War in Iraq

This article can be found in Internationalism No. 156.

On February 17, 2010, Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved in a memo to Central Command head David Petraeus the rebranding of the American mission in Iraq. He stressed that “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the US Military’s name for the 2003 invasion and seven-year occupation of that country, “has ended and our forces are operating under a new mission.” Six months later, on August 19, the last American ‘combat’ brigades crossed the Iraqi border into Kuwait, and twelve days after that—over seven years after President Bush made a similar announcement—President Obama announced “the end of our combat mission in Iraq.” 

The Chilcot Inquiry is now the 5th inquiry linked to the Iraq War. Six years after the invasion and despite the withdrawal of British forces, the conflict continues to haunt the British ruling class.

There can be no doubt about the government's determination to defend the interests of British national capital abroad. We have only to look at the UK involvement in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain isalways pronouncing on current conflicts, even if it is powerless to influence, as it was in Georgia, and even more now with David Milliband proposing an EU force on stand-by for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Five years after the USA, assisted by Britain and a few other countries, successfully invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in only three weeks, nothing is going according to plan. Of course we can read about an improvement in the security situation following the troop surge... But events on the ground have well and truly drowned out any celebration of the original victory.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 there has been no let up in the effects of the conflict on the local population, caught between invading western armies, feuding warlords and the Taliban. While the media fawn on ‘our hero’ Prince Harry, leading US generals admit that the mission is on the verge of failure, claiming that Karzai’s Kabul government only controls 30% of the country.

We have received this leaflet against the Turkish army's current "Operation" in Kurdistan, distributed in Turkey by the comrades of the EKS.

Workers Against the War (WAW) has posed an important question, "What can workers do about the war?" and offers a quick, ready answer. On their web site WAW says workers can stop the war in Iraq in a single day by refusing to move war materials: "If workers across the US decided to stop working until the war ended, it would only be a matter of days, if not hours, before the first soldiers were on the planes heading home."

We are publishing below the text of a leaflet that we have just received from the comrades of the EKS in Turkey, taking position against the threat of war on the border with Iraq.

The working class in Britain is daily faced with its sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and friends in the armed forces being sucked ever deeper in to what appears to be a growing series of wars. The chaos in Iraq is rejoined by the revival of conflict and casualties in Afghanistan, although the full extent of the victims of war is deliberately hidden by the state, which does not report the number of injured.

The summer of 2007 has once again been marked by the worsening of military chaos and horror in many parts of the world. While the situation has momentarily eased in Lebanon (with the exception of the slaughter in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp after a long stand-off between the army and Islamists), in Afghanistan there has been a sharp rise in the fighting and in terrorist attacks by the Taliban.

Wednesday 18 April was an ordinary day in Baghdad. Like virtually every other day of the week, there were bombs. These killed over 190 people, many of them women and children. As so often before, the main target was a market, al-Sadriyah, very close to a building site employing workers who were risking their lives to earn a miserable wage to help their families survive. These attacks, among the most bloody since the fall of Saddam in 2003, were carried out in the same market which was hit on 3 February, killing 130 people. The aim of those who perpetrate such crimes is to kill as many people as they can. The purpose is destruction, the annihilation of human beings whose very existence makes them enemies. This is the rule of bestial hatred; this is a society in profound decomposition.

Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Every night this tortured city resounds to the sound of mortar fire. Using the car, for those who still have one, immediately puts the occupants in mortal danger from heavily armed gangs who can stop the vehicle at any moment and shoot them in cold blood. Every day brings its share of bloody attacks. It is no longer considered proper to give a daily total for the number of dead in a country plunged into the greatest barbarity...

The dramatic situation of a Middle East that has been plunged into chaos reveals the profound cynicism and duplicity of the bourgeoisie in all countries.

Even at the highest level of the American state, it has become evident that the war in Iraq has been a complete disaster. The report of the Iraq Study Group made it perfectly clear that the longer the US and ‘Coalition’ troops stay in Iraq, the worse things are going to get.

The judgment and execution of Saddam Hussein were hailed by Bush as a “victory for democracy”. There’s some truth in this: the bourgeoisie has so often justified its crimes in the name of democracy (see International Review 66, 1991, ‘The massacres and crimes of the great democracies’). With boundless cynicism, Bush also announced on 5 November 2006, when he himself was in Nebraska in the middle of an election campaign, that the death sentence handed out to Saddam was “a justification for the sacrifices willingly accepted by the US forces” since March 2003 in Iraq.

The concerted efforts of the dominant fraction of the U.S. ruling class to force a readjustment of imperialist policy in Iraq has run into fierce resistance from hardline stalwarts in the Bush administration. Since the failure to change the ruling team in the 2004 elections, the administration has been under pressure to modify its failed policies...

In his address to the nation on January 10th, Pres. George Bush completely rejected the central recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, ignored the political meaning of the Republican electoral defeat in November, and escalated the war in Iraq by sending more troops and threatening hostilities against Iran and Syria...

Daily life in Iraq has become unbearable. Every day there are new outrages, bombings and deaths. The thirst for destruction seems to have no limit. On Thursday 23 November, Baghdad saw its most murderous bomb attack since 2003 and the outbreak of war. The main target was Sadr City, the huge Shia district in the Iraqi capital. The whole district was devastated by at least four car bombs, leaving 152 dead and 236 wounded. At the same moment, a hundred armed men attacked the health ministry, which is controlled by Ali al Chemari, a follower of radical Shia imam Moqtadr al Sadr. Iraq is in chaos.

In defence of proletarian internationalism against the barbarity of capitalist war.

Bogged down by the war in Iraq, the manifest failure of the war on international terrorism with the growth in deadly attacks, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world: this is not just a setback but a truly stinging reverse for the USA.

The credibility of the US forces as protectors of the Iraqi population took another hammer blow with the allegations of an ‘Iraqi My Lai’, in which US marines are accused of running amok after a roadside bomb attack in Haditha last November, slaughtering 24 defenceless Iraqi men, women and children... The ‘humanitarian’ pretexts for the US invasion are being exposed as worthless lies.

The triple bombings on April 24 in Dahab, a major tourist centre in Egypt, which left 30 dead and 150 wounded, is another reminder that no one in the world is safe from the fury of terrorism and war... On the contrary, this attack aimed at innocent civilians who had come to spend a few days on holiday enabled the politicians to once again reaffirm their commitment to the ‘war against terrorism’, in other words, to the continuation of massacres on an even grander scale.

Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq the country is in chaos. Following the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia shrines, there was a whole series of reprisals, an increasing cycle of violence in which hundreds died. Media speculations on the ‘possibility’ of civil war are already behind the situation.

It’s now getting close to three years since the American army took control of Iraq, and the country is descending further and further into chaos. More than 120,000 Iraqis killed; 2,000 American soldiers killed and 18,000 wounded; massive destruction of infrastructure, houses and public buildings. Iraq is in one of the worst situations of any country since the Second World War...

This leaflet was distributed by the ICC at the mass demonstration in Washington, DC against the war in Iraq. The leaflet offers a revolutionary Marxist perspective on the reasons for the war, in contrast both to the official government explanation and the confusions and obfuscations offered by the leftists, who function as the extreme leftwing of the bourgeoisie.

It’s now more than two years since the US army took control of Baghdad, and George Bush came out with the cynical victory cry: “mission accomplished”. A bright future was promised: the world would be a safer place and Iraq would become a stable democracy. Reality is elsewhere. Iraq is sinking deeper and deeper into chaos and barbarism.

If you are going to be at the demonstration in Washington, or in any other towns, and you agree with the positions that this leaflet defends, then print off the attached PDF file and distribute it yourself.

In the midst of the violence and fear that is Iraq today, and after a mortar attack had killed 7 Shia pilgrims, it was easy for panic caused by suspicion of a suicide bomber to cause a stampede. On August 31, in Baghdad, nearly 1000 were killed and hundreds more injured by a stampede on a bridge over the Tigris, with the bottleneck amplified by security barriers.

If we were to identify a vice that is characteristic of each epoch of human history, it would certainly be the hypocrisy of the ruling class that would fit the bill in the case of capitalism. The great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, amassed piles of skulls when he conquered towns that had not submitted to him. But he never claimed to do it for the good of their inhabitants. It took bourgeois capitalist democracy to teach us that war is "humanitarian" and that it is necessary to bomb civilian populations in order to bring… peace and freedom to these very populations.