The latest editorial in Solidarity (3/50) expresses a position on the current conflict in Iraq which I believe moves us too far towards some form of critical support for the US. The editorial seems to portray the current US offensive in Iraq as being a fight for a "relatively progressive" programme against Islamic reactionaries. This, I would argue, is certainly not the case.
To highlight the weaknesses in the editorial, it is useful to compare it to Clive's article in the same paper which is well researched and far more reasonable. The editorial portrays the US offensive as a battle to stop "clerical fascists" from obstructing it's programme to bring secular democracy to Iraq. Clive's article, on the other hand, portrays the offensives as "massacres" and says that they should stop. He also makes the point that Al-Sadr's militia is not the only one in Iraq and that SCIRI, another bunch of Islamist reactionaries, are actually in alliance with the US. As for the prospect of the US bringing democracy to Iraq: "The American-British occupation is unable to bring meaningful democracy to Iraq. Far from pacifying the insurgents, they have inflamed them, alienated wide sections of Iraqi society which beforehand were prepared to tolerate them, and threatened to plunge the country into civil war...All that the occupation offers is the brutal "democracy" of helicopter gunships and cluster bombs."
The programme of the US in Iraq has never been very coherent, they have stumbled from crisis to crisis and have been buffeted by events. The only constant seems to have been their desire to have an Iraqi government that is reasonably stable and will work to promote US interests in the region. I guess that their ideal would probably be a regime in the style of those that ran Iraq from the end of World War 1 until 1958, formally independent but effectively in lockstep with UK interests. Originally the "neo-cons" in the Pentagon wanted to install their exiled stooge Ahmed Chalabi as leader, but now we are at a stage where the US has been forced to let the UN take charge of much of the planning of Iraq's future governmental institutions. But this has only happened because of the errors that the US has made and the setbacks that it has suffered. Therefore, to portray the US's current war as being one for "democracy" or "secularism" is fallacious. In reality they are only fighting to preserve their own influence.
Last month, in a debate around his article "Moving On" on our web site, Alan Johnson argued that we could reasonably support the US Army when it fought against the insurgents in Iraq because they were objectively helping socialists and trade unionists to organise by slaughtering some of their opponents. At the time I argued that, in practice, any major US offensive against the insurgents would involve massive violence and only fuel further terrorism. Unfortunately, I was proved right. The editorial, however, learned no lessons from the recent round of slaughter in Iraq and effectively backed Johnson's position after it had been proved disastrously wrong.
The author of the editorial seems to want to have their cake and eat it. On the one hand they can claim credit for supporting the coalition if things go right by hailing their programme as "democratic", but on the other hand they can distance themselves from it all if things go wrong by saying "Well, I always said that you couldn't trust the Americans!". This is no way to build a third camp! To try to explain away the American atrocities by saying that "objectively" they are fighting for secularism and democracy is to put us dangerously close to those Stalinists and kitsch-Trotskyists who, at the time of the USSR's war in Afghanistan, argued that the Soviet violence, although excessive and counterproductive, was "objectively" furthering the cause of socialism by defending secularism and collective property relations.
Dan Nichols, Romford
Reply: Analysis and mutation
The editorial did not "move us" any distance at all towards any form of "critical support" for the USA in Iraq. Dan takes one sentence out of the editorial and extrapolates from it enormously, without taking account of all the other sentences.
The passage Dan objects to read: "... the proclaimed programme of the US-UK in Iraq... the setting-up of a viable democratic Iraqi government, and ultimate US withdrawal - is relatively progressive" (compared to that of the Sadr and other Islamist or neo-Ba'thist "resistance" forces).
Now, either that is true, or it is not. The question is not resolved simply by the fact that the USA is the USA, or the desire to have an uncomplicated anti-US storyline.
Either the USA is aiming for the same sort of outcome as it engineered, for example in Japan after the Second World War; or it has regressed into the era of the old "high imperialism" of rival colonial empires, and has the same sort of strategy as Britain had after the First World War, when Iraq was not even formally independent until 1932.
When the editorial says that the USA is pressing for the "Japanese" road, it simply repeats our analyses since before the 2003 war. Those analyses do not imply support for the USA. In Japan, after all, though a democracy of sorts was stabilised, with legal trade unions and so on, on the way to it the USA atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, in 1947, helped to crush the more militant sections of the Japanese trade union movement which emerged after 1945.
Since before the 2003 war we have also warned that the occupation might well mutate into something different, into an old-style colonial occupation.
A time may come when the labour movement has been ground to bits between the USA and the "resistance"; the situation has been simplified, polarised, and flattened out into one of colonial occupation and we can only propose only the negative slogan that the troops should get out before they do even more damage.
But to hasten to draw that conclusion prematurely, just for the sake of greater agitational vehemence against the USA, would be a huge disservice to the Iraqi workers' movement.
Martin Thomas
