THE DEATH OF Yaser Arafat, as well as the American assault and ensuing holocaust in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, occurred shortly after our previous issue (Against the Current 113) went to press. The end of 2004 finds the Middle East sliding toward an even bloodier morass, thanks in large part to imperial and colonial arrogance which has rarely been on such open display.
Begin with Iraq, where the real lesson of Fallujah is as clear to most of the world as it is obscured in the United States by government spin and the declining visibility of the antiwar movement: The U.S. occupation has already lost the Iraq war. In Fallujah, exactly as the U.S. general famously described the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre, the military “had to destroy the city in order to save it.”
The war in Iraq, of course, is not over. Quite the contrary, it will last for many years, as the carnage in Vietnam persisted long after 1968. A wide range of outcomes are possible, from a centralized semi-dictatorship to the breakup of the country. What will not happen in Iraq is a stable, peaceful, happy haven for U.S. corporations and American military bases to dominate the Middle East—what the Bush administration would have called the “new democratic Iraq.”
The Bush gang got through the U.S. election by hiding from enough voters the degree to which this war was being lost. Now, claiming “victory” and promising “reconstruction” in Fallujah, this regime seeks to hide the fact of its defeat long enough to get through the January election in Iraq. Its main hope is that this exercise will confer enough legitimacy to induce other countries to share the burden of cleaning up the mess Bush has made.
Frankly, this is why many imperial elites both here and abroad were hoping that John Kerry would defeat Bush: The chances of getting Europe to throw Washington a rope to pull out of the Iraq swamp would thereby have improved. But if Kerry despite his miserable campaign had won the election, he would have inherited a situation in the Middle East that is the deadliest and most chaotic in that region’s modern history.
Shortly after all this came the off-again-on-again deal between the European Union and Iran to suspend Iranian nuclear enrichment programs. The EU-Iran negotiations provoked the rage of the U.S. administration against the Europeans, who for reasons of their own security keep trying to rescue Washington from the consequences of its own ideologically driven warmongering.
The last thing the mullahcracy in Iran, which is deeply hated by most of its own population, wants now is a showdown with the United States. If forced into such a confrontation or if hit by a “preemptive” U.S.-Israeli military strike, however, Iran has the capacity to make Shia Iraq an even worse hellhole for American forces than the Sunni insurgent regions already are.
The crisis in the Middle East combines multiple elements that are difficult to untangle. Seldom if ever has a triple threat coincided as at present: an imperial military occupation and insurgency in a major Arab country (Iraq); an international political crisis over potential nuclear proliferation and threats of preemptive war against a regional power (Iran); the likelihood of a consolidated apartheid reality and a protracted, messy struggle against it (Israel-Palestine). Competition among imperialist centers; local elites threatened from within by the growth of militant religious fundamentalism all over the place; the traditional politics of oil; all these are part of the pool of oil and quicksand in which George W. Bush’s administration is standing.
The issues of oil price and supply, in particular, are made more volatile by factors outside the Middle East arena, notably rising demand from China and Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution.” There is also the specter that somewhere down the road, a sharply declining U.S. dollar might impel OPEC to price its oil in euros instead. It could be that meeting such a potential threat is a factor propelling the incredible expansion of U.S. military-technological power.
If the Republicans are now the United States’ ruling party until they screw something up really badly, the interlocking Middle East crises make a likely short-term place for that debacle to occur. (The second leading possibility is a financial meltdown over budget and trade deficits—that’s a story for another time.)
Most of the world, frankly, would shed no tears at seeing the Bush gang politically crash and burn. The problem is the terrible damage to human lives, to say nothing of our planet’s fragile ecology, that this regime can inflict upon us all in the course of its self- destruction.
That John Kerry’s campaign failed to give focus on the Iraq debacle, let alone offer a way out of it for an increasingly war- weary and fearful American public, was only to be expected. The Democratic Party is after all an unconditionally loyal party of U.S. capital and imperialism.
The Democrats could call Bush’s war “a terrible failure of judgment,” but it would not and could not tell the population the simple truth: “Victory” is impossible. The only way out of Iraq is—Out of Iraq. Bring the Troops Home Now!
Only the antiwar movement, independent and visible in the streets, could deliver that message. The tragedy is that most of this movement, trapped by the logic of “Anybody But Bush,” sincerely convinced that “defeating Bush” (i.e. electing Kerry) was an overriding obligation to American democracy and to the people of the world, became largely invisible. The movement’s invisibility could only benefit an incumbent President who, between the two prowar candidates, came off as the more optimistic and “decisive.” It didn’t matter in the end that the optimism was a tissue of lies; the truth, except for the much-maligned Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo campaign and the essentially invisible Green Party ticket, wasn’t on the 2004 ballot and not in the streets either.
Following the election it is commonly agreed on the left that reviving the antiwar movement—and making it also an anti-draft movement—is urgently necessary. We look forward to the winter and spring mobilizations hopefully forthcoming from United for Peace and Justice, US Labor Against War, Million Worker March and other coalitions. These begin with protests at the presidential inaugural initiated by ANSWER, and continue with March 19–20 antiwar actions including an East Coast mobilization in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon proclaimed “a historic opportunity for peace,” now that the historic leader of the Palestinian people is gone, while the Israeli army’s killing of civilians in the Arab West Bank and Gaza continued. We want to focus briefly here on the importance of Palestine/Israel as part of the antiwar agenda in the second GW Bush term.
Indeed the Palestinian people, along with those Israelis struggling against their own society’s self-destruction, face a particularly desperate moment of crisis that they cannot survive singlehanded. Among the many facets of the situation, a few can be highlighted:
ATC 114, January–February 2005