Washington launched its war drive in early August 1990 with an air, sea, and ground blockade. The initial ships and aircraft as well as the first troops and war matériel were dispatched to the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding waters. In a little more than six months, these became a half-million-strong mechanized and armored invasion force. The U.S. rulers' goal was to impose a virtual protectorate in Baghdad, a reliable regime subservient to U.S. imperialism; secure greater control over oil reserves in the Gulf; shift the relationship of forces against the region's toilers, especially the Palestinian people whose intifada and internationalist dignity remain the biggest thorn in Washington's side; and in the process stabilize and strengthen pro-U.S. regimes in the region. In pursuing these aims, the U.S. capitalist class sought to use its military might to deal economic and political blows to its imperialist rivals in Europe and Japan.  
 
U.S. did not fight a war at all
Far from the stunning war victory proclaimed by President George Bush on February 27, however, the massive U.S. armored invasion force did not fight a war at all. Instead, allied imperialist forces on the land and from the air and sea conducted a militarized slaughter of tens of thousands of individual Iraqis--workers and peasants in tattered uniforms--attempting to flee Kuwait and return to Iraq. The Saddam Hussein regime had abandoned them in foxholes and trenches without air cover, stripped of all but a skeletal command structure, with minimal communications and few provisions. Despite its grab to control oil, land, and waterways in Kuwait, Baghdad never intended to fight a war against U.S. imperialism.

Nor has Washington achieved its political aims in the region. The capitalist regimes and imperialist order in the Gulf and Mideast are more unstable today than before August 1990. The imposition of a "solution" to the Palestinian "question" short of justice for the Palestinians continues to evade the imperialists. Far from becoming closer and warmer, the U.S. and Israeli rulers continue to diverge in their policy interests. Washington has failed so far to oust Saddam Hussein and impose a regime more to its liking. Growing numbers of working people in the United States are questioning the purpose of a war that, as they are now learning, destroyed the Iraqi people's modern means of life support and culminated in two massacres: one in late February against defenseless Iraqi soldiers fleeing Kuwait--carried out by Washington and its allies, with the complicity of Baghdad; the other, in March, against the Kurds and Shiites in northern and southern Iraq--carried out by Baghdad with the complicity of Washington.

The U.S. government stands guilty before the world for making refugees of some two million Kurds and others who fled Baghdad's murderous assault. But Washington and its allies have refused to open their borders to the Kurds and other refugees seeking asylum.

Having won a military "victory," U.S. imperialism is breaking its teeth in the attempt to achieve its political goals. This outcome has opened wide tactical divisions within U.S. ruling circles over the Bush administration's policy decisions in the Gulf. The "Vietnam syndrome" has been reinforced, not pushed back as Bush initially boasted at the end of February. It will be slightly harder, not easier, for the U.S. rulers to mobilize public support for their next military adventure. It will be slightly more difficult for union bureaucrats and other misleaders, echoing the wishes of the government and corporations, to get away with demanding that working people and the oppressed accept sacrifices, defer strikes, or postpone protest actions for patriotic reasons. More political space can be taken--right now--by working-class opponents of imperialism and war.

The war and its immediate consequences did not resolve, but rather exacerbated the economic and political contradictions in the United States and worldwide that increasingly drove Washington to use its military might in the first place. The war accelerated the rivalry between Washington and other imperialist powers and increased the likelihood of sharpening conflicts among them. Neither the German nor Japanese imperialist ruling classes were politically able to send units to participate in the allied assault. For the first time since the buildup to World War II, however, the war in the Gulf put Bonn and Tokyo on an accelerated course toward using their military forces abroad to advance their respective state interests.  
 
March toward war, crisis
Working people around the world today face an unstable prewar situation, not a stabilized postwar period. Washington's assault on Iraq was the first of the wars that will mark the segment of the historic curve of capitalist development announced by the October 1987 crash of stock markets from New York to Tokyo, from Bonn to Hong Kong. Capitalism today is marching not only toward more wars but at the same time stumbling toward a depression and world social crisis. We will see deepening capitalist economic dislocation within which a partial shock or breakdown--a collapse of the banking system, a steep recession in a major industrial country, an inflationary explosion, a massive crop failure--could trigger a collapse of world industrial production.

With no end in sight, fear is growing that the recession in North America, Britain, France, New Zealand, and Australia could become both as deep as the 1981–82 downturn (or deeper) and worldwide in scope, as happened in 1974–75. It is precipitating the kind of pressures on capitalist profits that further intensify interimperialist competition. As a result, the employers will try to take more out of the hides of the hundreds of millions of debt slaves in the semicolonial world. They will drive harder at home to lower living standards and step up the pace and intensity of production inside mines, mills, and factories. They will extend their efforts to chip away at rights and democratic liberties and seek to weaken and restrict the space open to the working class and its organizations for independent political action.

Washington's war against Iraq was thus an announcement, a loud and clear one, of the conflicts that lie ahead as the imperialist rulers follow the historic logic of their declining world system of exploitation and oppression--a line of march that, willy-nilly, moves toward World War III.

For working people the world over, for vanguard working-class fighters, and for that section of the working-class vanguard who are communists, these political assessments are decisive in charting a course to advance the historic line of march of our class. The future of humanity depends on the independent political organization of the world's toilers to resist the devastation the rulers seek to impose on us. It depends on our capacity to fight, to win revolutionary battles, and to take war-making powers out of the hands of the exploiters and oppressors by establishing governments of the workers and farmers. Whether or not the unthinkable horrors of a third imperialist world slaughter are unleashed will be decided by mighty class battles and their outcome in the coming years. It is in our hands, the hands of the workers of the world, to prevent the calamities that imperialism is marching, and stumbling, toward. We will have our chance.  
 

We may never know the actual numbers of toilers killed in Iraq and Kuwait during the six weeks of incessant allied air and sea bombardment and the murderous one-hundred-hour invasion launched by Washington February 24, 1991. But the one common media estimate that as many as 150,000 human beings were slaughtered is conservative, if anything. Just think about the impact of a massacre of that magnitude on the less than 19 million people of Iraq. Compare the blow of this number of deaths, and many additional maimings, and the relatively short period over which they mounted, with the impact many of you can remember in the United States, a country of 250 million, of the 47,000 U.S. combat deaths during Washington's nearly ten-year--not ten-week--war to prevent Vietnam's reunification.  
 
Concentrated bloodletting
The most concentrated single bloodletting was organized by the U.S. command in the final forty-eight hours of the invasion, as Iraqi soldiers fled Kuwait along the roads to Basra. While publicly denying that Iraqi forces were withdrawing from Kuwait, Washington ordered that tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers be targeted for wave after wave of bombing, strafing, and shelling. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, others with rifles packed in bedrolls, leaving in cars, trucks, carts, and on foot. Many civilians from Iraq, Kuwait, and immigrant workers from other countries were killed at the same time as they tried to flee.

The U.S. armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait city to Basra, sealing it off. They bombed the other end of the highway and sealed it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hills overlooking it. And then, from the air and from the land they simply massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on traffic jams backed up for as much as twenty miles. When the traffic became gridlocked, the B-52s were sent in for carpet bombing.  
 
The killing zone
That was the killing zone. You couldn't move down the road. You couldn't move up the road. You couldn't move off the road. You couldn't surrender, wave a white flag, or give yourself up. The allied forces simply kept bombing and firing--at every person, jeep, truck, car, and bicycle. One allied air force officer called it a "turkey shoot." Others called it the biggest of the "cockroach hunts." That's the American way--carpet bombed, and shot in the back...

The imperialist coalition and the Baghdad regime both have their own reasons for covering up the truth about the bloodbath. As a result, we'll never know how many people died in the massacre. In late March Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by a reporter to provide an estimate of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of combined allied bombing and ground operations. Showing a little of the true face of imperial arrogance and racism, Powell replied: "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."  
 
 
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