Re-reading my post on "Ba'athwater" I am not sure that the sarcastic pun really came off.
But it is remarkable that the imperialist coalition is forced to scramble to use the Baathist intelligentsia to counterbalance the fast-growing passionate Muslim fundamentalist reaction a matter of weeks before they are nominally going to hand over sovereignty to some of the Iraqis. One of the strategic errors they admit is that they should not have disbanded the Iraqi army, (which assumes the Iraqi army did not want to disband itself to engage in a well-prepared guerrilla campaign). But what is really central here is the role of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia as a general rule in most countries and at most stages of history is a stratum rather than a class, (because it has no specifically determined relationship to the forces of production). It usually serves the class in power. A minority of the intelligentsia pre-occupy themselves with the contradictions in the realm of thought which are reflections of the class struggle actually taking place, and of other real contradictions. At times they throw up a minority of individuals who are subjectively genuinely revolutionary. These are joined by a minority of the intelligentsia who are self-taught and come from working class and poor peasant families.Dealing with the internal contradictions of the intelligentsia is one of the main roles of the intelligentsia particularly the radical intelligentsia. Now in relation to Iraq the strategic dream of the Neo-Cons - themselves defined as a group of the US intelligentsia by an unusual and 'interesting' intellectual trajectory - was that within a new century policed by overwhelming US hegemonic power, a whole Middle East in which oil not only flowed smoothly to lubricate the imperialist forces of production, but there was a bourgeois imperialist civil society across the whole of the Near and Middle East in which the Zionist state is smugly secure, the Palestinian refugees are absorbed as lumpen proletariat in a supposedly expanding global capitalist economy. Crucially that the large intelligentsia stratum of Iraq and Iran, instead of serving state regimes openly and covertly supporting Palestininian suicide bombers (the real axis of terrorism) would be in the service of a liberal "middle class" largely urban civil society, pre-occupied with cafes and minor features of semi-privileged consumer lifestyles, in a capitalist economic environment ultimately dominated by the largest finance capitalist corporations, especially the US ones. The baby thrown out with the bathwater in the war of imperialist aggression against Iraq was therefore the intelligentsia. They threw it out literally with the Baathists. For a generation the majority of the Iraqi intelligentsia have grown and developed alongside and within the Baath state structures, even at the expense of discomfort about civil liberties. Saddam Hussein appears to have been a member of the intelligentsia coming from socially and emotionally pretty deprived circumstances. His regime, although using terror in a dictatorship if not of the proletariat, at least of the petty bourgeoisie, also is on record in the words of a former British ambassador to Iraq as having introduced many benefits to the Iraqi people up to the time of the Iran/Iraq war and for these reasons to have enjoyed a genuine degree of popular support. The intelligentsia would have been part of these progressive efforts bringing electricity and education to countless villages. The majority of the Iraqi intelligentsia would not necessarily have been involved in subsequent terror. The mass graves appear to date from the terror used to suppress the Shia uprising at the end of the first Iraq war, but in terms of the real-politik of the 20th century were hardly unique. The more isolated public acts of terrorism associated with Uday and the Fedayeen would have been distasteful to the Iraqi intelligentsia but might well have been seen in the context of economic crisis of the sanctions era. In return for an easing of sanctions a more multi-lateralist imperialist strategy towards Iraq could have worked in alliance with the Iraqi intelligentsia to soften the democratic credentials of the regime and open it up to global capitalism (in a similar way to that done with the former East Germany and now with Libya) The Neo-Con unilateralist war of aggression on Iraq not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction, which has shot Blair's legalistic fox with his strategy of going to the United Nations on the issue of WMD to certify it as a just war of intervention. Far more important it appears they failed to do an accurate enough class analysis. They are now in a situation where they have fanned intense Muslim reaction in Iraq and elsewhere - Saudi Arabia could also go up in flames - and it is now ironically *urgent* to turn to the very intelligentsia that their blundering intervention has marginalised. In terms of the themes of this thread title: globally I suggest there is little doubt that the growing intelligentsia of the world is interventionist in other countries, provided that intervention is done with discretion (eg that is the position of people like Clare Short and Robin Cook in the UK who opposed the war). Within Iraq, rather than our taking sides between different radical elements, because we do not have the luxury - rather the appalling burden - of our lives being on the front line - of considering which strata and classes objectively and subjectively different political organisations may have their main strength in. For example neither the Iraqi Communist Party not the Workers Communist Party of Iraq are proposing an immediate struggle for socialist revolution, and that implies some degree of compromise with non-socialist forces. But I would suspect that the ICP has somewhat more connections with more privileged members of the intelligentsia with links with old class structures, while people adhering to the WCPI, by its name alone at least, would be more linked with less privileged members of the intelligentsia. Hopefully, however important their differences, they can argue and discuss with one another in practice. The revolutionary intelligentsia is a complicated animal. Remember that Lenin's father was a state bureaucrat who was thereby nominally noble. Remember that the League of Communists who commissioned the Communist Manifesto from Marx, were not so much proletarian, but mainly from a petty bourgeois, artisan, stratum of society that had been thrown onto the defensive by the developments of capitalism. What immediate stance towards developments in Iraq should be taken by the 10% of the intelligentsia of the world, who are radical, revolutionary, or at least progressive, over and against Empire? People's initiative is limited by circumstance, opportunity, and consciousness, but broadly I assume something along the following lines. That the progressive intelligentsia, and progressive class forces, in the hegemonic countries of the US, UK and other members of the coalition, should support broadly anything that gets their troops rapidly out of Iraq, and should support a near and middle east peace settlement. The progressive intelligentsia and class forces within Iraq should try to make alliances which preserve the possibility of national resistance to economic domination at the whims of global, especially US, finance capitalism, and preserves some measure of bourgeois liberal human rights, including in the status of women, and democratic accountability especially of the need for production to resume based on social cooperation and social foresight. That non-violent ways of resolving conflicts should as much as possible of course be employed, and solidarity be promoted, if necessary by a federal structure, to preserve the possibilities of cooperation between the different communities and religious groupings of Iraq. That outside forces should only come by invitation, to complement the bodies of armed force which have the sanction and support of the community, from states that can supply forces sensitive to the culture and values of the local people. That reparations should be paid. Even at the expense of diverting all resources of further capitalist development in the imperialist heartlands of the USA and the UK, towards the near and middle east and particularly Iraq, for the purposes of a democratic reconstruction building up from the bottom by stabilising the immediate lives of ordinary working people. Reparations should be paid. It would not just be a moral gesture to assuage the guilt of liberals in the imperialist heartlands. It would be an important precedent for humankind. Chris Burford London PS Note in concentrating on the intelligentsia I do not intend to ignore billions of people whose class position is clearly that of the working class, the lumpen proletariat, or the lower petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. But the intelligentsia is a particularly crucial and contradictory stratum who articulate political positions, and the radical classes themselves globally are now linked through the radical intelligentsia, as the global anti-capitalist agenda that was running so strongly up to September 2001, showed. Nevertheless I accept there are of course important differences of emphasis, and I look forward to other, contrasting, contributions. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Burford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "The A-List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "PEN-L List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2004 9:15 AM Subject: [A-List] bring back the Ba'ath water!! > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Friday, April 23, 2004 12:12 PM > Subject: [A-List] Iraq: the quagmire deepens > > > > > LUCY BANNERMAN > > The Herald, April 23 2004 > > > >> > Also yesterday, US authorities announced that some senior Iraqi > officials purged after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be > restored toduties in an overhaul of what had been a keystone > policy of the occupation. > The review could allow some former members of Saddam's Ba'ath party > to join an interim Iraqi government. > << > > > I had heard on the BBC that they were going to allow Ba'ath members > who are teachers and academics to return. That presumably was the spin > in the press release. Also that the Brits in the Basra area have been > retraining Ba'athist officers for the military. > > But this penetrating analysis in the Herald (once again) makes it > clear that the occupiers have had to turn a political corner. > > This was the weakness of the whole strategy of the invasion of Iraq: > that the Ba'ath party for all its repressive dictatorial measures > including the use of terror (in tens of thousands at the time that the > country was just going to fall apart at the end of the first Iraq war) > neverthess was imbedded in a complex society. > > The neocons actually have no chance of building anything like a > liberal bourgeois civil society in Iraq dominated by global finance > capital, without relying on the whole generation of intelligentsia > who cooperated with and saw their line of advance through Ba'ath > membership. > > The unilateral imperialists have come close to throwing out their > baby, instead stoking the flames of muslim reaction. They > desperately need Ba'ath water. > > Chris Burford > London > > >
