Imperialist hands off the
EDITORIAL The motley bunch of governments supporting George Bush's "anti-Saddam alliance" are already in heated debate over the shape of the 'peace' they will want to impose after the Gulf War is over.
The USA has been extremely reluctant to define its final objective from the war, and simply quotes the vague United Nations resolution of November 29, which called not only for Saddam to leave Kuwait by January 15, but also for the restoration of interational peace and security in the area".
Any objective observer of US foreign interventions in the last 45 years will know that their track record of success in creating either peace or security is far from encouraging. In practice the only peace Washington is keen to see is a 'pax Americana', creating 'security for the multinationals and bankers to continue profiteering at the expense of the 'third world".
Previous American efforts at restoring 'peace" and 'security' in the post-war period have brought us a catalogue of brutish, corrupt - often warlike - regimes, from Syngman Rhee in South Korea to Mobutu in Zaire; from the Shah of Iran to Ferdinand Marcos; from Pinochet's Chile to the Zionist state of Israel. They have brought decades of war in Vietnam, and agonies of "destabilisation" in Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique. Time and again the US effort to make the world safe for "democracy' has led to the imposition and preservation of dictatorship. Now they want to try again with the Middle East - a region constantly convulsed by crises stemming from centuries of arbitrary imposition of extemal imperialist 'settlements".
It seems that George Bush is deliberately leaving himself room to interpret the UN resolution as giving the "alliance" a mandate to push beyond Kuwait and into Iraq, to oust Saddam Hussein. This is surely the only way the US can carry out its threats to deal with Saddam as a "war criminal'. After demolishing most of the Iraqi and Kuwaiti economies, the US may hope to instal a pliable regime in the ruins of Baghdad, who can be propped up by a long-term emplacement of US/UN forces in the Gulf.
Other governments supporting the war drive clearly have different objectives: the Turkish bourgeoisie clearly hopes to carve off a slice of Iraq; the Egyptians and Syrians probably want to see Iraq cut down to size, but not demolished, for fear that this would open the way for Iran to dominate the region. The Iranians, for their part, under pressure from fundamentalists, have begun putting forward 'peace plans" and threatening to fight any attempt to dismember Iraq!
Much of European and Japanese capital, however, has been enlisted in Bush's 'alliance' largely on the level of restoring the old regime in Kuwait and 'containing" the threat to oil supplies posed by Saddam. We cannot expect these gavemments to be overjoyed at the idea of handing long-term effective control of such a vast percentage of oil supplies over to the USA as armed arbiters of a new 'peace" in the Gulf.
Even the Gorbachev regime, whose support for the onslaught has been purchased for $4 billion in aid, is now shrinking from the sheer barbarism of the US attack, and the long-term damage that could be done to their diplomatic links in the Arab world.
It proved relatively easy for the US, through blackmail, bribery and
Middle East!
arm-twisting, to set the war machine in motion: the rows seem likely to erupt over when and how it should be stopped.
The fact is that none of the countries contributing to the allied war effort - least of all the USA itself - can claim any consistency in their new-found opposition to Saddam Hussein, synthetic hatred for whom now fuels the imperialist propaganda machine. Many would prefer to have Saddam - with reduced forces - continue to repress the Iraqi masses in the way he has done so effectively, rather than risk the installation of a fragile puppet regime that could trigger new waves of instability in the Middle East.
Only socialists, genuinely concered with the liberation and defence of the Arab masses and the defeat of imperialist domination of the Middle East, have a consistent record of opposing Saddam as a brutal anti-working class dictator. We opposed him - and his bloodstained Baath Party - before the Iran-Iraq war, as the murderer of communists and left winger and oppressor of the Kurdish people.
We condemned Iraq's cynical role in the Iran-Irag war, triggered by Saddam but driven on by massive aid from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and by arms shipments and loans from the USA, France and Britain. We opposed Iraq's war against the Kurdish people long before the horror of his use of chemical weapons against them. And we opposed Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and called for the withdrawal of Kuwaiti troops, not through any affection for the wretched al-Sabah ruling family, but because the invasion gave US imperialism the pretext it wanted to dispatch vast armies to the Gulf: it now endangers the defence of irag itsell.
Saddam remains the biggest liability in the defence of Iraq, clearty prepared to take his own country and its people up to and over the brink of ruin to fulfil his own ambitions.
There is no disagreement over whether Saddam is a despicable torturer and tyrant: the difference is over who should remove him, and who should decide the fate of Iraq, the Gulf region, the Middle East and the Arab world as a whole. It is here that socialists have nothing in common with those in the imperialist camp. We believe that the overthrow of Saddam is a task for the Iraqi people themselves, and that the security of the Middle East can only be guaranteed by the Arab masses, and not by wester generals and bankers. For us the right of national self-determination is a principle to be defended, not just a useful card to play when it embarrasses the Kremlin bureaucracy.
History shows that every involvement of imperialism in carving up Middle East 'security' leads to further misery, exploitation and repres sion for the workers and peasants. The latest military adventure, using weapons more powerful and deadly than ever before, is already in danger of destroying the economy and the environment of the Gulf for many years to come.
That's why we make no apology for calling at one and the same time for the immediate withdrawal of British and US/UN troops from the Gulf, and for the defence of Iraq against the imperialist offensive, while we support struggles by Iraqi workers and peasants for the removal of Saddam Hussein, as part of the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of pro-imperialist regimes and the establishment of a socialist federation of states in the Middle East.