"Anti-imperialism" in Iraq: a response to debate

Comment on the web discussion provoked by the Solidarity 1/134 article, Self-determination for Iraq!.

The case-by-case policy

In reference to Iraq, Bill J of the Permanent Revolution group asks: "How is it possible to militarily support the Islamicists?" [sic: I take it he means Islamists].

"It should be obvious. If the Islamists are attacking an American tank they should be supported. If they are attacking a trade union they should not. Straightforward, huh?"

All too straightforward. Who needs Marxism? If the police are helping old ladies across the road, we should support them. If they are attacking picket lines we should oppose them. When the British in India were building railways and trying to suppress suttee, they should have been supported; when they were carrying out the Amritsar massacre, they should have been opposed. If your boss is friendly and in a generous mood, you support him; if he is hostile today, you oppose him.

With the approach Bill suggests, socialists' attitude to everything in the world would depend on the morning's news, on the "politics of the last atrocity" or of the last benevolent act.

It might make sense if the socialist movement were something like the US imperialist dreams of a "rapid deployment force", a compact, speedy, and punchy military unit able to zoom Superman-like into any situation, helping these Islamists against that US tank here and the next minute zapping the same Islamists when they attack trade unionists.

But the socialist movement is not, and cannot be, like that.

What we can do is not the Superman role, but the task of helping the working class learn class-consciousness; helping it to develop its own stable assessment of other forces in politics and assert itself as an independent force.

As Trotsky put it: "Our tasks... we realize not through the medium of bourgeois governments [nor through the medium of imaginary military rapid-deployment units] but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. [This] cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us".

Bill's approach is, I fear, the same as the approach of what would become the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany, dissected by Rosa Luxemburg in her article "Either/Or". The future Independents had voted against war credits in the German parliament on the grounds that now Germany's borders were safe and Germany's war was one of aggression; the implication was that a change in the fortunes of war could make the same war by the same German government "defensive" and justify support for war credits.

"These are not tactics based on principle", explained Luxemburg, "but a policy of speculation tailored to the momentary situation in the theatre of war, the famous case-by-case policy, the old opportunistic see-saw upon which the party performed magnificently on August 4th, 1914".

A "case-by-case policy" will not suffice for the clerical-fascist movements in Iraq, either.

In fact I don't believe the real attitude of Bill and the Permanent Revolution group is a case-by-case one. Their journal does not alternate between articles supporting the Islamist militias in Iraq and articles denouncing them. It supports them pretty steadily. Bill's "case-by-case" argument is more a fobbing-off device: he supports the militias because they attack American tanks, and if they attack trade-unionists, then, in principle, if PR can find the time for such secondary details, they can denounce that.

Basic assessment

Bill and his friends have a basic assessment of the clerical-fascist militias, that they are national-liberation forces, and a secondary line of criticising the militias' attacks on trade unionists (and women, and gays, and students, and gypsies, I suppose).

Is that basic assessment accurate? It is not. I shall argue that it based on glossing over most of the realities of the clerical-fascist militias; depending on the bare fact that they are "anti-American"; and surmising, inaccurately, that anything "anti-American" must be essentially pro-national-liberation.

Does anyone seriously believe that one or another of the clerical-fascist militias being able to strike big enough blows to the US military to force it out of Iraq would actually lead to national emancipation for Iraq (or least for Arab Iraq)? That it would not lead to full-scale civil war, the intervention of neighbouring states, and the chopping up of Iraq into sectarian statelets?

I've never read anyone argue such a case in any detail. I have read hard-nosed US-imperialist strategists arguing that US withdrawal and ensuing civil war is a better option for US imperialism that the present morass - whatever governments emerged from the civil war would still have to sell their oil, and might well still value US assistance against neighbouring states - but that is a different matter.

The pro-militia stance usually depends on a suggestion (never argued in detail) that US withdrawal would automatically "end the war", or that we are duty bound to champion whatever we think worst for the USA, whatever the consequences for the workers and peoples of Iraq.

The Sunni clerical-fascist militias cannot possibly lead a national liberation struggle, any more than the UDA and the UVF could ever have led a national liberation struggle in Ireland. They are based on a historically-dominant minority. They fight the Americans - when they do fight the Americans, rather than carrying out sectarian attacks on the Shia - in the cause of trying to regain hegemony for that minority.

So far as I can gather, the thinking of some of the Sunni militias has been that realistically they can't win, but they can prevent the stabilisation of power for the Shia-Kurdish coalition of the type which has led the various Baghdad governments since early 2005, and thus push the Americans into engineering a political system for Iraq giving a better deal to the Sunni Arabs. Some of the Sunni militias which thought that way have latterly been collaborating with the Americans, though they still have an uneasy relationship with the Baghdad government.

The Sunni Arab "ultras", like Al Qaeda, may really believe that the Shia are only a minority in Arab Iraq, or that Allah will bring them victory whatever the balance of forces. Their cast of mind is aptly enough illustrated by the declaration of an Al Qaeda leader in May favouring a US attack on Iran (on the grounds that, bad though the US is bad, the main thing is to get the Shia infidels zapped).

The Shia clerical-fascist militias have not attacked American tanks much. The Badr Corps, the militia of SCIRI/ISCI, has more or less collaborated with the Americans since 2003. The Mahdi Army has had clashes with the Americans, but only episodically and usually on US initiative.

They cannot possibly unify Iraq, either, because their fundamental aim is clerical rule, which means rule by Shia clerics.

To explain the clerical-fascist militias in Jason's terms, as a purely instinctive reaction to the occupation - "when the occupation is attacking schools, houses, hospitals, forcibly looting industries and the oilfields then many workers quite rightly are angry and want to take up arms" - is false.

I'm sure the brutality and arrogance of the American military have driven many Iraqis into the arms of the clerical-fascist militias. The character of such movements is not determined by the exasperated and inchoate rank and file, but by the leadership - and especially so in militarised movements. The militias have their own political character, which is not merely a mechanical reaction against the Americans.

The Sunni clerical-fascist militias emerged very early after March 2003, when most Shia had a "wait and see" attitude to the Americans; former Ba'thist military officers played a large part in them; they started sectarian attacks from very early on. The Shia clerical-fascist movements have an even longer history, back to the late 1950s when their first nuclei were formed as a rearguard action against the tide of secularism, democracy, and socialistic politics in Iraq at the time, and through extensive sponsorship by the Iranian regime.

Attacking schools? What about when the clerical-fascist militias were threatening school teachers with death if they made Saturday as well as Friday a holiday for schoolkids, because to do so would be a "Jewish" and "Zionist" move? Don't you think some workers would have been "quite rightly angry" then too?

The clerical-fascist militias are not only forces hostile not only to the Iraqi labour movement, and to women's, gay, and democratic rights in Iraq, but also destructive of the possibilities of self-determination for Arab Iraq. Their triumph would mean the bloody tearing-apart of Iraq into sectarian statelets.

That the clerical-fascist militias cannot win self-determination does not in the least imply, as Bill J would have us "claim", "that self determination will be arrived at through imperialist occupation". Sorry about the length of my original article, but it really isn't possible to understand what is happening in Iraq without being willing to read at least articles of a couple of thousand words long, and maybe occasionally whole books too. If Bill had read the article, or even its opening paragraph, he will know that most of it was a dissection of the USA sitting on Iraq militarily - as I put it, like a toad.

There are other options besides the clerical fascists and the Americans. There already exists an Iraqi labour movement, weak and harassed, but real and committed to unity across the sectarian divides. Prospects for it do not look good at present, but it is not at all ruled out that a more-or-less bourgeois-democratic, anti-sectarian movement for self-determination should arise in Iraq.

(In fact: something more or less like the Guomindang... Contrary to what Arthur suggests in the web discussion on my article, the Left Opposition never contested the necessity for the Chinese CP seeking alliances with the Guomindang against Japanese imperialism. The Opposition denounced only political subordination to the Guomindang. A basic consideration in the assessment of the Guomindang was that it sought - and with some success - to bring China out of the "warlord period" and to unify it. Trotsky wrote that "the revolution now unfolding under the leadership of the Kuomintang is a bourgeois-national revolution"; and when denouncing the reactionary acts of the Guomindang, he referred to them as "the attempts of the nationalist-liberal bourgeoisie, by using the Kuomintang as a tool").

Is US imperialism in Iraq today the same as classic "high imperialism"?

To equate the US in Iraq now with classic "high imperialism" - say, the Japanese in China in the 1930s - and the clerical-fascist militias with the Guomindang is, it seems to me, like equating a plain with a forest because the plain also has some trees similar to those in the forest.

I'm against the USA having permanent military bases in Iraq. I'm also against the USA having permanent military bases in Britain, but those bases do not prove Britain to be a US colony. History shows that the post-1945 USA having permanent military bases in a country, even large ones in a poor country, is not the same as that country becoming a colony in the sense of the old "high imperialism" which dominated the late 19th century and most of the 20th century but ended in the West in 1975 with the Portuguese retreat from Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.

Japan has had huge US military bases since the end of World War Two - and moreover has been forced to pay for them - and was extremely poor compared to the USA. South Korea has had huge US military bases since the Korean war. The Philippines had gigantic US bases until 1992, and still has sizeable ones.

All of these countries have been broadly in the "US sphere of influence" - but then so were most non-Stalinist countries until 1991, and so have been almost all countries in the world since 1991.

They are not especially economically subordinate to the USA. When Japanese manufactured exports started to out-compete US manufacturers in the US market in the 1960s, and South Korean manufactured exports more recently, the US military bases in those countries were of no help to the hard-pressed producers. None has a particularly high proportion of US ownership in its economy.

The Philippines, instructively, opened up to foreign investment at the same time - in the early 90s - as its government forced out most of the huge US bases there. Although the US still has bases there, the US holds only 22% of foreign direct investment there, while Japan holds 23% and various European powers over 26% (2002 figures).

None of them was especially responsive when the US called in favours from all its friends in 2003 and after for its invasion of Iraq. None contributed to the US effort more than token numbers of soldiers, in non-frontline posts, often quickly withdrawn: when sending its troops, the South Korean government rather touchingly stipulated that they should not be sent anywhere dangerous.

When Germany refused to support the invasion of Iraq, the US responded by threatening to withdraw US troops from Germany (where, despite a reduction from 248,600 US troops stationed there in 1989 to 66,400 in 2005, the US bases are still important economic factors in some areas).

In sum, the US aspires to be, and largely is, the world's policeman, through a military apparatus and a network of bases vastly bigger than any other country's. It also works at being, and largely is, the centre and keystone of what Ellen Wood calls the "empire of capital" and what we in Workers' Liberty have called "the imperialism of free trade" - an economic world order adapted to the drives and greeds of the world's big multinational corporations and financial institutions, a large proportion of which are headquartered in the USA. It is the weightiest voice in the political conclaves of world capital (United Nations, G8, etc.), and works to keep that position. As we argued in Workers' Liberty 2/3, this is a world of US hegemony, and the conventional story of "relative decline of the USA" is largely untrue.

But this is not the same as the old "high imperialism". There is not, and the USA has consistently not tried to implement, a direct one-to-one correspondence between military deployment, economic domination, and political domination, such as characterised the old "high imperialism". US capital is playing a bigger game. It knows from the experience of the old European empires that in the era when most so-called Third World countries are substantially urbanised, literate, and instilled with nationalist consciousness, to try to maintain old-style governor-general domination is very expensive financially, politically, and militarily - and, moreover, not necessary.

The Bush administration was attempting a bigger game when it invaded Iraq. It did not want to make Iraq a new US colony. It wanted to use the forced transformation of Iraq as a lever to transform the whole Middle East into a world-market-friendly - and therefore, in the long run, it calculates, US-capital-friendly - configuration.

Events have shown a large measure of neo-con hubris in Bush's scheme. But making Iraq a new US colony is not a plausible fallback policy. Even with 150,000 troops there, the US is not able to get a government in Iraq suitable to it. My best guess is that the US hopes to hold out long enough, and "harden" a new Iraqi army sufficiently, that it can engineer a "deniable" soft military coup in Iraq which will ensure a more or less friendly, world-market-compliant regime there for a sizeable period to come as Iraqi society eventually convalesces from 28 years of unbroken horror since Saddam Hussein launched war against Iran in 1980. It also wants to get as many cards in its hand as it can now - thus its overweening demands in the negotiations over the "State of Forces Agreement".

But for now the situation is epitomised by the fact the Baker-Hamilton report of late 2006 - produced by a group which included Robert Gates, now Bush's Defense Secretary and tipped to be Obama's Defence Secretary too if Obama becomes president - seriously proposed that the US should knock the Iraqi government into shape by threatening to withdraw US troops. Some US ruling-class commentators remonstrated that, yes, the Baghdad ministers might be whipped along by fear of their country collapsing into chaos, but that chaos would not do the US any good; some "hard-headed" neo-con types argue that chaos is a better option for US imperialism than the current costly policy, since whatever Iraqi governments emerge at the end of a civil war will still have to do deals on the world market; no-one said that the US troops could just be used directly to get the Baghdad ministers to do what the US wants.

As regards oil, by the way, some 20 deals with foreign oil companies have so far been signed in Iraq. Only one is with a US company; the others are with companies based in such countries as Russia, India, Korea, Canada, Norway...

If the US moving to old-style colonial-type rule of Iraq was ever a possibility, it is not now, No-one in the US ruling class thinks it is feasible financially, politically, or diplomatically to keep in Iraq indefinitely as many troops as would be necessary to ensure direct and effective US rule there, presumably at least 200,000, maybe 300,000.

"Anti-imperialism" today may mean anti-modernist reaction, not national emancipation

Precise assessment here is not pedantry, and still less is it pedantry to suggest that the US's world rule is "not as bad as you might think". The assessment of world structure is important for a clear assessment of "anti-imperialist" forces today.

We wrote back in 1982, as part of the debate with the Permanent Revolution group's political forerunners and others who wanted to side positively with the Argentine military junta in the British-Argentine war of that year: "The notion that what Trotsky wrote in a very different world (dominated by colonial imperialism, for example) about countries like China can provide us directly with answers to the Argentine war is ridiculous. The principles, methods and ways of looking at the world remain what they were when Trotsky wrote, but to conclude that the texts embodying their results when applied to working through a concrete problem can directly offer us guidelines now, the comrades would have to establish that similar or roughly similar conditions exist..."

In the era of high imperialism, of rule by governors-general over weaker nations which systematically blocked their democratic development, it was almost automatic that rebellions against the colonial-imperial powers would have a national-liberation character - that their conflict with the colonial-imperial power would be primarily about national liberation, whatever the secondary factors.

It is not at all true that "anti-imperialism" today - in the sense of hostility to the "imperialism of free trade" - has any emancipatory character. It is often reactionary "anti-imperialism". Its most militant form is a drive for withdrawal from the world economy, which has an entirely different import to withdrawal from a political empire. Consider North Korea, Burma, the Taliban's Afghanistan, Mugabe's Zimbabwe: what was or is in the least emancipatory or progressive about their "anti-imperialism"?

"Anti-imperialism" is often the cover for regional paleo-imperialism: Serbia in former Kosova; Saddam Hussein's Iraq in Kurdistan and Kuwait and (Saddam hoped) chunks of Iran; Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas...

Movements which are primarily about the democratic cause of national liberation should still be supported; but it is not at all to be assumed that the negative definition, "anti-imperialism", implies that positive progressive content.

In Iraq, the "anti-imperialism" of the Sunni-Arab clerical-fascist militias is not a liberation struggle, but a drive to reassert the domination of a traditional elite over the majority of the population, Shias, Kurds, and others.

Among the Shia-Arab clerical-fascists, too, "anti-imperialism" or "anti-Americanism" is by no means an ideology of emancipation. Nir Rosen's book In the Belly of the Green Bird shows that when they denounce America, they mean, more or less interchangeably, “the Jews”, secularism, Israel, “the Masons”, or “Zionism”.

As Gilles Kepel puts it in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, "the Islamist intelligentsia's role was to gloss over [the] clash of social agendas [between the devout bourgeoisie and the urban poor] and reconcile the two groups to the shared pursuit of power. The intellectuals did this by concentrating on the moral and cultural dimensions of religion. They won the broadest base of support... when they mobilised both the young urban poor and the devout bourgeoisie with an ideology that offered a vague social agenda but a sharp focus on morality".

The "anti-Americanism" of the clerical-fascist militias is turned much more firmly against workers' rights, women's rights, and democracy of any sort, than against the USA's plans for toad-like politico-military squatting on Iraq, let alone against the world-market-capitalist incisions which are the major substance of imperialism today.

And to repeat, there are other options besides the clerical fascists and the Americans. It is those other options - the "Third Camp" - that we should support.