[Socialism Today, No 12, October 1996, p. 2-5]
Seizing the opportunity created by the blunders of US imperialism and fighting between rival Kurdish factions, Saddam Hussein has effectively taken back control of northern Iraq. The UN-sponsored ‘safe haven’ is now controlled by Saddam’s new allies, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), led by Barzani.
This is a fiasco for US imperialism. Even though the KDP-Iraqi forces were striking against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) which is backed by Iran, still regarded by the US as its most deadly enemy, Clinton felt compelled to order air strikes against Iraq. The action was not to protect the Kurds in the north, already effectively abandoned by the US, but to try to salvage US credibility, to defend the strategic power and prestige of US imperialism. The fall of the UN/US-sponsored ‘safe haven’ shatters the US policy of ‘containing’ Iraq. Saddam has now regained most of what he lost in the Gulf war. The Western coalition of 1990-91, legitimised by a United Nations mandate, has fallen apart. The UN itself, which would not have yielded a Security Council majority for US air strikes, has been totally side-lined.
With only a few weeks to go to the presidential election, Clinton no doubt felt he had to be seen to be taking ‘decisive action’ against Saddam. In the short run, this may well have boosted his electoral support. But the US raids will do little more than temporarily disable some of Iraq’s air defences and add to the misery of the civilian population. In the longer run, the US bombings will aggravate the region’s already explosive tensions.
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In August Saddam was invited by Massud Barzani, leader of the KDP, to support his forces’ drive to oust the Iranian-backed PUK, led by Jalal Talabani, from the Kurdish enclave. The KDP leaders complained that the US had virtually abandoned ‘Operation Comfort’ aid to the area, while allowing the Turkish army to mount more and more ‘search and destroy’ operations against Turkish based Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) forces in northern Iraq. At the same time, the KDP leaders complained, Iranian army units currently backing the PUK were also making punitive attacks on Kurdish organisations opposed to the Tehran regime.
The failure of the US to respond to Barzani’s appeal for active support led him to turn opportunistically to Saddam. Interlaced with these political manoeuvres, is a greedy struggle by the different Kurdish leaders – in reality, feudal warlords – for shares of customs tolls, protection money, and black-market trade. In this situation, the US effort to build a unified coalition of Kurdish groups fell apart, despite generous CIA funding – a miserable failure for US diplomacy.
Taking advantage of this opening, Saddam sent 30,000 troops and 400 tanks to support the KDP’s offensive against Arbil, which fell on 31 August. Such was the blow to PUK forces that Sulaymaniya was easily taken by the KDP forces on 9 September without the direct involvement of the Iraqi army. With effective control of the north through his new proxies, Saddam could afford to withdraw his forces and taunt the US to make further air raids – in southern Iraq! The first casualties in the north were the US’s allies, members of the CIA-funded Iraqi National Council, who were abandoned to their fate (with many executions reported) – another shattering blow to US prestige in the region.
But how will Barzani’s pact with Saddam help the Kurdish people? The KDP leader may well be playing the old game of setting one ruler against another. He is also reportedly trying to keep the line open to Washington, hoping to bargain for new inducements to distance himself from Saddam. But this is a dangerous game. Saddam, it is true, is the only regional leader to support Kurdish autonomy, at least in words. But in the past he has conducted barbaric, genocidal attacks on the Kurds. For its part, the US has only supported Kurdish groups when it suited current US policy. And in whose interest is such an opportunist game being played?
The tragedy of the Kurds is that they are a divided, subject people oppressed not by one power but by four rival powers – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. As if this were not bad enough, the Kurdish people are also cursed by leaders motivated by tribal, regional and mercenary interests, warlords who put their own personal wealth, power and prestige above everything else.
The Kurdish people have a right to self-determination, to a united Kurdish homeland. Their nightmare history cries out for a solution. History makes it clear, however, that this democratic right will not be achieved within the framework of the existing crisis-ridden capitalist states ruled by repressive, nationalist regimes of varying complexions. The struggle for self-determination has to be linked to the struggle for social liberation, through the overthrow of feudal and capitalist exploiters and through the workers, small farmers and rural poor taking power into their own hands. This will not be achieved by trying to play off one ruler against another, only through solidarity between the workers and exploited strata of all the states in the region.
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The fact that Saddam, in only five years, has regained almost everything he lost in 1991 and can cock a snook at the US, underlines the barbaric futility of US imperialism’s intervention in 1990-91 – which, while not for a moment supporting Saddam’s dictatorship, we totally opposed. Mobilising 750,000 troops and utilising a massive arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, the Western powers spent over $150 billion to achieve an estimated $190 billion destruction in Iraq.
There were 10,000 civilian casualties from air-raids and over 100,000 military casualties, many of them when the Western forces rained lethal fire on retreating Iraq forces. At least 50,000 died in the internal conflict, when the West encouraged uprisings by the Shia Muslims in the South and the Kurds in the north – and then stood passively by while Saddam’s Republican guards massacred the insurgents.
Power stations, transport infrastructure, and factories were pulverised by cruise missiles and bombs, leaving a massive shortage of fertiliser, agricultural equipment, and food. The country’s output is now reduced to the level of the 1960s, when the population of Iraq was seven million compared to the current 18 million.
Since the intervention, Western sanctions, legitimised by the UN, have deprived the population of essential food and medical supplies. Members of the ruling elite, of course, do not go short of either essentials or their usual imported luxuries. The agreement to allow Iraq to export $2bn worth of oil every six months to pay for imports of food and medicine, recently agreed by the Western powers, is now off. Now, the extraordinary suffering of the Iraqi people will be given an extra twist.
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In the short run, Saddam’s advance in the north may well strengthen his position. Like all military dictators, he relies heavily upon exploiting the threat from foreign enemies, especially the great Satan of US imperialism. His new blow against the US will undoubtedly boost his popularity among opposition trends throughout the Arab states, where anger against US imperialism is again strengthening among professional and small-business strata and is a powerful, volatile current of feeling among the oppressed and exploited people of the region. While reactionary, feudal-style rulers like the Saudis fear Saddam’s regional power and influence, they equally fear the sympathy Saddam can evoke among their own subjects, especially their fundamentalist Shi’ite opponents – which is why they have not been able to support the US’s latest air raids.
Nevertheless, within Iraq itself Saddam’s main prop is the vicious military-police apparatus he commands. His reliance on an army of informers, on sweeping arrests of suspected dissidents, and the seemingly indiscriminate use of torture to terrorise potential opponents all points to his lack of a political base. There are clearly deep fissures even within the ruling clique – a gangster clan united by blood and crime – and also the top army command itself. There have been at least six coup plots against Saddam, the latest alleged plot leading to over 800 arrests and the execution of 35 alleged ring-leaders in June.
Some of Saddam’s recent opponents, like Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law (and Saddam’s daughters), have been welcomed by King Hussein of Jordan. But people like this are really disenchanted henchmen, bloodstained thieves who have fallen out, and have no alternative to offer the Iraqi people. Hussein, of course, has his own motive for supporting such figures. Raising the idea of a Hashemite Federation, this king of a Starving people has his own ambitions for gaining an influence in post- Saddam Iraq. But he is not the only one. The recent incursion of Iranian, Syrian, and Turkish forces in northern Iraq is partly motivated by their regimes’ desire to establish a foothold in preparation for the fall of Saddam and the possible break-up of the country.
Other top-ranking opponents of Saddam have gone to Washington for support, and some of them are probably receiving some help – so the CIA still has some irons in the fire. Some of the Iraqi bourgeois opposition, however, complain that Washington seems to prefer a crippled Saddam to a free Iraq. Whether the US has a coherent policy seems doubtful. But one thing is certain: it is futile for anyone to rely on US backing for an effective opposition to Saddam, and it would be a disastrous mistake for the working people of Iraq to rely on any political groups which have had ties with Saddam’s regime or are rooted in the country’s corrupt, feeble and cruel ruling class.
Nor will parties of Islamic fundamentalism offer a way forward. Throughout the region, the ‘fundamentalists’, while ready to mobilise militant opposition to established regimes, have in reality – if not in words – embraced the market policies of the capitalist West. Even if they take power, which may be possible in a number of states, they will not be capable of radically improving the living conditions of the people – and the fundamentalists’ record on democratic rights is as bad, if not worse, than the region’s numerous gang of Bonapartist dictators.
In the next few years events will expose the complete exhaustion of the bourgeois Arab nationalist regimes which emerged in the narrow space created between Stalinism and imperialism, and demonstrate the incapacity of the nationalistic ‘fundamentalist’ regimes – largely a reaction to the bankruptcy of dependent, third-world capitalism – to fill the gap for more than a brief transitional period. Only forces arising from the workers and labouring poor will be able to provide a real escape from the nightmare of dictatorship and poverty, whether in Iraq or in the other states of the region. Parallel to a revival of socialist ideas in the advanced capitalist countries, there will be a rediscovery throughout the third-world of socialism as the only reliable guide to action against repression and the only programme for radical change which can satisfy the majority of the exploited and oppressed.
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The events of the last few weeks have exposed the hollow, temporary character of the 1990-91 coalition put together to hammer Iraq. At the time, it was claimed that the US had overcome the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, the domestic political limits of US intervention overseas which resulted from its ignominious defeat in Vietnam. Many on the left, moreover, believed that imperialism had been fundamentally strengthened.
In reality, the West’s Gulf war victory (as we analysed at the time) was the result of an exceptionally favourable conjunction for imperialism, a triumphal moment, not the advent of a ‘new world order’, as proclaimed by Bush. ‘Desert Storm’ followed the 1980s boom (itself a hollow, speculation-driven upswing) and the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the East. Gorbachev gave the US a free hand to intervene. Moreover, several Middle Eastern regimes, such as Syria, which had previously balanced between imperialism and Stalinism and generally resisted US pressure in the region, also gave the US a green light.
The US was able to rely on a strong Western alliance. Britain, as in the current episode, gave the US a blank cheque. But even France, at that time, supported the US, contributing forces to Desert Storm. In return for the protection of their cheap oil supplies, Japan and West Germany each contributed at least $20bn towards the cost, helping to pay for the huge stockpile of weaponry already built up during Reagan’s arms boom.
In the Middle-East itself, Turkey willingly allowed the US to use its military bases – vital to the Western assault on northern and central Iraq – as of course did Saudi Arabia, the state most directly affected by Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait.
All this has changed. France has refused to endorse the US action. Just as Germany is pushing to develop trade with Iran, France is pushing to increase its trade to Iraq, attempting to re-establish its former sphere of political and commercial influence in the region.
In the Middle East, the situation is now much more problematic for the US. Only Kuwait itself has allowed its bases to be used for raids on Iraq. Despite their fear of Saddam, however, even Kuwait’s ruling family is a reluctant collaborator, fearing the growing internal opposition to imperialist attacks on an Arab neighbour.
Even though the recent raids on Iraq were partly aimed at reassuring both the Kuwaiti and Saudi regimes that they could still count on US military protection, the Saudi rulers were not prepared to allow US warplanes to fly from Saudi bases. Saudi Arabia’s feudal monarchy, besides being squeezed by declining oil prices, has been severely shaken by internal opposition. The recent bombing of the US army base is no doubt linked to the growth of Shia fundamentalist opposition, which claims to champion the Islam of the oppressed against corrupt oppressors in league with foreign imperialism.
This denial of Saudi bases (together with the denial of Turkish bases), made it virtually impossible for the US to strike northern Iraq. Using B52 bombers from Guam and cruise missiles launched from warships in the Gulf, the US could hit only Iraq’s southern zone, highlighting the new limits of the US’s strategic power in the region.
In any case, no amount of US bombing will secure stability on the ground in the Middle East, a region subject to recurring political earthquakes. In the recent period, for instance, King Hussein’s regime in Jordan, a key collaborator in the US’s regional diplomacy, was shaken by hunger riots. The US-brokered Palestine-Israel ‘peace-process’, moreover, has been seriously stalled by Netanyahu’s victory in Israel’s recent general election.
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US policy is in total disarray, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Turkey, once its most dependable ally.
The US can no longer rely on Turkey as a base for its operations. The new government of Erbakan, which took over in June, is an unstable coalition of the Islamic Welfare Party (RP) and the secular, pro-west True Path Party, led by Tansu Çiller. Erbakan, however, is already pushing for a new orientation, reflecting the outlook of a section of the capitalists, big merchants and petit-bourgeoisie. They resent the fact that Turkey’s position as NATO’s eastern bulwark tended to cut them off, economically and politically, from their Turkic neighbours in the Balkans and their Islamic neighbours in the Middle East.
After the US raids on Iraq, one of their papers commented: ‘Clinton is getting a domestic political booster as he spanks Iraq. But as usual Turkey is on the losing end. The US has never treated us as a partner, only as an outpost – which cannot be tolerated’. Turkish capitalists increasingly resent the effects of UN sanctions against Iraq, which have cost them over $27bn since 1991. Earlier this year, Erbakan’s government negotiated a $23bn natural gas deal with Iran, which is a slap in the face for Washington. At the same time, the government is retreating on the former government’s military deal with Israel, which brought sharp criticism from Arab regimes.
How far Erbakan will be able to move in this direction without provoking opposition from the military, who are strongly pro-US (which has always supplied their arms) and suspicious of Islamic tendencies (they continue the secular nationalism of Kemal Atatürk, founder of the bourgeois republic) is not certain. The secularist Çiller, however, supports the deal with Iran and has not voiced support for the latest US strike against Saddam.
All the bourgeois leaders, moreover, are united in their determination to curb any movement of the Kurds towards autonomy or independence. The former premier, Bülent Ecevit, now leader of a nationalist, populist opposition, denounces US policy as ‘bankrupt’ and calls the government to establish a ‘permanent forward defence line’ 20km inside Iraq. The government supports the idea of a 10km ‘security zone’, fearing that the latest US raids will mean further instability in northern Iraq, encouraging the PKK.
In reality, however, the Turkish army’s recent incursions into Iraq (together with Iranian army raids) have been one of the key triggers of the recent events. Last year the Turkish regime sent 35,000 troops into Iraq to combat the forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), who are fighting for an independent state for the 13 million Kurds living within Turkey’s borders. This brutal conflict has cost at least 20,000 lives.
The Turkish army, moreover, was reportedly granted permission by Saddam for ‘hot pursuit’ of the PKK (though the Iraqi government predictably denounces the idea of anything resembling Israel’s ‘security zone’ in Southern Lebanon). Turkish army operations also have the tacit approval of the PKK’s rival, Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party. Yet the Turkish regime, whatever parties are in power, are not just opposed to the PKK but are bitterly hostile to any Kurdish entity whatsoever, fearing that its existence would inevitably reinforce demands for an independent Kurdistan.
Whatever the immediate future of Erbakan’s shaky coalition, there is no possibility of Turkey returning to its old position as a compliant base for US intervention in the region. This is not merely the result of a turn by sections of the Turkish ruling class. Erbakan’s stance reflects mass opposition to the country acting as a local stooge for US imperialism. Turkey’s growing economic and social crisis, with even worse impoverishment of workers and rural labourers and brutal repression by the state machine, place an explosive revival of the workers’ movement high on the agenda for the next period.
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