The crushing of Iraq: Ushering in the new world order?

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"If we look beneath the surface of the Middle East, we will be driving American capitalism to play role matching and surpassing the crimes of all those tyrants who sought to establish world peace through military conquest and 4 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1991 Not since nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II has the world witnessed such unconscionable destruction of a defeated people.

As in the nuking of the two Japanese cities in August 1945, the lesson intended by the devastation wreaked on an already defeated Iraq is unmistakable. In both cases, American imperialism demonstrated its newest capability for mass destruction. More importantly, it showed a willingness to blow up tens of thousands of human beings as a warning to all its potential and future opponents.

On Feb. 27, President George Bush announced to the nation and the world that "Kuwait is liberated, Iraq's army is defeated, our military objectives are met." But throughout the next day, bombs continued to rain down on innocent civilians in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

Rather than allow Iraq to give up with a modicum of self-respect, President Bush made the most humiliating demands, designed to maximize the chances of their rejection by President Hussein. Then Bush authorized a further slaughter in what could only be a shooting gallery "battle," designed to show the destructiveness of U.S. weaponry.

It is safe to say that this mass murder had nothing whatsoever to do with the destruction of Iraq's alleged "threat to the region." To the extent there was a threat to imperialist interests, it had been removed at least weeks before the ground war was launched.

At a Feb. 27 news conference, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces in the Persian Gulf, described in gloating detail how he "closed the gate," on the Iraqi army and "destroyed" the remaining enemy divisions, who were "for all intents and purposes, blinded."

Members of the American high command have thrown out figures ranging up to over 150,000 dead Iraqi soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians killed in the course of one of the largest aerial and naval bombardments in the history of warfare. The air war was closely followed by the largest mechanized and coordinated air-ground assault since World War II.

The military effectiveness of the 30-nation allied force is underscored by the "miraculously" light casualties suffered by the imperialist invaders—less than 200 killed in action! (The allied force was backed by the resources of over 400 million people in the developed countries alone, against an underdeveloped country of less than 19 million inhabitants.)

Alleged U.S. war aims The stated aims of American imperialism centered on the eviction of Iraq from Kuwait and the restoration of the alleged "legitimate" goverment.

A few words need to be said on the "legitimacy" of the al-Sabah monarchy, which President Bush pledged to restore to its throne in Kuwait:

Sheikh al-Sabah was foisted upon the indigenous population of Kuwait by British imperialism. As Emir of Kuwait, this feudal lord reigned as absolute ruler. The Emir's "legitimate" government denied the rights of citizenship to the majority of Kuwait's inhabitants.

More than 80 percent of the workforce, some of whom are third-generation inhabitants born in Kuwait, had no rights. Only 10 percent of non-Kuwaiti Arabs were allowed to attend public schools. Non-Kuwaitis were denied medical care provided to citizens and were not permitted to own property, not even homes. They were also barred from participating in political activity and were not allowed to join trade unions.

It has been widely noted that Kuwait cannot really be seen so much as a state, but as a company owned by the Sabah family of several thousand brothers, uncles, and cousins.

The ruling Kuwaiti family, moreover, used little of its profits for development of Kuwait or anywhere else in the Mideast. Instead it has invested over $60 billion of these profits primarily in United States banks, corporations, and real estate.

Continuation of this abominable state of affairs is what it means to "restore to power the legitimate government of Kuwait!" But, even though this is part of their stated objectives, this is not why American imperialism invaded the Persian Gulf. Neither does control over Middle East oil adequately explain the U.S. invasion.

The real purpose of the smashing of Iraq is to serve as a warning to all comers that U.S. capitalism has the power and the will to spill any amount of blood necessary to defend its interests.

Why go to war?

If we look beneath the surface of events in the Middle East we will be able to see the historical forces driving American capitalism to play a role matching and surpassing the Christopher Morris the historical forces crimes of all those tyrants who sought to establish world "peace" through military conquest and intimidation.

We will see that while the destruction of Iraq constitutes a major victory for imperialism, the underlying reality driving the American ruling class tells another story. It tells of a critical new stage in the decay of the world capitalist order, which led them to carry out this outrage.

Let's take a brief look back over the history of the 20th century to gain a perspective on today's world situation.

The dominant imperialist powers in the post-World War I world were headed by Britain, France, and the United States. Their dominance was challenged by Germany, Italy, and Japan towards the middle of the 1930s. The latter were, and are, imperialist powers too, but were largely excluded from access to the colonies and neo-colonies controlled by the dominant capitalist states.

The excluded imperialist states were intent on gaining a more favorable re-devision of sary or by the threat of force.

In short, the Second World War, like the First World War, was an inter-imperialist war for markets-for the right to superexploit the dependent nations of the world. The history books say it was a war against fascism. This is false.

As a matter of fact, Hitler and his Nazis were financed and helped to power by the dominant "democratic" imperialists. Germany had previously been disarmed and made to pay reparations after its defeat in the first global war. After the economic crisis of the Great Depression upset capitalist stability, Germany's former adversaries saw fascism in a rearmed Germany as a "bulwark against communism"-especially the threat of revolution in Germany itself.

In fact, had Hitler been content to limit himself to smashing the workers' organizations in Germany and later to overrunning the Soviet Union, there might have been no World War II. At least not until after German imperialism had conquered the Soviets and digested a neo-colonialized Eastern Europe and parts of Asia.

Thus, when German imperialism made clear its intention to go beyond the limits established by its imperialist rivals, their interests and those of the dominant imperialist powers ceased to coincide.

When Hitler and his allies moved toward establishing a Pax-Germana over Europe and the colonies by military conquest, the Anglo-French-American imperialist bloc was inexorably impelled toward a collision with the upstarts.

It is said that politics makes strange bedfellows, and the Europe of the 1940s showed the truth of this once again. After Holland, Belgium, France, and much of the rest of Europe were overrun by German troops, the remaining components of the Anglo-American imperialist alliance made a military bloc with the Stalinized Soviet Union against the German-Italian axis.

Precursor of Desert Storm It is instructive to note that Germany, rearmed with the latest in military technology, also attempted to intimidate its rivals with the original version of warfare based upon sudden, devastating, highly maneuverable and swiftly moving motorized armies.

The German "blitzkrieg" (lightning war) and the recent "Desert Storm," have more in common than the names given to the technologically advanced, mechanized warfare innovated at the end of the 1930s and the upscaled version employed in the Gulf in 1991.

It is also no accident that Adolph Hitler was the first to march to war in the name of peace and a "new world order"-one that he claimed would last a thousand years. The Nazis had at the outset characterized their regime as the "new order" in contrast to the sharp class warfare prevailing in most other capitalist countries of the time. They expected, and not without good reason, that a Europe made peaceful by fascist-imposed class "peace" might be attractive to the hard-pressed capitalists of that continent in the 1930s.

It is also instructive to note that the seeds of WWII were sown in the Great Depression which opened up a pre-revolutionary situation in Europe and deepened the turmoil persisting in many of the colonies since the end of WWI. The resulting intensified economic competition between imperialists could only be resolved by war or revolution.

The failure by the world's workers to construct a revolutionary leadership, along with betrayal by reformists of the Social Democratic and Stalinist varieties heading the mass workers' parties of that day, made WWII inevitable.

It was no surprise that at the end of WWII, the objective basis for the alliance between Anglo-American imperialism and the Soviets came to an abrupt end. Even before the end, when their victory was in sight, the fundamental antagonisms between the two social systems erupted. It took the form of a race by the allied armies, East and West, to defeat and occupy as much of Germany as they could.

And in short order, after the defeat of Italy, Germany, and finally Japan, the imperialist victors prepared to settle accounts with their erstwhile Soviet allies.

This was the context. It points to the motive for the nuclear annihilation of two Japanese cities. It had one purpose, and one purpose alone, to show off the awesome power now in the hands of U.S. imperialism (continued on page 6, in “Turkey's involvement in Gulf War triggers opposition among workers”)

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May 1990: National Security Council white paper labels Iraq and Saddam Hussein "the optimum contenders to replace the Warsaw Pact" as the rationale for major military spending.

July 1990: Iraq charges that Kuwait is overproducing oil and stealing oil from Iraqi oil fields across the border. Kuwait refuses to settle.

July 25: U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie informs Saddam Hussein, "We have no opinion on ... conflicts like your border dispute with Kuwait."

Aug. 2: Iraq's army occupies Kuwait.

Aug. 6: On the urging of the U.S government, the UN Security Council imposes harsh economic sanctions on Iraq.

Jan 28-30. Iraqis capture Saudi port of Khafji. U.S. Marines and Saudi troops retake it. Eleven Marines are killed.

Feb. 3: Over 300,000 rally in Morocco to denounce U.S. intervention in the Gulf.

Feb. 4: Iran offers to mediate Gulf conflict. United States is cool to the idea.

Feb. 5: Israeli planes destroy Palestinian bases and villages in southern Lebanon in the largest attack in years.

Feb. 6: King Hussein of Jordan declares support of Iraq.

Feb. 13: U.S. planes attack bomb shelter in Baghdad. Close to 350 civilians are killed.

Feb. 14: British warplanes hit

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events able to intimidation."