Of all the political problems agitating the more advanced, progressive, class-conscious workers and oppressed everywhere, the most thorny is the role of the USSR and China in the Middle East crisis. Why have they seemingly united with the imperialist bourgeoisie, their irreconcilable class enemy, in an adventure whose military dimensions are so open-ended it can only strengthen the hand of the imperialist militarists against them both?
True, the first vote in the UN Security Council on Aug. 2 only said they were "alarmed by the invasion of Kuwait on August 2 by the military forces of Iraq," that "there exists a breach of international peace and security as regards the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait," and that under Articles 39 and 40 of the UN Charter they "condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."
The resolution called on Iraq and Kuwait to immediately begin intensive negotiations, saying that the Security Council would meet again and if necessary consider "further steps to insure compliance with the resolution." That's all.
Then on Aug. 6, they met again and decided that "all states shall prevent the import into their territories of all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait or exported therefrom."
On Aug. 9, another resolution stated they were "gravely alarmed by the declaration by Iraq of a `comprehensive and eternal merger with Kuwait' " and again demanded that Iraq withdraw immediately and unconditionally. It decided that the annexation of Kuwait by Iraq had no legal validity.
However, the Secretary General of the UN, Javier Perez de Cuellar, has had to publicly complain, although in veiled diplomatic language, that the UN Security Council did not authorize the U.S. military buildup. Since then, the USSR has proposed a multilateral UN force.
As we said last week, "By asking for UN intervention rather than the unilateral intervention of the imperialist powers, [the USSR] demonstrated a fear that this may turn into a general conflagration going far beyond the occupation of Iraq." It was a sign that the USSR was pulling back. Now this has been fully confirmed.
"Soviet objections have so far been the main cause of the United States' inability to win Security Council backing for the use of force to uphold the embargo of Iraq, diplomats [at the UN] say," reports the New York Times in an Aug. 22 front-page article.
Perhaps just as significantly, New York Newsday of the same date writes that "The ambassador from China, one of the five nations with veto power in the Security Council, said yesterday his country is `opposed to military involvement by big powers' in the Persian Gulf conflict. The statement carries an implicit criticism of the U.S."
What is the significance of all this? What does it mean when the two countries once considered the firmest pillars of the socialist camp first vote for the condemnation and embargo and then pull back?
Did they at first join in with the imperialists because both of them are oil producers and can get some narrow, temporary economic gains as a result of higher prices? Or was it a subtle attempt to get the imperialist colossus somewhat off their backs and into a war in which the U.S. would get mired down for a protracted period without China and the USSR getting involved?
This vacillation back and forth is not based upon the duplicity characteristic of bourgeois imperialist diplomacy. It reflects a far deeper problem. It flows from the dual character of the Soviet Union and China. Both are workers' states born out of great socialist revolutions, but with serious deformations in their state structures arising from their inability to completely root out the previous social systems, which were based upon class oppression.
Their domestic and foreign policy reflects the sociological duality of these workers' states: on the one hand are those forces which carry considerable baggage from the old class society, on the other are those who press forward. These two forces have been in irreconcilable struggle since day one of both revolutions. And this is reflected in the dual character of their foreign policy.
Unless one understands the root of the problem, no clear analysis can be made of the complex international situation in which both countries are involved.
Gorbachev's bourgeois reforms in the Soviet Union have been accompanied by an accommodating and capitulationist relation to imperialism and in particular to the U.S. Now U.S. imperialism has gone too far and alarmed the Soviet leaders.
Similar circumstances motivate Chinese diplomacy as well. Before they crushed the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Beijing last June, they found the imperialist monopolies becoming as aggressive as they were almost 100 years ago. Now that they've become even more hostile, the Chinese leaders would welcome a period of relief from the imposed political and economic isolation.
The continuing antagonism between the opposing class forces within the workers' states will be accompanied by serious setbacks and great advances, until the inevitable downfall of world imperialism and the final victory of socialism.
Now that President Bush has finally uttered the word "hostages," it is sure to inflame and poison public opinion in order to obscure the real causes of U.S. intervention in the Middle East.
As in the Iran crisis, both liberal and conservative historians will undoubtedly bring up the Tripolitan War (1801-05 in what is now part of Libya) between the young U.S. government and what were then called the "Barbary pirates" in order to show how earlier U.S. presidents, from Adams to Jefferson to Madison, dealt with a "hostage" crisis in the Mediterranean.
The moderates are sure to argue once again that a careful, wise policy of disengagement brought the hostage vessels and their crews safely home. But the rabid interventionists will say that it was the tough policy of sending U.S. warships to northern Africa that paid off.
That long-ago struggle is worth considering, but only in the broader perspective of the transition from 19th century commercial capitalism to today's monopoly capitalist imperialism. Only by considering such developments as milestones in the evolution of capitalism can a Marxist hope to arrive at correct tactical and strategic positions in relation to the present U.S. intervention in the Middle East.
In the early 19th century, the main problem for U.S. capitalism in relation to European affairs was to ward off or to limit the power of Great Britain, France and Spain in the Western Hemisphere. The interests of U.S. commercial imperialism in Europe were peripheral to their basic economic, political and strategic interests.
The principal thrust of the U.S. at that time was into the Western Hemisphere and what they called the Far East. The basis for U.S. commercial imperialism was the existence of slavery, the bulwark for the growth and development of what is today global U.S. finance capital.
Presidents Adams, Jefferson and Madison had various options available to them on how to deal with what were called "pirates." They finally extricated themselves from a naval intervention in the Mediterranean. Really and truly, the U.S. only established a presence of any significance in the Middle East in 1866 when, through the American Protestant Mission, it established the Syrian Protestant College, which later became the American University of Beirut.
For serious, revolutionary, class-conscious workers and progressives to focus on the so-called hostage crisis is to fix on the most superficial element in what is rapidly becoming a world crisis; it is to become manipulated by the capitalist media, which milks humanitarian instincts in order to conceal the fundamental causes of the U.S. intervention. How they loved to cry "Remember the Maine!" — William Randolph Hearst's phony slogan in 1898. How they wept crocodile tears in 1914 over "Little Serbia" after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, just like those shed for "little Kuwait" today — Bush's own choice terminology.
The remarkable difference between the present and the epoch of the Barbary Wars lies in the virtual impossibility of American finance capital in this day and age being able to extricate itself from its vast dominions, from its truly fabulous empire of oil and other resources. It is totally committed to the military, political and strategic positions of a worldwide colossus, and must everywhere seek to overcome all obstacles standing in its way in the drive for global hegemony.
The springboard for the transition from early commercial imperialism to imperialism in the age of nuclear bombs and satellites is the scientific-technological revolution. The real pirates of the 19th and 20th centuries have been able to monopolize and develop technology as against the vast majority of the world's population. Their power, at least superficially, rests on this "feat."
At rock bottom, however, the source of their domination is the exploitation and oppression of untold millions of workers and peasants, from the mountains of Peru to the cotton fields of Georgia and Alabama, from the textile mills of New England to the oilfields of Arabia.
While all this must be said, it would be wholly one-sided and purely academic if we did not point out that the overriding tendency in both early and late capitalist development is to collapse like a house of cards under the pressure of the inherent contradictions which it accumulates over decades. Notwithstanding periods when it can stave off financial panics and short-term economic recessions, the inherent tendency is towards decay and collapse. Only militarization, only the development of a virtual behemoth of a military-industrial complex serving the oil monopolies and supported by the superbanks has been able to hold off the inevitable day of reckoning.
The existence of a sharp recession is now openly admitted in the capitalist press. The hope of the military is that their adventure in the Middle East will divert the oncoming economic crisis and set in motion a new upward phase in the capitalist cycle of development. But this is an utterly false perspective and disregards the entire history of the first and second world wars.
It conceals that which should be brought to the fore: Military intervention, even the militarization of the country, merely accelerates or delays the inherent tendencies present in peacetime.
The same economic laws which prevail during peacetime prevail in wartime. They are not abolished; they merely take on a different form. What has been temporarily stifled eventually reappears.
Do we need examples? Is it not a fact that the principal cause of the First World War was the growing predominance of German capitalist industry in competition with the British, who boasted that the sun would never set on their empire?
Consider the gargantuan efforts of the U.S. to contain the economic development of Japan. First it mobilized all its statecraft, then its military might, ending up with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But have not the same inherent tendencies reappeared, even more vigorously?
Two world wars for the redivision of the booty, the sweat and blood of millions of workers and peasants in the oppressed countries, have in no way changed the fundamental tendencies — the aggressive character of imperialist finance capital, the growth of giant multinational corporations, and their thrust for superprofits in virtually every corner of the globe.
It is now being said (New York Times, Aug. 20, p. 6) that among other factors behind its Middle East intervention, the U.S. is seeking to reestablish its world hegemony in the light of the reassertion of economic power by Japan and Germany. There is also the growing significance of the struggling people of the Middle East and the vast wealth that is daily drawn from that area, which fills the coffers of the huge superbanks.
Can a U.S. military victory, so-called, change the relentless growth of the inherent contradictions in the imperialist system? Can this military intervention, this reassertion of hegemony, even moderate the scientific-technological development of Japan and Germany with its consequent economic and political advantages? Or, to a lesser extent, that of French capitalism? Or even Canada, Australia, and the lesser European capitalist powers?
Can even a "successful'' U.S. military intervention in Iraq stop the growing ease with which it is now possible to design and build supercomputers, making it more difficult for not only the U.S. but also Japan to keep these powerful machines from "proliferating" to the rest of the world?
Every complex development which seemingly strengthens capitalism also discloses its vulnerability, not merely to competition but to capitalist overproduction. A huge portion of the surplus value, that is, of the sweat and blood of workers and peasants, is devoted to research and development. Most of it is kept under lock and key, but nevertheless it inevitably finds its way to the light. By hook and by crook these developments become widespread, which only accelerates and deepens the oncoming economic crisis.
No wonder that the ruling circles of the U.S. are now showing a very slight but visible apprehension over the war, even at this early stage. It won't necessarily stop the coming military onslaught, but it does show that this colossus indeed has clay feet.
For a Marxist, the initial point of analysis is always the class character of any given phenomenon. What is the class character of this current war unloosed by the U.S. military forces? What class conducts the war and whose class interests does it serve?
Without first answering these questions, no dispassionate, let alone scientific, analysis can be made. For the war is initiated, promoted and led by the capitalist class. In that sense, it is a class war. Who is the war conducted against? It is conducted against a whole group of oppressed peoples who have been exploited, manipulated, visited with violence and years and years of colonization, whose borders have been drawn and redrawn to suit the imperialist powers, whose wealth is drained to fatten the profits of the wealthiest capitalist countries.
When the bourgeois liberals finally awaken to the dreadful significance of this war, the public will be reminded of the political character of Saudi Arabia. True enough. Saudi Arabia is not only a rare phenomenon because of its fabulous oil deposits. It is even more extraordinary in that it is one of the very few, perhaps the only absolute monarchy in the world. It has not even the semblance of a written constitution. King Fahd and his immediate family are responsible to no one — except the imperialist oil monopolies, formerly the Arabian-American Company (Aramco), which has undergone several reorganizations and has become state-owned, presumably nationalized.
In the 1970s the Fahd clique was lionized as virtually a superpower that could dictate terms. Fahd's great achievement in military affairs was his purchase of U.S. AWACs planes, which can spy all over the area and be virtually invulnerable from fighter attacks. (Only American pilots can operate the planes.)
But the U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia, with no real prior permission, shows that all this power and independence is really an incredible, gigantic fraud. It is not the Saudi Arabian masses, now more than 10 million people, that are maintaining or even tolerating the monarchy. It is the U.S. and its imperialist allies.
It is the most "democratic" countries, you see, which maintain the most archaic and most repressive client states on earth.
The monolithic capitalist press has dutifully announced that there is virtually no opposition to the war (New York Times, Aug. 21, p. 16). This is calculated to intimidate public opinion. The movement has to clarify for itself the issues that are truly at stake.
It is easy enough for an American to have denounced the colonialism of the French in Algeria, say, in the period of the Algerian struggle. It is easier for someone English to have denounced the U.S. invasion of Grenada than the British occupation of Northern Ireland or Wales.
We should learn from some of the mistakes of the liberal intelligentsia in this country during the Vietnam War. Their position frequently began with "We should not support dictators in Vietnam like the Diem brothers." But this is an intrinsically wrong formula.
The word "we" supposedly encompasses the imperialist bourgeoisie and the mass of the people. What's also left out here is that it wasn't the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon policy to support a dictator. They created them. The oil companies deliberately keep a reactionary, absolutist monarchy in control in Saudi Arabia, without even the most superficial democratic facade, just to maintain their stranglehold of the profits.
But in Kuwait, a much smaller country, the imperialist bourgeoisie has found it to their advantage to allow all the superficial political indices of sovereignty. For example, a so-called parliament conducts foreign relations with all governments, including the Soviet Union and China. It's a member of the Nonaligned Movement. So is Egypt. The imperialists have even encouraged this path for the Kuwaitis — as long as they controlled the fundamental lever, as long as the oil profits, the petrodollars, continued to flow into U.S. and British banks.
The acid test is not whether one attacks the colonialism of a foreign power, such as the French, British, Germans or Japanese. That's easy. The acid test is when one attacks the imperialist aggression of one's own government. The deeper problem is in taking a thorough-going class approach to one's own capitalist government and to capitalism in general, especially its most aggressive stage, monopoly capitalism. Its most fundamental features push it constantly in the direction of unbridled military intervention.
The principal issue in the current U.S. struggle against Iraq is not Saddam Hussein, just as it never was Noriega in Panama or Marcos in the Philippines (as anyone can now see). The peoples of those countries, and more concretely the working class, peasants and progressive intelligentsia, must deal with those matters. Our alliance has to be with the oppressed peoples in a united front against imperialism, the main enemy.
Last updated: 23 March 2018