Printed below is an excerpt from the lead article in New International no. 7, "The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq." The article is based on a talk given in Cleveland in March 1991, one month after U.S.-led imperialist forces carried out a six-week bombing campaign and four-day ground invasion of Iraq. Jack Barnes is the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright © 1991 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY JACK BARNES  
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.

Coming out of World War II, U.S. imperialism emerged the dominant power in the world imperialist system, both economically and militarily. For a substantial period following that war the rate of profit, and for even longer the tempo of growth of the mass of profits, was rising in all the imperialist countries. As a result, competition between the imperialist powers over markets for commodities and capital and over sources of raw materials was buffered.  
 
Capitalist decline
Since the mid-1970s, however, the combination of the declining rate of profit, halting growth in the mass of profits, and relative slowdown in economic expansion has precipitated growing, sometimes sharp rivalry among the imperialist ruling classes. The years 1974-75 saw the first worldwide recession since 1937, as economic interdependence among the major capitalist powers grew alongside their competition and conflict. Although the sheer size and output of the U.S. capitalist economy remains enormous, and while it remains the largest market in the world, its position as an industrial and trading power has slipped substantially in recent decades in the face of growing challenges from German, Japanese, and other rivals. U.S. strategic military power remains unchallenged, however, and is the main lever the U.S. rulers have to compensate for their relative decline.

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.

The relationship of forces that existed prior to the Gulf war among the capitalist powers in Europe has not been altered, but the national and state conflicts between them have been exacerbated. The war underlined the limits of the European Community’s modest steps toward greater "economic integration" (lowered barriers to trade, investment, and travel).

The U.S.-engineered war drive exposed beyond doubt that these measures do not translate into a "common European" foreign policy, a "common European" military policy, let alone steps to build up a "common European" armed forces. Nor do they even translate into a "common European" economic policy, let alone a common currency; in fact, strides in this direction were set back.

Instead, the rival capitalist classes in the European Community (EC) were further propelled toward defending their separate state interests, whatever their common stake in a trading bloc in face of U.S. and Japanese competition.

The war set back German imperialism’s goal of an integrated European Community under Bonn’s domination. It battered the Bonn-led alliance of German and French imperialism in the EC. The French imperialists--who had made special ties to Baghdad one of the axes of their foreign policy in the Middle East, in hopes of regaining a stronger economic foothold in the Gulf--suffered humiliating cuffs from Washington....

The Gulf war revealed that important changes have occurred in what appeared to be the continuing pattern of world politics coming out of the initial consequences of World War II.

Washington was the chief victor in that war. It emerged as imperialism’s predominant economic and strategic military power, and the only one nuclear-armed to boot. The Soviet toilers, at the sacrifice of tens of millions of workers and peasants, had repelled the onslaught by German imperialism. By the beginning of the 1950s capitalist property relations had been overturned throughout much of Eastern and Central Europe, even if under Stalinist-led regimes. By the latter half of the 1950s the USSR had its own nuclear arsenal (although not effective parity with Washington in weaponry and delivery systems until late in the 1960s).  
 
Post-World War II pattern
Struggles for national independence and self-determination gained powerful momentum throughout the colonial and semicolonial world during World War II and its aftermath. During the decade and a half following 1945, victorious national liberation struggles in Azerbaijan, Yugoslavia, Albania, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba grew over into deep-going anticapitalist revolutions; brought to power workers and peasants governments; and (except for Azerbaijan) culminated in the expropriation of the landlords and capitalists and the establishment of workers states.

Washington’s wars in Korea and Vietnam were fought during a period of an ascending world capitalist economy. The U.S. rulers’ dominance in the world imperialist system was still unchallenged, both economically and militarily. The dollar reigned supreme in world financial markets. But U.S. imperialism’s German and Japanese rivals were not under sharp competitive economic pressures that pushed them toward direct military involvement in the Korean or Vietnam conflicts. (In fact, Tokyo took advantage of huge construction contracts during the Korean War to take the first steps toward rebuilding its devastated economy, without having to share the burden of the U.S.-organized military operations.)

Given this global picture that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, imperialist war was expected to be largely limited for the foreseeable future to the use of military power against the colonial revolution, as well as threats against the workers states. It was in the colonial world that the main organized, massive resistance to imperialism was continuing to take place--from Asia and Africa, to the Middle East and the Americas. Bourgeois-nationalist leaderships and Stalinist organizations frequently dominated these struggles, but the obstacles posed by this misleadership did not prevent substantial victories from being won by the toilers in their fight for colonial independence.

In some cases radical petty-bourgeois leaderships--responding in a determined way to blows aimed at them by an arrogant imperialism, and under the impetus of worker and peasant struggles against capitalist exploiters in city and countryside--went through an anticapitalist evolution. This was the case with respect to the July 26 Movement in Cuba; a major wing of the Algerian resistance movement; and a few organizations influenced by the Cuban revolution such as the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and New Jewel Movement in Grenada. (Most petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships, on the other hand, did not evolve in this direction and ended up tailing or being integrated into bourgeois nationalist formations, or, in a few cases, Stalinist parties.)

This was the period of the so-called Cold War. At least from some point in the 1960s, the U.S. rulers operated on the assumption of a nuclear stalemate with Moscow, especially once the Soviet Union developed the capacity to hit U.S. targets with nuclear-tipped missiles. Meanwhile, the privileged castes in the Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese workers states, acting as transmission belts for imperialist pressure, combined police-state repression with Stalinist political disorientation to push working people at home increasingly out of politics and keep them isolated from the international class struggle--to the great advantage of the imperialist ruling classes as well.

On the basis of this post-World War II pattern, most revolutionists concluded--correctly for the foreseeable future--that the international class struggle was not heading toward increased interimperialist military conflicts, but toward a standoff between the two major powers with strategic nuclear arsenals--U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union--and their allies. A third world war, it was assumed, would necessarily find the imperialist powers aligned behind Washington in a conflict with the USSR. The rival capitalist ruling classes would avoid military conflicts among themselves, conflicts that would leave them vulnerable both to the Soviet Union and to the loss of additional portions of the world to anticapitalist revolutions.

I’m presenting a simplified version of this view of the world, but not a caricature. Whatever onesidedness there was to this assessment, it was grounded in the objective fact that due to the factors just cited there was no drive toward interimperialist military conflict during this initial period of postwar capitalist expansion.

This pattern corresponded with what was actually happening in world politics during the initial decades following World War II, including the generally low level of intensity of the class struggle in the United States and other imperialist countries. We were not heading toward intensified class combat on the picket lines and in the streets. We were not heading toward an ascending working-class movement bursting beyond the bourgeois political framework imposed by the petty-bourgeois union officialdom. We were not heading toward clashes in the streets with growing ultrarightist and fascist movements organized by wings of the employing class to try to take on and crush a class-struggle-oriented vanguard of the labor movement.  
 
Class struggle in imperialist countries
With a time lag that could not be predicted, it was assumed, the class struggle in the United States and other imperialist countries would eventually turn a corner heading in this direction and begin narrowing the gap with the level of combat in the colonial world. This would lead to prerevolutionary situations that could result in major new advances in the international struggle for national liberation and socialism.

Politics and the class struggle in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and other Stalinist-dominated workers states were largely a nonfactor in this political equation. The existence of a substantial portion of the world where the domination of capitalist property relations had been abolished was recognized as a conquest of the toilers worth defending against imperialist assault. But the workers and farmers of these countries seemed more and more to have been frozen out of the world class struggle for an indefinite period by the repressive and politically stultifying domination of the castes and their police-state regimes--especially following the bloody defeat of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.¹ Meanwhile, as a way of maintaining bargaining leverage with Washington, the Stalinist regimes provided arms and financial aid to national liberation movements and to governments that came in conflict with imperialism in the Third World.

But none of these political assumptions hold any longer in the world situation today--one whose advent was most explosively marked by the 1987 crash of the world’s stock markets. The crash was further evidence that the 1974-75 worldwide recession and the sharp and sudden slump of 1981-82 were not simply two more periodic downturns in the capitalist business cycle; they also signaled the end of an ascending segment in the broader curve of capitalist development and the ushering in of a descending segment heading toward intensified class battles on a national and international scale, including among the imperialist powers.  
 
Capitalist economic stagnation
The world pattern today is characterized by capitalism’s tendency toward economic stagnation, instability, and vulnerability to breakdowns that can precipitate a global depression and social crisis. It is a world of intensifying interimperialist competition and conflicts. It is a world in which resistance and class conflicts will mount in response to the capitalists’ intensifying assault on the rights and conditions of workers and exploited farmers. It is a world in which the disintegration of Stalinist parties and regimes across Eastern Europe will continue, and the crisis faced by the privileged caste in the Soviet Union will deepen, opening up space for the first time in decades for hundreds of millions of workers and farmers in those parts of the world to begin engaging in political life, to recognize and connect with fellow toilers abroad.

Capitalism will not be able to open a new period of accelerated economic development and improving social conditions to the peoples of the Third World under bourgeois regimes, including the Gulf region or elsewhere in the Middle East. Instead, international debt slavery weighs ever more heavily on all these peoples. Struggles for national liberation will increasingly be combined with battles against local exploiters for land, democratic and labor rights, and social justice. These national-democratic and anti-imperialist struggles, in order to be carried through to victory, will more than ever require revolutionary working-class leadership and political perspectives. Conflicts between capitalist governments in the Third World will also increase. In the face of these volatile conditions, the imperialists will be driven time and again to use their military might to defend their power and their profits.

Washington’s assault against Iraq is the first of a number of such wars that imperialism will continue fighting against peoples and governments in the Third World. They will be more and more intertwined with intensifying conflicts among the rival imperialist powers themselves. The gap will widen between Washington’s military power and its relatively declining economic prowess, while its major imperialist rivals will seek to narrow the gap between their own economic strength and their relatively subordinate military power.

The mounting instability throughout Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, as well as in China will not be reversed by reactionary, national-socialist efforts to win economic concessions from imperialism in return for foreign policy favors. The petty-bourgeois misleaders can only ape the world bourgeoisie, not become them, even if they share their values and beliefs. Workers and farmers in these countries will keep pressing their way into politics--domestic and international. So long as major means of production, banking, and trade remain expropriated, these states will continue to come into conflict with the imperialist ruling classes, which will be driven by their profit needs toward taking back hunks of the world and the world’s toilers for direct capitalist exploitation. The dangers of imperialist wars against the republics of the Soviet Union and other workers states will grow, not recede.

Threats and probes against the Cuban and North Korean workers states--where working people refuse to back down in face of imperialist threats--will continue, and relations between these governments and the U.S. rulers will be exacerbated.

By the time of these rebellions in the 1950s, the Stalinist regimes and parties, through a combination of murderous repression and political disorientation, had decimated any vestige of communist leadership of the working class in these countries. These revolts, however, were the last in Eastern Europe to involve layers of socialist-minded workers who in their youth had been won to communist perspectives prior to the consolidation of the Stalinist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Communist International in the early 1930s.

The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was a period of mass radicalization during the early part of 1968 that initially succeeded in winning some democratic concessions and political space from the Stalinist regime. It was crushed by the August intervention of more than 650,000 Soviet and Eastern European troops. No communist leadership existed during this rebellion to organize resistance by working people and students, or to forge a nucleus of a revolutionary internationalist vanguard of the working class in the aftermath of the defeat.  
 
 
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