--including France,
Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom--and details their
specialties and, in some cases, their particular interest. An
attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant
oilfield,' 'other oilfield,' and 'earmarked for production
sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of
the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future
development."
Suskind also recounts that at the start of 2001, "Actual
plans, to O'Neill's astonishment, were already being discussed
to take over Iraq and occupy it--complete with disposition of
oil fields, peacekeeping forces, and war crimes
tribunals--carrying forward the unspoken doctrine of preemptive
war."
This incendiary material has been kept out of the testimony
about pre-9/11 preoccupation with Iraq because its intimate
detail is too illustrative of imperialist conspiracy.
This preoccupation with conquering Iraq by the forces around
Bush is no secret. In fact, it was laid out as far back as
January 2002 in a series of articles by Bob Woodward and Dan
Balz of the Washington Post. On Jan. 28 two years ago, they
wrote about the "war cabinet" meetings the day after 9/11. The
discussion was how to open up the war and what type of
coalition to build.
"Rumsfeld then raised the question of Iraq, which he had
mentioned in the morning meeting. Why shouldn't we go against
Iraq, not just al Qaeda? he asked. Rumsfeld was not just
speaking for himself when he raised the question. His deputy,
Paul Wolfowitz, was even more committed to a policy that would
make Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on
terrorism and would continue to press the case."
The debate continued for several days and finally Bush came
out for first attacking Afghanistan and then "moving forward"
to Iraq.
At these early meetings, both CIA Director George Tenet and
Gen. Hugh Shel ton, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pulled
out elaborate war plans to attack Afghanistan. The complex
operations of the CIA and the Pentagon were quickly meshed.
Surveillance and ground spying operations had long been in
preparation. Predator drones had been taking real-time pictures
of Afghanistan for months. The drones had been armed with
Hellfire missiles; contacts had been made with tribal leaders.
The Northern Alliance counter-revolutionaries were already
under CIA tutelage. The battle of Masr-i-Sharif had already
been planned.
Richard Clarke, the former Bush national security official,
has made the Bush administration's refusal to move aggressively
to prevent an attack a sign of negligence and preoccupation
with Iraq.
There is another, more cogent explanation for how the Bush
forces proceeded after 9/11. They had been expecting an attack,
based on all the intelligence warnings, and were sitting
waiting like a coiled spring to react with a major world
offensive, with Iraq as an early target.
Why a debate now?
Why is this debate taking place now? Why did a faction of
the ruling class get a dissident Bush official to testify at
such a crucial and widely publicized hearing to the effect that
the Bush administration was fixated on Iraq?
It is because in the eyes of important sections of the
capitalist political and strategy-making establishment, the
Bush policy is heading downhill.
The Pentagon is unable to suppress the resistance in Iraq. A
narrow section of the U.S. capitalist class--Bechtel,
Halliburton and those with close ties to the Pentagon and the
Bush administration, whose business is connected to oil or the
occupation--are making money. But the capitalist class as a
whole is unable to set up shop in Iraq. They cannot travel
without military escort and the prospect for setting up a
stable regime of imperialist economic and financial
exploitation is still highly uncertain.
The Bush administration is committed to handing over the
title of authority to some puppet regime on June 30. But that
prospect is fraught with peril. U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, Paul
Bremer, and the Pentagon have had to jettison their plan for
caucuses and suppress the demand for elections. They must find
some expanded version of the puppet "Governing Coun cil," which
has no credibility in Iraq.
The political disaster for Bush in the Spanish elections,
where his loyal flunky, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, was
defeated and the incoming Socialist Workers Party leader
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero threatened to pull
Spain's troops out of Iraq, has further isolated Wash ington.
Even the Polish puppet regime weakened and began to backtrack,
declaring it had been "lied to" about the war.
The decision to unleash Sharon's terror on the Palestinians
has backfired in the face of unrelenting Palestinian
resistance. Sharon, like Bush, can only use force to try to
overcome failure, but that is fomenting a widening rebellion
throughout the Middle East--as illustrated by the assassination
of the leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
The Bush administration, desperate for the capture of Osama
bin Laden or some high al Qaeda leader to bolster his election
campaign, has sent Colin Powell and the commander of U.S.
forces in Iraq, Gen. John P. Abizaid, to Pakistan to bribe and
cajole the regime into joint operations on the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border to capture bin Laden or his
lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri. They have reclassified Pakistan
as a strategic "non-NATO ally," which entitles the regime of
Gen. Pervez Musharraf to weapons and intelligence. In addition,
they have thrown a "ton of money" into the fray.
The result so far has been the killing of Pakistani
civilians. Protests in Peshawar. Major casualties for the
Pakistani Army and allied tribal fighters. And the further
political deterioration of Musharaff's position as a paid
collaborator of U.S. imperialism. In addition, the Indian
bourgeoisie was not consulted about the newly conferred
"non-NATO ally" status of Pakistan and is up in arms about
it.
And the Bush-orchestrated coup d'etat in Haiti is turning
into an occupation of unknown duration. All the Caribbean
nations are now on the spot about their relations with Aristide
and the U.S. hand-picked coup regime.
The Bush administration--the Rums feld, Cheney, Wolfowitz
grouping and all the supporting neoconservative right-wing
imperialists--have tested their theories of absolute,
unilateral domination of the globe through war and threat of
war. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR they have probed
the possibilities of domination without having to share any of
the spoils with their imperialist rivals and operating by
diktat.
In pursuit of their ambitions they have refused to consult,
not only with their imperialist rivals, but with important
sections of the ruling-class establishment. They have proved to
be a narrow grouping that lacks elementary foresight and
strategic cunning, unlike their opponents within the
"multilateralist" camp of imperialist strategists. So far the
Bush policies have not yielded either great profits or vast new
regions of exploitation for the bosses. While they have been
placated by tax cuts, all these foreign adventures have been
politically and financially costly and doubts have begun to set
in.
The Kerry forces are trying to use these weaknesses to their
advantage. They are promising to bolster the fortunes of the
ruling class by combining brutal military force with more tact
and diplomacy. They want to reverse the isolation of Washing
ton. They want to crush the resistance in Iraq, put out the
fires of Palestinian resistance, subdue Haiti with more
finesse, and so on. And they want to find ways of shoring up
U.S. capitalism at home.
The weaknesses of Bush should be a signal to the movement
not to run to the Democrats but to intensify the struggle
against the system of imperialist expansion and capitalist
exploitation. The move ment should pay no attention to
electoral demagogy and instead build upon the great March 20
global anti-war mobilizations to escalate the struggle.
Reprinted from the April 1, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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