You may also be interested in this website's NEWS
& VIEWS page, and LINKS to
sites on related topics - see the CHANGING THE WORLD section.
WHY BRITAIN IS GOING TO WAR
By John Smith (website - Raging
Wave.) See end re copyright. Posted
January 11, 2004.
href="why_war.pdf">Download this article in pdf
format
Why is the British government so determined to
join with the US in war on Iraq? Why is Tony Blair joined at the hip to
George Bush? These questions are the source of a great deal of
perplexity, including among supporters and activists in the Stop the War
Coalition – yet how can we know what course of action to follow unless
we can find some answers to these questions?
This article attempts to look for clues in two particular areas.
First, we shall survey the past century of Britain’s entanglement in
Iraq. We’ll soon see a pattern emerging, and we’ll also see, in this
historical panorama, the origins of the “special relationship” between
Washington and London now being tested to breaking point. Second, we’ll
look at the economic imperatives which compel Britain to join in Bush’s
“coalition of the willing”. So sit down; make yourself a cup of tea.
What you are about to read will make you angry.
Editor's note: This article was written just before the attack on Iraq by the USA and the
UK in 2003.
Part One
Britain and Iraq: A short history of infamy
Sikh troops, used as ground
forces during Britain's bombing
campaign against Kurdish villagers
in 1920-21.
Britain just can’t stop messing in Mesopotamia
At the time of writing, 42,000 British troops are poised on the Kuwaiti
desert, alongside 250,000 US troops, awaiting the order to march on
Baghdad.
The first time British troops (assisted by a much larger force
of Indian soldiers from the white-officered British India Army) fought
their way towards Baghdad was in November 1915, twelve months into a
bloody campaign to seize “the land between two rivers” from its Turkish
rulers.
Sikh troops, used as ground forces during Britain’s bombing campaign against Kurdish villages in 1920-21.
Britain’s imperialists wanted to construct a railroad from
Palestine through Mesopotamia to the Gulf, allowing them to move troops
between their colonies in Egypt, Asia and Africa to put down rebellions
wherever they broke out. They also caught the whiff of oil.
In March 1917, after the death of 22,000 British and 30,000
Indian soldiers, Sir Stanley Maude captured Baghdad. Crucial to this
victory was the sympathy of the local population, who believed in
Britain’s promise of independence: “Our armies do not come into your
cities as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators,” he announced.
However, Britain had already secretly carved up the region with France
and Russia in what became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was
published by the Bolsheviks soon after the October 1917 revolution, to
the great embarrassment of London and Paris (for its part, Russia’s
revolutionary government renounced all colonial possessions and claims).
But they don’t come thicker-skinned than Winston Churchill, then
the Minister of State for the Crown and Colonies, who whipped out his
ruler and red pen and drew a line around three vilayets or provinces
(Mosul, Baghdad, Basra) of the old Ottoman empire and defined the state
of Iraq.
The League of Nations (which, like the United Nations now, was a
front for imperialist domination over oppressed nations) added its seal
of approval – and the Arabs and Kurds who found themselves subject to
the concocted state of Iraq rose up in rebellion. T.E. Lawrence
(“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote in the Sunday Times: "we have killed ten
thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain
such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely populated."
Further north, the rising of the Kurds – outraged at the
betrayal of promises of Kurdish independence – was suppressed by a
squadron of RAF bombers, who perpetrated the first aerial bombing of
civilians in history.
Churchill selected Arthur Harris, later known as Bomber Harris,
in command of the operation. Harris wrote in his diary: "The Arab and
the Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage.
Within 45 minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a
third of the inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines.”
An RAF Vickers Vernon
flying over the River Tigris
Bombing Iraq in the 1920s
“For 10 years the British waged an almost
continuous bombing campaign in the oil-rich and mountainous north-east
against the Kurdish rebels, to whom they had earlier promised autonomy.
“Some Iraqi villages were destroyed merely because their
inhabitants had not paid their taxes. … When the air force proposed
using bombs with delayed action fuses, one senior officer protested that
the result would be “blowing a lot of children to pieces".
Nevertheless, the RAF went ahead, because delayed-action bombs prevented
tribesmen from tending their crops under cover of darkness.
“Churchill was sometimes troubled by the realities of the
methods he had supported. During one raid in Iraq, British pilots
machine-gunned women and children as they fled from their homes. "To
fire wilfully on women and children taking refuge in a lake is a
disgraceful act," Churchill protested to the Chief of the Air Staff. "I
am surprised you do not order the officers responsible for it to be
tried by court martial." No action was taken, and this incident was
quietly forgotten.
“The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, had great
ambitions for his bombers. In a paper written early in 1920, when some
politicians feared a revolution in Britain, he suggested that the RAF
could even suppress “industrial disturbances or risings" in England
itself. Churchill was horrified, and demanded that Trenchard never refer
to the proposal again – at least not in writing.”
- From The Guardian, 19 January, 1991, by David
Omissi, military historian and author of Air Power and Colonial Control:
The Royal Air Force 1919- 1939, Manchester University Press.
Harris achieved this devastating effect by
combining large blast-bombs, which ploughed up whole streets, and then
sowing thousands of burning phosphorus bombs into the shattered
buildings. This is an extreme form of terrorism, a weapon of mass
destruction on any reasonable definition. The RAF also scattered metal
crow’s feet to maim livestock. Publicly available documents indicate
that, if chemical weapons outlawed after WW1 were not dropped from
aeroplanes, it was only because the means of delivery had yet to be
perfected (gas shells were used by groundbased artillery). Churchill
strongly advocated the use of chemical weapons: “I do not understand
this squeamishness about the use of gas,” he stated. “I am strongly in
favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”.
Over the next few decades, aerial bombing mounted from the
Habaniya airbase outside Baghdad – proved an effective support to the
military dictatorship through which Britain ruled Iraq, “massacring
Kurds in the north in the 1920s, slaughtering Assyrian Christians around
Mosul in 1933 and bombing Baghdad itself in 1936” (See Note i »)
The same combination of blast bombs and incendiaries, and the
same combination of Winston Churchill and his personal fist, Arthur
Harris, would be used twenty years later to devastate three quarters of
Germany’s cities. Bomber Command’s WW2 targets were not industries or
enemy soldiers, but the civilian population; workers and their families
in particular.
The campaign in northern Iraq in the early 1920s provides the
golden key which unlocks this secret of the Second World War: Churchill
used terror-bombing in Iraqi Kurdistan to suppress a popular 3
insurrection. This was also his motive in Germany: to so traumatise
German workers that they would be unable to rise up against Hitler and
the capitalist and landlord families who stood behind him and whom
Churchill wanted at all costs to preserve in power. The massacre of
German civilians was not part of the war against Hitler; it was
counter-insurgency. It was to “secure the peace”.
Imperialism & the labour movement
British multinational companies made staggering
profits from their control over the oil fields of the Middle East. Some
of the proceeds were used to subsidise the standard of living of British
people, including the working class, significantly softening post-war
austerity and helping steer organised labour into an ever-deeper
alliance with Britain’s imperialist ruling families. Ernest Bevin,
Labour's Foreign Secretary after the Second World War, acknowledged this
reality in a 1947 speech to the House of Commons:
“His Majesty's government must maintain a continuing interest in
that area if only because our economic and financial interests in the
Middle East are of vast importance ... If these interests were lost to
us, the effect on the life of this country would be a considerable
reduction in the standard of living ... British interests in the Middle
East contributed substantially not only to the interests of the people
there, but to the wage packets of the workpeople of this country.”
Ernest Bevin, imperialist thug,
Labour’s Foreign Secretary in
the post World War 2 government.
‘I am not prepared to sacrifice the British
Empire because I know that if the British Empire fell...it would mean
the standard of living of our constituents would fall considerably’.
(House of Commons, 23 February 1946)
The lion’s share of the superprofits, of course,
was pocketed by the UK’s ruling rich, while a portion was used to buy
the passivity of the working class and to further corrupt its upper
layers.
Not much was left for the Iraqi people.
Iraq’s democratic revolution and its overthrow
On the eve of Iraq’s national-democratic
revolution of July 14, 1958, which ended direct colonial rule and
brought to power the only popular and progressive government the Iraqi
people ever had, the conditions of the Iraqi people were unbelievably
dreadful. Two per cent of landowners owned around 70% of cultivable
land; the peasantry had been converted into sharecroppers, forced to
hand over two-thirds of their produce to the often-absentee landlords.
Hundreds of thousands of landless peasants had flocked to the cities,
settling in giant slums.
One observer described the conditions:
“There is much trachoma and dysentery, but no bilharzia or
malaria, because the water is too polluted for snails or mosquitos. The
infant mortality is 250 per thousand. A woman has a 50-50 chance of
raising a child to the age of ten. There are no social services of any
kind. … On the adjacent dumps, dogs with rabies dig in the sewage. And
the slum dwellers package it for resale as garden manure.” (See Note ii
»)
Life expectancy was 26 years; the rate of illiteracy was 90%.
(See Note iii ») By comparison, Iraqi life expectancy on the eve of the
so-called Gulf War of 1991 was 68 years; twelve years of sanctions and
bombs since has, according to UN figures, reduced this to 46 years, on a
par with the poorest sub-Saharan African nations today.
In 1958, the masses expressed their rage by lynching the old
regime; Sir Stanley Maude’s statue was smashed into a thousand pieces.
The new government, led by General Abdel Karim Kassem, confirmed its
popularity by nationalising part of Britain's oil industry, legalising
trade unions, expanding education, and implementing a land reform.
Increasingly corrupt and repressive, it squandered much of this
popularity. The Iraqi Communist Party, the biggest in the Middle East,
was given ministerial posts in the new government.
The US and UK were alarmed that the overthrow of one pro-western
dictatorship could lead to the downfall of others. The US despatched
14,000 marines armed with atomic howitzers to the Lebanon, to help
repress a struggle by the Muslim majority to redraw a French-imposed
constitution which gave all power to the Maronite Christian minority.
This imperialist intervention condemned Lebanon to decades of civil war
and hundreds of thousands of dead.
The US considered sending its Marines on into Iraq “to aid loyal
troops to counterattack” but it was soon admitted, “no-one could be
found in Iraq to collaborate with. Everyone was for the revolution”.
(See Note iv ») The US was forced into a containment strategy,
threatening Iraq with nuclear weapons to deter its army from entering
Lebanon on the side of the people.
When Churchill defined Iraq’s boundaries 40 years before, he
made sure that the most important southern oilfields, and virtually the
entire Gulf coastline, were placed in another invented country called
Kuwait, whose ruling monarchy had formed a close relationship with
British imperialism. In response to an agreement between Kassem and the
Kuwaitis to federate their two countries, in 1960 Britain sent troops to
force its Kuwaiti subjects back into line. Iraq objected to the United
Nations, who refused to take any action. At that time, Kuwait was the
world’s third-largest oil producing country, with around a quarter of
the world’s known reserves.
Saddam Hussein made his first appearance on the world stage as a
participant in a failed assassination attempt on Kassem in October
1959. He fled to Egypt, where he worked with the CIA, helping to draw up
long lists of leftists and intellectuals to be executed once the Kassem
regime was overthrown.
The Kassem regime was toppled in a CIA-orchestrated,
British-supported coup d’état on 9 February 1963. “It was the ClA's
favourite coup. ‘We really had the ‘ts’ crossed on what was happening,"
James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the in the Middle East, told
us. ‘We regarded it as a great victory.’… 'We came to power on a CIA
train,' admitted Ali Saleh Saadi, the Ba’ath Party secretary general who
was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror.” (See Note v
»)
In what became known as the “elimination campaign”, thousands of
those who appeared on the CIA’s lists were killed in cold blood. An
amazing fact! Not only was the Ba’ath dictatorship helped into power by
the CIA, they also helped design its characteristic extreme
ruthlessness!
"On the morning of 9 February 1963, his headquarters under
repeated aerial attacks, Kassem surrendered … he was subjected to a
summary trial … When the time to execute him came, he shouted, ‘Long
live the people' with a steady voice which betrayed no fear or remorse.
He was shot dead without a blindfold." (See Note vi »)
The forging of the US-UK alliance
In 1956, Britain, France and Israel tried to
reverse Egypt’s nationalisation of the British- owned Suez Canal by
mounting a military invasion of that country. This adventure was opposed
by the US, who ensured that it ended in fiasco. This was a defining
moment in the decline of the British Empire. It marked the displacement
of Britain by the USA as the dominant power in the Middle East/Persian
Gulf region.
Suez should be seen together with the earlier usurpation by the
US of Britain’s dominant position in Iran. In 1951, in its last months,
the post-war government of Clement Atlee – touted as the most socialist
of Labour Governments for its nationalisation of coal and its
introduction of the NHS – responded to Iran’s nationalisation of
Britain’s 100% stake in Iran’s oil industry by trying to organise a
military coup against the popular nationalist regime of Dr Mossadeq. The
coup was blocked by the USA. In August 1963, Britain’s secret services
played a junior role in the CIA’s successful military coup. Mossadeq was
imprisoned, thousands of workers and others resisting the coup were
shot and beaten to death, and Iran’s oil was redivided – 60% to two
Rockefeller-owned oil companies, 40% to Britain’s BPOC (later BP).
The loss of Iran and of the Suez Canal signified the end of
British domination over the Middle East; henceforth it would act as
junior partner of the US. But we should not imagine this meant Britain
had become any less imperialist, aggressive or parasitic. Quite the
contrary! Since the end of the Second World War Britain has launched at
least 98 overseas military interventions. Of these, 28 have been in the
Middle East.
The 1979 Iranian revolution – a giant blow to US and British Imperialism
The modern history of the Gulf region begins with the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Its important oil industry, and its geographical location
stretching from the Middle East to the former Soviet Union, were two
reasons why the US had turned Iran under the Shah into the biggest
military base outside of the US itself. Through Iran and Israel, the US
and its junior partner the UK dominated the whole of the Middle East and
Persian Gulf.
The 1979 revolution was a pivotal event. The longest general
strike in human history, part of a gigantic mobilisation of Iran’s
workers and peasants, brought the Shah crashing down and dealt US and
British imperialism a giant blow from which it is still to recover.
The US would certainly have sent hundreds of thousands of troops
to protect the Shah. What stopped them was defeat in Vietnam just 3½
years earlier. Unable to use their own military forces against the
Iranian revolution, they were forced to resort to a proxy force: the
Iraqi Army. The hated Shah was toppled on February 12, 1979. A few
months later in next-door Iraq, Saddam (then Vice-President) seized
complete power, conducted a ruthless purge of the government, and
proceeded to ensconce himself in a series of secret meetings with the
CIA. It is reasonable to assume that Iran was one of the subjects
discussed.
From Iraq to Indochina
On 2 September 1945, national liberation forces
led by Ho Chi Minh crowned the defeat of the Japanese military
occupation of Vietnam with the declaration of an independent republic.
Half a million people in Hanoi demonstrated their joy.
Ten days later, British imperialist troops arrived. Instead of
resisting, the Vietnamese leadership followed Stalin’s orders and
welcomed the supposedly ‘democratic, anti-fascist’ British forces.
Immediately upon his arrival, General Gracey, the British commander,
ordered the disarming of Vietnamese nationalists, organised a coup
d’état, and freed Japanese prisoners of war, using them as a temporary
police force until French troops arrived to repossess their former
colony.
This was Britain’s part of a secret agreement with the French,
signed by Labour’s foreign minister Ernest Bevin, in which Britain
pledged to return Indochina to French colonial rule in exchange for a
French withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon.
What a diabolical crime! To secure Britain’s Middle East
“interests”, the Labour government was prepared to deny Vietnam its
chance of freedom and condemn its people to thirty years of continuous
war and millions of dead!
On 22 September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. But
instead of the easy victory promised by the CIA, expected in part
because the revolution had executed or put to flight the Iranian army’s
entire officer class, the Iranian people fought back fiercely. So much
so, within two years Iraq was staring defeat in the face. Only the use
of huge quantities of chemical weapons against Iranian front-line troops
averted catastrophe. The first Gulf war ended in stalemate in 1988,
after the death of 1.5 million people.
How ironic, once it was very important to the US and Britain
that Saddam did possess weapons of mass destruction, that he should use
them against his neighbour, and that he should be rewarded for doing so!
Anyhow, instead of winning back Iran, the US lost control over
Iraq as well. The US had used up Saddam, he was no longer any more value
as an ally… but he still had one more vital task to perform. His
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was exactly the pretext the US needed for a
war to reassert its own military power in the region.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the US set a trap for
Saddam and that he walked right into it. But even the 43-day blitz in
1991 known as the “Gulf War” (a strange war it is which has no battles,
and where only one side gets to do any killing) did not result in a
firmer US grip over the Middle East. In 1991, the US was still hamstrung
by Vietnam, and did not attempt to capture Baghdad or establish a
permanent military base in Iraq. This time, the hawks running the Bush
administration are determined things will be different.
Crisis in relations with Iran and Iraq was accompanied by lack
of US influence in new areas of critical importance: until September 11
and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan, the US had no military bases
anywhere near the central Asian oilfields. US weakness in this region is
still a long way from being overcome.
However, where the imperialists have lost most ground is in the
hearts and minds of the people. The great masses of ordinary people
across the Middle East have learned to see through the imperialists’
trick. They recognise the ruthless self-interest hiding behind their
proclamations on democracy, peace and human rights. They hate and
despise them all the more for being thought of as stupid enough to be
taken in by it all.
The economic distress of our sisters and brothers in the Middle
East is intensifying at the same time as the 50-year struggle between
the Zionist state and the Palestinian people is moving towards a climax,
and amid universal horror and outrage not just at the threat of US
invasion of Iraq, but at the whole century of violence and violation
that the peoples of the Middle East have endured at the hands of the US
and Britain.
The US has paid a heavy price for its political and military
alliance with Israel. Throughout this entire period, the irrepressible
struggle of the Palestinian people has provided a focus for
radicalisation and a source of inspiration to new generations. Why does
the US reward Israel’s occupation of Palestine but punish Iraq so much
for its invasion of Kuwait? This question is helping to radicalise tens
of millions of people across the Middle East and beyond. It has turned
the Middle East into a different place.
Now we shall turn from our survey of the last century to
investigate more closely the economic forces impelling US and Britain to
war, and the nature of the partnership between London and Washington.
Part Two
Economic forces compelling US and Britain to go to war
London – Washington, the real “axis of evil”
Question: what is the name of biggest oil company within the US itself?
Answer: BP (British Petroleum, until 1953 known as the Iraq Petroleum Company, has 40% of its employees in the USA).
Question: the ruling families of which country own two of the three biggest oil companies in the world?
Answer: Britain (BP and Shell; Exxon is the biggest). BP has
major interests in Colombia, where US-backed death squads are attempting
to annihilate the trade union movement; along with Shell, it has large
operations in central Asia. Across the world, Britain’s imperialist oil
monopolies and other multinationals, banks and bondholders rely on US
military power to protect their property and their superprofits.
Question: which country is second only to the USA in the size of its empire of wealth in other peoples’ countries?
Answer: …you’ve guessed it; Britain. In 2001, Britain’s overseas
direct investments amounted to $902,000,000,000, or 14.4% of the world
total. This compared to 21.1% owned by US imperialists, 7.9% owned by
the French, 7.8% owned by Germans, and 4.6% owned by Japanese. In both
1999 and 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, Britain was the
largest foreign direct investor in the world, contributing around 21%
of world FDI outflows, compared with the US and France (13%), and
Germany (7%).
What is more, the rate of profit on these overseas investments
is much higher than on investments at home: in 2000 Britain’s’
imperialists “earned” £134,000,000,000, or approximately
$200,000,000,000 from its direct investments, equivalent to 71% of the
gross profits of British non-financial corporations.
These figures relate to direct investments in land, factories,
mines etc. This picture of Britain as a leading imperialist power would
be reinforced if we were to also look at the world of banking and
finance. Used also as a base by imperialist finance capital from other
countries, the City of London remains the most important financial
centre in the world.
No wonder the British establishment is split down the middle by
the dilemma of whether it should throw in its lot with Europe and adopt
the Euro, or whether it should continue to pursue its “special
relationship” with the USA! In fact, Blair’s decision to join with Bush
in the aggression against Iraq means that the debate on the Euro has
been settled: Britain will not be joining in the foreseeable future.
The relationship between the US and Britain is indeed special.
Each is by far the biggest investor in each other’s factories and real
estate. In the ten years to 2000, British capitalists invested $188,300
million in US industries, while their US counterparts invested around
$120,000 million in British firms (See Note vii »). Britain is the
biggest weapons exporter to the USA, accounting for 40% of that
country’s arms imports. "BAE sells more these days to the Pentagon than
it does to Britain’s Ministry of defence," noted the Economist (See Note
viii »).
Despite their alliance with the US, British capitalists still
have to fight their corner: Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, recently
intervened in secret discussions about how Iraq is to be carved up by
publicly calling on the US to grant a “level playing field” to British
oil companies.
US economy stalked by deflation
In the past twenty-four months, the US Federal Reserve has
slashed interest rates from 6½% to 1¼%, in a drastic and desperate
attempt to avert an economic recession. Yet the interest rates paid by
US companies with medium credit rating have hardly declined. And these
companies are more numerous – in the past two years many have lost their
blue-chip status and with it their access to cheap credit.
What makes the problem immeasurably worse is that US companies
are losing their ability to increase prices. From cars to computers to
chicken dinners, sale volumes can only be maintained by offering
discounts and price cuts. And so, despite the decline in the official
interest rate, US corporate debt – similar in size to that owed by all
Third World countries – is actually getting more expensive. This is an
important sign of the powerful deflationary pressures that have started
to assert themselves within the US economy.
As well as slashing interest rates, the US government has
ordered huge tax cuts and a big increase in military spending, helping
to boost profits of the giant industrial corporations from Ford to
Boeing who make the weapons. The aim of this electricshock therapy has
been to revive growth. Without these unprecedented measures, the US
would already be in the midst of a devastating wave of bankruptcies and
an extremely severe recession.
The Bush administration senses that the US economy is just one
recession away from entering a Japanese-style deflationary spiral. As
Japan has discovered and Germany is now discovering, from this there is
no escape. Five years ago, there was a joke. “What’s the difference
between Japan and the US/Europe?” The answer was: “Five Years”.
This is not just another economic crisis. And neither is the
coming war on Iraq just another war against a “rogue state”.
How are the two connected? We can put this another way: how is
the very nature of the war on Iraq determined by the overall context, of
a capitalist world economy on the verge of a global depression?
Oil, the “privileged commodity”
Oil behaves completely differently from all other raw material
commodities. Contrast oil with sugar or coffee, with base metals, with
cotton or even coal… world market prices for many of these commodities
are at thirty-year lows and are well below their costs of production.
Even this understates the situation: while the Third World’s non-oil
export prices have plunged, the price of imports from the rich countries
have risen uninterruptedly. The combined effect of falling prices for
raw material exports and rising import prices for manufactured imports
is known as “unequal exchange”, a form of exploitation and inequality
intrinsic to imperialism that has shaped today’s world of extremes of
wealth and poverty. Its direct effect is that Third World raw material
producers have, over the past three decades, lost up to 80% of their
purchasing power.
Fidel Castro called oil the “privileged commodity”. There are
two special characteristics of oil that give it this status. Whereas
coffee grows at a certain altitude, and sugar cane is produced in
countries with similar tropical climate, oil is found in the land and
below the oceans; it may be near the surface or it may be under miles of
rock; it may be forty below or forty degrees in the shade.
To the extent that the world oil price bears any relation to
production costs, what matters with oil is its marginal cost of
production. As the oil price rises, higher-cost oilfields become
profitable and come on stream, increasing supply and reducing upward
price pressure until oil finds its natural price, which therefore
reflects production costs in the most marginal field. Those with much
lower production costs can reap super profits. This is why oil is a
source of profits like no other raw material.
Arising in part from the allure of these super profits, the
second special feature of oil is that it is not just a commodity, not
just a source of fuel. In a way that isn’t true of any other important
raw material, control over sources and reserves of oil confers political
power. Because of this, oil’s world market price bears very little
relationship to its costs of production. Access to and control over, oil
supplies is an economic imperative, a political imperative and a
military imperative. Japan discovered the truth of the last of these in
1940, when the US Navy’s sixth fleet blockaded oil shipments to Japan
from the Middle East, provoking Pearl Harbour and the entry of the US
into WW2.
Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not just the site of 70%
of the world's proven oil reserves; it is so easy to extract the oil
that production costs are often lower than $1 per barrel. With oil
prices bouncing around $30 a barrel, profits are astronomical.
Oil companies, banks, arms manufacturers and others from the
imperialist countries capture the lion's share of oil profits, another
slice is taken by local elites and royal families – yet workers and
farmers across the Middle East face high and rising unemployment,
declining wages and agricultural prices, collapsing public services, and
brutal repression of their democratic rights.
A prime motive for the US/UK drive to war is to recapture from
their rivals the biggest slice of Iraqi - and Iranian – oil profits.
They resent the free reign that French, Russian and Chinese and other
oil companies enjoy in markets largely closed off to them by their own
belligerence.
The coming war on Iraq is the sharpest point of friction between
the imperialist powers. In going to war on Iraq, the US ruling families
are seeking to use military might to advance their economic interests
at the expense of their rivals. This is the logic that leads to World
War 3.
While Pentagon planners are busy choreographing the coming
air-war, top US lawyers are hard at work planning legal challenges to
Iraq’s current contracts with French, Russian and Chinese companies.
International law says that contracts survive changes of government, but
the US government’s disdain for international law is even more
pronounced in the economic arena than elsewhere...
Some conclusions
Why, then, is Britain going to war?
Along with its nuclear weapons and permanent seat on the UN
Security Council, Britain’s ability to punch above its weight on the
world stage derives from the huge empire of wealth amassed by its ruling
families in other peoples’ countries, the Middle East in particular.
This is why Blair’s alliance with Bush is not slavish, it is not
the relationship between a poodle and its master, it is the mutual
self-interest of two imperialist powers that for different reasons need
each other.
The British government has made the realistic calculation that,
if it does not accompany the US to war, it will be cut loose by
Washington. It knows that the US would show no sentiment in converting
Britain from an ally into a rival, and would be quite ruthless in
cutting the British Empire down to size. For their part, France and
Germany would relish the opportunity to avenge Britain’s disruption of
their efforts to forge a common European economic and military policy.
So, the short answer to our question is – Britain is going to war
because the US is going to war.
So why is the US going to war? The US rulers have a range of interlinked economic and political motives.
US imperialism is forced to go to war because the deflationary
slump that stalks the US economy can only be kept at bay by increasing
its share of super-profits. In a stagnant world economy, this means
cutting into their rivals’ share. War is not an aberration, it results
from the normal functioning of capitalism and imperialism.
A successful invasion of Iraq would – so the extremists who
dominate the Bush administration Bush believe – deal a demoralising blow
to the Palestinians and the oppressed masses of other Arab countries.
Bush and friends are well aware of the peoples’ outraged
hostility to US support for Israel and preparations for war against
Iraq. They know that a growing majority despise them and their corrupt
client regimes. The radicalisation of the Arab peoples peoples is
forcing the corrupt regimes into conflict with Washington and London,
making them less pliant and useful than in the past.
This political radicalisation, in the context of
sharply-declining living standards and deepening economic crisis,
threatens to provoke revolutions, and the US needs to be ready to
intervene. Confidence in the repressive powers of the Arab regimes is
draining away. The US rulers have decided that they cannot continue to
rule over the Middle East in the old way, through its Israeli garrison
and through the servile dictatorships that they have put in power.
Neither can the US empire place too much reliance on its Israel.
$3 billion of annual military aid is enough to preserve Israel’s
military supremacy over its neighbours; Israel serves as a garrison and
an important forward military base for imperialism, however it cannot
substitute for a direct imperialist military presence. The US rulers can
no longer rely on others to do the job - one reason why the Bush
administration has concluded that it must go to war, to carve out a base
for the tens or even hundreds of thousands of troops that it intends to
permanently station in the region.
“Baghdad or bust” was how one newspaper described US policy.
This gormless phrase sums up what’s at stake. If the US fails to take
and hold Iraq, the world’s final empire will receive a terrible blow,
one that would threaten to turn its decline into a tail-spin.
The coming war will be the first in a series of wars which the
US will wage in a doomed attempt to restore its failing empire.
We mustn’t be mesmerised by the military might of the US. US
military strength stands in contrast to its economic weakness and
fragility. The US is not trying to impose stability, it is trying to
recapture the ground it has lost over the past quarter century. It is
trying to use weapons to reverse the course of history. Mission
impossible! There are no weapons, which can do this! Their ultimate
defeat is certain. What is unknown is how much of the Middle East and
the world they will take with them before they are finally forced to
retreat.
From our examination of Britain’s long history of imperialist
aggression against Iraq and its exploitation of Iraq’s people and
natural resources, one outstanding feature emerges: the wealth of
Britain’s ruling rich, and also the living standards of their subjects,
depend to a very large extent on Britain’s continued ability to suck
wealth and profits from the rest of the world. In other words, Britain
is a parasitic and decrepit imperialist power par excellence, which
relies ever more on the protection offered by US military power.
While Suez was a key moment in the decline of the British
Empire; in the current crisis, the British Empire is staring into its
grave.
If we don’t wish to follow the British Empire into its grave, we
must become its gravediggers. We must break the centuryold alliance
between labour and capital that has cost the peoples of Iraq, Vietnam,
Africa, Ireland, India and other countries so dear, and join with them
in building a movement strong enough to disarm the imperialists and
confiscate their obscene wealth.
We have reached a fork in the road. Socialism, or barbarism; or,
as the Cuban people say, revolución o muerte – revolution or death!
March 16, 2003
NOTES
i. Iraq Must Go! – Charles Glass in London Review of Books, 3 October 2002
ii. Doreen Warriner, Land Reform and Development in the Middle
East (London, 1987), quoted in From Sumer to Saddam, by Geoff Simons
iii. See Simons, pp244-252
iv. DF Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins 1917-1960, quoted in Simons, op cit
v. Out of the Ashes – the Resurrecction of Saddam Hussein Patrick & Andrew
Cockburn (HarperPerennial, 1999) (pp 74-5)
vi. Saïd Aburish, The Brutal Han dd shake – the West and the Arab Elite (pp134-143)
vii. Figures on investment flows and other economic data are
from UNCTAD’s World Develeopment Reoprts and from the Office of National
Statistics, cited in Labour Aristocracy and Imperialism, by David Yaffe
in Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism (see www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk)
viii. 14 September 2002
This article is
copyright by John Smith.
href="mailto:mailto:johncsmith@btinternet.com">Contact John
Smith with any comments or criticisms. John's website, with other
articles, is at Raging Wave.
href="why_war.pdf">Download this article in pdf
format
Page
updated 31.10.05
BACK TO TOP
My address from 30.04.12 is 14 Holly Bank Grove, York YO24 4EA, U.K.
contact me on: 01904 621510
info@paulboizot.co.uk
This website is best viewed at a screen resolution of 800 x 600
pixels - at 640 x 480 everything will look bigger,
at 1024 x 768 you may need a magnifying glass. I have tested
it on Opera 7.11, Netscape 6.2 and Internet Explorer 6. It may
not display properly in older browsers that do not support CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) - it will lack text formatting,
background colours, etc.