Despite their concern for its horrific effects on the Iraqi people, many would be prepared to support a war on Iraq if it were sanctioned by the United Nations. Indeed, much of the popular opposition to the U.S. rush to war seems motivated primarily by a concern to preserve and sanctify the "United Nations process" and to give the UN arms inspectors more time to "peacefully" disarm Iraq. This is the "soft underbelly" of popular anti-war sentiment.
U.S./ Canada/ United Nations - Hands off Iraq!
[This is the transcript of a talk by Professor Murray Smith at Brock University Anti-War Teach-In, March 4, 2003]
Last month, on February 15, I was a proud participant in the 80,000 strong Toronto march against the war on Iraq, one of the largest anti-war demonstrations in Canadian history. On the same day, one hundred thousand people marched against the war in Montreal, and tens of thousands more marched in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver and other Canadian centers. Huge demonstrations, involving millions of people, also took place in London, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, New York City, Paris, Melbourne and many other cities around the world. Never before have so many people hit the streets on the same day to oppose a war.
This international mobilization was striking in several important respects. One is that, unlike the mass Vietnam anti-war demonstrations of the late sixties and early seventies, this was a protest against a war that was not yet fully underway. A second important aspect was that most of the participants in these protests believed that the war drive led by George Bush's America would not likely be stopped, however many people demonstrated in the streets. I want to return to this fatalistic mood later. But first I want to discuss another aspect of the anti-war sentiment that the demonstrations reflected to some extent, and one that I think is particularly pronounced in the English-speaking world. It is this: many people who have adopted an anti-war stance are only conditionally opposed to a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Despite their humanitarian concern for the horrific effects of such an invasion on the Iraqi people, many would be prepared to support a war on Iraq if it were sanctioned by the United Nations. Indeed, much of the popular opposition to the U.S. rush to war seems motivated primarily by a concern to preserve and sanctify the "United Nations process" and to give the UN arms inspectors more time to� � "peacefully" disarm the Baghdad regime.
This is the "soft underbelly" of popular anti-war sentiment in Canada and elsewhere. An EKOS poll conducted in Canada about two weeks ago showed that 74% of the Canadian people would oppose Canadian participation if the United States and several of its major allies attacked Iraq without the full support of the United Nations Security Council. However, 63% would be prepared to see Canada join in a U.S.-led attack on Iraq if it receives the blessing of the UN Security Council. Now, in my opinion, this reflects a badly misplaced faith in the United Nations on the part of huge numbers of people. Indeed, the illusion that the United Nations is a "force for peace" is perhaps the single biggest obstacle to the emergence of the kind of anti-war movement that might have the potential to actually prevent or thwart the impending invasion of Iraq.
Here are some plain facts. Since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the United Nations has played a key role in what has been an on-going war on Iraq spearheaded by the USA and its British junior partner. Having thwarted a popular uprising against Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the so-called "liberation" of Kuwait, the United States, with the assistance of the United Nations, imposed a sanctions regime aimed at pressuring Saddam into gradually disarming and at bleeding and completely demoralizing the Iraqi people. The economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq under the aegis of the United Nations have led to the premature deaths of over one million people including at least a half million children. They have deprived the Iraqi health system of access to medicines to treat the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have developed cancer through exposure to the depleted uranium and other toxic agents left behind by the Americans after their desert slaughter of 1991. Further, the U.N. sanctions have enormously complicated the task of rebuilding vital infrastructures that had been destroyed by U.S. aerial bombardment, and they have encouraged Saddam Hussein to mobilize scarce resources in defense of his own worthless skin. But this is not the end of the story. Over the past decade, Iraq has continued to be bombarded by U.S. and British fighter jets, leading to the deaths of thousands more Iraqis. This too has been sanctioned by the United Nations. This on-going, albeit "low-level," military and economic warfare on Iraq has created conditions so desperate that many Iraqis would now welcome a U.S. invasion, not so much to remove Saddam as to remove the pretext for the unremitting rape of Iraq that has been carried out with U.N. sanction since 1991. If George Bush the Elder feared that the removal of Saddam in 1991 might lead to uncontrollable popular mobilizations unfriendly to American interests, George Bush the Younger seems supremely confident that the U.S. invasion force will encounter a populace too tired, too weak and too demoralized to resist the imposition of an American military governance that may go on for many years.
Today, the United Nations is continuing its dirty work against the people of Iraq by upholding a Security Council resolution that threatens dire consequences if Saddam fails to immediately disarm. America's build-up to war is based on the fundamental premise that Iraq (at least an Iraq headed by Saddam Hussein) has no right to defend itself against attack from the world's sole remaining superpower. The United Nations stands firmly behind this premise. Effectively, it upholds the "right" of the U.S. superpower to bomb, bleed and bully the Iraqi people, while demanding that Iraq divest itself of any and all means of defending itself militarily. This is how the UN fulfills its mandate to promote "peace and security," to oppose unprovoked aggression, and to uphold the principle of national sovereignty upon which it was supposedly founded.
How can we explain the U.N.'s ignominious record with respect to Iraq? The key to explaining it is to understand that the UN's prime mission is to promote the "stability" of the existing world order. For all its rhetoric about human rights and its charitable good works, and despite its periodic lamentations regarding the extent of global inequities, the UN is not in the business of challenging the institutional structures that concentrate great wealth and power at one pole of the world system and great misery and despair at the other. The world order that it seeks to "stabilize" and perpetuate is one in which tens of millions die annually of easily preventable hunger, malnutrition and disease; in which billions subsist on less than three dollars per day; and in which profit-driven transnational corporations dominate and shape the world economy to the detriment of the eco-system and the vast majority of the world's population. This world order that the UN was designed to sustain should be called by its right name: it is the imperialist world order.
What is imperialism? At the most basic level, imperialism is a system of relations that enables the most developed capitalist countries in the world to perpetuate their global supremacy and to resolve their economic problems at the expense of weaker countries - most obviously, the semi-colonial countries of the Third World. Imperialism is about the search for super-profits beyond the borders of one's own country; it is about accessing cheap raw materials and labour power in the so-called "developing world"; it is about controlling markets and exploiting new arenas of capital investment; it is about the transfer of value from one country to another through processes of unequal exchange. At the same time, it is about the rivalries and conflicting interests that exist among the most powerful advanced capitalist states, rivalries that are now finding expression in the rift between German and French imperialism on the one hand and U.S. imperialism on the other over the Iraq issue. The notion that the French and German Governments are "united for peace" is an illusion that must be mercilessly exposed. Their opposition to the US war drive stems not from pacifism but from divergent geo-political and economic interests in the Middle East.
The modern history of Iraq provides an instructive case study in the logic of imperialism. Like other countries in the Middle East, Iraq is the product of the carving up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One by the victorious imperialist powers, above all by Great Britain. Boundaries were drawn in such a way as to "divide and conquer." With the discovery of vast petroleum reserves in the inter-war period in several Arab countries as well as in Iran, the region acquired a pivotal economic and strategic significance. The imperialist powers sought to ensure that the oil wealth of the Middle East would be exploited not to the advantage of the Middle Eastern masses, but to the advantage of Western oil cartels and in the interests of "lubricating" the economic and financial systems of world capitalism. To achieve this, every effort was bent to place and keep in power compliant and corrupt local elites who could be counted on to repress mass movements from below and secure imperialist interests.
In the case of Iraq, British and American intelligence operations played vital roles in ensuring that the Hashemite monarchy that was overthrown in 1958 would not be succeeded by radical nationalist or communist forces. This was the beginning of U.S. imperialism's long and turbulent association with the semi-fascist Ba'ath Party that nurtured Saddam Hussein. The United States welcomed the Ba'athists' murderous repression of the communist-led workers movement in Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s; but it was decidedly less happy when the Ba'ath Regime nationalized the oil industry in 1972.
This nationalization facilitated the use of oil revenues to fund an ambitious modernization program and substantial industrial development in the 1970s and 1980s, most of which was undone by the 1991 war and its aftermath. The United States welcomed Saddam Hussein's war on Iran in the 1980s as a means of containing the "Islamic Revolution"; but it was dismayed when he invaded the oil-rich state-let of Kuwait in 1990.
The consistent pattern in U.S.-Iraqi relations is this: when Saddam was murdering leftists or attacking America's enemies, like the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, the U.S. supported him; but when he demonstrated the slightest inclination to challenge imperialist interests in the Middle East, he became America's public enemy number one. The vicious tyranny that he has exercised over the Iraqi people - above all during the period in which he was an American ally -- has never been a determining factor in the American attitude toward him. The "freedom" that George W. Bush now proclaims he wants to bring to Iraq is the freedom of U.S. and British oil companies to amass huge profits from an oil industry "liberated" from any obligation to serve the interests of the Iraqi masses. The "peace" that he wants to bring to the region is the peace of the grave.
Let me return now to the issue of the United Nations.
The fundamental reason that the anti-war movement should place no confidence in the United Nations is that the U.N. is, and always has been, a servant of the imperialist world order. To be sure, during the Cold War era, the United Nations was, to some extent, an arena of political struggle between the forces of world imperialism and forces ostensibly opposed to imperialism, in the first place the so-called Communist countries and above all the Soviet Union. But in the last analysis, the U.N. - as an institution - has always been about promoting the "stability" of the imperialist system and safeguarding the interests of the leading capitalist powers. Thus, while its charter prohibits its member states from violating the national sovereignty of other states, except in "self-defense," the United Nations Security Council authorized a U.S. war in Korea in 1950 that claimed the lives of some three million Koreans. Later, the United Nations turned a blind eye to the U.S. aggression in South-East Asia which resulted in the deaths of millions more. The United Nations did nothing to prevent the slaughter of Algerian independence fighters at the hands of French imperialism, and it did nothing to stop covert American operations that led to a mass slaughter in Indonesia in 1965 and to the overthrow of numerous leftist regimes in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere. It also did nothing to stop the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America has been responsible for the deaths of more people on foreign soil than any other country in the world; and yet the United Nations has never imposed a single sanction on this rogue imperialist state. The reason is plain for all to see. The United Nations cannot "discipline" or "punish" or "restrain" the United States, or any other imperialist power, because it is fundamentally an instrument of the imperialist powers.
To fulfill its promise, the anti-war movement must become an anti-imperialist movement, a movement dedicated to abolishing the systemic causes of war. This requires that it reject all illusions in the United Nations and the hypocritical "human rights imperialism" for which the U.N. stands. The war on Iraq is not the result simply of bad policies being pursued by misguided, stupid or greedy American cowboys. It is the outcome of the continuous efforts of the U.S., as the leading imperialist power, to assert control over the most strategically significant resources and arenas of investment of the semi-colonial world, and to compensate for its declining economic hegemony by flaunting its unmatched military power.
This brings me to my final point. At the beginning of this talk I mentioned that one of the striking features of the current international anti-war movement is its fatalism -- its lack of confidence in its ability to prevent a US-led invasion. In fact, the anti-war movement in its present form cannot stop this invasion, and most of its participants are realistic enough to know that. They know that Bush and Blair are indifferent to world public opinion, and that the juggernaut of war cannot be halted by millions of people bearing moral witness to their opposition to war through peaceful - and essentially non-disruptive - protests. But this is not to say that the war cannot be effectively opposed. For effective opposition to be mounted, the anti-war movement must be transformed into a consciously anti-imperialist movement. The struggle against war must be opened up into a class struggle against those who profit from war. The labour movement must be mobilized to prevent the movement of military materiel and to engage in political general strikes against the war. We must be prepared to hit the imperialists where it really hurts - by disrupting their economies and making "business as usual" impossible. Not only might this stay the hand of the imperialists in their drive to war against Iraq; it will also inspire huge numbers of people to bring an end to the ultimate cause of war in our time: the imperialist world system and all its manifold iniquities.
US - Canada - UN ---- Hands off Iraq!
Murray E.G. Smith, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1
msmithNOSPAMspartanDOTac(dot)brockuDOTca
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