Workers' Liberty

By Sean Matgamna

George W. Bush's defeat in the US Congressional elections reinforces what opinion polls had already made known: that most Americans do not want the USA to remain in Iraq. The dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defence and his replacement by Robert Gates most likely signals a change in US policy.

Bush is due to receive a report from a committee headed by Republican old-stager James Baker, who has already said that he considers simply "staying the course" is not an option. Gates is an associate of Baker's.

Should Third Camp socialists now raise the call for US, British, and other troops to withdraw immediately from Iraq?

Vast numbers of people, Sunni and Shia, have been killed by Shia and Sunni sectarians. The slaughter goes on; and it may well be escalating.

According to a UN report perhaps 1.6 million, out of a pre-war population of 26 million, have fled from sectarian murder gangs, Sunni and Shia, over the borders of Iraq in the last three years. At least as many again, and almost certainly greater numbers, have relocated to "safe" areas, Shia majority areas for Shia, Sunni for Sunni, within what is still called Iraq.

Something very like a "spontaneous" partition of Iraq into its three ethnic and sectarian components, Shia, Kurd and Sunni, has already occurred (not by any means tidily). "Baghdad", Patrick Cockburn says in the Independent, “is breaking up into a dozen different cities, each under the control of its own militia." Baghdad, in the middle of the "Sunni" area, may have a Shia majority in its population, and certainly has a large Kurdish minority.

There was much talk, even before the elections, of moves towards an accelerated US withdrawal. British Foreign Office Minister, Kim Howells, perhaps echoing the reappraisals being made in Washington, had talked of Britain handing over to an Iraqi administration, within a year.

In the language of a blustering schoolboy, President George W Bush said on the eve of the Congressional elections: "Our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging. Our goal is victory." "Tactics", however, were, it seemed, about to change.

Now that Bush's Republican Party has paid a heavy electoral price for the bloody chaos in Iraq, the pressure for change is greatly strengthened.

The goal of establishing a functioning bourgeois-democracy in Iraq is now receding even faster. The Iraqi Government is, indeed, the product of broadly democratic elections, but its writ does not run properly in any part of Iraq. It depends entirely on the occupation forces. Actual administration, in so far as it exists, is mostly in the hands of local sectarian or tribal leaders. An Iraqi state can scarcely be said to exist.

The prospect of establishing one is disrupted, repeatedly, by the sectarian civil war — that is what it is — which rages murderously around the occupation armies. The inability of the occupation forces to control inter-Islamic sectarianism is attested to by the horrific daily sectarian slaughter.

The war and invasion of 2003 has destroyed not only the Saddam regime, the stated objective of those who launched it, but, it increasingly seems likely, Iraq too. The disintegration of Iraq is a consequence of their destruction of the Ba'athist Iraqi state, before they had anything to replace it with other than the naked military might of the occupation forces.

That might has been deployed savagely, arrogantly, counterproductively, and, usually, with mind-boggling stupidity!Even some of the Neo-conservative architects of the war have denounced the ineptness of Bush ans Runsfeld in Iraq.

The rulers of the USA started that war in the conviction that their immense military might could give them the mastery of any situation.Rumsfeld, especially, epitomised that delusion. That was probably the main reason why they neglected to plan for what would replace the Saddam regime after they had smashed it.

They quickly disposed of the Iraqi military forces. In doing it they smashed much of the infrastructures of Iraq society — what they did to electricity supplies, for example. The supply of basics - clean water, electricity, fuel, housing, food rations - is getting worse, not better. Unemployment is estimated around 60%. What little real economic reconstruction has been done, has quickly been destroyed again by the burgeoning Sunni-sectarian "resistance". By casual brutality, and by an ineptitude that challenges belief, the invaders drained the initially large sea of good will towards those who said they came to liberate Iraq.

They found that they had unleashed the forces of communal-sectarian chaos and disintegration.

Iraq is an artificial, internally divided, entity, put together by Britain from three provinces of the dismantled Turkish Empire after World War One. The Kurds had been a conquered people, and the Shia (dominant in the south) a subordinate religious community, for centuries within the old empire.

The Ba'thist regime that took power in 1963 was Sunni-sectarian. It allowed no space for the development of democratic, secular politics. With the smashing of the Ba'thist state, which brutally restricted them, old sectarian and even tribal divisions have surged up.

In 1990-91 in the first Gulf War, the US and Britain were careful not to destroy the Iraqi state. They hoped instead for "regime change", by way of a coup against Saddam, which would leave the state, and Iraq, intact. They feared, while the rival super-power, the USSR, still existed (tottering) to create a power vacuum and, maybe, the disintegration of Iraq.

In 2003, these considerations were no longer, for the Americans, important. After their easy victories in the first Gulf war, in Kosova in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2001 they felt themselves equal to all eventualities. They weren't. Events have shown that they aren't. They have discovered that immense military-technical superiority and a superstitious, historically ignorant belief in the magic-working powers of market economics, is not enough.

Though the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty said that the destruction of the Saddam regime was in itself desirable, we opposed the 2003 war. We had no confidence in the ability of the USA to achieve — or in face of likely difficulties, to go on wanting to achieve — their stated objective of a bourgeois-democratic Iraq.

We refused to give political confidence or political credence to the British or US states to carry through progressive change in Iraq. We did not favour the method of war by imperialist states against the Iraqi regional imperialist state as the best way to bring about a revolution in Iraq.

We hoped, of course, that the result of what the US, Britain, etc., were doing would, nevertheless, be the creation of some sort of bourgeois-democratic Iraq. We rejoiced in the re-emergence of an Iraqi labour movement in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the fascistic Ba'ath regime.

We are for self-determination for the peoples of Iraq. But after 2003 we opposed those on the left who thought that the call for a US-British immediate withdrawal was the necessary, and only acceptable, concrete expression of being in favour of Iraqi self-determination. We thought that the chaos that would follow a precipitate withdrawal by those who had smashed the Iraq state would, amongst other terrible things, lead to the annihilation of the new Iraqi labour movement.

The development of the working class, and its movement, was and remains for us the all-important concern, over-riding all else. We refused to raise a political slogan whose main consequence were it to be acted upon, we emphatically did not want.

We thought it wrong to make a fetish of a particular immediate slogan, "troops out now", and to substitute that for the longer term expression of the same idea, "self determination for the people of Iraq". (Or "peoples, which raises many additional questions.)

We refused to shout "militant" slogans that made no sense to us, in the safe knowledge that, since we are too small for our slogans to determine events, it is safe to be cheaply “anti Imperialist”. (That is, we rejected the demagogic approach to a difficult question, the approach that for decades has been typical of the SWP — on “Troops out of Northern Ireland”, for example).

The situation in Iraq now raises the question: is the time ripe for calling for the immediate withdrawal of the occupation forces, and for making that our central political focus?

The main argument for such a shift is simple: that the occupation forces are making things worse, and that there is no prospect of things getting better until they leave Iraq to its own internecine conflicts.

It is true that the occupation powers have created the present situation. They destroyed the old state, and much of Iraq’s economic infrastructure. They have displayed blatant economic greed, and unrestrained brutality. But it does not follow that things cannot get worse. Things can get a great deal worse.

Unrestrained Sunni-Shia sectarian war would be worse! The numbers slaughtered in such conflict would be vastly greater than the casualties now in the half-smothered sectarian civil war.

The probability is that Iraq would break up, with great massacres on the scale, in Iraqi terms, of the slaughter that accompanied the separation of India and Pakistan in 1947.

A Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas, motivated by Turkey's determination to keep down its own oppressed Kurds, would probably be part of such a development. Iran would seek hegemony over southern Iraq, and also might invade.

Is all hope then gone of consolidating anything like a bourgeois-democratic Iraq?

Increasingly, that is how it looks. We will be pleased if events prove that assessment wrong. In any case there is a very wide gap between thinking that and advocating it, between thinking it and adopting as a slogan, a proposal, "withdraw immediately", which would, if it were to determine events, make it a certainty, which translates in real terms into the proposal for Iraq: "just let it rip!". The slaughter then would be immensely greater. The new Iraqi labour movement would be destroyed.

We should not, either directly or in effect, shout: “let it rip”.

The Iraqi labour movement can still, just about, function in today’s Iraq, at least in those areas where the Sunni-supremacist “resistance” are not dominant. That is where those clerical fascists (who are the “anti-imperialist” heroes in the anti-working class mythology of our own kitsch left) are not able to destroy the Iraqi labour movement. There still remains a small space for the Iraqi working class to organise in.

Socialists, whose first concern is the development of the Iraqi labour movement, and who are also concerned for the well being of the people inside the Iraqi "failed state", should not advocate something whose realisation would have the likely consequences outlined above.

We opposed the 2003 war; we indict the crimes of the occupation; we support self-determination for the peoples of Iraq, which means that in general terms we are against the foreign military occupation. But it matters a great deal how the occupation is ended, by whom. We are for the occupation being ended by democratic self-assertion of the peoples of Iraq; against it being ended by a collapse into sectarian civil war, let alone a victory of the Sunni-supremacist "resistance".

The argument that it is a matter of principle at all times to call for Troops Out has already been answered.

So then, we should advocate that the occupation forces stay, perhaps that they should be numerically strengthened?

No! Here too, there is a very wide — a class-wide — difference between not advocating a nonsense slogan ("Troops Out Now", a negative slogan whose practical positive meaning would be: victory to the Sunni-supremacist "resistance") and positively taking political responsibility for the occupation forces, and, still less, advocating that they stay.

The answer is neither the explicit support of the kitsch left for the Sunni-supremacist "resistance", nor implicit support for the collapse of Iraq into full-scale sectarian civil war, nor support for Bush and Blair. It is working-class solidarity and support for the new Iraqi labour movement, against both the sectarian militias and the occupation powers.

The kitsch-left, the sharia socialists who support those in Iraq who are primed to accelerate the mass slaughter of other Iraqis —the Sunni supremacist and the clerical-fascist "resistance" — are criminally mistaken.

Events must by now have alerted even the obtuse ex-socialists who put their political trust in Blair and Bush to the idea that their “position” is increasingly untenable.

The leading sharia socialists are almost certainly beyond learning. They will be reduced to a high delirium of the fools at the way things are going in Iraq.

And the large number of young people who have been misled by them, in the name of “anti-imperialism”, into allying in Britain with the clerical-fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saddam Hussein’s faithful British sycophant, George Galloway, and in Iraq into distant alliance with even worse clerical-fascists (those "resistance" forces who assassinate leaders of the softer-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood as "collaborators") and with the small fascistic remnants of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party? Some are still capable of learning. Some of them will learn.

The situation in Iraq is grim and terrible. The first duty of Third Camp socialists, those who advocate working class unity across the sectarian and national divides, is to tell the truth about the situation and honestly assess it. That is the only basis on which serious working class politics can be promoted, in Iraq — or in Britain.