Imperialist Rivalry in the Gulf

Against all imperialist wars !

Earlier on this year the Western bourgeoisie were celebrating their victory in the „Cold War“ with the crumbling of „Communism“. Suddenly all the barriers were falling, free trade possible, peace and prosperity would be there for all to see and share. Their happy party didn’t last very long. On August 2nd Iraqi tanks invaded Kuwait and dumb-struck bourgeois parties were suddenly faced with a very serious threat of war in the Gulf. All sorts of alliances were rearranged with various states doing about-turns. Yesterday’s hated enemies were to be today’s friends. It helped when the leaders of Oil Rich States went looking for protectors when they took their cheques books with them. There is nothing like money to buy protection.

We have already dealt with our attitude to war and the defence of the nation state in two of the other articles in this issue. It should not be necessary to repeat them here. Instead we shall deal with some of the specific issues involved, not least those who look at possibilities of taking sides, „after all this is a war and we can’t be neutral!“ syndrome. This really applies to those trotskists who are falling over themselves to defend the Iraqi state by urging people to Break The Blockade! But to do this means participating in a war which working class will lose by death and destruction whilst only one section or another of the bourgeoisie will gain. They may shout about Internationalism but in reality will tail-end nationalist gangster in the hope of finding an audience. Pacificists are arguing against war in principle as a terrible and destructive affair, but they are silent about the Capitalist „peace“ being destructive in its own way, in the form of slumps, famines, (whether ’natural’ or because people haven’t the money to pay for food), pollution and industrial diseases. Wars against the „internal“ enemy which can often be more destructive of human life than the wars against the „external“ enemy. We will spell it out for the ’Give Peace A Chance’ merchants that peace is not big deal either.

Wars have been raging in the Middle East in one form or another for decades. Tens of thousands have been killed, millions have been displaced while the states in the area have been armed with all sorts of weaponry, at a price of course. Many of these states have their national income mortgaged for years ahead, either to Washington or Moscow, with other countries of Western Europe making sure that they have received their piece of the action. The West has usually stayed to one side while the states of the Middle East (except Israel) have fought each other. The eight years long Iran-Iraq War, a particularly murderous and destructive affair, was allowed to continue despite the show of keeping the Gulf safe for shipping, making sure that trade would not be too much affected.

The Middle East has long developed out of the colonial phase of occupation and is now a full part of the world bourgeois order. Irrespective of where the various borders were drawn, and whether they should go through one point or be moved this way or that, is only relevant to state leaders railing over ’injustices’ done to their state and that somebody else’s territory should be ceded to them, what will all this settle? It will just sow further seeds for new grievances and conflicts. True, that Western occupying countries were arbitrary in drawing borders, but then were ancient Kings and Tyrants any less arbitrary m defining their own borders? Iraq states that Kuwait should be part of Iraq, for ’historical’ reasons, but what about the rights of Kurdistan to possibly exist? That sort of question will not be allowed on to the agenda because not only Iraq, with also Iran and Turkey having vested interests in this matter.

Until the overthrow of the Shah of Persia the US and USSR had the Gulf neatly divided up between themselves, with Iran in the American camp and Iraq in the Russian. The lower Gulf states had been largely under British tutelage and had gravitated more to the American sphere as their oil revenues grew. The ’natural’ alliance of Israel and the Shah’s Iran completed the balance which maintained itself in the Middle East. The fall of the Shah and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has unhinged that balance. Iran’s campaign against America as the ’Great Satan’ was only controlled by the war with Iraq, which was to the mutual benefit of both super-powers, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. Iran’s decline as a regional power led to the balance between itself and Iraq being tipped decisively in favour of the latter. Such instability is dangerous in an area like the Gulf.

Both Iraq and Iran came out of the eight year war exhausted financially. Iraq owed billions of dollars not only to the West but also to Gulf states. These Gulf states such as Kuwait had given money and made loans to help keep Iraq in the war because Iraq was presenting itself as the Arab protector against the Persian hordes. But once the war was over, and without spoils to take, Iraq was faced with massive debts many of which was to its southern neighbours. Options were few, with most of Iraqi revenues through the sale of oil, the projected income of Iraq would be decisive. Yes, Iraq could produce more oil but the price of oil was not high enough. Perhaps more conflict in the Gulf could raise the price and get its finances out of crisis. After all a threatening conflict in the area is easy enough and hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult to raise the oil prices. It even seems that advisors from the U.S. were saying that a border dispute with Kuwait wouldn’t go amiss, with a claim to the Northern Kuwaiti oilfields and access to the Gulf by the ceding of some islands. A bit of sabre-rattling shouldn’t do too much harm, especially if the small neighbour would give way. It didn’t, so Iraq just moved its tanks in and carried out the equivalence of the modern financial exercise of asset stripping.

Why The Defence Of Kuwait?

Hypocrisy is the taunt being thrown around. Why defend a small country in the Gulf while nothing has been done about the continuing Israeli occupation of former Palestinian areas such as the Gaza strip and the West Bank of Jordan. Such counter-arguments are dismissed that this is an example of one country completely taking over another and trying to absorb it. But then again what about Afghanistan, Cambodia and the Latin-American states in the U.S.A.’s sphere of influence? There was no large forces raised under the U.N. banner to reverse these aggressions so why should Kuwait be any different? Oil is certainly an important reason for this defence of Kuwait, but it is not the only one. Kuwait was actually a fairly important part of the international financial network. Much of its oil revenues had gone into international investments to the point where its income from such investments exceeded its income from oil production. The Kuwaiti Investment Office alone handles assets in the region of 140 billion dollars, with its returns being about 12 billion dollars a year. If we take the whole wealth of the Kuwaiti ruling class then we have a financial conglomerate of large proportions. This financial conglomerate, Kuwait PLC, is suddenly without a home. Its sudden liquidation would have had a very destabilising factor on the international financial system. The tanks rumbling down the streets of Kuwait City might as well have been moving down Threadneedle Street in the City of London or Wall Street in New York the way that financial circles reacted. Loans were suddenly hard to get and everybody waited to hear what would happen.

America was quick in moving to defend Saudi Arabia just in case Iraq moved further South. In the present world financial system money can be moved in minutes around the globe. The physical assets of Kuwait were waiting to be ceased but the real financial wealth was circulating as usual around the world. The buildings of the banks were ceased but the liquid assets (its money) was well away. The real prize of the Iraqi invasion had eluded Saddam Hussein.

Like Kuwait the real wealth of the oil rich Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, is back in the international financial system and money markets. The oil price rises of the 1970s had given the oil producers immense increases in their income. Some had spent them on armaments, such as Iraq and Iran, and so the money returned through the payments to the arms exporters. However, those who have invested not in arms, or industry, but in the future placed their money in investment organisations, large banks and other financial safe havens. This oil money in the 70s was sloshing around the global financial system and there was money aplenty for loans and investments. The massive loans to the Third World countries stem from this period, with various bankers lining up to virtually thrust funds at countries around Latin America. There was money to be invested in some form or another, and what could be more secure than national production and assets?

Much of the Gulf states’ money is invested throughout the world either to Governments or in capitalist concerns. The returns in the form of income does not come out of thin air but is sweated out of somebody, either through the appalling privations of the people of the Third World or directly out of profits of capitalist enterprises. These Rentier Arab capitalists (living off investments) have a stake in the surviving of the international capitalist order. In a like manner America and other important Western countries have a vested interest in maintaining these assets as without them the whole international financial order could collapse around them. The Gulf states are not „Stooge“ states as some leftists claim but are bound to Western capitalist states by billions of links, in the form of money. They will all sink or swim together. And it is because of this that the West is threatening to go to war with Iraq.

Leave Kuwait or be thrown out is the threat of the other countries of this grand anti-Iraq alliance. Various evidence is produced about how brutal Iraqi occupation of Kuwait is. Other evidence is produced of atrocities and mass murder against Kurds, executions and imprisonments taking place in Iraq. A brutal regime for sure, its collapse or overthrowal would be merely replaced by some other bunch of gangsters. But what of Kuwait, which the impassioned defenders of small countries and ‘just’ wars have pledged to liberate? They will place back the old ruling class back in its position, which represented only a tiny proportion of Kuwaits. But the population of the country was only about half Kuwaiti, the rest being Palestinians, Europeans, with large numbers of servants and employees from India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Philipines and other countries. These people ware just abandoned by the Kuwaiti ruling class and they obviously don’t matter to the advocates of the ’just’ war. Who will look after them and restitute them for their sufferings and casualties? Such people are the real victims of Imperialist Wars.

We care nothing about the interests of the Oil Companies or the big financial concerns who just want to ensure the stability of the international capitalist order. It is a crazy, anarchic and crisis-ridden system anyway and the sooner it is forced off the historical stage the better. Only a Communist system of producing for people’s real needs (and not the false marketing which capitalism wants us to believe we need) can ensure a peaceful and rational way of life.