Return to the killing
February 18, 1991•#200 International Viewpoint fields
BY JANUARY 31, the air forces of the Impertalist coalition had been bombarding raqi and
Kuwaiti territory systematically for over two weeks. There had been over 30,000 sorties, bringing in their wake massive destruction and death. The number of human losses on the Iraqi side is unknown, since both Washington and Baghdad have an interest in minimizing them.
SALAH JABER
S ADDAM HUSSEIN's interest
is in hiding the terrible costs he has brought on his own population, who are prevented from expressing themselves by the Ba'athist terror, and in giving credit to the legend of his army's invincibility, which will certainly win "by the grace of God". For the Pentagon the aim is to sustain the myth of the "surgical" war, supposedly clean, because civilians are spared.
When you look at the huge tonnage of bombs dropped on cities like Basra, including in raids by B-52s, which drop their deadly loads from a great height, it becomes clear that this is a gigantic mystification. If this is surgery, it is amputation not cosmetic surgery.
Given the lack of verifiable figures, widely varying estimates of the number of dead are current, ranging from a few thousand to a hundred thousand (of which 70,000 are soldiers in Kuwait and the south of Iraq), the latter figure being given by the Iraqi opposition. Whatever the truth, the concentration of half a million troops in and around Kuwait by the Iraqi army inevitably exposes them to slaughter, all the more so in that the imperialist coalition's air steamroller has been operating against them in particular.
"Cut it off and kill it"
For these Iraqi troops, the so-called "humane" war takes on tragically ubuesque dimensions in the discourse of the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. On January 23 he declared on the subject of the Iragi forces in Kuwait: "Our strategy for dealing with this army is very simple: first we are going to cut it off, then we are going to kill if".! The high-minded supporters of the "democratic" crusade have so far found nothing to complain about in the Pentagon chief's cold promise to kill half a million men. Three days previously, the French president François Mitterrand candidly stated in an televized interview, that it was necessary "destroy the Iragi military-industrial complex" (which France, it must be said in passing, did much to help construct) Kuwait". It requires considerable reserves of hypocrisy to pretend that doing this has anything to do with applying the UN mandate. Having said this, it seems that the US air force generals have lost their gamble. They were looking for a wholly airborne and relatively short war — perhaps of 30 days duration — which would be enough to force Iraq to capitulate.? In fact, while they have effectively gained the overwhelming air superiority that was predicted, they have not been able to profit from it to the anticipated extent. A large part of Iragi military capacity seems to be relatively sheltered from the assaults, under concrete covers or well hidden. Above all, Saddam Hussein is still in a position to defy them
Impact of Scud missiles
The intermittent firing of Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel has practically zero military effect, on the other hand it has a definite psychological impact on the Arab mass movements, galvanized by these snipes at the US and its Zionist ally. The Iragi air force has also been able to get some dozens of its planes out of the battle to Iran, to the great annoyance of plexed by the aim of this operation. cance — whether an act of desperation by an army on its last legs or an operation to provoke an offensive, as Baghdad would have it — the assault on January 30 by three battalions of elite Iraqi troops on Saudi held positions to the east of the Kuwaiti frontier, has strongly increased the prestige of the attackers.
Confronted by these embarrassing problems, the US administration is taking care to prepare public opinion for a difficult war, which may be prolonged and lead to many more US casualties than predicted. On the other hand, after at first raising the bidding, caught in the trap of the propaganda coming out of his own media,
GULF WAR George Bush's bellicose ardor has cooled somewhat. There is less talk of capturing Saddam Hussein on Noriega lines and Bush now swears that he is not seeking Iraq's destruction.
The Soviet-American declaration on January 29 proposing to end the fighting if Iraq undertakes to withdraw from Kuwait and accept the UN Security Council resolutions is another sign of the dilemma confronting the White House. Bush had banked on Baghdad's rapid surrender. Now that this prospect looks less and less certain he is compelled to move on in a short time to phase II of the plan to reconquer Kuwait — the land war. This involves the risk, if not the certainty, of heavy losses in the American ranks, with a disastrous effect on public opinion in the United States.
George Bush will do everything he can to achieve his stated objective of the "liberation" of Kuwait without taking this risk. Now that an essential part of Iraqi military/industrial capacity, including chemical and nuclear plants, has been destroyed, the American government could be satisfied with regaining Kuwait, even if Saddam Hussein's regime were to survive the defeat.
### Continuing embargo
Its survival would in any case be precarious, given that Iraq would be even more drained than after its eight year war against Iran. Strict control and a selective embargo would be maintained to prevent Iraq from rebuilding its shattered potential. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein remains an accessory, not a fundamental, objective for Washington, in relation to the basic aim of substantially reducing Iraqi military capacity. Bush will not take big risks to overthrow a man who, not so long ago, was still an ally of the US and its Saudi protégés. This is why an escape route is being left open, on condition that Saddam submits to withdrawing from Kuwait.
While offering these political branches to Saddam Hussein, Washington will continue to aim for the quickest possible military victory, avoiding a prolonged land battle. To put it another way, in the coming days the Pentagon will probably get the green light for a further murderous
The bombing will be less and less "surgical" and more and more devastating. It is, furthermore, not ruled out that, using the pretext of an Iraqi attack with chemical weapons, the American army will itself use chemical or nuclear weapons. This could be done by proxy - the Zionist ally could be given the job, with the blessing of Washington, which would prefer to avoid the inevitable political consequences of such an act.
In fact, US imperialism is already very 1. International Herald Tribune, January 24, 1991. 2. See my articles in /V 197 and 199.
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3
iel Sheehan at September 14 Berkeley antiwar teach-in).
Extracts from an articie by Ralph Schoenman in the December 1990 issue of the
US revolutionary Marxist monthly, Socialist Action. *
International Viewpoint #200 • February 18, 1991
GULF WAR worried by the future. The political cost of the aggression is already very high in the Arab region and considerable throughout much of the "Muslim world". The attack on Iraq has whipped up the national and anti-imperialist consciousness of the Arab masses as nothing has done for the past 23 years.
The disproportion between the means of the two sides and the resistance put up by Iraq until now contrasts with Egypt's capitulation after six days in the 1967 war; the grotesque spectacle of the one-sidedness of the West's "moral" reactions, notably with regard to Israel, presented as an innocent victim (see article on p.27);
the unbearable hypocrisy of the supposed defenders of "international law"; all have profoundly radicalized the hostility of the Arab masses to the coalition powers, including France, whose president has lamentably missed the best possible opportunity to emulate his unavowed model, Charles de Gaulle.
The radicalization of the Arab masses, in itself eminently positive, is threatened by the accompanying illusions in the Iraqi despot. There is a danger that it will go in a profoundly chauvinist direction, not only against the oppressors, but also against the Kurds, oppressed by Ba'athist nationalism. It is in fact possible that
Kurdish guerillas will resume their action in the North of Iraq. A representative of the Ba'athist regime has already threatened the Kurds with a new Halabja — the name of the Kurdish village where several thousand civilians were gassed in March 19883.
There is also a big risk of a turn towards fundamentalism. Saddam Hussein has greatly assisted the fundamentalists, who at the start of the conflict were highly embarrassed by the confrontation between a regime hitherto considered as "atheist" and Saudi Arabia, the most fundamentalist of the Islamic regimes, which is today openly participating in what looks like a Western crusade against an Arab and Muslim country.
Walking into Bush's trap
ON September 18,1990, the Foreign Ministry of Iraq published verbatim transcripts of meetings held between high-ranking US officials and Saddam Hussein just days before Iraqi troops entered Kuwait on August 2.
James McCartney, columnist for Knight-Ridder newspapers' Washington bureau, acknowledges that these transcripts are "not disputed by the State
Department." On July 25, US Ambassador April Glaspie, informed Saddam Hussein in her official capacity, "We have no opinion on...conflicts like your border dispute with Kuwait."
Glaspie repeated this several times. To make sure the point was taken, she added, "Secretary of State James Baker has directed our official spokesman to emphasize this instruction..".
Indeed, Baker's official spokesperson, Margaret Tutweiler, and Assistant
Secretary of State John Kelly, "both did exactly that. A week before the invasion, both repeated publicly that the United States was not obligated to come to Kuwait's aid if it were attacked." (Santa Barbara News-Press, September 24,
Mc Cartney is incredulous in reviewing the heavy-handedness with which the massage was conveyed to Saddam Hussein. "At one point in the conversation,
Glaspie said: "I have direct instruction from the President..."
Two days before Iraqi troops entered Kuwait, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee, where
Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind) asked him if the United States was committed to come to Kuwait's defence.
Later, Hamilton recalled Kelly before the Sub-Committee to remind him of their colloquy: "I asked you if there was a US commitment to come to Kuwait's defence. Your response over and over again was: 'We have no defence treaty with any
Gulf country.'"
...A similar conclusion was reached by the New York Daily News, but with a most revealing twist. In its lead editorial on September 29, the editorial states:
"State Department officials... led Saddam Hussein to think he could get away with grabbing Kuwait." Reciting the uncontested facts, the editorial continues:
"Small wonder Saddam concluded he could overrun Kuwait. Bush and co.
gave him no reason to think otherwise."
The newspaper concludes cold-bloodedly, that, embarrassing though this revelation may be, the crisis was going to get "tighter and tougher" and "when the smoke clears in Baghdad, there will be plenty of time to examine Bush's
Iraq policy, preferably with tweezers and a microscope."
That's for after the war. For now, "George Bush deserves plenty of credit for his impeccable handling of the Persian Gulf crisis. He may also deserve credit for allowing the crisis to happen in the first place."
....Professor Michael Clare of Hampshire College also makes reference to a National Security Council White Paper, prepared in May 1990, in which "Iraq and Saddam Hussein were set forth as 'the optimum contenders to replace the Warsaw Pact' as the rationale for major military expenditure." (quoted by Dan-
The fundamentalists have, to a large extent and once again, capitalized on the anti-imperialist radicalization of the Arab masses. The wanderings of the Arab left, split between the unreserved support for Baghdad of its nationalist components and the equivocations of the Stalinists in the face of the imperialist aggression, have once again left the field open to religious fanaticism.
These political dangers make it more than ever necessary for the revolutionary Marxists of the region to try to combine in their actions intervention in the movement of opposition to the imperialist aggression; political education on the real nature of the Ba'athist regime; and internationalist education on the subject of the rights of the Kurdish people and against the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations, whoever they may be.*
Inversely, in the imperialist countries, the revolutionaries in the antiwar movement must above all fight against the essentially racist and completely hypocritical campaign of intoxication being conducted by the governments and the bourgeois and social democratic media. The antiwar movement, which is growing again, even in the countries where it declined under the impact of the media barrage at the start of the war, is another fundamental element which can maximize the political costs of the imperialist aggression. It is an element that already weighs heavily in the behaviour of the imperialist governments.
The broader it becomes, the more the "new world order" of Bush and co. will be breached by movements of national and social emancipation. These are the stakes in the battle under way, which cannot be reduced to a military confrontation between Irag and the coalition. * 3. IHT, January 25, 1991. 4. It is depressing to hear slogans on Palestinian demonstrations calling for the use of weapons of mass extermination against Israel. These slogans are all the more stupid in that the main victims of a chemical attack would be the Palestinians themselves, who have been deprived of gas masks — see article on this subject on p. 10 of this issue of IV.
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4
WAR IS Biggest antiwar actions since
GOOD
BUSINESS
IN RESPONSE to the beginning of
George Bush's shooting war against Iraq, hundreds of thousands of US citizens took consecutive Saturdays - January 19 and
SỌN! 26. By all accounts, these demonstrations constitute the largest outpouring of antiwar sentiment in this country since
HE numbers are indeed impressive. In Washington DC there were 50,000 on the 19th and 250,000 one week later. In San Francisco the figures were 75,000 and 200,000. In addition the citywide antiwar coalition in Los Angeles organized its own protest of 25,000 people on January 26. Smaller actions were held in other towns where people could not travel to one of the major national demonstrations.
What is particularly noteworthy is that these massive mobilizations have taken place at the very beginning of the war, at a time when the American people are hearing over and over again how successful the bombing raids against Iraq have been and about the continuing atrocities of Saddam Hussein. Despite the opinion polls, in which George Bush's approval rating is running at a record 70-80%, those who oppose his attack on Iraq have not been intimidated. January 19 and 26 demonstrate conclusively that Washington has failed to overcome the legacy of mistrust that still exists among the people of this country as a result of Vietnam.
It is not of course surprising that Bush should be able to rally a large majority in the opinion polls at the start of his shooting war.
The real contest for
US public opinion lies ahead. As the war continues, and the casualties on both sides mount, more and more people will begin asking: What is the killing really for? Is it worth it? Why are we spending a billion dollars per day on war when state and local governments say that they are unable to continue paying teachers or to provide other basic public
What will be the further financial drain on a country already in a deep recession?
Today, Bush can get away with his lies about a fight for "freedom" and the "liberation of Kuwait". But once people take the time to think things over it will not be hard for them to see what this war is really all about - oil and the continued US military domination of the world.
Fragility of national consensus
The marches on the 19th and 26th show that a well-organized opposition is already in place that can help explain this truth. Bush's "national consensus" could well prove extremely fragile - even if his military experts are right and they can bring the war to a victorious conclusion within a few months. If they are wrong, and things drag on much longer, the potential exists for a real social explosion
GULF WAR
Vietnam
to the streets in protest on two
Vietnam. STEVE BLOOM in the US.
However, the US movement is not without its problems. Because there is an organizational split between two coalitions, two national demonstrations were called one week apart with virtually identical political programs. The 19th was called around three slogans: "Stop Bush's war now!" "Fight racism and poverty at home!" "Bring the troops home!". For the 26th the demands were: "No war in the Middle East!" "Bring the troops home now!" "Money for human needs, not
The January 19 wing of the movement is represented by the National Coalition to Stop US Intervention in the Middle East. This group was formed shortly after Bush deployed troops to Saudi Arabia and was responsible for the first round of nationally coordinated actions last October 20, when tens of thousands mobilized in cities across the US.
### Martin Luther King celebrations
In late November, the leadership of this coalition issued the call for January 19 marches in Washington and San Francis. co. They chose that date to tie in with the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday (January 15, official holiday on January 21) and thereby link opposition to the war with the needs and demands of the Black community.
The other grouping, the National Campaign for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, was formed at a September meeting of activists from across the country. Its second national meeting December wad manded by hendreds of 5
International Viewpoint #200 • February 18, 1991
GULF WAR representatives from national and local antiwar groups, as well as local coalitions. This was by far the broadest and most representative planning meeting of the movement up to that point, and it issued the call for January 26 — motivated largely on the basis that students needed extra time to mobilize, since campuses would be closed in early January.
Those attending the December 1 meeting appealed to the National Coalition to join them and unify around the January 26 date. The Coalition, however, stated that it had already done substantial publicity for its January 19 action, and insisted that the link with Martin Luther King's birthday was one it did not want to give up. Each group tried to achieve hegemony for its date. Either could have deferred to the other on the question, but neither one did. The result was two separate mobilizations built by two separate national coalitions. Differences on condemnation of invasion of Kuwait
There are political differences between the Campaign and the Coalition. One of the most important represents a general dividing line among antiwar activists in the US: should the movement here join in the international condemnation of Saddam Hussein for his invasion and annexation of Kuwait? The Coalition, from the beginning, rejected any statement along these lines as part of its political platform. This was one of the main reasons why some of the more conservative elements in the movement decided to work for the formation of the Campaign for Peace, and insisted at its founding meeting that an explicit condemnation of the Iraqi invasion must be integrated into the political platform of the Campaign.
Two other political questions have also been important, but on these the divisions are not so clear. One has to do with the use of sanctions by the Bush administration as an alternative to a shooting war. The other is what role the UN might play as a force for peace in the present conflict. The Campaign has not taken a formal position on these questions, but the same conservative elements in the movement - who are concentrated in the Campaign - tend to support both the idea of sanctions as the "proper" way to force Irag out of Kuwait, and appeals to UN intervention.
Others in the movement have argued a more consistent "Out now!" viewpoint: that sanctions are, in fact, simply war in another form — another way for Bush and the US rulers to establish their right to control the oil wealth of the Mid-east -and that the UN has proven to be nothing but a tool used by the rulers of the US to gain a political cover for their slaughter. The January 19 coalition has taken a clear position against sanctions. But opponents of sanctions can also be found working within the Campaign for Peace. In fact, many who have been active within the
Campaign during the period leading up to January 26 even oppose its call for condemnation of Iraq.
The political dividing line between the two coalitions is, therefore, a fuzzy one. The main reason for this lies in the decision-making process that has been impleby the Coalition to Stop Intervention. It has never allowed activists to have a real voice in the process. All of its proposals for action — including the call for January 19 — have been issued by a self-selected administrative committee". Mobilizing sometimes held so that the leaders can tell activists what will be done and how they should do it. Agendas and reports at these meetings are structured in advance with no opportunity for those in attendance to change them. Discussion is limited. And no votes are taken.
Many within the movement, even those who are politically closer to the program developed by the Coalition, have oriented more to the Campaign because of such undemocratic practices. Within the structures of the Campaign there has at least been an opportunity to raise ideas for dis-
It is significant that, despite the differences that do exist in political orientation, the formal demands of both January 19 and 26 were essentially the same. This reflects the fact that a truly broad movement against the war in the US can only be built around those basic points that unite all activists. There is simply no agreement on whether to condemn Iraq, or on the call for sanctions and UN intervention. Diverse views on these questions should be welcomed in the movement and at demonstrations.
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