TARIQ ALI, author of Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon, will
speak at a Green Left Weekly Public Forum on March 14, 6pm at the
University of NSW.
Bookings essential: 02 9690 1977 or 1800 634 206
$20 or $10 concession
(Following is an interview with Tariq Ali from Counterpunch, Dec 20-21,
2003)
-----------------------------------
Empire and Resistance
An Interview with Tariq Ali
By RAFAEL HERNANDEZ, Counterpunch
December 20 / 21, 2003
1. What are the new features of current imperialism, as opposed to the
one described by Hilferding, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg? Is it a
policentric phenomenon, a new "allotment of the world," a "government of
monopolies," a "last and highest stage of capitalism" --or something else?
TARIQ ALI: The most startling aspect of the 21st century-- something
that is genuinely new-- is that we have, for the first time in human
history, the existence of a single Empire. This is not the abstract
utopian 'empire' of Hardt-Negri, but something very concrete and real.
The dominant position of the United States has no precedent in history.
The figures speak for themselves: there are 189 member states of the
United Nations, there is a US military presence in 121 countries. We are
closer now to the 'ultra-imperialism' of Karl Kautsky than ever before.
Kautsky's text, 'Der Imperialismus' Was written before the outbreak of
the First World War, but published afterwards despite the fact that the
war itself, a classic demonstration of inter-imperialist contradictions,
had dynamited Kautsky's central thesis, namely, that the latest phase of
capitalist development would abolish inter-imperialist conflicts forever.
Despite the war, Kautsky insisted on publishing his text and for good
reason. He believed that the growing rise of anti-colonial movements in
Asia and the Arab East would compel imperialism to close ranks against a
common enemy. And he argued that the arms race would become an
unacceptable burden on capitalism, necessitating a strategy of peace,
not war between the major imperialist powers. On this last point, of
course, he was proved totally wrong. Military spending helped to protect
capitalism after the Depression of the Thirties as demonstrated by
Germany, Japan and the United States. And it would take another
inter-imperialist war to bring the capitalist world to its senses. The
refusal of German imperialism to accept the division of the world into
British and French zones brought about the Second World War. Its spread
to the Soviet Union and Asia created the basis for a spread of the
revolution. Vietnam, China, Korea, Indonesia benefited from the
inter-imperialist conflicts. It was only after the defeat of Germany and
Japan that the capitalist world accepted US leadership, though former
rivals secretly celebrated US defeats in Cuba and Vietnam.
Nonetheless the existence of a 'communist world' forced capitalism to
discipline its competitive urges in the politico-military sphere. The US
re-built German, Japanese and West European capitalism that had been
devastated by the war and, in return, these states accepted US
leadership. In Kautsky's words the 'result of the World war between the
great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who
renounce their arms race.' What he predicted after the First World War
actually happened after the Second one.
However as long as the non-capitalist world existed there was still some
space for manouevre. The French under de Gaulle and the Scandinavians,
were strongly opposed to the US war in Vietnam. And not a single NATO
country dispatched troops to help the US war effort in South-East Asia.
The collapse of 1989 changed all that and brought about a new unarmed
struggle for hegemony. There could only be one victor: the United
States. The major European states might moan and grumble and search
eagerly for crumbs of comfort ('multilateralism', the 'UN' etc) but US
politico-military hegemony was unchallengeable. The British and Spanish
leaders accepted this and positioned themselves permanently in the
posterior of the US Empire. Despite this the old spectre could not be
completely exorcised. The question arose: given that there is no real
enemy to unite the capitalist world (the notion of Islam as the new
enemy is a joke) might not inter-imperialist contradictions re-emerge?
And, horror of horrors, might they lead to war?
This question was not posed by isolated Marxists in the Western
academies. It was first raised in the White House during the reign of
George Bush I. An Afghan-American ideologue, Zalmay Khalilzad, published
an essay in which he suggested that US hegemony had to be preserved at
all costs. If necessary by force! The disintegration of Yugoslavia----a
direct result of global economics and inter-imperialist rivalries within
the European Union---concentrated the Clinton White House. US
intervention in the Yugoslav civil war was an assertion of raw
power.....Rwanda where a real genocide was in motion was ignored.
2. Is the war economy a basic component of current imperialism? Is it
consistent with global chain networks, free trade, neoliberalism?
TARIQ ALI: Yes. The Washington consensus includes wars necessary to
preserve the consensus. The founder of neo-liberalism, Friedrich von
Hayek was a staunch imperialist. He suggested that Teheran be bombed in
1979-80 and advised Margaret Thatcher to bomb Buenos Aires during the
Malvinas conflict.
The recent wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq had, as one of their aims, the
'opening up' of the market. US corporations are heavily involved in
plans to privatise Iraqi oil and 'reconstruct' the country. Haliburton
and Bechtel, the two corporations closely tied to the ruling elite in
the US, hope to benefit from the Occupation, though the growing
resistance might make that difficult. The privileged status of the
defense industry in the United States reflects the strength of the
military-industrial complex. For a long time Marxist theorists studied
imperialism largely from the vantage point of economics.
The situation today is such that the US Empire has to be analysed from a
politico-military position. Economically, the US is not as dominant as
it is militarily. So it will use its military strength to shore up its
economy. Here the shift has been dramatic. The US Empire maintains its
global hegemony despite the unprecedented levels of debt and deficits.
Here East Asia has replaced Europe and accounts for 70 percent of the
world's foreign exchange reserves, the bulk of which are kept in dollars
and thus help maintain the exchange rate of the imperial currency. China
could easily create a crisis for the dollar and the US economy by
shifting to the euro or gold, but it has a gigantic trade surplus with
the US ($105billion) and has no desire to provoke a depression. US
interdependence with the two East Asian powers_China and Japan---is the
Achilles heel of the US economy. Hence the importance of keeping the
military option open. If China were to mount a resistance, the Empire
has two possible routes of attack and Balkanisation: Taiwan and Tibet.
Of course its a very risky business but capital has always taken risks.
3. Is there a new dominant imperialist ideology? Which ideological
elements are really new? Is it a worldwide dominant or hegemonic ideology?
TARIQ ALI: Yes, as I have explained above it is the American consensus
that dominates the world (with the single exception of Cuba and,
partially, Venezuela). The economic basis of this consensus is hardly a
secret: prising open the hitherto hallowed domains of public provision
to private capital. The state's control of health, education, housing,
broadcasting which was the basis of social-democracy in Western Europe
has been effectively dismantled. Speculation has become the hub of all
economic activity with the unscrupulous use of employee pension funds to
shore up profits. The Enron and WorldCom scandals have made no
difference at all. In the absence of any serious political alternative,
capital remains confident. The collapse in Argentina was a disaster for
the Washington consensus, but in the absence of a politico-economic and
social alternative, its back to business as usual. The Brazilian
rejection of the consensus, which led to the de-industrialisation of the
country and the collapse of the national bourgeoisie, produced Lula's
triumph, but the PT administration, frightened of its own shadow,
remains mired in the IMF swamp. Of all the continents, Latin America is
in open revolt against the economic fundamentalism of the new order. The
social movements in Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia,
Venezuela have created a new political climate. The people want change.
The politicians are scared. And then we have the obscenity reported in
the New York Daily News of 27th August 2003: "The 1300-strong Spanish
contingent will formally relieve US forces today in Iraq. They will be
joined at their base in the rice- and date-growing town of Al Diwaniya,
160 kilometres south of the capital, this week by 1200 troops from
Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and El Salvador - all of
whom will be under Spanish command." The use of old imperial powers to
help police the world is part of imperial strategy today.
4. What is the meaning of cultural imperialism? Is the cultural
dimension a basic feature of current imperialism?
TARIQ ALI: Cultural imperialism= Starbucks + Hollywood. The control of
the means of information by the corporations has meant the curtailing of
diversity. Television is strictly controlled. The coverage of the Iraq
war on CNN and BBC World was pure propaganda. Fox TV (owned by Murdoch)
would have won the approval of Goebells. The US control of cinema
distribution has compelled its rivals to try and mimic Hollywood
successes. Opposition comes from the margins: Iranian, Korean and
Chinese cinema; al-Jazeera TV..... Latin America needs its own
equivalents. An al-Bolivar TV that reports what is really happening in
Venezuela or Bolivia or Brazil would be a sensational development. The
notion that private TV networks are 'free' is now seen to be a sick
joke. The use of these networks in Venezuela to destabilise and
overthrow an elected regime is reminiscent of the use of the print media
against Salvador Allende in Chile.
5. As a global structure of power, imperialism may be considered a
system of conflicts. What are the limits of its power and its basic
contradictions? What are the forces fighting inside current imperialism?
Is there an emergent "counter-power"? Which are the main conflicts
confronted by imperialism as a global domination system? Which factors
are shaping imperialist trends in the long run?
TARIQ ALI: The major resistance to imperialism today comes from the
social movements in Latin America, the Palestinians and, recently, the
resistance in <Iraq.The> recolonisation of Iraq is not proceeding
smoothly. The resistance in the country (and in Palestine) is not, as
Israeli and Western propagandists like to argue, a case of Islam gone
mad. It is, in both cases, a direct consequence of the occupation.
Before the recent war, some of us argued that the Iraqi people, however
much they despised Saddam Hussein, would not take kindly to being
occupied by the United States and its British adjutant.
Contrary to the cocooned Iraqis who had been on the US payroll for far
too long and who told George Bush that US troops would be garlanded with
flowers and given sweets, we warned that the occupation would lead to
the harrying and killing of Western soldiers every day and would soon
develop into a low-intensity guerilla war.
The fact that events have vindicated this analysis is no reason to
celebrate. The entire country is now in a mess and the situation is much
worse than it was before the conflict.
The only explanation provided by Western news managers for the
resistance is that these are dissatisfied remnants of the old regime.
Washington contradicted its propaganda by deciding to recruit the real
remnants of the old state apparatus - the secret police - to try to
track down the resistance organisations, which number more than 40
different groups. The demonstrations in Basra and the deaths of more
British soldiers are a clear indication these former bastions of
anti-Saddam sentiment are now prepared to join the struggle.
The bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad shocked the West, but as
Jamie Tarabay of the Associated Press reported in a dispatch from the
Iraqi capital , there is a deep ambivalence towards the UN among
ordinary Iraqis. This is an understatement.
In fact, the UN is seen as one of Washington's more ruthless enforcers.
It supervised the sanctions that, according to UNICEF figures, were
directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and
a horrific rise in the mortality rate. Two senior UN officials, Denis
Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest against these
policies, explaining that the UN had failed in its duties to the people
of Iraq.
Simultaneously the US and Britain, with UN approval, rained hundreds of
tonnes of bombs and thousands of missiles on Iraq from 1992 onwards and,
in 1999, US officials calmly informed The Wall Street Journal that they
had run out of targets.
By 2001, the bombardment of Iraq had lasted longer than the US invasion
of Vietnam.
That's why the UN is not viewed sympathetically by many Iraqis. The
recent Security Council decision to retrospectively sanction the
occupation, a direct breach of the UN charter, has only added to the anger.
All this poses the question of whether the UN today is anything more
than a cleaning-up operation for the American Empire?
The effects of the Iraqi resistance are now beginning to be felt in both
the occupying countries. The latest Newsweek poll reveals that President
Bush's approval ratings are down 18 points to 53 per cent and, for the
first time since September 11, more registered voters (49 per cent) say
they would not like to see him re-elected. This can only get worse (or
better, depending on one's point of view) as US casualties in Iraq
continue to rise.
A contrast with the Vietnam war might be instructive. The anti-war
movement of the 1960s was not simply an anti-war movement. It was also a
movement that wanted victory for one side, that wanted the Vietnamese to
win. So that gave it extra zest. People knew which side they were on. It
was ultra-radical for that reason.
The anti-war movement that erupted before the Iraq war was certainly
broader and much larger. You can put all the Vietnam demonstrations
together and add them up and, globally, it was 100 times larger. But,
this was not a movement supporting one side -- because no-one in the
anti-war movement supported Saddam Hussein -- it was rather a movement
trying to stop a war that many people believed was completely unjustified.
And not just unjustified, but the reasons for it were kept completely
hidden from public view by the US and British governments. It wasn't
about weapons of mass destruction. It was about capturing an
oil-producing country with a regime that was very hostile to Israel,
which was giving money to the Palestinians. These were the reasons for
that war -- apart from being a way of showing just what imperial power
is and what it can do.
People felt they were being lied to. They were not happy about this war.
They felt it was irrational. That explains the size of the
mobilisations. It brought out large numbers of people who were not
usually political. The reason why the 'Vietnam syndrome' such a force is
that the Vietnamese people inflicted a defeat on the US. Fifty-thousand
US soldiers died in that war. The Americans could not maintain their
hold on that country and were forced to withdraw as a result of the
combination of Vietnamese military successes and the fact that the
anti-war movement had spread into the US army itself. GIs opposed to the
war organised large demonstrations of GIs outside the Pentagon and this
scared the living daylights out of them. To say that the US war against
Vietnam was bought to an end because of the [Western] anti-war movement
is wrong. It was because the Vietnamese people had been resisting three
big empires for a long, long time and everyone knew the history of that
struggle. Partially, it was bought to an end by the anti-war movement,
but what made the anti-war movement happen -- after all it didn't exist
as a large movement until the Vietnamese people began to score big
victories against the US forces. What made the anti-war movement very
big, was that many US people realised the war could not be won.
I think there is demoralisation, but I don't think people should be too
demoralised. The war in Iraq isn't going well for Washington. The US
administration thought it would capture Iraq and everyone there would
welcome them. That hasn't happened. There is a resistance movement and
it is not just made up of the remnants of the Baath Party. There are
lots of other people resisting the occupation as well.
The only people capable of stopping the US-led occupation is the
resistance in the region.
If this resistance carries on, I think the US will switch its tactics,
probably by bringing in blue-helmeted United Nations mercenaries to run
Iraq for them. For the US, the main thing in Iraq is to push through the
privatisation of Iraq's oil, to achieve the liberalisation of the Iraqi
economy and to get the big US corporations in there. They are not too
concerned as to how the country will be run, as long as that sort of
economic structure is maintained.
Ultimately, this Empire too, like its predecessors will overstretch
itself and come to an end. I think by that time many of us will be dead,
but our grandchildren might see that day.
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<pre>TARIQ ALI, author of Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon,
will
speak at a Green Left Weekly Public Forum on March 14, 6pm at the
University
of NSW.
Bookings essential: 02 9690 1977 or 1800 634 206
$20 or $10 concession
(Following is an interview with Tariq Ali from Counterpunch, Dec 20-21,
2003)
<img src="cid:[EMAIL PROTECTED]" title="" alt=""
width="200" height="567">
-----------------------------------
Empire and Resistance
An Interview with Tariq Ali
By RAFAEL HERNANDEZ, Counterpunch
December 20 / 21, 2003
1. What are the new features of current imperialism, as opposed to the
one described by Hilferding, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg? Is it a
policentric phenomenon, a new "allotment of the world," a "government of
monopolies," a "last and highest stage of capitalism" --or something else?
TARIQ ALI: The most startling aspect of the 21st century-- something
that is genuinely new-- is that we have, for the first time in human
history, the existence of a single Empire. This is not the abstract
utopian 'empire' of Hardt-Negri, but something very concrete and real.
The dominant position of the United States has no precedent in history.
The figures speak for themselves: there are 189 member states of the
United Nations, there is a US military presence in 121 countries. We are
closer now to the 'ultra-imperialism' of Karl Kautsky than ever before.
Kautsky's text, 'Der Imperialismus' Was written before the outbreak of
the First World War, but published afterwards despite the fact that the
war itself, a classic demonstration of inter-imperialist contradictions,
had dynamited Kautsky's central thesis, namely, that the latest phase of
capitalist development would abolish inter-imperialist conflicts forever.
Despite the war, Kautsky insisted on publishing his text and for good
reason. He believed that the growing rise of anti-colonial movements in
Asia and the Arab East would compel imperialism to close ranks against a
common enemy. And he argued that the arms race would become an
unacceptable burden on capitalism, necessitating a strategy of peace,
not war between the major imperialist powers. On this last point, of
course, he was proved totally wrong. Military spending helped to protect
capitalism after the Depression of the Thirties as demonstrated by
Germany, Japan and the United States. And it would take another
inter-imperialist war to bring the capitalist world to its senses. The
refusal of German imperialism to accept the division of the world into
British and French zones brought about the Second World War. Its spread
to the Soviet Union and Asia created the basis for a spread of the
revolution. Vietnam, China, Korea, Indonesia benefited from the
inter-imperialist conflicts. It was only after the defeat of Germany and
Japan that the capitalist world accepted US leadership, though former
rivals secretly celebrated US defeats in Cuba and Vietnam.
Nonetheless the existence of a 'communist world' forced capitalism to
discipline its competitive urges in the politico-military sphere. The US
re-built German, Japanese and West European capitalism that had been
devastated by the war and, in return, these states accepted US
leadership. In Kautsky's words the 'result of the World war between the
great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who
renounce their arms race.' What he predicted after the First World War
actually happened after the Second one.
However as long as the non-capitalist world existed there was still some
space for manouevre. The French under de Gaulle and the Scandinavians,
were strongly opposed to the US war in Vietnam. And not a single NATO
country dispatched troops to help the US war effort in South-East Asia.
The collapse of 1989 changed all that and brought about a new unarmed
struggle for hegemony. There could only be one victor: the United
States. The major European states might moan and grumble and search
eagerly for crumbs of comfort ('multilateralism', the 'UN' etc) but US
politico-military hegemony was unchallengeable. The British and Spanish
leaders accepted this and positioned themselves permanently in the
posterior of the US Empire. Despite this the old spectre could not be
completely exorcised. The question arose: given that there is no real
enemy to unite the capitalist world (the notion of Islam as the new
enemy is a joke) might not inter-imperialist contradictions re-emerge?
And, horror of horrors, might they lead to war?
This question was not posed by isolated Marxists in the Western
academies. It was first raised in the White House during the reign of
George Bush I. An Afghan-American ideologue, Zalmay Khalilzad, published
an essay in which he suggested that US hegemony had to be preserved at
all costs. If necessary by force! The disintegration of Yugoslavia----a
direct result of global economics and inter-imperialist rivalries within
the European Union---concentrated the Clinton White House. US
intervention in the Yugoslav civil war was an assertion of raw
power.....Rwanda where a real genocide was in motion was ignored.
2. Is the war economy a basic component of current imperialism? Is it
consistent with global chain networks, free trade, neoliberalism?
TARIQ ALI: Yes. The Washington consensus includes wars necessary to
preserve the consensus. The founder of neo-liberalism, Friedrich von
Hayek was a staunch imperialist. He suggested that Teheran be bombed in
1979-80 and advised Margaret Thatcher to bomb Buenos Aires during the
Malvinas conflict.
The recent wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq had, as one of their aims, the
'opening up' of the market. US corporations are heavily involved in
plans to privatise Iraqi oil and 'reconstruct' the country. Haliburton
and Bechtel, the two corporations closely tied to the ruling elite in
the US, hope to benefit from the Occupation, though the growing
resistance might make that difficult. The privileged status of the
defense industry in the United States reflects the strength of the
military-industrial complex. For a long time Marxist theorists studied
imperialism largely from the vantage point of economics.
The situation today is such that the US Empire has to be analysed from a
politico-military position. Economically, the US is not as dominant as
it is militarily. So it will use its military strength to shore up its
economy. Here the shift has been dramatic. The US Empire maintains its
global hegemony despite the unprecedented levels of debt and deficits.
Here East Asia has replaced Europe and accounts for 70 percent of the
world's foreign exchange reserves, the bulk of which are kept in dollars
and thus help maintain the exchange rate of the imperial currency. China
could easily create a crisis for the dollar and the US economy by
shifting to the euro or gold, but it has a gigantic trade surplus with
the US ($105billion) and has no desire to provoke a depression. US
interdependence with the two East Asian powers_China and Japan---is the
Achilles heel of the US economy. Hence the importance of keeping the
military option open. If China were to mount a resistance, the Empire
has two possible routes of attack and Balkanisation: Taiwan and Tibet.
Of course its a very risky business but capital has always taken risks.
3. Is there a new dominant imperialist ideology? Which ideological
elements are really new? Is it a worldwide dominant or hegemonic ideology?
TARIQ ALI: Yes, as I have explained above it is the American consensus
that dominates the world (with the single exception of Cuba and,
partially, Venezuela). The economic basis of this consensus is hardly a
secret: prising open the hitherto hallowed domains of public provision
to private capital. The state's control of health, education, housing,
broadcasting which was the basis of social-democracy in Western Europe
has been effectively dismantled. Speculation has become the hub of all
economic activity with the unscrupulous use of employee pension funds to
shore up profits. The Enron and WorldCom scandals have made no
difference at all. In the absence of any serious political alternative,
capital remains confident. The collapse in Argentina was a disaster for
the Washington consensus, but in the absence of a politico-economic and
social alternative, its back to business as usual. The Brazilian
rejection of the consensus, which led to the de-industrialisation of the
country and the collapse of the national bourgeoisie, produced Lula's
triumph, but the PT administration, frightened of its own shadow,
remains mired in the IMF swamp. Of all the continents, Latin America is
in open revolt against the economic fundamentalism of the new order. The
social movements in Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia,
Venezuela have created a new political climate. The people want change.
The politicians are scared. And then we have the obscenity reported in
the New York Daily News of 27th August 2003: "The 1300-strong Spanish
contingent will formally relieve US forces today in Iraq. They will be
joined at their base in the rice- and date-growing town of Al Diwaniya,
160 kilometres south of the capital, this week by 1200 troops from
Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and El Salvador - all of
whom will be under Spanish command." The use of old imperial powers to
help police the world is part of imperial strategy today.
4. What is the meaning of cultural imperialism? Is the cultural
dimension a basic feature of current imperialism?
TARIQ ALI: Cultural imperialism= Starbucks + Hollywood. The control of
the means of information by the corporations has meant the curtailing of
diversity. Television is strictly controlled. The coverage of the Iraq
war on CNN and BBC World was pure propaganda. Fox TV (owned by Murdoch)
would have won the approval of Goebells. The US control of cinema
distribution has compelled its rivals to try and mimic Hollywood
successes. Opposition comes from the margins: Iranian, Korean and
Chinese cinema; al-Jazeera TV..... Latin America needs its own
equivalents. An al-Bolivar TV that reports what is really happening in
Venezuela or Bolivia or Brazil would be a sensational development. The
notion that private TV networks are 'free' is now seen to be a sick
joke. The use of these networks in Venezuela to destabilise and
overthrow an elected regime is reminiscent of the use of the print media
against Salvador Allende in Chile.
5. As a global structure of power, imperialism may be considered a
system of conflicts. What are the limits of its power and its basic
contradictions? What are the forces fighting inside current imperialism?
Is there an emergent "counter-power"? Which are the main conflicts
confronted by imperialism as a global domination system? Which factors
are shaping imperialist trends in the long run?
TARIQ ALI: The major resistance to imperialism today comes from the
social movements in Latin America, the Palestinians and, recently, the
resistance in <Iraq.The> recolonisation of Iraq is not proceeding
smoothly. The resistance in the country (and in Palestine) is not, as
Israeli and Western propagandists like to argue, a case of Islam gone
mad. It is, in both cases, a direct consequence of the occupation.
Before the recent war, some of us argued that the Iraqi people, however
much they despised Saddam Hussein, would not take kindly to being
occupied by the United States and its British adjutant.
Contrary to the cocooned Iraqis who had been on the US payroll for far
too long and who told George Bush that US troops would be garlanded with
flowers and given sweets, we warned that the occupation would lead to
the harrying and killing of Western soldiers every day and would soon
develop into a low-intensity guerilla war.
The fact that events have vindicated this analysis is no reason to
celebrate. The entire country is now in a mess and the situation is much
worse than it was before the conflict.
The only explanation provided by Western news managers for the
resistance is that these are dissatisfied remnants of the old regime.
Washington contradicted its propaganda by deciding to recruit the real
remnants of the old state apparatus - the secret police - to try to
track down the resistance organisations, which number more than 40
different groups. The demonstrations in Basra and the deaths of more
British soldiers are a clear indication these former bastions of
anti-Saddam sentiment are now prepared to join the struggle.
The bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad shocked the West, but as
Jamie Tarabay of the Associated Press reported in a dispatch from the
Iraqi capital , there is a deep ambivalence towards the UN among
ordinary Iraqis. This is an understatement.
In fact, the UN is seen as one of Washington's more ruthless enforcers.
It supervised the sanctions that, according to UNICEF figures, were
directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and
a horrific rise in the mortality rate. Two senior UN officials, Denis
Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest against these
policies, explaining that the UN had failed in its duties to the people
of Iraq.
Simultaneously the US and Britain, with UN approval, rained hundreds of
tonnes of bombs and thousands of missiles on Iraq from 1992 onwards and,
in 1999, US officials calmly informed The Wall Street Journal that they
had run out of targets.
By 2001, the bombardment of Iraq had lasted longer than the US invasion
of Vietnam.
That's why the UN is not viewed sympathetically by many Iraqis. The
recent Security Council decision to retrospectively sanction the
occupation, a direct breach of the UN charter, has only added to the anger.
All this poses the question of whether the UN today is anything more
than a cleaning-up operation for the American Empire?
The effects of the Iraqi resistance are now beginning to be felt in both
the occupying countries. The latest Newsweek poll reveals that President
Bush's approval ratings are down 18 points to 53 per cent and, for the
first time since September 11, more registered voters (49 per cent) say
they would not like to see him re-elected. This can only get worse (or
better, depending on one's point of view) as US casualties in Iraq
continue to rise.
A contrast with the Vietnam war might be instructive. The anti-war
movement of the 1960s was not simply an anti-war movement. It was also a
movement that wanted victory for one side, that wanted the Vietnamese to
win. So that gave it extra zest. People knew which side they were on. It
was ultra-radical for that reason.
The anti-war movement that erupted before the Iraq war was certainly
broader and much larger. You can put all the Vietnam demonstrations
together and add them up and, globally, it was 100 times larger. But,
this was not a movement supporting one side -- because no-one in the
anti-war movement supported Saddam Hussein -- it was rather a movement
trying to stop a war that many people believed was completely unjustified.
And not just unjustified, but the reasons for it were kept completely
hidden from public view by the US and British governments. It wasn't
about weapons of mass destruction. It was about capturing an
oil-producing country with a regime that was very hostile to Israel,
which was giving money to the Palestinians. These were the reasons for
that war -- apart from being a way of showing just what imperial power
is and what it can do.
People felt they were being lied to. They were not happy about this war.
They felt it was irrational. That explains the size of the
mobilisations. It brought out large numbers of people who were not
usually political. The reason why the 'Vietnam syndrome' such a force is
that the Vietnamese people inflicted a defeat on the US. Fifty-thousand
US soldiers died in that war. The Americans could not maintain their
hold on that country and were forced to withdraw as a result of the
combination of Vietnamese military successes and the fact that the
anti-war movement had spread into the US army itself. GIs opposed to the
war organised large demonstrations of GIs outside the Pentagon and this
scared the living daylights out of them. To say that the US war against
Vietnam was bought to an end because of the [Western] anti-war movement
is wrong. It was because the Vietnamese people had been resisting three
big empires for a long, long time and everyone knew the history of that
struggle. Partially, it was bought to an end by the anti-war movement,
but what made the anti-war movement happen -- after all it didn't exist
as a large movement until the Vietnamese people began to score big
victories against the US forces. What made the anti-war movement very
big, was that many US people realised the war could not be won.
I think there is demoralisation, but I don't think people should be too
demoralised. The war in Iraq isn't going well for Washington. The US
administration thought it would capture Iraq and everyone there would
welcome them. That hasn't happened. There is a resistance movement and
it is not just made up of the remnants of the Baath Party. There are
lots of other people resisting the occupation as well.
The only people capable of stopping the US-led occupation is the
resistance in the region.
If this resistance carries on, I think the US will switch its tactics,
probably by bringing in blue-helmeted United Nations mercenaries to run
Iraq for them. For the US, the main thing in Iraq is to push through the
privatisation of Iraq's oil, to achieve the liberalisation of the Iraqi
economy and to get the big US corporations in there. They are not too
concerned as to how the country will be run, as long as that sort of
economic structure is maintained.
Ultimately, this Empire too, like its predecessors will overstretch
itself and come to an end. I think by that time many of us will be dead,
but our grandchildren might see that day.
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