Mark Phillips: The American Question

4/9/03: Their democracy and ours.

Today's pictures of celebrating Baghdadis are indeed, as Rumsfeld put it, "breathtaking." Why then was the war wrong?

1. It's anti-democratic. If the principle of self-determination is the basis of democracy, the right way to overthrow the Ba'ath Party dictatorship was by assisting the Iraqi people in doing it themselves. By replacing a dictator with a puppet-to-be, as we've done in Afghanistan, we've gone out of our way to prevent the mobilization of the Iraqi people.
2. It's an inept way to fight terrorism. By imposing a neo-colonial client regime we further enflame the desperate and embittered masses who become the next generation of terrorist recruits.

What would a socialist government have done differently?

Instead of regime change from above, it would have provided arms, training, asylum, and other forms of support to the democratic Iraqi resistance. The political principal would have been to directly empower the Iraqi people themselves.

For many years America's ruling elite aggressively pursued the opposite course, aiding and abetting the Ba'ath Party dictatorship in its consolidation and abuse of power. At the time of the Ba'ath Party coup, our C.I.A. assisted the new regime by turning over lists of pro-democracy activists for executions which were videotaped, perversely enough. The Director of the C.I.A. at that time was George Herbert Walker Bush, the current President's father. In 1983 we helped keep the regime in power by assisting in its acquisition of chemical weapons for use against Iran and, later, Kurdistan. The U.S. envoy who conducted these negotiations was Donald Rumsfeld. Toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war we strengthened the Iraqi dictatorship once again by intervening militarily against Iran: our navy attacked Iranian installations and aggressively interdicted Iranian shipping. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War we allowed Iraqi helicopters to massacre Shiites and Kurds.

Now that regime change is the ruling-class agenda, that change has been accomplished in disregard of the rights and aspirations of the people whose name has been invoked as justification. The old government has been removed by military force; the new one will be chosen by the conquerors in such a way that it guarantees their interests, first and foremost by preventing the full mobilization and therefore the full empowerment of the Iraqi people.

None of which leads to a safer world. As Mubarak said, "Today there is one Bin Laden; afterwards there will be one hundred." As World War Four unfolds, people will fight back with all the technical and tactical means available to them, particularly the "asymmetrical" means our government labels "terrorist".

The Iraqi campaign has been swift. Imperialism is triumphant. Where will the next campaign take place?

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