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CounterPunch
March 14,
2003
Why Class Matters
The Gulf War
12 Years Later
by MITCHEL COHEN
"We have before us the opportunity
to forge for ourselves and for future generations a New World
Order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle,
governs the conduct of nations."
President George H.W. Bush,
Sept. 11, 1990
On September 11th 1990, U.S. President George
H.W. Bush, upholding "democracy" and "peace,"
declared his "New World Order" in a speech before the
US Congress. He was soon raining thousands of tons of napalm,
air-fuel explosives, phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs and uranium-encased
shells upon Iraq, killing thousands,terrorizing that country.
Seven years later, President Bill Clinton
did George Bush one better -- he actually signed a top secret
directive authorizing first use of nuclear weapons against Iraq
"under certain circumstances."
By the end of February, 1998, two Los
Angeles-class submarines carrying nuclear warheads atop Tomahawk
missiles had arrived in the Gulf. Each missile was encased in
so-called "depleted" uranium. The non-nuclear version
of these weapons, also coated with depleted uranium, are now
being used by the US in Afghanistan.
Depleted uranium had been used extensively
in the Gulf war and in the bombardment of Yugoslavia, irradiating
food and water supplies and poisoning the land for millennia.
Childhood cancers have skyrocketed in Iraq and in Yugoslavia;
depleted uranium is thought to be a contributing factor in the
illnesses of tens of thousands of US soldiers who had handled
or become exposed to the material. The question-- then as well
as now-- is "Why did the US government think all of this
was, and remains, necessary? What strategic goals was actually
trying to accomplish?"
What are we to make of George Bush's
assertion that the war had "nothing to do with oil"?
As much as the U.S. wanted the Gulf states to line up behind
Saudi Arabia as the industry's price-setter and steady prices
at around $26 a barrel, it did not need the violent, brutal bombardment
to accomplish that. Nor was the slaughter necessary to secure
immediate profits for the oil companies, assert control over
a larger share of the world's oil resources, defend the hundreds
of billions of dollars deposited in U.S. banks by Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait, or test out new weapons systems -- all rationales
we are hearing again today from the peace movement, which is
trying to make sense of what is going on. From the long-term
perspective of capital, the war was not needed to achieve those
results; these were secondary plumbs, achievable through other
measures.
The war was about two things, and we
need to look at the current plans to bombard and occupy Iraq
within this context:
* the war enabled the international banking
and oil companies, Council on Foreign Relations, and Rockefeller-founded
Trilateral Commission to secure new political as well as economic
conditions for the ongoing production of oil (and other commodities).
For the first time, the U.S. government, acting as the "executive
arm of the ruling class" -- succeeded in forcing all the
severely divided factions and competing interests of the capitalist
class into line behind a strategy for the globalization of capital:
the "New World Order"; and,
* the success of the New World Order
depended upon crushing all eruptions of working class uprisings
in the Gulf region, most visibly in Iran and Iraq, keeping them
from spreading to other countries, breaking up the increasingly
organized oil proletariat and replacing them with workers from
even more desperate and unorganized areas of the world.
Fundamental to this, of course, is control
over the oilfields. Please note, we are not talking here about
going to war to generate huge immediate profits for oil companies
(even though that is one result. Individual corporations will
again profit handsomely, and we will all continue to be distracted
from Enron, WorldCom, and the collapse of the U.S. economy).
On the one hand the longstanding contradictions
within the U.S. capitalist class between trilateralist (world
bankers, oil cartels), construction, manufacturing, agribusiness,
and aerospace/armaments/"defense" industries -- all
with their own competing sets of economic and political interests
-- had again propelled conflicting, even chaotic, government
policies. And on the other, within Iraq -- as had been the case
in Iran eleven years earlier -- leftist-led uprisings were threatening
to destabilize the centralized nation-state itself, with the
potential to launch a powerful communist push throughout the
region. Crushing those uprisings became a priority for the US
and a main reason for the U.S. government's promotion, funding
and arming of Iraq in its long war with Iran.
In 1978 and 1979 the Iranian revolution
had bubbled up from the grassroots and ejected the Shah -- the
main supporter of Israel in the region and the U.S. government's
military strongman in the Arab and Western Asian oil-producing
world. One of the key features of the Iranian revolution -- one
not shown on American TV, which focused solely on the student
takeovers in Iran's capital city, Teheran, and the taking of
52 hostages (1) -- was the rebellion of the oil workers, some
80,000 strong.
With the involvement of two million people
living in oil towns, striking workers shut down the massive Iranian
petroleum industry. "The U.S. engineered an attempt to get
oil flowing again by staffing the fields and refineries with
10,000 naval cadets trained for this purpose. The strikebreaking
effort failed. The striking workers refused to send oil to Israel
and South Africa. Yet through a strong and intricate network
of peoples' committees called Shura in Pharsi, oil products were
distributed throughout Iran, though not to the Shah's military."
(2)
The Iranian oil workers were irreplaceable
in the dangerous and highly technical operations of the oil system.
They immediately coordinated amongst themselves a national operation,
using the organization and communications technology of the industry
itself.
Iranian society during the revolutionary
period was democratically run from the grassroots by decentralized
popular committees (Komitehs or Shuraá) for approximately
two years. These Shura formed in late 1978 in all sectors of
society: the schools, the military and media, the oil industry,
among the rural Kurds and in the civil service as well as in
local neighborhoods. Garbage collection, bread baking and distribution,
education and publishing, munitions manufacture and international
relations were some of the social activities that these radical
democratic committees carried out. (3)
The Ayatollah Khomeini's aim in returning
to Iran after the upsurge from his exile in Paris, was to reassert
the power of the bazaari, the mullahs and the national bourgeoisie
in Iran -- the basis for his authority. In this way, the situation
in Iran 24 years ago is very similar to that in Afghanistan under
the Taliban. Even while declaring the United States to be "the
Great Satan," the Islamic fundamentalist Khomeini crushed
the neighborhood and workers' councils that were serving to democratize
the society as well as the oil industry (to the consternation
of the U.S. oil companies) by reactivating the Shah's SAVAK --
the savage secret police that had been trained a generation earlier
by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's father. To gain the upper hand
over the Shura, Khomeini needed a means for galvanizing the country.
This was accomplished by the war with neighboring Iraq, which
lasted for 8 long years, killing more than 1 million Iranian
and Iraqi people.
From Khomeini's position, the war between
Iran and Iraq served as a means to defeat an insurgent working
class movement at home. It enabled Khomeini to concentrate the
power of the State in the hands of ultra-religious fanatics (an
outcome welcomed by the U.S. government as the lesser of two
evils, representing the long term interests of the oilgarchy);
and, from Saddam Hussein's position, the war served as a means
to reap the material benefits of doing the U.S.'s bidding in
the region and, similarly, to crush rising working class movements
in Iraq, particularly around Basra, Nasria and Hilah where, for
decades, there had been strong Stalinist as well as council communist
movements, and among the Kurds in the North. The ruling clique
in Iraq used U.S. aid to consolidate the power of Iraq's fascist
state through the terror of Saddam's brownshirts -- the Republican
Guards. (More about them shortly.)
How could the U.S. play off the various
forces in the Middle East? When should it befriend one sector,
attack another? How could it maintain the Saudi rulers' allegiance
as U.S. capital's primary ally in the region along with Israel?
These have ever been the source of debate in Washington. Here
we come to a main argument I am making: There is no monolithic
U.S. policy that benefits all sectors of the ruling class equally.
The alignment of members of the U.S. President's cabinet with
different sectors of capital helps explain the differences in
approach and even outright policy struggles between Baker and
Cheney in 1990, or Haig, Shultz and Weinberger a decade earlier
(4) -- and, for that matter, between Clinton/Gore and Bush/Cheney
in 2000.
Support for sanctions against Iraq and
for the U.N. Security Council resolutions had been a prime strategy
of the big oil and banking sector, reflecting its own long-range
economic and political interests, and its reliance upon military
assistance to Israel. Military support for Saudi Arabia, on the
other hand, had long been a strategy of the aerospace and construction
companies, such as Bechtel and Northrop, with enormous projects
in that country and billions of dollars at stake. In contrast
to the first term of Reagan's presidency (in whose cabinet the
Bechtel corporation played an inordinately powerful and, exceptfor
Gen. Haig, a controlling role), all camps had strong presence
in the first Bush Administration. (After the Gulf war and still
under George Bush's presidency, Bechtel was awarded multi-billion
dollar contracts for the reconstruction of Kuwait. Bush used
the power of his office to basically cajole, coerce and bribe
the different sectors of capital into getting in line behind
his policy of the New World Oder/globalization of capital, just
as his son is currently attempting to do with members of the
Security Council.) Bush's successful cooptation of the right-wing
of capital, which had historically been hostile to the United
Nations, and disciplining the entire capitalist class behind
the dominant strategy of seeking U.S. capital's expansion through
U.N. mechanisms was quite an extraordinary feat of political
manipulation with long term political consequences.
The Gulf war was the hammer needed to
accomplish that objective. The alphabet soup of UN structural
adjustment programs, debt service payments, enterprise zones,
the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NAFTA, GATT, U.S. Agency for International
Development and what today we call NGOs -- non-governmental organizations,
the so-called "progressive" arm of globalization --
are the resulting mechanisms through which the New World Order
is implemented. (5)
Today, we are seeing various sectoral
tensions being played out at the UN Security Council. Whether
the massive outpouring of global antiwar sentiment has helped
bring about a rupture in the New World Order consensus promulgated
by George Bush, Sr. (which would be irony worthy of Sophocles
(or, should we say, "Carlyle") and give new meaning
to Oedipus Rex, so to speak, in which the son wrecks the neoliberal
strategy of the father), or is only a slightly chaotic blip within
that still hegemonic framework remains to be seen. It is this
concern that is occupying the various global strategists, as
is evidenced by their slightly nuanced and grating statements.
If the anti-globalization movement can
more deeply influence the direction of the anti-war movement,
we may be seeing the end of this period of neoliberalism and
the beginnings of mass movements for revolutionary economic,
ecological and social transformation, worldwide.
End Part One
Mitchel Cohen
is editor of Green Politix,
the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. . He can
be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
NOTES
1. ABC's Nightline, with Ted Koppel,
was born as a means of documenting the hostage crisis day by
day.
2. Terisa Turner, "The 1991 Gulf
War and Popular Struggles," in Arise Ye Mighty People! Gender,
Class & Race in Popular Struggles, Terisa Turner and Bryan
Furguson, eds. Africa World Press, Inc., Trenton, NJ.
3. Turner, ibid., and Terisa Turner,
"The politics of world resource development in the 1990s,"
International Oil Working Group, New York, 1990.
4. See, for example, Mitchel Cohen, "Class
Wars: Haig, Israel & the U.S. Government," in Red Balloon
Newsletter, October 1981. Haig represented the strong pro-Israel
position of the trilateralists; Shultz and Weinberger, who had
been officers of the Bechtel Corporation, represented the position
favoring arms to Saudi Arabia, which was strongly protested by
Israel, even though they, too, did not take an anti-Israel line
directly.
5. See Mitchel Cohen, "The L.A.
Rebellion and the World Bank," in The Capitalist Infesto:
What Is The Existential Vacuum ... & Does It Come With Attachments?,
and also Mitchel Cohen, Haiti and Somalia: The International
Trade in Toxic Waste for further development and case study applications
of NGOs in practice and the development of a new global division
of labor to which the Gulf war was central.
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