Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Written: 1992.
First Published: October 1992.
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The two statements presented here were issued jointly by the LTT of Belgium and Germany and the WIL of Britain together with other groups. The first, which was produced during the crisis preceding the imperialist attack on Iraq, was drafted by the WIL and signed by other organisations in the Liaison Committee. The second was produced during the war itself and was a joint statement between the LTT and the Internationalist Faction of the LIT.
Workers everywhere must mobilise against the enormous imperialist military build-up in the Middle East which is preparing for war against Iraq. The United Nations ultimatum to Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait by January 15 is the clearest warning that imperialism is prepared to unleash the bloodiest conflict for decades. UN sanctions are, no less than the huge deployment of Western forces to the Gulf, the means for preparing imperialist war.
These measures have the almost universal support of the leaders of social democratic and Stalinist parties and trade union confederations on an international scale. Workers must demand not only that their leaders break from supporting the imperialist war drive, but actively seek to break the UN blockade of Iraq. In the event of war, they must resolutely fight for the victory of Iraq and for the defeat of their ‘own’ governments.
Ranged against Iraq is the largest US military force assembled since the Vietnam war, with substantial contingents from Britain and other imperialist powers. They have also succeeded in gaining the support of the openly pro-imperialist regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey, which are deeply dependent on the West both economically and militarily. Faced with the collapse of Stalinist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, and its own acute crisis, Gorbachev and the Soviet bureaucracy have sanctioned and supported imperialist intervention in an attempt to gain Western aid to shore up its collapsing economy. Gorbachev's ‘condition’ of UN control over a military strike against Iraq is nothing more than a cover for supporting US gunboat diplomacy.
Because of its vital economic interests and its need to maintain the supply of cheap oil, imperialism has sought throughout the 20th century to control the Gulf region through the policy of divide and rule. It has systematically denied the right of self-determination to the Arab masses, drawn and redrawn the map with the diplomat’s pen and supported the most reactionary regimes. Unlike its role during the war against Iran, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 1 represented a major threat to the status quo. The military response to Iraq has nothing to do with ‘human rights’, and everything to do with imperialist oil interests.
But the military build-up in Saudi Arabia has intensified the crisis of the Arab bonapartist regimes. In particular, Jordan has not been able to openly join the imperialist front. Under pressure from the Jordanian and Palestinian masses since August, King Hussein made desperate efforts to achieve a settlement between Baghdad and Washington. Any compromise involving possible Kuwaiti territorial concessions to Iraq would have as its object the stabilisation of all the region's reactionary regimes against the prospect of popular unrest.
President Bush and other Western leaders have justified their onslaught by invoking international law, the defence of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian sovereignty and the rights of the ‘legitimate’ government of Kuwait. International law, so-called, is a fig leaf for imperialist interests. It serves, under the auspices of the United Nations, as a framework to underwrite and legitimise imperialist plunder throughout the world, whilst maintaining a discreet silence over such events as the US invasion of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), the bombing of Libya (1986) and the support given to such murderous counter-revolutionary movements as Unita in Angola, the Contras in Nicaragua, the death squads in El Salvador and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
American imperialism’s pose as the defender of small nations is a hollow fraud. No less is its feigned concern for the population of lraq. Bush has obliquely referred to the gas-bombing of the Kurdish town of Hallabjah by Saddam Hussein’'s regime in 1988, although at the time the United States, Britain and France were increasing credits to Iraq to sustain its war against Iran, while West Germany and Israel were supplying Iraq with raw materials for the manufacture of chemical weapons. As recently as April 1990, US credits to Iraq were announced.
US support for Israel (despite occasional rebukes to Israel designed to pacify the Arab bourgeoisie) has not lessened one iota despite the Zionist regime’s massacres in the Lebanon or its brutal suppression of Palestinian Intifada.
The invasion of Kuwait threw the world stock exchanges into panic as the prospect of a rapid rise in the price of oil resurrected the spectre of the slump of the mid-1970s. Against a background of steadily rising inflation in the imperialist countries, Iraq’s effective control of a substantial portion of the world’s oil reserves poses a direct challenge to their existing trading relations with Arab oil producers. The imperialists’ fears were rapidly confirmed as oil prices rocketed. As the price of oil escalated, so did the scale of military intervention.
The rallying cries in Western capitals to defend ‘poor little Kuwait’ areas hypocritical as the crocodile tears shed for ‘gallant little Belgium’ in August 1914. As for the ‘legitimate’ government of Kuwait, the Emir and the royal family have ruled without even the semblance of a parliament since 1986, and head what leading writer Fred Halliday describes as ‘a viciously reactionary state with an untarnished record as a supporter of imperialist interests’. Kuwait – like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrein and Oman – is an entirely artificial creation of imperialism, carved out to safeguard oil production after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Historically and culturally it does not constitute a nation. At the time of the Iraqi invasion over half its population, including almost all workers, were foreign nationals. For these reasons, there can be no question of Kuwaiti self-determination. The artificial divisions imposed on the Arab population of the Middle East can only be resolved through the creation of a Socialist United States of the Middle East.
Whilst we unconditionally defend Iraq against imperialist intervention, we condemn the arrest of Iraqi oppositionists, including members of the Iraqi Communist Party, in Kuwait, and demand their immediate release. There have been widespread reports of Iraqi soldiers raping Asian women. If there is any truth in these stories, we unreservedly condemn such actions. Workers in Kuwait must have full rights to organise within trade unions and join political parties of their choice.
Iraq’s motives for invading Kuwait are not a mystery. By the time that a ceasefire had ended the Gulf War, Iraq had accumulated a foreign debt of $70-85 billion. The cost of the war had been exacerbated by the steep fall in oil prices in 1986 – a slide which was followed by four years of stagnation. Saddam Hussein’s revival of Iraq's long-standing claim to Kuwait is an act of self-preservation by the Iraqi bourgeoisie and Ba’athist state bureaucracy against the Western stranglehold over the oil market, which followed the decline of OPEC’s bargaining powers. A mixture of ultra-lefts, pacifists and reformists will chorus: ‘But Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party are butchers, who have been the hangmen of Iraqi workers and of the Kurds. You cannot possibly give any support to such a regime.’
We hold no illusions in the viciously anti-working class character of Hussein’s government, but neither are we abstract moralists opposed to all wars. Iraq remains a semi-colony of imperialism, largely dependent upon the sale of crude oil. In spite of Hussein’s intentions of pursuing good relations with the West, Iraq faces a direct conflict with the major imperialist powers. As Trotsky wrote, only cowards, scoundrels or complete imbeciles can remain neutral in such a confrontation. We lend full military support to an Iraqi victory, and stand for the breaking of the UN blockade and for the defeat of all imperialist and Arab interventionist forces. But we do not lend any political support to the Baghdad regime.
A genuine anti-imperialist struggle cannot base itself upon the political and economic agenda of the Iraqi bourgeoisie. On the contrary it requires international solidarity between Arab workers and the clearest support for Kurdish self-determination. The role of the Ba’athist regime has been to suppress the democratic and national rights of the Kurds, and has enabled Barzani’s DPK to ally itself with Turkey-support which has assisted the Turkish regime in attacking the PKK and strengthening its position in Kurdistan.
We do not call upon workers to suspend the class struggle either in Iraq or Kuwait, nor do we call for the Kurdish minority in Iraq to abandon its struggle for self-determination. But we warn of the danger of any section of Kurds seeking to join an imperialist-sponsored attack on Iraq. Kurdish self-determination, denied for so long by the imperialists, will not be won in alliance with imperialism!
We call for independent workers’ and peasants’ mobilisations against the imperialist threat, and warn the Arab masses that the Iraqi bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying through the struggle to the finish – let alone liberating Palestine. We fight imperialism not by Holy War but with the methods of the class struggle.
‘But wouldn’t victory strengthen capitalism in Iraq?’, some ultra-lefts persist. The logic of such a position is to deny the legitimacy of all wars of national liberation, which contain the possibility of enlarging the sphere of operations of the semi-colonial bourgeoisie. This is indeed the goal of Saddam Hussein’s dream of a ‘Greater Iraq’. But an Iraqi victory would – as the popular demonstrations in Jordan and Tunisia indicate – greatly raise the self-confidence of the Arab masses, and facilitate the struggle against the Arab bourgeoisie, the sultans, sheikhs and emirs. It would also undermine the foundations of the Ba’athist regime and facilitate its overthrow by the Iraqi working class. An imperialist defeat would conversely mean a serious blow for Bush, Major and Co.
The Soviet bureaucracy’s offer to underwrite imperialist intervention is entirely in line with its counter-revolutionary pursuit of ‘regional settlements’, and in accord with its treacherous record during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. Throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, workers must demand:
* Break off all bi-partisan agreements with the imperialists!
* Full support for Iraq!
To workers internationally, particularly in Europe and the United States, we say:
* Break the blockade!
* Boycott the movement of all war materials!
* Demand that the social democratic, labour and communist parties and the trade unions break with the bourgeoisie and the UN. Organise class action to defeat imperialist intervention!
* Oppose all attempts to whip up anti-Arab and ‘anti-Islamic’ racism and chauvinism!
* International solidarity with the Kurdish struggle against Turkish and Iraqi repression!
* Build solidarity with Iraqi workers against the Ba’athist regime!
* Turn the Iraqi struggle into a genuine anti-imperialist struggle led by the working class. Nationalise all imperialist assets under workers’ control
* For the defeat of British and American imperialism and all other interventionist forces!
* Victory to Iraq!
* For a United Socialist States of the Middle East!
Workers all over the world must come to the aid of beleaguered Iraq, attacked on all sides by imperialist forces, aided by traitors to the Arab national cause. The scale of the onslaught upon Iraq – surpassing that used against Vietnam – underlines the ongoing crisis facing the imperialist order. Despite the collapse of Stalinism in eastern Europe, no ‘new world order’ of peace and democracy has been built. The thousands of bombs and rockets used to subdue Iraq are proof that the imperialist epoch remains fundamentally the epoch of wars and revolutions.
Nobody should believe that the unfolding events in the Gulf are solely the concern of the Arab masses. The imperialists and semi-colonial governments supporting their intervention will use the war against Iraq to attack the gains and rights of the working class at home. The precedent of the Malvinas war in 1982 fully demonstrates this truth. The British Tories were able to turn the patriotic war fever they whipped up into a weapon to attack the working class and the trade unions, culminating in the defeat of the heroic miners’ strike of 1984-5.
The United Nations, far from being a force for peace, has sanctioned and supported war. This supposed ‘court’ of international law has once again shown itself to be no different from the ‘thieves kitchen’ of the League of Nations (1919-39). This defender of 'human rights’ has stood by while Allied bombers have every night unloaded greater explosive forces than were used on Hiroshima.
No socialist, no politically conscious worker, no honest defender of the rights of oppressed nations can remain neutral in this conflict. As Trotskyists, we stand alongside Iraqi workers and peasants and the Arab masses against the aggression of the imperialist allies. We fight for the victory of Iraq and for the defeat of the armies of the imperialists and their semi-colonial servants. We denounce the support given to the war by the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies.
The justification for the war – the defence of Kuwaiti sovereignty – is a grotesque farce. Kuwait is an entirely fictitious ‘nation’ created by British imperialism. Behind the smokescreen of defending the rights of a small nation, it is the allies who are once again trampling upon the rights of the Arab peoples.
The hypocrisy of US imperialism knows no bounds. It devastated Vietnam, supported dozens of military coups in Latin America, backed British armed intervention in the Malvinas, invaded Grenada and stamped upon Panama. It funds the Israeli Zionist regime, which denies Palestinian self-determination.
We dismiss the demand for Iraq to withdraw as reactionary. It is not the self-determination of the city-statelet of Kuwait which is at stake but the self-determination of the Arab peoples as a whole. The disputed borders of the region will only be solved by the formation of a socialist federation of the Middle East without emirs, sheikhs, sultans, military or pro-imperialist castes.
This is not a war between ‘democracy’ and a ‘new Hitler’. We certainly do not forget the crimes of Saddam Hussein against the Iraqi workers and the Kurdish people. It is the imperialists and the Kremlin bureaucrats who casually overlooked these acts, carried out on their behalf, when they poured weapons into Iraq. The history of the Ba'athist regime is one of military Bonapartist dictatorship in collusion with the imperialists. Like many other such regimes, the Ba’athists hid their collaboration behind ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric designed to disarm the Arab masses.
The nine-year war against Iran, launched by the Ba'athists and continued by the Iranian ayatollahs, led to millions of casualties, without the slightest gain for workers on either side. The imperialists were quite happy to let Iraq and Iran bomb each other to exhaustion then; do not believe their claims to be concerned for the Iraqi people now!
If they defeat Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, it will not be to liberate the Iraqi people but to install a new and more reliable pro-imperialist despot, with the possibility that they will reward ‘allies’ such as Turkey with territorial gains. The task of overthrowing the Hussein regime lies with the Iraqi working class alone.
On the other hand, an Iraqi victory would open the road to a revolutionary struggle to unite the Arab peoples in a socialist federation of the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalism, which has rapidly expanded with the open treachery of the Arab bourgeoisie, is incapable of uniting the workers and poor peasants of the region, as the twelve-year reign of the ayatollahs in Iran has shown. Only the building of Trotskyist parties throughout the Middle East can complete this task, and prevent Arab workers from being ground between the millstones of imperialism and bourgeois nationalism.
Our attitude to the present war is identical in content to that taken by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International in relation to the war between China and Japanese imperialism in the 1930s. China, too, was ruled by a reactionary militarist – Chiang Kai-shek – and the same arguments advanced for neutrality today, were put forward then by a mixture of ultra-lefts, pacifists and reformists. It is only necessary to substitute Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist party for Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang to understand that Trotsky’s answers have lost none of their relevance today.
We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China, just as Marx and Engels had no illusions about the ruling classes of Ireland and Poland. Chiang Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of the independence of China. Tomorrow he may again betray. It is possible. It is probable. It is even inevitable. But today he is struggling. Only cowards, scoundrels, or complete imbeciles can refuse to participate in that struggle. (Leon Trotsky on China, Pathfinder 1976, p. 568).
And again:
We do not attack Chiang Kai-shek for conducting the war. Oh no. We attack him for doing it badly, without sufficient energy, without confidence in the people and especially in the workers. (ibid., p. 573).
We advocate a programme of action through which the Iraqi workers will gain the necessary experience to evaluate the Ba’athist leadership and consider replacing it with a proletarian revolutionary one. We place no trust in Saddam Hussein: we give no political support to his regime. On the contrary, for Iraq to win the war, it is necessary to break with the methods of its ruling class. We are for arming the workers, for steep taxation on the rich, rather than deprivation for the poor, to finance the war; for a class appeal rather than a religious one to Muslim workers; for the nationalisation under workers’ control of all foreign assets; and for the right of self-determination to the Kurds.
Today imperialism poses not only as the defender of small nations and of democracy but as the defender of the environment against Iraqi use of oil slicks and chemical weapons. This self-righteous hypocrisy should not fool anyone. It is the allies who have concentrated the largest nuclear arsenal ever known in the Middle East.
They have forgotten their own nuclear and chemical pollution of the planet from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam. It is they who maintain huge stocks of foodstuffs, to keep up the rate of profit while millions go hungry. It suited the imperialists to remain silent when Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds. Today, it is the imperialists who are trying to provoke Iraq to use chemical weapons so that they can respond with ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
The same propaganda machine portrays Israel as an innocent victim of the present war. This is a lie. Since it forcibly expelled the Palestinians in 1948, Israel has been in a permanent state of war against its Arab neighbours. It is the Israeli state which has murdered hundreds of Palestinian youth during the three-year Intifada, and which today keeps the population of the occupied territories under day and night curfew. There will be no solution of the Palestinian question without the overthrow of the racist Zionist state, and the creation of a Palestinian workers’ state in which Arab and Jewish workers can live in equality.
All over the world, particularly in the metropolitan countries, rallies and demonstrations have been held against the war and for a peaceful solution. Pacifist sentiments among sections of workers and the middle class are the inevitable first response to the horrors of war. But we distinguish between the honest pacifists of the rank and file and the professional pacifism of the reformists, bourgeois liberals and Stalinists, who condemn both sides ‘equally’, and, like the imperialists, demand Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. Such forces consciously or unconsciously aid imperialism, by placing oppressor and oppressed on the same level.
Revolutionary Marxists (i.e. Trotskyists) know that a peaceful imperialism is impossible. Only when the oppressors are themselves disarmed and their system of exploitation overthrown will it be possible for the nations of the world to live alongside each other peacefully. For this reason, we are opposed to a United Nations ‘peace’ settlement imposed upon the Middle East. Such a settlement, built upon the bones of Iraqi workers, would only be the prelude to new wars and new devastation wreaked upon the region.
In the face of the sharpest nationalist and chauvinist pressures, we insist upon the just nature of Iraq’s fight, in spite of the Ba’athist leadership. Iraq's real crime in the eyes of the allies is not that it invaded another state – after all Syria has not been prevented from Balkanising the Lebanon – but that it encourages the Arab peoples to seek to control the oil resources of the region in their own interests.
The development of the struggle in the Gulf from crisis to war has demonstrated a new stage of the political fracturing of Arab bourgeois unity. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Syria and the Gulf sheikhdoms have openly joined hands with the allies to attack an Arab ‘brother’. Meanwhile, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia, Sudan and Algeria, faced with a tide of support for Iraq at home, have maintained a cowardly neutrality.
In Latin America the situation is similar, with some governments verbally condemning Iraq and supporting the blockade (Brazil, Uruguay), while Menem of Argentina, dreaming of economic rewards from the imperialists, has sent naval forces to the Gulf. Internationally, the social democrat and ‘labour’ parties in government (France, Spain, Australia, Belgium etc.) have directly supported military intervention. While some reformist parties in opposition have tried to ride the anti-war tide, the British Labour leadership (as in 1982) has fully endorsed the Tories’ imperialist war drive.
In the wars of 1967 and 1973, the Soviet bureaucracy gave a purely verbal and hypocritical semi-support to its Arab allies against Israel. This time, the Stalinists have openly lined up with the imperialists against Iraq. The support of the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies – whatever their reservations – has been a vital source of strength and justification for the allied invasion. No longer able even to pose as a counterweight in the Middle East to imperialist ambitions, the Stalinists now endorse not only imperialist diplomacy but imperialist war in the hope of securing loans to bale out their collapsing economies. In return, America, Britain and their allies have maintained a diplomatic silence over Soviet repression in the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania.
The Gulf war has once more demonstrated the depth of the crisis of working class leadership all over the world. No national programme can answer the challenge of the present situation or forge a genuine international unity of the working class and the oppressed masses of the world.
War necessarily puts every theory and every programme to the sharpest test in practice. Today genuine internationalists are swimming against the stream in a small minority. But a principled and correct attitude to the vital questions of this period – and particularly war – will advance the struggle of those fighting to rebuild a genuine world party of socialist revolution, the Fourth International.
Inseparably from this strategic task, revolutionaries must strive for the widest possible united front action around principled anti-imperialist demands. We condemn all those self-proclaimed ‘Trotskyist’ tendencies which have failed clearly and unequivocally to call for the victory of Iraq and for the defeat of the imperialist and allied interventionist forces (especially of their own country). We call upon militants within such organisations to recall their leaders to order and demand that the anti-war struggle be conducted upon the basis of the principles laid down by the Communist International under Lenin and in the founding documents of the Fourth International.
We say:In defence of Marxism Index (1992-1996)
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