This week the Militant is featuring “The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq” by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. It’s the lead article in New International no. 7. Along with issues no. 10, 11 and 12 of New International, it is being promoted by members and supporters of the SWP and Communist Leagues in discussions with working people today. Studying this literature helps understand the crises and spreading wars confronting workers and farmers worldwide, as the U.S. rulers and their capitalist rivals push rearmament and realignments to try to defend their places in the disintegrating world imperialist “order.” Below is an excerpt from the introduction, “In this issue.” Copyright © 1991 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
The six-week bombardment and one-hundred-hour invasion of Iraq by Washington and its allies devastated the country and its peoples. In a land that had been semi-industrialized, the assault left millions homeless, hungry, and vulnerable to disease. It was one of the most massive, cold-blooded slaughters in modern history. …
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. …
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.
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. …
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.