BY JACK BARNES
Below we reprint excerpts from "The Opening Guns of World
War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq" by Jack Barnes. The
entire article, based on a talk given in April 1991, appears in
issue no. 7 of the Marxist magazine New International. The
magazine is copyright by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp.
and reprinted by permission. Subheading is by the Militant.
The Bush administration presents the war against Iraq as the first triumph of the "new world order." It points to the fact that Moscow not only gave public backing to the U.S. war drive, but also voted for every U.S.-initiated motion in the United Nations Security Council, right down to the April 2 resolution rubber-stamping Washington's stranglehold cease-fire conditions that in practice suspend Iraqi sovereignty. This enabled the U.S. rulers to use the UN as a fig leaf in a more brazen manner than any time since the opening of the 1950s during its war against Korea.
Washington succeeded in gaining political and diplomatic cover for each new stage of its aggression in the Gulf with the aid of all four of the Security Council's other members with veto powers: Britain, China, France, and the Soviet Union. Enlisting the collaboration of the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet and Chinese workers' states was decisive to Washington's ability to present the devastating assault on the people of Iraq as if it flowed from a mandate of an "international community."
Only the government of Cuba - currently one of ten governments serving a two-year rotating stint on the Security Council -is using its position in the UN to speak out consistently against Washington's right to intervene in the Arab-Persian Gulf, under any circumstances or with whatever rationalization. Cuba exposed the successes of Washington and its allies in using this body as cover to justify its murderous course. The record of much of that effort by the Cuban government is presented in the book published by Pathfinder in October 1990 entitled U.S. Hands Off the Mideast! Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations, which contains speeches and letters by Cuba's deputy foreign minister and chief UN representative Ricardo Alarcón and by President Fidel Castro. Later speeches by Alarcón and other Cuban representatives were run in the Militant newsweekly.
The truth is that Washington's Gulf war and its outcome did not open up a new world order of stability and UN-overseen harmony. Instead, it was the first war since the close of World War II that grew primarily out of the intensified competition and accelerating instability of the crises-ridden old imperialist world order. It is the increasing internal strains within this declining order that drove Washington to launch its murderous military adventure. The irremediable social and political conflicts, and consequent instability, that existed before the Gulf war and that underlay it have all been exacerbated:
between imperialism and the toilers of the Middle East and elsewhere in the semicolonial world;
among the rival imperialist powers;
between the various imperialist states and the oppressed nations;
between exploiters and exploited within these oppressed countries;
between the toilers and the bourgeoisified leaderships who speak in their name and claim to represent their interests;
among the bourgeois states of the Middle East and other oppressed nations;
between Washington and the governments of the deformed and degenerated workers' states, first and foremost, the Soviet Union;
between the U.S. imperialist rulers and the two workers' states that pose the biggest problems for them, North Korea and Cuba; and
between Washington and the revolutionary government and communist leadership right on U.S. imperialism's very doorstep in the Americas - that of Cuba.
The war demonstrated once again that there is no "international community" under the aegis of world capitalism. Most importantly, it has driven home the fact that there can be a world community - if the exploited and oppressed worldwide remove the exploiters and oppressors, the war makers, from power...
Conflict between imperialist rivals
The assault against Iraq was the first of Washington's wars
since World War II in which it sought to use its military might
to deal blows, indirect but palpable, to U.S. imperialism's
rivals, especially in Bonn, Tokyo, and Paris. The Gulf war
exacerbated the conflicts and divisions between Washington and
its imperialist competitors, as well as between these rival
powers themselves. While we know these sharpening conflicts
already existed (every working person has been deluged by
protectionist propaganda from the U.S. government, bourgeois
politicians, trade union bureaucrats, and their radical hangers-
on), the war brought them to the surface with greater force and
accelerated them to a degree not seen in world politics for
some time...
No power other than Washington could have transported and put in place the mammoth order of battle necessary to carry a war to Iraq. While waged behind the facade of a broad "international coalition," the war was a U.S. government operation, with London's enthusiastic support and with Paris being forced to join in out of weakness. Bonn and Tokyo - still limited in their use of strategic military power abroad flowing from their defeat in World War II - took no part in the combat at all.
Through the initiation, organization, domination, and execution of this war effort, U.S. imperialism strengthened its control over Gulf oil reserves, gaining additional leverage over its rivals in Bonn, Tokyo, and Paris in the competition for world markets for commodities and capital. By throwing the biggest military forces of any other imperialist power behind Washington's war effort, the rulers in London successfully sought to guarantee themselves a privileged junior position alongside U.S. finance capital in this region, which was once largely a British protectorate but had been penetrated more and more by French trade, aid, and loans. The commitment of combat forces abroad by the Canadian ruling class for the first time since the Korean War, and Ottawa's increasingly open and unqualified backing of Washington's foreign policy moves, indicate the pressure to grab more firmly onto the skirt of U.S. imperialism. The regime in New Zealand did the same, easing conflicts with Washington that have grown up there over port visits by U.S. ships armed with nuclear weapons. The Australian ruling class, as usual, made sure it was represented in Washington's armed entourage as well.