March 19, 2008
Five years after Washington inaugurated its "shock and
awe" campaign, striking Baghdad with cruise missiles and
precision-guided bombs, it has become abundantly clear that the
war of aggression against Iraq has produced the greatest geo-political
disaster in American history.
The war’s costs, in terms of both US imperialism’s
global position and sheer dollar amounts, have eclipsed the immense
damage wrought by the protracted intervention in Vietnam nearly
four decades ago. It has already lasted longer than the American
Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War. Even
in Vietnam, after five years of major troop deployments, the withdrawal
of American forces had already begun.
A "war of choice" that was launched as a demonstration
of the overwhelming and irresistible force of American militarism
has turned into an operational debacle that has strained the US
armed forces to the breaking point and eroded the strategic position
of the United States in every corner of the world.
For the Iraqi people, the war has produced a catastrophe. For
the American people, as well, it has yielded nothing but suffering
and tragedy. It unquestionably constitutes the single greatest
war crime of the twenty-first century. In both its motivation
and execution, it embodies the essential characteristics of similar
crimes carried out in the last century.
The International Tribunal at Nuremburg that convicted the
leaders of the Third Reich summed up its verdict with the following
observation: "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences
are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the
whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not
only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime,
differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole."
The "accumulated evil" wrought by the decision to
launch a war of aggression in Iraq continues to unfold. According
to the most credible estimates, it has cost the lives of over
1 million Iraqis, while turning over 4 million more into refugees,
driven by violence and destruction either out of their country
or into internal exile.
A poll released this week that was conducted for the British
Broadcasting Corporation, ABC News in the US and German and Japanese
television found that nearly half of the residents of Baghdad
said at least one family member had been killed since the occupation
began.
The same poll found that over 70 percent of Iraqis want US
troops out of their country, a sentiment that has remained steady
throughout the occupation, but which is consistently ignored by
the US political establishment and the mass media.
The divide-and-rule strategy employed by the US occupiers and
Washington’s attempts to fashion a puppet regime based on
ethnic politics created the conditions for a savage sectarian
war that claimed untold victims and "ethnically cleansed"
large sections of Baghdad and other areas where Shia, Sunni and
Kurdish Iraqis had previously lived side-by-side.
The destruction of social infrastructure caused by American
high explosives five years ago—as well as the previous years
of punishing sanctions—has only been exacerbated by the disintegration
that has unfolded under US military occupation. Essential infrastructure
remains devastated, with the population deprived of electricity,
fuel, clean water, sanitary facilities and garbage collection,
creating hellish conditions and an immense public health crisis.
The killing of over 600 doctors and medical professionals and
the flight of thousands of others, together with severe shortages
in medicine and equipment, have left Iraq’s health sector
in a state of collapse.
The death toll among US troops will soon top 4,000. At least
60,000 more have been wounded, and many thousands more American
soldiers and Marines sent into this dirty colonial war have come
back with severe psychological problems.
As for the costs to American society, it is now estimated that
the occupation is consuming some $12 billion a month and could
total as much as $3 trillion. A report by the Joint Economic Committee
of Congress found that the war thus far has cost an average American
family of four $16,900, an amount projected to rise to $37,000
by 2017. These vast sums have been diverted from pressing social
needs in the US itself, while the massive expenditures have contributed
significantly to a raging financial crisis that threatens to plunge
the economy into a depression.
It is a measure of the perverse mindset of the US president—and
his criminal indifference to the loss of human life—that
in a video conference last week with US military personnel in
Afghanistan, Bush declared himself envious of those fighting in
America’s colonial-style wars, calling it "a fantastic
experience" and "in some ways romantic."
Equally delusional were the comments made by Vice President
Dick Cheney during an unannounced visit to Baghdad. Cheney called
the five-year war a "successful endeavor" that "has
been well worth the effort."
The reality is that five years after a US invasion that was
expected by its organizers to swiftly replace the government of
Saddam Hussein with a stable US client regime, 160,000 US troops
remain deployed in the country and—as the extraordinary security
measures surrounding Cheney, even in the fortified Green Zone,
make clear—no area can be claimed to be fully secure.
The surge initiated by the Pentagon a year ago has yet to create
conditions in which American commanders believe they can reduce
occupation forces even to the level that existed at the beginning
of the invasion. The surge, which Cheney said was responsible
for a "remarkable turnaround," has not halted the daily
bloodbath. Even according to US government figures, on average
26 Iraqi civilians were killed every day in the month of February.
To a large extent, the reduction in what remains a horrific
death toll is attributable not to US pacification efforts, but
to the fact that the sectarian violence unleashed by the occupation
has largely separated Sunni and Shia populations, leaving fewer
people to kill. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is financing and arming
former Sunni insurgents, who have no loyalty either to Washington
or the US-backed government, but who for the moment see the Shia-dominated
security forces and militias as the greatest threat.
As for Iraqi perceptions of conditions in their own country,
the recent poll indicated that more than half believe the beefing
up of the US troop presence in Baghdad and Anbar Province has
made matters worse.
A war based on lies
As is now universally recognized, the war was prepared in 2002
and early 2003 with a campaign of deliberate lies and fabrications
about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties between Baghdad
and Al Qaeda, both of which proved to be non-existent.
The Bush administration, with the complicity of congressional
Democrats, sought to exploit the fears and political confusion
in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to implement
long-prepared plans to seize control of a country holding the
word’s second-largest proven oil reserves and turn it into
a platform for the extension of US military power throughout the
region.
Notwithstanding the popular disorientation fostered by a relentless
propaganda campaign waged by both political parties and backed
by a subservient media, there was broad opposition to the drive
to war, reflected in massive demonstrations both in the US and
around the world.
The five years since the invasion have not only seen the original
lies thoroughly exposed, but also a complete discrediting of the
US government and US policy in the eyes of the world’s population.
The old attempt to drape predatory US policies in the mantle of
democracy—used to some effect during the two world wars and
the Cold War that followed—is now rejected with contempt
by people around the globe, who have been repulsed by the killings
and repression in Iraq and atrocities such as the sadistic torture
practiced at Abu Ghraib.
Of equal importance is the discrediting of the political system
within the US itself. Rejecting the official story relentlessly
sold by the mass media and the two major parties, the American
people by a large margin have come to oppose the war. Yet it continues
unabated, and the president who launched it—who is despised
by millions and retains the support of less than a third of the
population—retains undiminished power to pursue a policy
of unrestrained militarism. Nothing could expose more thoroughly
the undemocratic character and political rot that pervade the
entire governmental system within the United States.
The global eruption of American militarism and the crisis of
US and world capitalism are inextricably linked. In the final
analysis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the threat of
a new war against Iran, are a product of the attempt by the US
ruling class to maintain the hegemonic position of US capitalism
by military force, under conditions in which it can no longer
do so by virtue of its economic weight. The most important war
aims of Washington are to establish a stranglehold over the oil
resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, in order to gain
a decisive strategic advantage over its economic rivals in Europe
and Asia.
The Iraq war is not an aberration. War is the inevitable product
of a world situation dominated by the increasing tensions between
a globally integrated economy and the capitalist nation state
system in which the decline of US imperialism poses the most explosive
consequences. Despite the failure of the US adventure in Iraq,
objective pressures are pushing Washington towards new confrontations
with enemies ranging from China to Russia to Venezuela.
The economic crisis that is driving this policy is not merely
conjunctural, but systemic. It is now acknowledged widely within
financial circles that the credit crisis that has erupted with
the bursting of the housing bubble has put the United States on
the edge of the most severe economic downturn since the Great
Depression of the 1930s.
The sharpest expression of this economic crisis is the unrelenting
growth of social inequality. The financial elite’s policy
of using military force to gain control of world markets is pursued
at the direct expense of the masses of working people, who are
paying for it through attacks on their jobs, living standards
and basic democratic rights.
The Democrats and the war
The evolution of the 2008 election campaign has already made
it clear that the American people will once again be denied the
right to decide at the polls whether Washington should continue
its criminal war against the Iraqi people. The Democratic Party,
following a now well-worn path, is once again preparing to politically
disenfranchise the substantial antiwar majority of the American
electorate.
In the 2002 midterm elections, the Democratic leadership in
Congress took a deliberate decision to deliver the votes needed
to authorize the invasion of Iraq, reasoning that it would thus
take the question of war "off the table" and enable
it to wage a successful campaign based on economic issues. The
result was a severe defeat that delivered both houses of Congress
to the Republicans.
In 2004, the party leadership steered the nomination to two
US senators—John Kerry and John Edwards—who had voted
for the war in 2002 and who made it clear they had no intention
of withdrawing American forces. Indeed, Kerry suggested that,
if elected, he would launch his own "surge."
In 2006, the Democrats won back control of both the House of
Representatives and the Senate in a vote that clearly represented
a popular repudiation of the war. Having gained control of Congress,
the Democrats proceeded to do nothing but provide funding for
the war to continue.
Now, the two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination
are locked in a national security campaign aimed at proving themselves
best qualified to serve as commander-in-chief. Both Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama have advanced platforms that provide for the
continued presence of the US military in Iraq for purposes of
counter-terrorism operations, the protection of US facilities
and interests, and the training of Iraqi puppet forces—meaning
that tens of thousands of troops would remain in the country indefinitely.
Obama’s former senior foreign policy advisor spelled out
in a recent interview with the BBC that no one should take his
promises regarding troop withdrawal too seriously, as they would
be scrapped the moment he entered the White House and began consultation
with the military brass.
No doubt, there exist within the ruling elite bitter divisions
over the conduct of the war and plans for future US policy in
Iraq. These differences, however, begin from the standpoint of
advancing the interests of imperialism on a world scale and whether
the tying down of immense US military power in Iraq is hindering
the use of that power elsewhere. Many of the Democrats advocating
troop withdrawals from Iraq are calling for these same troops
to be sent to Afghanistan.
The character of the supposedly liberal opposition to the Iraq
war found its most grotesque expression in last Sunday’s
opinion section of the New York Times in which the paper’s
editorial board called upon nine "experts on military and
foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of
2003" to the war. All nine, without exception, were advocates
of the war, most of them drawn from within the administration
or from right-wing think tanks. Some, such as Richard Perle and
Paul Bremer, bear direct responsibility for the atrocities carried
out against the Iraqi people.
The implication is that in March 2003, everyone agreed that
war against Iraq was necessary. Differences arose only afterwards
due to the exposure of "faulty intelligence" and because
of the Bush administration’s flawed execution of this necessary
act.
This is a lie. There were millions who recognized that the
war was an act of criminality carried out on the basis of lies.
For its part, the World Socialist Web Site had no illusions
as to what was behind the war or what it would produce.
As we wrote in "The
crisis of American capitalism and the war against Iraq" on
March 21, 2003: "All the justifications given by the Bush
administration and its accomplices in London are based on half-truths,
falsifications and outright lies. At this point, it should hardly
be necessary to reply yet again to the claims that the purpose
of this war is to destroy Iraq’s so-called 'weapons
of mass destruction.’ After weeks of the most intrusive inspections
to which any country has ever been subjected, nothing of material
significance was discovered."
And we predicted accurately: "Whatever the outcome of
the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism
has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It
cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle
East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution
to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties
and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of
the internal contradictions of American society."
Today, an effective struggle against the war cannot be waged
based on protests and appeals to the existing two-party system,
or on yet another attempt to place greater power in the hands
of the Democrats by putting Clinton or Obama in the White House
and giving the party a larger majority in the Senate. What is
required is a rejection of imperialism itself.
Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and defeating the already
well-advanced plans for further and even bloodier wars in Iran
and elsewhere is possible only through the fight to mobilize the
working class against the capitalist system that is the source
of war.
This means an irreconcilable break with the Democratic Party
and the building of a new mass political movement of working people
based on a socialist and internationalist program.
This is the alternative which the Socialist Equality Party
and the World Socialist Web Site will fight to place at
the center of the struggles to come in the run-up to the November
election, advancing the demand for the immediate and unconditional
withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and demanding
that those who conspired to launch these wars of aggression be
held accountable, both politically and legally.
We urge all of our readers and supporters to draw the lessons
of five years of the Iraq war and join us in this fight for the
independent political mobilization of working people in the United
States and internationally against imperialism.
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