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   Vol.65/No.41            October 29, 2001 
 
 
Imperialism's record of brutality, exploitation in the Mideast
Against Washington's new 'crusade', labor needs to reach out to powerful allies in semicolonial countries
(feature article)
 
BY GREG MCCARTAN  
Shortly after Washington launched its brutal bombing campaign against Afghanistan, a videotaped message by Osama bin Laden responding to the attack was played on al-Jazeera, a widely watched Mideast television network, and rebroadcast in many countries, including the United States. A few days later, on October 10, the Bush administration upped the patriotic pressure on U.S. television networks to cease broadcasting any further statements by bin Laden or other al-Qaeda leaders.

Initially, some in the U.S. ruling class may have wagered that airing the videotape would bolster the demonization campaign drummed up by the White House and echoed by the big-business press, seeking to portray the U.S. government as leading the worldwide forces of "good" against "evil," of "reason" against "fanaticism," of the "heavens" against the "cave."

If so, the trick backfired, undercutting Washington's claim that there are no political issues other than "terrorism" underlying its stated goal of bringing in bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders "dead or alive." In fact, the broadcast reinforced the fact that the conflict is rooted in the ongoing consequences of a century of imperialist superexploitation and oppression of the Mideast and Asia, preceded by a century or more of colonial domination and outrages during the rise of capitalism in Europe and North America.

The Bush administration faces mounting problems in making the fake rationalizations for U.S. war policies stick. No matter how effective the press self-censorship may be, it cannot explain why the content of bin Laden's message strikes such a chord among hundreds of millions of working people and middle layers in Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and elsewhere.  
 
Historic injustices
Osama Bin Laden's statement, printed below, calls for an end to the stationing of U.S. and other foreign troops in Saudi Arabia and other countries on the Arabian Peninsula. It calls for an end to the U.S.-British bombing of Iraq, the decade-long economic embargo, and other imperialist policies that have visited death and maiming on hundreds of thousands of Iraqis since 1990-91. And it demands reversal of the forcible dispossession of the Palestinian people by the Israeli regime and the continued occupation of those lands, as well as a halt to support by Washington to the course of all Israeli governments.

In recounting what are in fact historic injustices against the Arabs, Muslims, and other peoples throughout the Middle East and Asia, Osama bin Laden also points to other imperialist crimes, such as the use of nuclear weapons against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. His statement concludes that "neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we are secure in Palestine, and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, peace be unto him."

As the U.S. rulers have exhausted the spectacle of "national mourning" they promoted following the September 11 attacks, cynically using the deaths of some 5,000 people to marshal support for a war against Afghanistan and all nations hosting terrorists, they are finding it harder and harder to rule out-of-bounds any discussion of the political issues.

For example, the Jewish weekly Forward, a spin-off of the Yiddish daily published since 1897, said in an October 5 editorial: "But we needn't search the theology texts to divine bin Laden's motives. He's spelled them out repeatedly in various public statements. He's on a self-declared holy war against 'Crusaders and Jews,' with a threefold goal: 'liberating' Mecca and the rest of Arabia from American 'occupation,' 'liberating' Al-Aqsa [mosque] in Jerusalem from Jewish 'occupation,' and lifting the Western embargo on Iraq. They're always stated in that threefold form, and usually in that order."  
 
Putting the arm on the press
The week before Osama bin Laden's videotaped spot, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had already issued a complaint with the Sultan of Qatar about al-Jazeera's broadcasts of speeches by al-Qaeda leaders.

Then, in response to the statement released the day after U.S. bombs and missiles began falling on Afghanistan, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice held a phone conference with officials of U.S. television networks October 10. Later that day the Bush administration's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, "clarified" that Rice had issued a "request," not a "demand," that the networks stop airing statements by al-Qaeda leaders.

"At best, Osama bin Laden's messages are propaganda calling on people to kill Americans," Fleischer said. "At worst, he could be issuing orders to his followers to initiate such attacks." CNN.com reported that Fleischer said bin Laden and others "might be using the international news media to convey coded messages, because their own means of communications are limited." Colin Powell told CNN that the State Department assigned analysts to "pore over" the statements to find any such signals.

(The Militant inquired of the Ted Turner-owned Atlanta Braves whether their third-base coaches are also viewing the tapes to see if any signals might be related to the World Series playoffs now under way, since affecting the outcome of the "U.S. national pastime" would be a major feather in al-Qaeda's cap. As we go to press, the Braves "knock-a-homa" management has made no comment and not returned any messages.)

CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox Network quickly complied. CNN officials announced that in deciding what to air they "will consider guidance from appropriate authorities."

The next day Fleischer, saying the Bush administration was "pleased with the reception of the network executives," made the same "suggestion" to U.S. newspapers. The White House doublespeak officer said that if bin Laden is able to get out "his prepackaged, pretaped message," it could end up in "the hands of people who can read it and see something in it."

According to the New York Times, its executive editor Howell Raines told Fleischer the newspaper's practice "is to keep our readers fully informed."

Over the past month, Washington has imposed strict secrecy on war-related information, a decision the big-business media has gone along with without a peep of protest. Everything--from the names of the now 786 people placed in "preventive detention" in the United States, to the names of bomber pilots, to the growing numbers of Special Forces troops that have been in Afghanistan for weeks--is being withheld by the U.S. government.  
 
Demonization crusade
During Bush's October 11 prime time evening news conference, the U.S. president used the word "evil," "evildoers," or "the evil ones" 15 times in referring to U.S. war aims.

Echoing this demonization campaign, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, on the day following Bush's press conference, wrote that Afghanistan's head of government, Mullah Mohammed Omar, "is reputed to be so crazed that when shrapnel hit his eye in a battle with the Russians [against the 1978-89 Soviet government occupation], he simply cut it out with a knife and kept going."

A question for Dowd: How many thousands of U.S. soldiers have been given the Medal of Honor for such "crazed" actions?  
 
Imperialists carve up Mideast
"Our nation has been tasting this degradation for more than 80 years," bin Laden said in his videotaped message.

What was he referring to? What happened 80 years ago, around the opening of the 1920s?

Prior to World War I, the Ottoman Empire, with its seat in what is today Turkey, had ruled much of the Middle East and North Africa for several hundred years. Laying claim to the Ottoman realm was among the principal objects of British and French capitalists during the first world imperialist slaughter, which opened in August 1914. The region's strategic position in trade and commerce between Europe and Asia made it among the most sought-after prizes in the war.

Anticipating victory over the Triple Alliance, which was led by Germany and included the Ottoman Empire, the imperialist rulers of France and Great Britain secretly signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916. The pact divided the entire Middle East between the two powers--either through colonization, "protectorates," or spheres of influence. (Sir Mark Sykes, chief negotiator for the British Empire, expressed the view that the desert-dwelling Arabs were "rapacious, greedy...animals," while those in the cities were "cowardly," "insolent yet despicable," and "vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit." Also a stone anti-Semite, Sykes added that "even Jews have their good points.")

The Sykes-Picot agreement gave France what are roughly today called Lebanon and Syria. Iraq (then Mesopatamia) and Transjordan (encompassing what is today Palestine and Jordan) would be under "direct or indirect administration and control" by the United Kingdom, which would also establish "protectorates" over formally independent Egypt, the Sudan, and oil-rich Persia (now Iran).

Still nearly two decades before the discovery of vast oil reserves beneath the seemingly resource-poor desert interior of the Arabian peninsula, London was content to exercise de facto vassalage over "independent" kingdoms there such as that of Ibn Saud (now Saudi Arabia) and several smaller ones (now Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait).

At the very time the duplicitous British rulers were completing this pact, they were simultaneously wooing various Arab forces to organize a revolt against the Ottomans by promising them independence and self-rule after the war.

The treaty did not become known until the Bolsheviks--having led workers and peasants to power in Russia in the world's first socialist revolution in October 1917--published one month later many secret documents from the tsar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These included a copy of the Sykes-Picot accord, which the former imperialist government in Russia had also signed, receiving the promise of lands in what is now Turkey.

This imperialist plunder received the stamp of approval in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the rapacious pact that also imposed ruinous reparations and land grabs on the defeated powers in World War I, above all on Germany.

The colonization of the former Ottoman lands by the United Kingdom and France--with London squeezing a few more concessions from Paris--was imposed by military force under the fig leaf of agreements with local Arab rulers and "mandates" from the League of Nations. Newly established under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the League was quickly dubbed a "den of thieves" by Bolshevik leaders, since it served the interests of the imperialist victors in World War I--much as its post-World War II offspring, the United Nations, has been dominated by Washington to this day.

In order to create a powerful new obstacle to the Arab independence struggle, British capital also backed plans by the World Zionist Organization to colonize Palestine with Jews from Europe, where they faced persecution in many parts of the continent. The British rulers figured that colonial settlers over time would feel common cause in combating the Arab democratic movement and resisting efforts to oust imperialist overlords. British rule over Palestine, already entrenched at the close of the war, was formally authorized by a 1922 mandate from the League of Nations.  
 
'Imperialist predators'
Coming out of World War I, Britain and France stood before the world "not as representatives of culture and civilization, but as countries ruled by imperialist predators," declared Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in a Nov. 22, 1919, speech to a congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East.

Despite the democratic pretensions of these governments, Lenin said, "The eyes of the working people have been opened because the Treaty of Versailles was a rapacious peace, which showed that France and Britain had actually fought Germany in order to strengthen their rule over the colonies and the enhance their imperialist might."

What's more, Lenin said, "The internal struggle among these predators is developing so swiftly that we may rejoice in the knowledge that the Treaty of Versailles is only a seeming victory for the jubilant imperialists."

As Lenin foresaw in broad outlines, no more than two decades were to pass before a second world inter-imperialist slaughter erupted, this time not only in Europe, the Mideast, and North Africa, but in the Pacific and East Asia as well.

Following World War II, nationalist movements and revolutionary upsurges spread across much of the Arab and Muslim world, dealing blows to the already weakened British Empire and to France. Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan won their independence, as did Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria a few years later. The British had to pull their forces out of Egypt and Iraq in the late 1940s.

Even as World War II was still being fought, Washington, which was to be the principal imperialist victor in World War II, moved to replace London and Paris as the dominant power in the region. The U.S. government pressed for an end to British rule over Palestine and for the declaration of an independent Jewish state, winning United Nations backing for the forced partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israeli on the dispossessed lands of the Palestinian people.

With direct colonial rule and occupation of the region on the wane, Washington saw the need to establish a bulwark of the capitalist world order there.

Today, while Israeli capitalists have their own class interests that often conflict with those of the U.S. rulers, Israel at the same time stands as the only reliable military garrison state in the service of imperialist interests in the region--including the interests of Wall Street and Washington. Israel continues to occupy not only the lands it conquered in 1948, but also those captured in a brutal 1967 war against the Arab peoples, including the Golan Heights and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli authorities wage daily war on the Palestinian people, who have fought unremittingly for more than half a century for the restoration of their homeland and other national rights.  
 
Washington needs a protectorate
In addition to its reliance on Israel, Washington reacted against a post-World War II upturn of anti-imperialist struggles by workers, peasants, and youth in Iran by organizing a 1953 coup and reinstalling, for a quarter century, the monarchy of the shah of Iran. With a large and modern army and extensive secret police apparatus, the shah not only held the working people of Iran in check, but helped keep the toilers throughout the region under the imperialist boot.

In the late 1970s, however, a new round of democratic struggles spread across the region. In 1979 a mass revolutionary upheaval in Iran, with its decisive battalions among the oil workers and other workers, toppled the shah, dealing a decisive setback to U.S. imperialism.

Unable this time to directly turn back the revolution, Washington gave support to a war against Iran launched by the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Over an eight-year period in the 1980s Iraqi working people were sent against their class brothers and sisters in Iran, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. The Hussein regime, however, proved incapable of inflicting a decisive defeat on Iran--an outcome that would have opened the way for Washington to reimpose a regime there directly subservient to imperialist dictates.

A decade later, Saddam Hussein, believing he had the nod from Washington to invade and occupy part of Kuwait, gave the U.S. imperialists an opportunity to organize a massive bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

In August 1990 the administration of the senior George Bush imposed what quickly became a complete embargo on Iraq, cutting the country off from imports of food, medicines, machinery, and other vital supplies. Over the next 14 weeks the U.S. government deployed nearly a half-million troops in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, including many armored divisions, setting the stage for a brutal six-week bombing campaign that devastated the country. This was topped off by a 100-hour invasion in which more than 150,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers were slaughtered in what one U.S. Army officer called a "turkey shoot."

In carrying out the 1990-91 war against Iraq, Washington's goal was to topple what had become an unreliable bourgeois regime. In its place, the U.S. rulers aimed to install a U.S. protectorate around which Washington could build a stable military strike force to keep toilers in the region in line and look out for the interests of U.S. capital.

Despite its military "victory," however, Washington fell far short of those goals. It strengthened its position vis-a-vis its imperialist rivals--especially Paris, Bonn, and Tokyo--but it came no closer to imposing an imperialist "peace" on the region. Instead, the outcome of the conflict exacerbated the contradictions of the world imperialist order and set up the conditions for new and bloodier wars.

Since that time, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom have continued frequent bombing of Iraq, killing many civilians each year. And another decade of the embargo has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from malnutrition and lack of medical supplies.

The U.S. rulers see the current war, with the immediate goal of toppling the Taliban-led government in Kabul, as an opportunity to recoup some of what they lost with the Iranian revolution of 1979 and could not restore during the Gulf War. They are aiming to get back a direct foothold in the region by setting up a U.S. imperialist protectorate in Afghanistan--perhaps under the banner of the modern-day den of thieves, the United Nations.

Afghanistan, of course, lacks the modern infrastructure, larger population, and advanced army of either Iran or Iraq. And there are voices in U.S. ruling-class circles--including in the administration and both imperialist parties, the Democrats and Republicans--urging Bush to "finish the job" with Saddam Hussein after "dealing with" the Taliban.  
 
Denial of national sovereignty
A central feature of imperialist domination in the Middle East and Central Asia, as throughout the entire semicolonial world, is the denial of national sovereignty and dignity to the majority of humanity. From the arbitrary drawing of lines on a map to set borders, to imperial dictates to carry out Washington's bidding--the toilers across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America have faced "humiliation and degradation for 80 years," and often much, much longer.

Without such domination, and its necessarily accompanying affronts to peoples around the globe, imperialism cannot survive.

The latest example, and the main propaganda pretext for the escalating U.S. war, is Washington's demand that the government of Afghanistan hand over Osama bin Laden and others--"without negotiation," as Bush arrogantly intones, and without the pretense of presenting a shred of evidence to that sovereign government.

Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, October 14, Suhail Shaheen, deputy Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, explained that no representative of the U.S. government has ever sat down with them to present any of the case on which it bases its demand to turn over bin Laden.

What other sovereign government, anywhere in the world, would simply turn over an individual living within its borders on the demand of another government? On the demand that it do so or be pounded by bombs, followed by an invasion of ground troops? And Afghanistan, moreover, is a country with a long history of imperialist aggression and assaults on its national sovereignty and dignity--and resistance to them.

The Taliban ambassador added that the U.S. government, having "issued its own verdict" that bin Laden should be taken "dead or alive," has created a situation in which anyone, anywhere in the world can now commit an act of violence and have it blamed on Osama bin Laden. This is already being confirmed in life in the United States, as the anthrax panic is being used to crank up emergency war fever and at the same time build a bridge to "Iraqi complicity."  
 
'Embrace imperial role'
As Washington and London have expanded their war against Afghanistan, a number of kept columnists in the big-business press are doing their part to soften up bourgeois public opinion for the establishment of an imperialist protectorate.

They point to the example of Yugoslavia, where UN-sanctioned administrations--in fact, protectorates--have been established in Bosnia and Kosova, backed by imperialist occupation forces on the ground. What other alternative is there, say these apologists, in face of the "dangers to the world community" posed by "failed states"?

"The Case for American Empire" blared the front-page of a recent issue of the conservative Weekly Standard, replete with crisply dressed Navy officers and Old Glory waving overhead.

Instead of becoming a "kinder, gentler nation," writes Max Boot, the September 11 attacks prove "the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation." Recognizing that "unilateral U.S. rule may no longer be an option today" in Afghanistan, Boot suggests that the United Nations could "certainly lead an international occupation force under UN auspices, with the cooperation of some Muslim nations."

Boot says that former president William Clinton "eventually did something right in the Balkans" along these lines. "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," Boot concludes.  
 
Working-class line of march
The statement released by the Socialist Workers Party on September 11, through its New York City mayoral candidate Martín Koppel, presents the opposite class perspective: that of the workers and farmers the world over, including us in the United States. The statement said:

The U.S. government and its allies for more than a century have carried out systematic terror to defend their class privilege and interests at home and abroad--from the atomic incineration of hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the 10-year-long slaughter in Indochina, to the war against the Iraqi people in 1990-91, to the burning to death of 80 people at Waco on its home soil, to other examples too numerous to list. In recent weeks, the White House and Congress have stood behind Tel Aviv as it escalated its campaign of both random killings and outright murders in its historically failing effort to quell the struggle by the dispossessed Palestinian people for the return of their homeland.

Half a century ago the revolutionary workers movement and other opponents of colonial outrages, racism, and anti-Semitism in all its forms warned that by waging a war of terror to drive the Palestinians from their farms, towns, and cities, the founders of the Israeli state and their imperialist backers in North America and Europe were pitting the Jewish people against those fighting for national liberation in the Middle East and worldwide; they were creating a death trap for the Jews, which Israel remains to this day. By its systematic superexploitation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; by its never-ending insults to their national and cultural dignity; by its ceaseless murderous violence in countless forms--U.S. imperialism is turning North America into a death trap for working people and all who live here.

As part of the working-class campaign against imperialism and its wars being carried out today by members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists, communist workers are finding ways to discuss these consequences of the century-long exploitation and oppression imposed on humanity by a handful of capitalist ruling families. We point to the capacities of working people on every continent to join together in a common revolutionary struggle against our common class enemies, from the United States to Europe, and from the Middle East to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

To chart such a course means supporting the demand for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Saudi Arabia and throughout the Mideast.

It means championing the call for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland, and an end to U.S. support to the Israeli regime.

Working people in the United States and Britain would win mighty allies across the Mideast and worldwide by demanding an end to the bombing of Iraq, which continues to this day, as well as to the devastating embargo of the country.

As part of a fight against the employers at home, workers and farmers in the United States must join in the battle to cancel the ruinous debt with which the banks and other imperialist financial institutions have saddled the semicolonial countries. The debt is unpayable. It is only a means, through ceaseless interest payments, to transfer wealth created by the labor of working people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the coffers of the propertied families in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan.

From Argentina to Nigeria, from Indonesia to Pakistan and Nicaragua, toilers resisting austerity measures, cuts in wages, land foreclosures, and deteriorating living and working conditions would rally to such a call from working people in the United States.

While Bush and the bipartisan Congress carry out a "crusade" to defend "our country," workers and farmers in the United States are constantly reminded--whether we are yet conscious of it or not--that there are in fact conflicting classes within these borders, with irreconcilable interests and historic challenges. Meat packers in Washington State, workers in tank factories and at airlines, state employees such as those in Minnesota, and many others are being reminded that they too face an exploiter who is driving to increase profits at their expense.

The battle against U.S. imperialism, the last empire on the face of the earth, is the fight to overturn once and for all the profit system that inexorably produces and reproduces exploitation, the driving of farmers from the land, racism, national oppression, insults to different cultures, the denial of national sovereignty, fascism, and world war. That battle underscores the common interests of workers and farmers in the United States and those around the world, as well as our capacity to revolutionize social relations and transform the wealth of the earth and of our collective labor--and, for the first time in history, use it to the benefit of all humanity.
 
 
Related article:
Statement by Osama bin Laden
 
Imperialist War in Afghanistan and the Building the International Communist Movement Today; meeting October 26 in Stockholm  
 
 
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