Weekly Worker 616 Thursday March 16 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

US ‘double or quits’

Three years after the invasion of Iraq, and with Iran now in US sights, ‘Out now!’ must still be our main demand, writes Mike Macnair

It is now three years since the US and its allies, most prominently Britain, invaded Iraq. The Weekly Worker on the week of the invasion headlined: “Rather defeat for US-UK forces than their victory” (March 20 2003).

It is now clear how right this slogan was. Britain has since 1991, and all the more since 2003, been party to an enormous criminal enterprise. The US and UK have inflicted death and destruction on Iraq and have achieved … very little, and nothing like their war aims. The more likely result of this enterprise is something worse: war on a larger scale with Iran, and perhaps the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945.

It is worth taking stock of the situation three years since that headline was published. Doing so involves a somewhat cold-eyed, realist approach: we have to set on one side both pacifism in general and our proper repulsion at the horrors of war. We have to do so because it is only by grasping what the invaders might have hoped to achieve that we can understand where they are going.

The goals of the invasion

There is more than one aspect to the goals of the invasion. At the first level, the invasion was sold to the British public - and attempted to be sold to a disbelieving world - on the basis that the Ba’athist regime had “weapons of mass destruction”. The US public was told that Saddam Hussein “sponsored terror” and was an ally of al Qa’eda. Both were barefaced lies whose falsity was always pretty obvious, but was also rapidly exposed by the failure to find WMDs.

Beyond this point, specifically British motives for invading Iraq can be discarded. Blair played the role of Bush’s most prominent ally because Britain has, since 1940-41, had the same relationship to the US that the Netherlands and Portugal had to Britain in the period of British world hegemony. We are the unsinkable aircraft carrier, and the Trojan horse in Europe. London is also a component of the US offshore financial system. We owe Britain’s (relative) prosperity to these roles and the US willingness to allow Britain a share of the spoils of the dollar system in exchange for Britain’s acting as a poster-child for neoliberal economics. It is therefore unthinkable that any British government under present circumstances would not line up with the US.

Behind the lies was the ideological claim that the invasion would overthrow a vicious and corrupt tyranny (true) and create a beacon of ‘democracy’ in the Middle East (false). This idea was fairly clearly believed by many of the invasion’s cheer-leaders in the academy and the press and may have been believed by some of the political leaders both in the US and here. ‘Democracy’ is in scare-quotes here, because what the ideologues mean by it is not real democracy, but a parliamentary and lawyers’ oligarchy of corruption. At that, they are looking to create a dependent oligarchy, a regime like those created in Latin America to replace the old pro-US military dictatorships. Such a regime is still preferable to a Stalinoid nationalist tyranny like the Ba’athist regime. But the invasion has not created such a regime and has no chance of doing so.

Behind, or parallel with, the ideological claim, were the aspirations of the neoconservatives and the Project for a New American Century. These groups saw in the invasion the US taking up its imperial destiny to bring order to the world. More specifically, they talked the language of ‘geopolitics’ originally developed in the late 19th and early 20th century. By seizing control of south-central Asia and its oil resources, the US is to position itself to interdict the rise of any potential rival global power. This view was parallel with the ideological aspiration to ‘democracy’ to the extent that the US was seen as the global leader of democracy. It lay behind the ideology to the extent that many people who talked the language of geopolitics were perfectly willing to settle for an overtly tyrannical regime in Iraq, as long as it was militarily dependent on the US and gave the US basing rights.

It is now widely understood that the neocons’ position was wildly unrealistic, and that there is no prospect of this goal being achieved. Far from creating a stable regime, the invasion of Iraq has created a sink for money, lives and military materiel with no sign of stability in sight; it has exposed the falsity of the defence department’s claims that the US could fight two regional wars at once; and overall it has made it less likely that the US will be able to achieve global dominance through any means other than raw nuclear blackmail.

A possibly connected level in US politics is that there exists a bunch of christian religious nutcases - many of whom voted and campaigned actively for Bush and some of whom are probably in positions of responsibility - whose goal is to bring on the conversion of the Jews, Armageddon and the Last Judgment. I say a “possibly connected level”, because both the neocons and the mad evangelicals are manifestations of profound irrationality in US politics. The latter have a goal which is utterly irrational, but - in the sense that the US could bring the world to an end with nuclear weapons - achievable. The former, on the other hand, have a goal which is in itself not irrational (just rather nasty), but cannot be achieved within the resources of the existing US political and economic order or the framework of the neocons’ own economic ideas.

Goals behind the goals

Behind the level of lies, the level of ideology and the level of plain irrationality, were there any realistic and achievable goals for US capital? After all, the big corporations and the class elite in the US have an effective veto, through election funding and other manipulations, of who gets into the White House, and they fairly plainly chose George W Bush and his madcap friends and supporters both in 2000 and in 2004.

The standard left argument that this is a “war for oil” will not wash. If US capital wanted to bring the oil price down, the obvious way was to make a deal with the Ba’athist regime - who had shown themselves, in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, all too willing to act as a proxy for US interests. In reality, the same applies to the geopolitical goal of strategic control of south-central Asia and its oil supplies: the US would have been far better off on this front if it had targeted Iran from the outset and made friends with the Ba’athists.

Andre Gunder Frank has suggested that it is not a coincidence that the “axis of evil” countries named by Bush as targets are all ones which had started to use the euro rather than the dollar to denominate international contracts, and Peter Gowan’s The global gamble (1999) explained the 1991 Gulf war, and much else, in terms of the USA’s manipulation of the dollar-led global money regime as a defence against its competitors. This approach has now become significantly more widespread - linking the war drive to the defence of the petrodollar mechanisms of financial globalisation. This motive is said to be significant in relation to the threats against Iran, since Tehran has proposed the creation of an ‘oil bourse’ or oil futures market denominated in euros.

A significantly different approach has been offered (in different ways) by Hillel Ticktin and Wadi’h Halabi. These authors have linked the war drive to the deep structural economic difficulties of world and US capitalism and their immediate manifestations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Thus ‘petrodollar’ theorists see the dynamics in terms of the relative decline of US capital as a world hegemon since the 1970s; Ticktin and Halabi see a crisis of capitalism as such and the systems of rule it has operated since 1945.

From either of these perspectives, the level of plain irrationality is perfectly comprehensible. At least in its heartlands, capitalism as a system is in decline. There is nothing surprising about this: all things sooner or later fall into decay. The result, however, is that there are no real options open to US capital which would restore the glory days of the ‘American century’. And this, in turn, promotes the growth of irrationality in US politics. It also drives US capital to lash out to achieve short-term advantages in the defence of its position. As comrade Ticktin has pointed out, what lay behind Bush’s willingness to launch the war drive was the 2001 bursting of the dot-com bubble: and this, in turn, succeeded the Argentinean crisis of 2000 and the Russian and east Asian crisis of 1998. It was not any part of the left, but The Economist, which headlined in 2003 that the Iraq war had begun to revive a shaky economy.

Economic success and its limits

On this basis the war has achieved what it set out to do. Like an insurance fire which allows a shaky business to carry on for a while longer, it has staved off the immediate threat of bankruptcy (collapse of the financial markets).

There are, however, two problems. The first is that, just as the insurance fire does not alter the underlying problems affecting the business, so the war in Iraq does not put US and global capital on a firm footing. This war has helped stave off crisis. But its impact has been limited: as Ticktin has pointed out, there has been no return to the levels of military expenditure of the cold war. Further measures will be needed as soon as the effect begins to wear off: ie, more and bigger wars.

The second problem is that invading countries to stabilise the financial markets is not like simple military-Keynesian increases in defence budgets. It cannot openly be said that the US invaded Iraq, killed tens of thousands of people, etc, in order to stave off a financial crash.

Moreover, the character of the dollar as the ultimate reserve currency flows from US military ascendancy, acquired and demonstrated in 1939-45. This military ascendancy was based on the US’s superior capabilities in military production and logistics and on the political legitimacy which has allowed it to create and maintain enormous armed forces. These in turn had their ultimate basis in America’s character as the largest and most dynamic capitalist productive economy, whose domestic forward movement propelled the US to world power. But the imperial role has led the US productive economy to begin to ebb away, and the US has begun to follow Britain (and the Netherlands before it) into the role of a financial surplus-eater consumer economy, not a dynamic producer economy. What remains is the military power itself, as was the case in the declining period of British world hegemony.

But then the question is posed: what is all this military power good for? If the US cannot use its military power to impose its will, it is not obvious that the dollar is a safe haven and a sound reserve currency. Hence the attempts of the ‘axis of evil’ to move into euros and Iran’s proposed ‘oil bourse’; hence also Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammed’s proposal of a return to the gold standard in the form of the ‘islamic dinar’. Even the neocons themselves asked the question, ‘What is all this military power good for?’ - and came to the conclusion that it should be used to reshape the world in US interests, before it is lost.

It is therefore critical that the US should get some result out of the invasion of Iraq beyond the result it has already got - staving off bankruptcy. If the US withdraws without imposing its order on Iraq, the message is clear: it can destroy any country, and will justify doing so by blatant lies, but it cannot impose its will or create order. On the one hand this will imply that every country needs to acquire its own strategic nuclear weapons targeted on the US and/or be part of a system of collective security against the US. On the other, it will give new urgency to efforts to create alternative reserve currencies to the dollar. The stakes could not be higher.

The failure of the neocons’ project

The neocons, or at least some of them, and the pro-war ideologues of one sort or another, imagined that Iraq could be reconstructed along the lines of the reconstructions of Germany and Japan after 1945. Those who did not share this view at least thought that it ought to be possible to create a stable authoritarian regime friendly to the US.

Both views have now proved to be illusory. What is available within the framework of the political dynamics of occupied Iraq is at best an islamic republic along broadly Iranian lines and dependent on Iran; more probably a descent into localised warlordism along the lines of Afghanistan.

As we have already seen, the power of the US state is ultimately historically dependent on the economic dynamism which gave it the backing of productive capabilities and of the legitimacy which backed its ability to maintain massive armed forces. The same is true of any state. Military force is indispensable to a state, but military force on its own will merely tend to disintegrate into local looting and warlordism. Force, to establish a stable political power, has to be linked to delivering better conditions of existence for the subject people, which will enable the emergence of political legitimacy to back the use of force.

Germany and Japan were able to be restabilised because the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods agreements enabled a real economic reconstruction which allowed substantial improvements in ordinary Germans’ and Japanese’ conditions of existence. The US-sponsored authoritarian regimes in the ‘third world’ of the 1950s and 1960s did, in fact, deliver significant material progress for their subjects through state-led economic development.

The neocons, however, believed that markets would automatically stabilise themselves and that the true role of the state was merely to use force to protect property rights. Indeed, in Iraq they went further, hiving off much of the core state role of the exercise of force to private ‘security contractors’ who have no political legitimacy whatever. Behind this free-market ideology was, in fact, a system of looting: the corrupt assertion of the particular interests of a group of individual firms linked to the Republican Party leadership, at the expense of any real commitment to changing the lives of Iraqis for the better.

The result is that the occupation was from the outset wholly unable to improve the material conditions of life affecting ordinary Iraqis. The occupiers have proved unable to achieve even the reconstruction to the level achieved by the Ba’athist regime under sanctions and episodic bombing. Iraqis have experienced continuing mass unemployment on a staggering scale, and acute shortages of power, water, etc.

A continuing guerrilla resistance has chipped away gradually at the occupation forces and their attempts to create local auxiliary ‘armed forces’. The guerrilla war, and the occupiers’ attempts to control it, have made everyday life for ordinary Iraqis a nightmare of car-bombings, arbitrary arrests and so on: US use of torture at Abu Ghraib prison is only the tip of the iceberg which became visible in the media.

After the toy politics

Before the invasion, the neocons may have conned themselves into the belief that the small (more or less secular) exile opposition groups had mass support within Iraq. This belief was demonstrated to be false within days of the invasion. The Ba’athists had support from a section of the masses, expressed in the willingness of the Fedayeen Saddam to fight. Beyond them, politics as it appeared under the occupation was from the outset dominated by religious leaders and islamist parties.

This should not have been surprising. The blockade and air war phase of the war called ‘sanctions’ (1991-2003) was guaranteed to undermine the Iraqi economy and civil society, and force people back on the resources of families, tribes and religious organisations. Since invading, the occupiers have attempted both to build support, and to divide and rule, on the basis of ethnic and religious divisions.

The result has been political incoherence at the centre and an ominous rattle of sectarian attacks, most recently the February 2006 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra and tit-for-tat responses to this. The extreme unclarity of the situation makes it difficult to tells how much of these events result from provocations manipulated by the occupiers’ security apparat, and how much the result of sectarian groups playing into the occupiers’ hands.

A succession of attempts to create legitimacy for a puppet regime through the ‘Iraqi governing council’, ‘interim government’ and more recently the January 2005 elections, the assembly and ‘government’ created by these, and the December 2005 elections, have had no effect outside the Baghdad green zone and the western media. In reality, the occupiers have not attempted to create a government which has control on the ground in any area: in the localities, control has fallen into the hands of local militias associated with particular religious authorities.

No road to a puppet state

It is quite clear that the occupiers will not, as things now are, achieve the ostensible objective of a ‘pro-western’ state in Iraq. A state requires armed forces which can enforce its decisions and defend its bureaucracies. The successive Baghdad ‘governments’ have had no such thing. All the serious military capacity in the country, apart from that of the occupiers, is in the hands of the (probably Ba’athist) core of the anti-occupation guerrillas, and the Kurdish nationalist peshmergas.

The narrow majority of the Iraqi population ‘represented’ by the UIA coalition of shia islamist parties is splintered along religio-political lines, and each of the splinters has militia gangs (some in police and army uniforms) capable of terrorising civilians, but not of serious military operations. The Sadrist militia Jaish Mahdi, for example, proved itself unable to fight US forces effectively in 2004, and has now proved unable even to secure its home base in Sadr City against a ‘sunni’ sectarian attack. The only way in which this coalition could create a state power is by open dependence on the neighbouring Iranian Islamic Republic.

Right now US ambassador Khalilzay is resisting the logic of a shia islamist government in (at least southern) Iraq allied with Tehran, by manoeuvres aimed to force a ‘grand coalition’ including some sunni islamists and the US’s preferred clients round Iyad Allawi. It looks unlikely that these manoeuvres will pay off: the UIA is, so far, clinging firmly to its unity.

Out in defeat, or on to Iran?

The adventure in Iraq therefore must end in one of two ways. Either the US and Britain will pull out - probably around or after the 2008 US presidential elections - without achieving their ostensible objective. In this case, the event will look like a repeat of the US operations in Beirut and Mogadishu on a much larger scale: it will confirm that the US can inflict destruction on foreign countries, but that it cannot impose order. As indicated above, the result of such a retreat would be to move us - perhaps slowly - towards a ‘multipolar world’ in which the decline of the US becomes evident and other powers begin more serious efforts to create an alternative.

Or else - and this now looks more likely - the US will go for ‘double or quits’: an air attack on Iran, possibly including the use of nuclear weapons, aimed at liquidating the regional military capacity of the Iranian regime. The US has been more or less openly threatening this sort of attack since spring-summer 2005. There is clearly hope in some US circles that the threat might provoke a military coup in Iran, creating a regime more friendly to the US. Either this or the actual execution of an attack, and the consequent effects both in simple terror and in undermining the autonomy of pro-Iranian politicians in Iraq, might allow the US to impose its sort of ‘order’ on Iraq. But the US state is probably underestimating - as it already did in the case of Iraq - the courage which can be produced by having little to lose.

The current brinkmanship round Iran is, therefore, very dangerous. There is a real logic to the US actions so far which implies a real and live threat of nuclear attack on Iran: it is the only possible ‘way out’ of Iraq. If the US threats induce some part of the Iranian military to make a coup, or to attempt one, leading to an internal crisis, the US might get better political leverage in Iraq. But there is as yet no sign pointing in this direction. If the US (perhaps in alliance with Israel) actually carries out a strategic bombing attack on Iran, the implications for regional, and global, politics are utterly unpredictable.

Out now!

The task of the anti-war movement in this country is to fight against the current occupation of Iraq and against UK involvement in the threat of war on Iran. It is important not to be disarmed by the idea that US and UK troops are in Iraq to prevent a civil war: Khalilzay has already said publicly that in the event of a civil war US troops would stand on the sidelines.

It is equally important not to be disarmed by the idea (held by the some Labourites and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) that the troops protect the fledgling workers’ movement in Iraq against the islamists. There is not the slightest evidence of either US or British troops providing any such protection. The occupiers’ local allies are, precisely, the islamists.

The last three years have shown unequivocally that the occupying troops cannot create order and stability in Iraq, but only inflict yet more destruction and promote sectarianism. US-UK endeavours in Iraq are themselves leading to a threat of war with Iran. ‘Out now!’ would be the best result for the interests of Iraqis as well as those of the wider region and the world.

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