The new imperialist
GULF CRISIS
SOVIET UNION
TURKEY
Tehran
SYRIA
IRAN
Baghdad a
IRAQ
FOR THE SECOND TIME in three years, an imposing multinational imperialist armada has been concentrated in the Arab-Persian Gulf and surrounding area. The fundamental objective remains the same, that Is, to defend and consolidate
Imperialist domination over this region. This area Is of the greatest strategic importance, among other things, because it produces the greater part of the world's oil exports, and contains the largest share of the planet's reserves of this fuel, which remains the principal energy source in the ecologically Irrational world in which we live.
The scenario of te new imperialist crusade Is, however, different in many respects from the one in 1987. The "villain"
this time is no longer Iranian but Iraql. The imperialist
Intervention is being carried out under cover of the United
Nations, as in the case of the Korean War, except that today - a sign of the times! — It enjoys the complicity of the USSR and
China. And, finally, this time some of the imperialists' Arab or
Muslim partners are directly involved on the ground alongside them.
SALAH JABER
ESIDES the various Gulf emirs,
B the imperialists' allies include the Saudi kingdom, which has been transformed into a gigantic
US military base; Mubarak's Egypt, which receives the second largest share of
US aid, after Israel; the Morocco of Hassan II, who is not embarassed to intervene against the annexation of Kuwait, althoughhet keeps trying to annex the
Western Sahara; and a Pakistan dominated by military officers linked to the Pentagon. This combination has been joined by
Baathist Syria, Iraq's "brother" enemy, which is hoping to be rewarded by a substantial Saudi and Kuwaiti contribution to solving its grave financial problems.
The scenario is different, and the production's budget too has been considerably increased. The cost of the
US deployment alone exceeds a billion dollars a month. The number of soldiers sent by
- Washington has already reached
100,000, and the Pentagon has made preparations to send double that number. The
United States has concentrated a staggering panoply of engines of destruction and slaughter in the area. None of the most recent electronic gadgets for mass murder
EGYPT SUDAN has been left out, from the invisible bomber to the latest model tank, including the whole range of state-of the-art missiles.
Not in the last 17 years, that is, not since the US withdrawal from Vietnam, have we seen such a buildup of an imperialist expeditionary force. Thus, despite the vast gulf between the bloody bourgeois dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Vietnamese revolution, the stakes of the confrontation underway are comparable to those in Indochina in 1965-1975 in one fundamental respect — its outcome will determine the extent of US imperialism's political and military dominance over the world, especially the Third World, for a whole period.
Freed from the "Vietnam syndrome" in a world where the Soviet deterrent is weaker than it has ever been, the American empire will no longer recognize any limits. That is why it is vital and urgent for all anti-imperialist forces in the world to mobilize to prevent imperialist aggression, and if it takes place, to work to defeat it, or at least to make its political cost as high as possible. Should we be taken aback to see that this time the
Riyadh • -I OMAN SAUDI ARABIA YEMEN Arabian See "ETHIOPIA imperialist mobilization is directed against a bourgeois dictatorship and not anti-capitalist forces, as was the case in China, Korea or Indochina? In fact the imperialist rulers are no more tender hearted toward bourgeois nationalism when it dares to threaten their vital interests, than they are toward anticapitalist nationalism. The misuse of a historical example MODERN history is full of examples of Third World bourgeois leaders who have been pilloried by the imperialists. Without going back very far, Argentina's Peron, the Egyptian Nasser or the Algerian FLN were also compared to Hitler in their time. More recently the Libyan Qadhafi, the Syrian Hafez El-Assad, and of course the Palestine Liberation Organization and above all Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini have been accorded such a characterization.
However, it is true that among all these cases, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is the regime most similar to bourgeois totalitarianism of the "national socialist" (Nazi) type. The tyrant of Baghdad came to power in 1968 through a counterrevolutionary putsch whose primary objective was to crush both a Che Guevara-inspired guerrilla focus in the southern part of the country and a left split from the Iraqi CP which was in the process of combining with the guerrillas.
In the following years (1969-1979), Saddam Hussein ruthlessly crushed any source of opposition to his personal dictatorship, and even the expression of the slightest independence from him. The 1. These movie metaphors are inspired by the Amencan media's treatment of this conflict. You only have work CBS, under the title "Showdown in the Gulf."
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crusade
International Viewpoint #190 • September 17, 1990
GULF CRISIS Kurdish rebellion; Communists of all tendencies; and even fractions of his own party, the Baath (Party of the Arab Socialist Resurrection), were drowned in blood. Every recalcitrant group or even individual was liquidated or neutralized. The inexorable rise of Saddam Hussein had culminated in the concentration of all power in his hands before the war that he unleashed against Iran in September 1980. To top it off, he organized an official personality cult as revolting, intrusive and grotesque as all such mascarades.
### Saddam Hussein's capitalist dictatorship SADDAM Hussein's dictatorship rests on a civilian, military and police bureaucracy organized in concentric circles, based largely on family and clan ties and origins in the tyrant's native province (Takrit). This bureaucracy's privileges come from the Iraqi state's oil revenues. The latter, however, are not sufficient to meet at the same time the development needs of a country that has virtually no other source of foreign currency than oil, and which has to import the bulk of its food; the cost of maintaining a social base with various gratuities and payoffs, including the maintenance of a multitudinous bureaucracy; and a burdensome military budget made necessary by the permanent "pacification" of the part of Kurdistan under Iraqi domination and by conflicts with neighbors over territorial questions (the Iran of the Shah and then of the mullahs) or water problems (the Euphrates river question with Turkey) or political differences (Syr-
In 1974, a war of liberation was unleashed by forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, with the support of the Shah of Iran, the United States and Israel, all of which wanted to tame an Iraqi regime that was trying to outdo Egypt and Syria, its rivals for regional leadership, in anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist saber-rattling: 2 The year after, the Baathist regime, which had not yet been able to take advantage of the 1974 oil boom to step up its arming, found itself within an inch of defeat.
It was forced to save itself by settling the territorial dispute (on land and in water) with Iran on the Shah's conditions. The result was the Algiers accord of March 1975. In exchange, Tehran abruptly stopped giving aid and refuge to the Kurds. Having made the mistake of intentioned allies, their struggle ended in
The following years, a breathing space 4 Saddam Hussein's totalitarian dictator- for Baghdad, were devoted to perfecting ship, as well as using the considerably increased oil revenues and the credit facilities they offered by virtue of the capitalist principle of "lending only to the rich." The Iraqi regime, an enlightened bourgeois despotism in the socio-economic sphere, was able to register some positive achievements - infrastructural investments in industry and agricultural, improvement in the status of women and partial secularization of the society.
At the same time, Saddam broadened his social clientele by swelling the administrative, political and police apparatus. Above all, in the context of the stampede to buy both traditional and sophisticated arms in which all the oil states in the region participated (with the Shah leading the pack) he acquired considerable mili-
The sale of arms to the oil states was and remains one of the main mechanisms by which the imperialist states, as well as the bureaucratic workers' states, recycle the capital they inject into these countries in return for the imports of black gold. The arms industry is a major sector in most of the economies of both categories
Saddam Hussein's Iraq supplied itself with arms mainly from those countries with the least ties to the Shah of Iran, and which had not contributed to bringing him near to defeat in 1975. They included, on the one hand, the USSR and its satimperialism, which after 1974 considered Baghdad its favored client in the Middle East. In the nonmilitary field, the French shared the Iraqi cake with the Germans and the Japanese.
The presence of the Iranian imperial army on its flank had both a deterrent and frustrating effect on an Iraqi dictatorship that dreamed of effacing the affront it suffered in 1975. Aware of Iran's advantages from the military point of view a population three times larger, as well as greater financial means and correspondingly superior greater military means), Iraq tried, without success, to buy Hafez ElAssad's Syria (the aborted unification project of 1979) and get itself coopted to the rank of regional Arab leader in the aftermath of the isolation of Sadat's Egypt as a result of its US-sponsored Camp David accords with Israel.
The collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979, with the ensuing disorganization of the Iranian army and above all the break in this army's ties with its main tutor and supplier, the United States, offered Saddam Hussein an unhoped-for opportunity to take revenge on his neighbor. He took the chance all the more willingly because the new regime of the mullahs mounted propaganda campaign against the "atheistic" government in Baghdad, appealing in particular to the Shiites, who the majority among the Iraqi Arabs (while Saddam's
In attacking Iran, the Iraqi despot had reverse the consequences of his capitulation in 1975; as a prelude to the hostilities, he renounced the Algiers accord concluded with the Shah. Next, in the context of dismembering the Persian empire, sought to take the region of Khuzistan (Arabistan), Iran's main oil-producing region which was inhabited by oppressed Arab ethnic minority. That would have made Iraq the world's main oil exporter, considerably reinforcing its potential in all spheres. Finally, he wanted to establish his regime as the dominant regional power, getting the other Gulf oil states, which were as worried as Iraq by the Khomeini regime's subversive behavior, to finance the Iraqi war effort.
Such were Baghdad's motivations in the war against Iran — bourgeois nationalist expansionist objectives. Saddam Hussein was not moved by any intention to serve Washington's interests, according to a black-and-white vision of things held by some supporters of Iran whom we had occasion to criticize. This view cannot integrate, with any coherence whatever, either Washington's secret contacts with Iran (Irangate) or still less the present behavior of the Iraqi regime.
The Pyrrhic victory over THE gamble taken by Saddam Hussein in 1980 was very risky, even adventurist. Carried away by his megalomaniac ambitions, he seriously overestimated his army's capacities against a large country with a much greater population. He did not foresee that by arousing a Persian nationalist reaction, his invasion of Iranian land would reinforce the cohesion of the mullahs' regime and therefore its ability to resist and later to mount a counterattack. In 1982, the Iraqi army became bogged down in Iran, and then went into retreat. The war was now on Iraqi soil.
In their turn, the expansionist PersianShi'ite nationalist Iranian mullahs made the same mistakes as their enemy had before. At the cost of terrible strain on the capacities of the Iraqi population; with increased support from its financial backers and its arms suppliers in both the West and East, who were frightened by the prospect of an Iranian victory; and by an increasing recourse to the deterrent horchemical weapons, regime was able to turn the situation to its 2. This was the period following the October 1973 which was supposed to be one of a negotiated settlement of this contlict. 3. See "Imperialism and the Gulf War," International Viewpoint, No. 132, December 21, 1987.
September 17, 1990 • #190 International Viewpoint favor again. In 1988, Iran was forced to accept the ceasefire that it had stubbornly rejected was still in a position of Iraq emerged victorious from the military adventyrant, but at what a price! For Iraq alone, the war meant 300,000 dead and handicapped, widows and orphans. The overall military cost (destruction, lost earnings, the cost of the war effort) was around $250 billion, plus $60 billion in debts. It was a Pyrrhic victory in the full sense. Furthermore, conflict with Iran was not settled, and therefore it was necessary to maintain a swollen army of a million soldiers, out of all proportion to a total population that the most generous estimates put at 17 million (that is, one in every 17 inhabitants were
Even before the war against Iran, the absorption of an important part of the Iraqi people's productive capacity in the military and bureaucratic apparatuses, as well as the lack of skilled manpower, and indeed the chauvinist policy of Arab colonization of the Kurdish areas, had led Iraq to open its doors to vast contingents of Egyptian immigrant workers (both skilled and peasants). Their numbers increased considerably during the war, reaching close to 2 million. The result was that a million Iragis mobilized for war were replaced in production by Egyptians, with the oil emirs of the Gulf largely footing
Iraq became, to some extent, an Arab replica of the state of Israel, an overarmed state, whose place in the international (Israel) or regional (Iraq) division of "labor" was determined by its military role. However, the financing of Iraq to a degree equivalent to that of Israel would require $20 billion a year. Even subtracting Iraq's oil income from this total, Sadfinancing on the order of $10 billion, without counting the enormous bill for rebuilding the country and the weight of its accumulated debt. Kuwait's oil income would just about cover the military effort and Kuwaiti capital invested in the West the reconstruction work.
Here was a terrible temptation, especially since the burden of the Iraqi regime's financial crisis was growing. The war was over. The Gulf money bags were cutting back their payments to Saddam Hussein considerably. They felt that they were caught in the trap of an endless racket, since militarized Iraq's appetite seemed
They no longer had any illusions that the many "loans" to the Baathist regime would be repaid. As a result, Iragi finances started to go under. Less and less able to pay back old debts, Iraq had more and more trouble in getting new ones. Even France, which not long ago encouraged it to buy, cut off credits and held back its deliveries.
The standard of living of the Iraqi population, maintained with difficulty during the war, started to plummet. It was necessary to "trim the fat." This took the form, not without problems, of beginning to send back the Egyptian workers. Foreseeing the growth of popular resentment, Saddam tried to gain some buoyancy in the same way as other dictatorships with statized economies — by offering facilities to the private sector and a simulacrum of multi-candidate elections (with all the candidates devoted to the despot). But in view of the gravity of the problem such expedients were no use.
The dictator tried to force the emirs to provide the funds he required by direct threats. He demanded that they officially write off Iraq's debts and pay him a substantial contribution toward the country. From Kuwait alone, the most vulnerable because of its tiny size and common border with Iraq, he demanded $30 billion. After all, had he not fought for their interests as well? Had he not defended the "Eastern Gate of the Arab Nation" against the Khomeinite Persian menace? Was it not right that the emirs foot the bill in dollars, since Iraq had paid