Today in Iraq

We've Done It Before, So Why All The Shock?: Many people seem to forget, or perhaps never knew, that the United States, like other advanced capitalist countries, has been aggressively expansionist from the beginning. From the moment of its founding, it has been driven to extend its domain on behalf of the dominant economic group and has used force to do so. The logic of the US slave system drove the United States to annex Texas and wage war on Mexico. Later, the logic of capitalism drove the US state to acquire the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii and Samoa as colonies and semi-colonies and dependencies, and to intervene militarily over and over again in Latin America to establish an effective suzerainty over the Western hemisphere. The same logic demanded wars be fought in the post WWII period, on north Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, as the weakening of Japan, Germany, Britain, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, opened up space for the US to pursue profit-making opportunities for its corporations on a worldwide basis. (I use corporation throughout in its broadest sense, to include manufacturing, service, resource-extractive and financial corporations.) Countries that stood in the way, that nationalized assets owned by US corporations and closed their doors to further exploitation by US economic interests, were attacked, if not militarily, then in other ways. The same logic is behind aggression, by threat of military intervention, economic blockade, and the financing of internal subversion, carried out today against Cuba, north Korea, Belarus, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Iran - all countries which rank at the very top of the list of states considered by Washington to be economically "unfree" (that is, that block, limit or place conditions on US investment and exports.) Viewed within the context of US history, and the social and economic forces which have shaped Washington's foreign policy, the US aggression against Iraq can be seen to be part of this coherent whole, not an anomaly that has sprung from an immanent lust for power residing deep in the psyches of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, nor a consequence of a unique set of events arising out of a social-economic vacuum. This has important implications for understanding what realistic options are available to those who seek to change this recurrent pattern of war, of domination, and of spoliation of foreign countries. New personalities won't do it, because personalities aren't the cause. Third parties alone won't do it, because third parties, as any other, are subordinate to the same systemic logic that has driven all parties in power, whether conservative, liberal, socialist and even communist (e.g. Yugoslavia) to pursue policies that facilitate the profit-making of the dominant economic class, including by the use of force to extort or secure opportunities from unwilling third countries. The solution is to step outside (to overthrow) the logic that compels this behavior, not to tolerate it or assume wrongly it can be tamed and harnessed. (...) Asked by a French reporter whether it was cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosives to kill innocent people, Larbi Ben M'hidi, leader of the resistance against the French colonial occupation of Algeria, turned the question around. "And doesn't it seem more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets." Contrary to the impression that could be easily formed from media accounts of armed resistance to the US and British occupation of Iraq, those engaged in hostile acts against occupation forces and collaborationist Iraqi police and military personnel are not, in the main, al-Qaeda fighters who have poured into Iraq from other predominantly Islamic countries. They're Iraqis retaliating against the invasion of their country. All but a small percentage of political prisoners held by US forces are Iraqi citizens (Washington Post, May 10, 2005). Likewise, the impression created by the media of resistance activities being comprised largely of an endless series of attacks on Iraqi civilians by suicide bombers is also wrong. To be sure, suicide bombings that kill Iraqi civilians occur, and they occur regularly enough, but they do not occur with anywhere near the frequency of attacks on occupying military forces, their adjuncts, and Iraqi collaborators. Imperialism has only ever been defeated by the recalcitrance of the natives, and the resistance of Iraqis to the blatant attempt by Anglo-American forces to dominate Iraq to exploit the country's land, labor and resources, is progressive, necessary and inevitable. As author Tariq Ali told the Stop the War Peace Conference held in London, last December, "the resistance is fighting for us all". It's tempting to come up with a single motive to explain the US-British take-over of Iraq, but while the impetus of securing profit-making opportunities for US and British oil companies was probably central to the decision-making of US planners, it's unlikely that it was the only, or even the chief, factor. Instead, it seems more likely that a complex of forces and motives impelled the US toward war on Iraq. One such factor is the necessity of destroying a counterexample to the self-serving trade and investment policies the US prescribes for less-developed countries. Under the government of Saddam Hussein, Iraq used its oil resources to build an economy that had many features of a socialist economy: free education through university; state-owned enterprises; subsidies to keep the prices of necessities low; a full-employment policy; and a healthcare system that was the envy of the Middle East. These achievements were secured by rejecting the model of an economy open to exploitation by the corporations of advanced capitalist countries, like the United States. Iraq's constitution, for example, defined Iraq's oil resources as the property of the people of Iraq, not as resources the oil majors of the US, Britain and other advanced capitalist powers could claim title to and exploit for their own narrow aims. As a model for how a post-colonial society could develop, Iraq was an anathema to the governments of the First World, for Iraq's economic nationalist policies negated the very goal to which the foreign policy of the advanced capitalist countries is directed: securing profit-making opportunities for their own corporations. Iraq rejected this model, adopting a set of counter-policies, which together with the country's native petroleum wealth, allowed it to thrive, while Third World countries that accepted the self-serving prescriptions of the First World for how a Third World country should develop, remained mired in poverty and thwarted in their development. Were all Third World countries to follow in Iraq's footsteps, the corporations of the First World would be doubly disadvantaged. First, they would incur the cost of lost opportunity, and second, Third World enterprises, developing behind protective barriers, might grow large enough to challenge their First World counterparts. For governments imbued by their economies with the mission of promoting the profit-making opportunities of their corporate communities, the prospect is intolerable. The solution is to crush the counter-example, and in the process, to send a warning to other countries inspired to follow the same path: develop outside the self-serving parameters we set, and we'll crush you. (...) So long as there is oppression, there will be resistance. It's naïve to think Washington is oblivious to the connection between its actions and the retaliatory actions it demonizes as terrorism. The connection is clear. However, the US state cannot, as a matter of choice, simply stop acting in ways that victimize weak countries, ways that impel partisans of those countries to strike back. Washington is under a structural compulsion to pursue a predatory foreign policy, which means it can't deal with the backlash its foreign policy generates by choosing to pursue a different path (a non-interventionist or "democratic" foreign policy.) Imperialism is the only option it can pursue so long as the organizing principle of US society is the pursuit of profit. It must, then, use force to limit the backlash as best it can. Conflict is inevitable, and it's the only path through which the US imperialist bloc can pursue its foreign policy and the only path through which its opponents can defeat it. For purposes of building support for a war, the US state prefers to spin fantastical tales of Tehran seeking to covertly develop nuclear weapons to "wipe Israel off the map," presumably in a direct nuclear attack on the Zionist state. The "wipe Israel off the map" line, attributed to Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is twisted to give it a sinister meaning: that Iran seeks to destroy every man, women and child living in Israel. This isn't the case. What Ahmadinejad would like to wipe off the map is Israel as an idea, that of a Jewish state based on the expulsion of Palestinians and discrimination against Arabs who remain in Israel; Zionism, in other words. Interpreting Ahmadinejad's words as a promised campaign of genocide to be carried out against Israeli Jews is tantamount to saying anyone who called for the Third Reich to be wiped off the face of the map was calling for the genocide of Germans. This deliberate, demagogic misinterpretation serves a purpose: to build public support for a war on Iran. If an attack on Iran comes, by US cruise missiles or B2s or Israeli warplanes carrying US-supplied bunker busters to penetrate deep into the earth to cripple Iran's fledging subterranean nuclear power industry, the fundamental reasons for the attack will remain hidden. But the main forces that drive the US to war will be the same as those that compelled the US, with British assistance, to attack Iraq: to replace an economically nationalist regime that has largely walled off the country from US and British capital, and is developing outside the self-serving parameters established by Washington. There will also be subsidiary factors, unique to Iran, which add or detract from these forces (e.g., the link between Iran and pro-Palestinian groups which threatens the viability of a country that acts as an enforcer in the Middle East on behalf of US interests.) If an attack comes, it will only be a military manifestation of an aggression already begun, one based now on the threat of the use of force, diplomatic pressure and the fomenting of internal subversion. This is part of a pattern that reaches back to the founding of the US, and has characterized the behavior of all advanced capitalist states. If the aggressions now being undertaken by Washington against Iran escalate to war, we shouldn't be shocked. It has been done before.