Iraq: Against Collaborationists and Resistance Fighters

In the Iraqi Referendum of October 15, 78% of those entitled to vote (9 million out of a population of 19 million) approved the draft constitution, officially elaborated by the Transitional National Assembly (an institution which emerged from last year’s elections on January 30^th and which performs the function both of a parliament and a constituent assembly). The draft constitution would be deemed to have failed if it was rejected by 3 out of the 18 provinces, and by at least two thirds of the voters, even if the majority of votes cast in the rest of the country were in favour of it. As anticipated, the provinces with a Kurdish majority in the North and those with a Shiite majority in the South voted in favour, whilst the three provinces with a Sunni majority, Salahuddin, al-Anbar and Niniveh, voted against, although in Niniveh only with 55% of the vote.

The way has thus been paved for the next electoral contest on December 15, which will supposedly lead to the formation of a stable parliament and government.

All this of course is entirely hypothetical since the actual situation in the country is light years away from the normality propagandised by the United States Occupying forces (and by their allies, whether indigenous or not).

“Errors”, or a Necessity?

In April 2003, the Anglo-American forces occupied Iraq, and were welcomed as ‘liberators’. Within a few days of the advance of the Western Coalition’s hyper-armed troops, and after minimal engagements, the Iraqi army melted away into the background. Hierarchies great and small took flight, abandoning their positions. Thus a formal surrender of the State, as for example occurred in Germany in 1945, never actually happened.

After long years of privation imposed by the war and by the embargo, the Iraqi people, now suddenly released from a regime based on the police and on terror, were expecting ‘liberty’ from the occupiers. They aspired to a life which was a little less wretched, they wanted the roads, schools, hospitals and aqueducts to be rebuilt. And this is why, in general, the occupying troops didn’t find the atmosphere that hostile.

Today, two years on, the majority of the population now see the Anglo/Italo/Americans as an army of occupation, which has not only not resolved any of the problems of daily life, but made them a good deal worse by imposing another regime based on terror; one no better than Saddam’s.

Over last few months the resistance movement has been growing and becoming ever more battle-hardened. Guerrilla actions and terrorist attacks targeted at roads and airports have imposed the necessity of diverting more troops to defend the oil fields and pipelines. The resistance movement has operational bases in many cities, towns and villages across the country.

This situation of infinite war – which has already resulted in 2,000 deaths (official figures) amongst the American troops alone, and tens of thousands amongst the Iraqi civilian population (100,000 at least) – is attributed, by many observers, to the United States making a series of inaccurate evaluations and out and out errors of a political and strategic nature.

Their worst error is supposedly that they insisted on declaring war in flagrant violation of “International Law”, meaning, in essence, against the explicit disapproval of the other great powers – i.e., a good part of Europe, Russia, China – which perceived the operation as an abuse of power and as a clear threat to their interests.

To this we could add their naïve assumption that a region as socially complex as Iraq would be easy to control with a reduced number of soldiers by relying on the active support of the indigenous population, support which turned out not to be there. Finally, the decision to exclude those States opposed to the war from any share of the reconstruction contracts only exacerbated the coalition’s international isolation, and held up the execution of the major infra-structural works.

A series of errors which, according to many commentators, should be blamed on the nationalist egotism and superpower delirium whipped up by the present bunch of eggheads currently residing at the White House.

Despite the ‘late empire’ atmosphere in which we live, with its wars of religion, god-anointed presidents and god-ordained hurricanes, we don’t believe it is anything to do with errors, but with necessity: the necessity of the largest of the capitalisms to defend its world domination, at any cost, at a time when its economic power, and therefore its political and military supremacy, is running out of steam. The productivity of capital invested in the West is less than in the East, whilst the enduring crisis of global over-production is exacerbating the clash between the imperialist powers. In the United States, it isn’t a case of the ‘right-wing neo-conservatives’ having ‘got it wrong’. The American bourgeoisie have been impelled, by a number of strategic motives of considerable importance, into wanting war: namely, the need to reinforce its military presence in the region after the occupation of Afghanistan and to control Iraqi oil supplies.

But the war has highlighted certain structural weaknesses in their military apparatus, and in their economic structure too.

Towards the Destruction of the Unitary State

At the end of the 2^nd World War, the Liberators from across the Atlantic occupied Europe and brought with them entire shipfuls of margarine, condensed milk, tinned meat and chocolate: if they weren’t going to conquer the hearts of the hungry defeated at least they would be able to fill their stomachs. After the armoured cars, there would come the Marshall Plan and big United States capital, paving the way to reconstruction. Soon the occupied countries, preventively flattened by the flying fortresses, would be obliged to re-embark on the cycle of accumulation, forcing the unemployed masses and poor peasant farmers into the factories and allowing our bourgeois capitalists to get back to enriching themselves. Finally, after a few decades had gone by, a few poisoned breadcrumbs (which today we are paying for) would filter down to the wage earners. Post-war imperialist colonisation by the United States occurred in a tormented Japan and Germany, and, a few years later, in South Korea. Steps were taken to prop up the State to ensure social peace and the submission of labour under the national democratic-republican or bureaucratic-Stalinist banners. With this end in view, either the old bureaucracy was recycled or it was perfectly substituted in a seamless way by one deriving from the anti-fascist parties. And this was the case for the army, police and judiciary as well.

We can’t therefore attribute the tragic Iraqi quagmire to the ‘errors’ of a state entity which has more experience than any other at exporting “liberty” and “democracy”. Despite the raised expectations produced by such slogans, after Baghdad was taken the victors left the city in the hands of criminal gangs for a good five months. This was after having previously bombarded the ministerial offices of the old regime (apart from the oil ministry) and allowed the national treasures to be plundered. Unexpectedly they sacked the vast bureaucracy on which the State was based, and by reducing to poverty many thousands of families, they broke up and embittered the only structures capable of maintaining order. First of all the Iraqi army. There is no doubt the army was a major symbol of national unity. It was, “multi-ethnic and multi-faith, custodian of ‘Arab nationalism’, and capable of opposing the break up of the country into ‘ethnic fatherlands’”, (as the Italian newspaper Manifesto would put it). And this indeed is precisely why the Viceroy, Paul Bremer, dissolved it.

After these events, we hypothesised that the United States was planning to attack the symbols of Arabic Iraq in order to destroy state unity, thereby opening the way to its dismemberment into various smaller States founded on the basis of ethnic or religious considerations. This plan, drawn up in Washington, has indeed been endorsed in the draft constitution approved by the parliament which was elected in the farcical elections of last January. The project, despite its generic nature, seems to open the way to the division of the State into three regions endowed with considerable autonomy, including having their own parliaments, armies, and, above all, control of the oil resources (‘open’, of course, to exploitation by the multinationals). This would mean that the Kurdish region would control the oil wells of Mossul and Kirkuk and the Shiite region the oil wells in the Gulf, whilst all that would remain to the Sunnis, in the centre of the country and including the capital Baghdad, would be some old wells which are running dry.

This would mark the end of the unitary State and be a repetition of that Divide and Rule strategy previously applied in this tormented region following the 1^st World War, when the imperialist powers divided up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.

With such a strategy the United States hopes to win the definitive support of the reactionary irredentist Kurdish parties and their armed militias, control the turbulent Shiite proletariat through an alliance with the clerics, which of course would have a nice slice of the oil cake, and finally, ‘normalise’ the predominantly Sunni areas which are the focus of guerrilla warfare by means of stringently repressive military action and economic impoverishment.

The Social Situation and the Task of the Proletariat

Two years after the war has officially ended life is still extremely hard in Iraq. There has been very little progress in the reconstruction of the basic infrastructure and the social situation is tragic: a quarter of the children are suffering from chronic malnutrition, and the probability of dying before 40 is greater than in any of the neighbouring countries; many children no longer attend school, three quarters of the inhabitants don’t have a stable electricity supply, and a third have great difficulty even accessing drinking water. The number of unemployed is enormous. Added to this there is the general insecurity, fear of terrorist attacks and bombings, indiscriminate killings, arbitrary arrests and generalised torture.

After two years of occupation, and despite the rise in the price per barrel, revenue from Iraqi oil (which was supposed, according to some, to cover the costs of reconstruction) has been considerably lower than anticipated and it hasn’t yet attained pre-war levels. Meanwhile, it seems the costs of the war have gone up, and it is costing the United States alone the staggering figure of 5 billion dollars per month.

In this extremely fraught situation, the Iraqi proletariat finds itself entirely alone in its daily struggle for survival. It is a situation which is neither new nor unexpected: in the present historical phase the proletariat has no allies, no defenders; it must find the power within its own class, and not expect help from outside it.

The Iraqi proletariat certainly cannot consider as their allies the United States and the parties bankrolled by it, who openly support the interests of the big multinational employers and use terror to maintain order. But neither can those parties and movements who are fighting against the occupation, whether by peaceful means or force of arms, be considered as allies. The Iraqi resistance is composed of a myriad of groups, parties and movements, ranging from Baathist supporters of the old regime, Arab nationalists, and various Islamic movements to groups which describe themselves as ‘nationalist communist’. But these various components have a common plan: to drive out the occupying armies to constitute a State which is united and independent; a State where the classes they represent can get back to selling their petrol, having their land cultivated, and churning out their commodities in peace – and above all, without having to share the profits and revenue with the invaders. All this, of course, on the back of proletarians, who have to keep on toiling away and sweating blood for their bosses. In fact, as many commentators have correctly remarked, the resistance represents the real continuity of the independent Iraqi State; a State which – whether of the warmongering Baathist variety or not – is still one which massacres proletarians.

In order to restore the conditions which suit it best, the Iraqi bourgeoisie wants to mobilise the Iraqi proletariat to take part in the war against the occupying forces and the collaborationist government. To obtain this outcome, it has no hesitation about conducting a ferocious war against the proletarian vanguards, who have no intention of being taken in by this plan, and who continue to defend their independence and their class organisations.

The arrangement of the world into free and stable nations isn’t an intermediary stage between the present situation and socialism. Communism devotes itself to undermining the blood-soaked framework of the national States with a view to the installation of proletarian power on at least a regional scale. In this necessary strategic perspective there is no place for struggle against the regional occupier. The working class has to conduct its hard, daily struggle to survive and to defend a living wage, but even in pursuit of these limited and contingent objectives it finds the other classes in its own country ranged against it. On the organisational level, the condition for proletarian defence today, and for an assault on capitalism tomorrow, is maintaining the political independence of its communist party; on the tactical level, it must remain outside any front or military structure of inter-classist resistance. What needs to be done in Iraq, tortured by occupation and civil war, as much as anywhere else, is to weave together the weft of the Revolutionary Communist Party with the warp of class based trade-union organisations.

The proletariat cannot recover its unity and power on the basis of belonging to such and such a country, ethnic group or religion, but only by actively belonging to its own class: the class of the exploited.

Just as the Baath party, despite its “lay” origins, fomented religious and ethnic divisions in order to prevent the re-composition of the working class, so too does the United States today; and so too will the resistance if it manages to drive out the occupiers.

The dominant classes will do anything to divide the proletarian movement. The latter, which in Iraq is restricted by the need for clandestinity and has to endure living in the midst of a war zone, must cling to its classist and internationalist traditions. It must oppose the war fronts and commit itself, as it is already doing in fact, to the vigorous activity of reconstituting free trade-unions and associations which are capable of resisting the reactionary propaganda emanating both from the various churches and bourgeois parties, be they collaborationist, or on the side of the resistance.