Behind the Invasion of Iraq

The Research Unit for Political Economy

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781583674062
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Volkswirtschaft

"This book contributes significantly ot the conversation seeking to understand the international forces at play in the threatening war on Iraq."
—Nelson Mandela

"Behind the Invasion of Iraq...synthesizes the seemingly disparate threads of the U.S. war drive in a blistering indictment of American foreign policy...The effect is of puzzle pieces clicking into place."
—Counterpunch

Since September 11, 2001, there have been many accounts of the ways in which the alignment of global power is changing or will be changed by the U.S.'s "war on terrorism." Most of them take as their starting point the options facing the wealthy and powerful nations of the world seeking to control an ever larger share of the world's resources. Behind the Invasion of Iraq is written from a different perspective, and one that makes possible a far more comprehensive point of view.

Its authors, Research Unit for Political Economy, are rooted in the politics of a Third World country—India—which has long been on the receiving end of imperialist power. As a consequence, they have a more sober view of the workings of global power. In clear and accessible prose, weighing the evidence carefully and tracing events to their root causes, they move beyond moral outrage to a clear view of the process being set in motion by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. They show that the invasion of Iraq is a desperate gamble by a section of the U.S. ruling elite to preserve their power, driven by the wish to stave off economic crisis through military means. Their efforts will not end with Iraq, but will require the recolonization of the middle East.

Behind the Invasion of Iraq exposes the idea that war will bring democracy to the Middle East as so much propaganda. In a context where so many rulers are themselves clients of the United States, the war is aimed not at the rulers but at the masses of ordinary people whose hostility to imperialism has not been broken even by corrupt and autocratic rulers. This book describes the remaking of global power with a truly global awareness of what is at stake.

1. INTRODUCTION

U.S. imperialism has announced its intention to launch an invasion of Iraq and to change the regime there. The impending invasion is the culmination of U.S. efforts for the last decade.

The 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq in the name of evacuating Kuwait not only caused a terrible immediate loss of life but systematically and deliberately devastated the entire civilian infrastructure of Iraq. Eleven years of sanctions have already wreaked unparalleled devastation in the country’s economic life and effected what a senior UN official termed “genocide” by systematically starving the country of elementary needs. Iraq is not free to spend the earnings from sale of its own oil in the way it wishes. “No-fly zones” and repeated bombings devoid of all legal cover have violated the country’s sovereignty and security. Under U.S.-U.K. protection, pro-U.S. Kurdish forces hold sway in northern Iraq. In the guise of “weapons inspection,” brazen espionage has been carried out by the United States, U.K., and Israel.

Now, however, we are about to witness a major new development, with far-reaching consequences: the direct imperialist occupation of the whole of Iraq. Further, it is widely reported in the American press that the United States plans to use the invasion of Iraq as a launching pad for a drastic reshaping of West Asia. The Bush administration is actively considering invading various countries and replacing regimes in the entire region—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Lebanon are among the countries to be targeted. This is to be accompanied by Israel carrying out some form of “final solution” to the Palestinian question—whether in the form of mass eviction or colonization.

The justifications U.S. imperialism is advancing for the impending assault on Iraq are absurd, often contradictory. Unlike in the case of the 1991 Gulf War or the 2001 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, this time the United States lacks even the fig leaf of an excuse for its aggression. The major American and British media corporations have once again come forward as foot soldiers in the campaign.

Apart from the U.K. and Israel, countries in the rest of the world have either opposed the planned assault or at least attempted to distance themselves from it; public opinion outside the United States and Israel is set against the war, and even within the highly indoctrinated United States opinion is rapidly shifting; indeed the world, including the United States, has seen a remarkable wave of protest before the start of the war. Most significantly, there are signs that a long-delayed popular upsurge is imminent in West Asia. While various Arab client states have under U.S. pressure now muted their opposition, and some will offer facilities for the assault, they evidently fear the wrath of their own people. It is clear that for the U.S. rulers the entire operation will entail not only huge expenditures but grave political risks. Yet they are determined to press on.

Although some voices of caution were sounded at first among senior strategic experts and political figures in the United States, there now appears to be broad consensus among the U.S. ruling classes regarding this extraordinary adventurism and unilateral aggression. The manner in which the U.S. president was able to ram through Congress his demand for sweeping and open-ended war powers makes clear that the corporate sector as a whole (not only the oil companies) is vitally interested in the war. It is significant that despite recession and economic uncertainty, despite deepening budget and balance of payments deficits, the United States is willing to foot the bill for a massive, open-ended military operation. Evidently U.S. corporations believe the potential reward will justify the war; or that the failure to go to war will have grave consequences for them.

It is more or less publicly acknowledged that the immediate reward is a massive oil grab, of a scale not witnessed since the days of colonialism. Caspian prospects pale in comparison with Iraqi oil wealth. Iraq has the world’s second largest reserves (at present 115 billion barrels, but long-delayed exploration may take that figure to 220-250 billion barrels). Moreover, its oil is, along with that of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran, by far the cheapest to extract. The United States is quite openly offering the French and Russians, who have giant contracts with the present regime that cannot be realized under sanctions, slices of the post-invasion cake in exchange for their approval in the Security Council.

Control of petroleum resources and pipeline routes is obviously a central consideration in U.S. imperialist designs worldwide—note the long-term installation of U.S. forces from Afghanistan through Central Asia to the Balkans; the entry of U.S. troops in the Philippines and the pressure on Indonesia to involve the United States in a campaign against Islamic fundamentalists in the region; the drive for U.S. military intervention in Colombia and the attempt to oust Chavez in Venezuela. (The systematic drive by the United States in northern Latin America has close parallels with its campaign in West Asia.) The United States is particularly anxious to install a large contingent of troops near Saudi Arabia, anticipating the collapse of, or drastic change in, the regime there. Saudi Arabia has the world’s greatest stock of oil wealth. Indeed the United States is contemplating using the invasion of Iraq as the springboard for a drastic political “cleansing” of the entire region, along the lines of the process long under way in the Balkans and continuing in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Indeed, it is even willing to provoke, by its invasion of Iraq, uprisings in other states of the region in order to provide it with an occasion to invade those states. All this is not speculation, but has been explicitly spelled out in various policy documents authored by or commissioned by those now in charge of the U.S. military and foreign policy.

Linked to the above is a further, strategic, dimension to the U.S. aggressive designs. Not only is the United States increasingly dependent on West Asian oil for its own consumption; its capture of West Asian oil is also intended to secure its supremacy among imperialist powers.

The global crisis of overproduction is showing up the underlying weakness of the United States real economy, as a result of which U.S. trade and budget deficits are galloping. The euro now poses a credible alternative to the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency, threatening the United States’ crucial ability to fund its deficits by soaking up the world’s savings. The United States anticipates that the capture of Iraq, and whatever else it has in store for the region, will directly benefit its corporations (oil, arms, engineering, financial) even as it shuts out the corporations from other imperialist countries. Further, it intends to prevent the bulk of petroleum trade from being conducted in euros and thus maintain the dollar’s supremacy. In a broader sense, it believes that such a re-assertion of its supremacy (in military terms and in control of strategic resources) will prevent the emergence of any serious imperialist challenger such as the EU. In that sense the present campaign is in line with the Pentagon’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which called for preventing any other major power from acquiring the strength to develop into a challenger to the United States’s solitary supremacy. (A European foothold even in Iran could bring about a euro-based oil economy; this perhaps explains the puzzling inclusion of Iran in the “axis of evil.”)

For these very reasons, the United States is facing more serious opposition from France, Germany, and Russia in relation to Iraq than on any strategic issue in the past. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union no imperialist power has had the military muscle to oppose U.S. unilateralism, and other powers have focused instead on getting their minor share of the spoils of the former Soviet empire and the intensified plunder of the third world. However, these powers see that the present campaign is intended precisely to shut them out of contention for equal status with the United States in the long term as well. Contention for such status is the very reason for the EU’s existence.

At the same time direct control over the region’s petroleum resources will give the United States another important lever to use against China, which will become considerably more dependent on petroleum imports during the next decade. The United States also sees capitalist China as a potential threat to its plans for domination of East and Southeast Asia. The United States has taken various steps to block China’s plans to obtain independent (i.e., not controlled by the United States), stable access to West Asian oil or Caspian oil. The United States has already installed its military throughout oil- and gas-rich Central Asia; now it is in the process of doing so in vastly richer West Asia.

Although certain circumstances have led the United States to navigate a resolution on Iraq through the UN Security Council, the United States has now openly declared the death of the UN system, for what it was worth: this was the content of Bush’s speech to the UN, where he declared that it would be irrelevant unless it rubber-stamped U.S. supremacy. The new doctrine is contained in the U.S. National Security Strategy document, which declares the right of American pre-emptive strikes against “emerging” or potential threats, and warns that it is willing to act unilaterally if other imperialist powers do not follow its lead. In line with the new doctrine, the United States is systematically revising the existing international consensus on use of nuclear weapons.

In order to carry out its plan, the United States, already over extended, will have to extend itself even further. Not only has it rapidly multiplied its military outposts and involvements across the world, from the Philippines to Asia (Central, South, and West) to Latin America, but it has taken on the status of a direct occupier in Afghanistan, and evidently intends to do so in at least Iraq. Thus it both spreads its forces thin and calls forth much fiercer nationalist resistance than under the indirect rule common in the neo colonial order. Anticipating the heavy costs of their new mission, intellectual hacks of the U.S. and U.K. ruling classes are busy preparing theoretical justifications for a new bout of colonialism. At the same time the internal repressive apparatus is being strengthened in the United States and panic, submission to authority, and other elements of fascism are being manufactured.

The simultaneous emergence of worldwide popular opposition and resistance, opposition from other imperialist powers, and profound weakness in the U.S. economy suggest that events will not develop as U.S. imperialism wishes.

2. WESTERN IMPERIALISM AND IRAQ

Three themes stand out in Iraq’s history over the last century, in the light of the present U.S. plans to invade and occupy that country.

First, the attempt by imperialist powers to dominate Iraq in order to grab its vast oil wealth. As regards this there is hardly a dividing line between oil corporations and their home governments, with the governments undertaking to promote, secure, and militarily protect their oil corporations.

Second, the attempt by each imperialist power to exclude others from the prize.

Third, the vibrancy of nationalist opposition among the people of Iraq and indeed the entire region to these designs of imperialism. This is manifested at times in mass upsurges and at other times in popular pressure on whomever is in power to demand better terms from the oil companies or even to expropriate them.

The following account is limited to Iraq, and it provides only the barest sketch.

FROM COLONY TO SEMI-COLONY

Entry of Imperialism

Iraq, the easternmost country of the Arab world, was home to perhaps the world’s first great civilization. It was known in classical times as Mesopotamia (“Land between the Rivers”—the Tigris and the Euphrates), and became known as Iraq in the seventh century. For centuries Baghdad was a rich and vibrant city, the intellectual center of the Arab world. From the sixteenth century to 1918, Iraq was a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, divided into three vilayets (provinces): Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the center, and Basra in the south. The first was predominantly Kurdish, the second predominantly Sunni Arab, and the third predominantly Shiite Arab.

As the Ottoman Empire fell into decline, Britain and France began extending their influence into its territories, constructing massive projects such as railroads and the Suez Canal and keeping the Arab countries deep in debt to British and French banks.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain directly ruled Egypt, Sudan, and the Persian Gulf, while France was the dominant power in Lebanon and Syria. Iran was divided between British and Russian spheres of influence. The carving up of the Ottoman territories (from Turkey to the Arabian peninsula) was on the agenda of the imperialist powers.

When Germany, a relative latecomer to the imperialist dining table, attempted to extend its influence in the region by obtaining a “concession” to build a railway from Europe to Baghdad, Britain was alarmed.¹ By this time the British government—in particular its navy—had realized the strategic importance of oil, and it was thought that the region might be rich in oil. Britain invested, 2.2 million in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (a fully British firm operating in Iran) to obtain a 51 percent stake in the company. Gulbenkian, an adventurous Armenian entrepreneur, argued that there must be oil in Iraq as well. At his initiative the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) was formed: 50 percent British, 25 percent German, and 25 percent Royal Dutch-Shell (Dutch- and British-owned).

World War I (1914-1918) underlined for the imperialists the importance of control of oil for military purposes, and hence the urgency of controlling the sources of oil. As soon as war was declared with the Ottomans, Britain landed a force (composed largely of Indian soldiers) in southern Iraq, and eventually took Baghdad in 1917. It took Mosul in November 1918, in violation of the armistice with the Turks a week earlier.

During the war the British carried on two contradictory sets of secret negotiations. The first was with Sharif Husayn of Mecca. In exchange for Arab revolt against Turkey, the British promised support for Arab independence after the war. However, the British insisted that Baghdad and Basra would be special zones of British interest where “special administrative arrangements” would be necessary to “safeguard our mutual economic interests.”

The second set of secret negotiations, in flagrant violation of the above, was between the British and the French. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, Iraq was carved up between the two powers, with the Mosul vilayet going to France and the other two to Britain. For its assent czarist Russia was to be compensated with territory in northeast Turkey. When the Bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in November 1917 and published the czarist regime’s secret treaties, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Arabs learned how they had been betrayed.

Iraq Under British Rule

After the war, the spoils of the German and Ottoman empires were divided among the victors. Britain’s promises during the war that Arabs would get independence were swiftly buried. France got the mandate for Syria and Lebanon, and Britain got the mandate for Palestine and Iraq. (The “mandate” system, a thin disguise for colonial rule, was created under the League of Nations, the predecessor to today’s United Nations. Mandate territories, earlier the possessions of the Ottomans were to be “guided” by the victorious imperialist powers till they had proved themselves capable of self-rule.)

Britain threatened to go to war to ensure that Mosul province, which was known to contain oil, remained in Iraq. The French conceded Mosul in exchange for British support of French dominance in Lebanon and Syria and a 25 percent French share in TPC.

However, anti-imperialist agitation in Iraq troubled the British from the start. In 1920, with the announcement that Britain had been awarded the mandate for Iraq, revolt broke out against the British rulers and became widespread. The British suppressed the rebellion ruthlessly—among other things bombing Iraqi villages from the air (as they had done a year earlier to suppress the Rowlatt agitation in the Punjab). In 1920, Secretary of State for War and Air Winston Churchill proposed that Mesopotamia “could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops,” a policy formally adopted at the 1921 Cairo conference.²

The British Install a Ruler

Shaken by the revolt, the British felt it wise to put up a facade. (In the words of Curzon, the foreign secretary, Britain wanted in the Arab territories an “Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff.… There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.”) The British High Commissioner proclaimed Emir Faisal I, belonging to the Hashemite family of Mecca, which had been expelled from the French mandate Syria, as the King of Iraq. The puppet Faisal promptly signed a treaty of alliance with Britain that largely reproduced the terms of the mandate. This roused such strong nationalist protests that the cabinet was forced to resign, and the British High Commissioner assumed dictatorial powers for several years. Nationalist leaders were deported from the country on a wide scale. (In this period the whole region was in ferment, with anti-imperialist struggles emerging in Palestine and Syria as well.) The British also drafted a constitution for Iraq that gave the King quasi-dictatorial powers over the Parliament.

In 1925, widespread demonstrations in Baghdad for complete independence delayed the treaty’s approval by the Constituent Assembly. The High Commissioner could only force ratification by threatening to dissolve the assembly. Even before the treaty of alliance was ratified—and before there was even the facade of an Iraqi government—a new concession was granted to the Turkish Petroleum Company for the whole of Iraq, in the face of widespread opposition and the resignation of two members of the cabinet. (Among other things, the British blackmailed Iraq by threatening that they would, in the negotiations with the Turks, cede the oil-rich northern province of Mosul to neighboring Turkey—the opposite of what they were demanding in the earlier-mentioned negotiations with the French. Thus even the borders of the countries in these regions were set at the convenience of imperialist exploitation. The worst sufferers were the Kurds, whose territory was divided by the imperialist powers among southern Turkey, northern Syria, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran.)

The terms of the concession, covering virtually the ...