Lenin's ‘Imperialism’ and the Downing Street memo

Prime Minister Tony Blair is carrying out a campaign of racist repression in Britain and trying to pretend that the London bombings had nothing to do with the war in Iraq.

The British ruling class has a long and bloody history. Millions of oppressed people over the centuries of the British Empire suffered colonial justice. They have been invaded by British armies, their cultures have been trampled and destroy ed; they were meted out summary execution, imprisoned and whipped; they endured forced labor and were captured and sold into slavery—from Egypt and the Sudan to South Africa and Kenya, from India (inclu ding what is now Pakistan and Bangla desh) to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Palestine.

The war in Iraq is the latest in a long series of British colonial crimes.

To put things in perspective, the people of Britain, who are understandably grieving and in shock, should recall the blazing headlines of a month ago about the Down ing Street “memos” leaked to the world press.

In these documents are found a cynical, Machiavellian series of schemes secretly devised by the British government to frame up Saddam Hussein, conjure up a legal justification and political strategy to deceive the British public, and carry out a brutal colonial war against a sovereign Middle Eastern nation under the leadership of U.S. imperialism.

All this was done while the Blair regime was pretending it was seeking to avoid war.

Intelligence was fixed

The principal memo is a recounting of a secret cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, in which: “C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

This problem did not faze the Labor Party cabinet. Defense Secretary Jack Straw said, “We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.”

The memo gives the conclusion of the group: “We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. ... The CDS (Chief of Defense Staff) would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

“The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.”

The following was stated in an earlier meeting of the Overseas and Defense Secretariat Cabinet on March 8: “A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers advice, none currently exists. This makes moving quickly to invade legally very difficult. We should therefore consider a staged approach, establishing international support, building up pressure on Saddam and developing military plans. There is a lead time of about six months to a ground offensive.”

The memo later continues: “Of itself, REGIME CHANGE has no basis in international law. ... In the judgment of JIC there is no recent evidence of Iraq complicity in terrorism. There is therefore no basis for action against Iraq based on action in self-defense.”

It ends by calling for “sensitizing the public: a media campaign to warn of the dangers that Saddam poses and to prepare public opinion both in the UK and abroad.”

Memo after memo shows the conspirators planning war and figuring out how to put it over while concealing their fundamental role as colonial aggressors.

Leaked memos reveal and conceal

These memos have a two-fold character. On the one hand, they are very revealing about the lying and the conspiracy to go to war. They are meant to expose Blair for concocting the case for war in order to justify an invasion that Washington and London were determined to carry out. As stated in the memos, their goal from the beginning was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of an Iraq compliant with imperialism.

But these memos are both a political revelation and an economic concealment. They are carefully targeted and they are limited in their content. They are significant for what they say and what they don’t say. The leaked part is obvious. But the un-leaked part is equally glaring.

The memos are silent on the overriding unanswered question. Why would the British ruling class, its government and its media all decide to support Washington in its adventure in Iraq, in defiance of world opinion and public opinion at home, and risk isolation and condemnation? A million people demonstrated in London on Feb. 15, 2003, trying to prevent the war. And the Blair government saw the military and political difficulties far more clearly than the Bush administration.

The answer is that what has not been revealed is the secret agreement between the Bush administration and the Blair administration about the division of Iraq and its oil between the stronger and weaker imperialist robbers.

Certainly Blair would not risk blood and treasure in Iraq out of a mere desire to be in the good graces of Bush and the U.S ruling class. It could hardly be cultural affinity that drew these imperialist robbers into this joint venture. The British ruling class is as ruthlessly profit-hungry and as calculating as the U.S. ruling class—only weaker.

The subservience of the Blair government, and its use of cunning and ingenuity in helping to make the U.S.-imperialist-led war effort succeed, can only be explained on the basis of a secret arrangement to give London a significant cut of the spoils.

Lenin, imperialism
and the Sykes-Picot treaty

The British participation can be correctly understood on the basis of Vladimir Lenin’s analysis of imperialism in his ground-breaking book “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”

This work was written at the height of World War I in 1916. Millions of workers and peasants were dying in a conflict unleashed for what Lenin explained was the re-division of the world, its territory and resources among the profiteering transnational monopolies.

In his book Lenin demonstrated by overwhelming statistical analysis that capitalism had advanced from the stage of competitive capitalism to its monopoly stage—the domination by banks that had merged with industry to create capital in all the major capitalist countries of Europe, Japan and the United States. These countries and their ruling classes had completed the division of the world by the time of World War I. Virtually the entire globe was under the rule of one imperialist power or the other.

Lenin wrote: “[T]he characteristic feature of the period under review [1860 to 1899-F.G.] is the final partition of the globe—final not in the sense that a repartition is impossible: on the contrary, repartitions are possible and inevitable—but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only re-division is possible ... .”

Even as Lenin was writing this book, unknown to him and to the world the Brit ish and French imperialists were entering into a secret treaty, known now as the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916, that confirmed his analysis. The secret treaty divided up the Middle East between the two powers, giving Iraq and Palestine to the British and Syria and Lebanon to France, among other provisions.

The two powers were dividing up the remains of the Ottoman Empire behind the backs of the workers, who were dying on the battlefields thinking that they were fighting against the dictatorial Kaiser of Germany. In fact, Germany, which had few colonies, was fighting for re-division also.

This treaty would not be known at all but for the fact that the Bolsheviks, after seizing power in Russia in 1917, published all the secret treaties entered into by the tsarist government—including the Sykes-Picot treaty, which had given Constan ti nople to tsarist Russia.

The Bolsheviks published all the treaties in the first days of the revolution. They made them into pamphlets so that the workers could see the machinations of the class enemy and would understand, by reading the very words of the imperialist diplomats, the class character of war and diplomacy under capitalism.

Redivision through re-conquest

Lenin wrote his book before the rise of the socialist revolution and the national liberation movements. But these developments did not alter his analysis at all.

The grip of the imperialists on the globe was loosened by these struggles. But the battle among the imperialist powers to re-divide the globe has continued. Except that now the re-division of the globe was combined with the attempt to re-conquer territories lost because of socialist revolution and the bourgeois national liberation struggles, such as those in Iraq, Iran and Libya.

Fast forward to 2002: The USSR, which had been an ally of Iraq and a counterweight to U.S. imperialism, was no longer in existence. The relationship of forces on a world scale, and in the Middle East in particular, had changed in favor of Washington. The first Bush administration had tested the waters with the first Gulf War in 1991.

By 2002, Bush the younger and his right-wing neo-cons were in the saddle and, like all imperialists, were eager to take full advantage of the new relationship of forces. This drive to re-conquer Iraq was also part of a struggle to re-divide the wealth in the Middle East.

The huge diplomatic and political tug-of-war among the French, Germans and Russians on the one hand, and the U.S. and British on the other, was part and parcel of that inter-imperialist struggle.

Displacing German, French
and Russian corporations

The 2003 Security Council debate in the United Nations between France, Germany and Russia on the one hand, and Wash ington and London on the other, about establishing “authority” in Iraq was in reality a continuation of the pre-invasion struggle that split these powers over whether to support the U.S.-led war.

Workers World newspaper analyzed this internecine rivalry at that time: “In the political sphere, this is a struggle by the leading imperialist powers of continental Europe to contain Washington in its drive to strengthen its absolute world domination, as outlined in the Bush National Security Strategy document of September 2002.

“In the economic sphere, where the tensions are the greatest, the resistance in the Security Council to the war was really a resistance by French, Russian and Ger man transnational corporations to being displaced or shut out by U.S. corporate power, enforced and protected by the Pentagon.” (Workers World, Oct. 9, 2003)

French oil giant TotalFinElf had a $4-billion contract to develop an Iraqi oil field in Majnoon. Russian oil companies Lukoil and Zarubneft had spent years working out drilling agreements for contracts in the tens of billions of dollars. In addition, Iraq owed Russia between $7 billion and $12 billion.

German companies had $350 million in two-way trade annually between Iraq and Germany and $1 billion through third parties. In addition, Germany was going to get a prime spot at the Iraq trade fair of 2001 in which 101 German companies would be represented. And, according to documents obtained by UN weapons inspectors, German corporations were the market leaders in supplying Iraq, even in the decade after the first Gulf War. Over 80 German firms supplied weapons and industrial devices.

The only hope these imperialist rivals had to execute their agreements and recoup their loans was to have the U.S.-led United Nations sanctions lifted.

However, the Workers World article explained, once the Pentagon moved in and overthrew the Iraqi government, “the U.S. authorities would take control of Iraq’s oil and finances and would inevitably cut down or totally exclude their rivals.”

British ride back on Washington’s coattails

Compare this with the situation of the British imperialists. They had been driven out of Iraq in 1958 by a militant, bourgeois nationalist revolution. The British-backed monarchy was overthrown and eventually the Iraq Petroleum Company and the Basra Petroleum Company, both British-owned, were nationalized.

The anti-colonial hatred for London, which ruled Iraq from 1920 to 1958 and whose forces used bombs and poison gas to put down a mass anti-colonial uprising in 1920, has made the British distrusted and unwelcome in Iraq—which has the second-largest oil reserves in the world.

It was entirely in London’s imperialist interests to grab onto Washington’s coattails and slide back into Iraq at the expense of the French, Germans and Russians.

The British wanted to participate in the re-conquest of Iraq in order to regain a minor position in the re-division of that country’s oil wealth. Perhaps, if there were victory in Iraq, Washington might even carry them further on to Iran in the next stage of the war.

No one can say with certainty what modern version of the Sykes-Picot Treaty was struck between Washington and London. But the military deployment once the invasion began might be a clue. During the joint invasion from Kuwait, the Pentagon forces marched straight to central Iraq and the Baghdad region and towards the Kirkuk oilfields in the north. The British went straight to the southern region and took control of the Basra oilfields and the port area.

Whether or not this reflects a secret agreement between these two robbers cannot be known yet.

Sam Marcy, the late chairperson and founder of Workers World Party, made clear in an illuminating 1990 article on the first Gulf War: “We don’t know any more about the secret agreements being made today than the people during World War I knew about the Sykes-Picot Treaty. But we do know about the greed of the imperialists—whether in the U.S., Japan, West Germany, France, Britain or even Denmark.

“None of them would gratuitously join a naval armada out of humanitarian instincts. They would do it only for what is called in imperialist diplomacy ‘a consideration.’ And the division of oil is an enormous factor in getting their cooperation. The hows we may not know, but we know the whys.” (Workers World, Aug. 23, 1990)

The same may be said of the British participation in the war, and the motive behind the collaboration reflected in the Downing Street memos. There was a dirty deal made in secret.

The whole episode reveals that Lenin’s thesis on imperialism, monopoly capitalism and the inevitable struggle among the banking and corporate monsters to re-divide the globe, peacefully at times but primarily by force, is a law that will remain in force until imperialism, and capitalism upon which it rests, is destroyed.