[South Asia Citizens Web | April 3, 2003]
A STRATEGY TO STOP THE WAR
by Rohini Hensman
The dilemma
What we are witnessing could be the beginning of World War III. An axis of states headed by the USA is engaged in an act of aggression, in violation of international law, in opposition to the United Nations, and in defiance of world public opinion. The leaders of the axis have already warned that their strikes will kill 10,000 civilians, and the actual death toll could be much higher, given the terrible blitzkrieg visited upon the helpless people of Iraq and the disruption of their food and water supplies. In other words, the aggressors announced in advance that this is a terrorist war in which they will knowingly be committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Bush administration has also made it clear that after Iraq, there will be attacks on several other countries. There are striking similarities with the situation in the late 1930s. The attack, now as then, is not just on one country or a few countries but on the international community as a whole. And the price of appeasement, now as then, will be a world war much more ghastly than its predecessor.
A major difference, however, is that there is no military solution to this war. The attack can be, and to some extent has been, weakened by lack of support from most states, and anti-war activists are continuing to put pressure on governments not to provide any form of assistance to the aggressors. But this has not prevented the attack. Criticisms of the UN for failing to stop the war are misplaced. How can the UN pose a military challenge to a state whose stockpiles of nuclear weapons can blow up the earth several times over, a state which has demonstrated its readiness to use weapons of mass destruction in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam and indeed Iraq itself, where tons of depleted uranium left after the first Gulf War caused an epidemic of cancer and birth defects? In order to confront the US militarily, the UN would need to have similar weapons, but this is certainly not desirable: one of its most important tasks is to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction, not to amass them on its own account! The importance of the UN lies in its moral authority, and it is crucially important that this should be strengthened by consistent opposition to a war that violates its most fundamental principles. Kofi Annan made a timid step in this direction when he said that if the US and UK start a war without UN backing, this will delegitimise not the UN ó as the Bush-Blair axis were claiming ó but the war itself; and the refusal of the majority of governments in the Security Council to be bribed or bullied into supporting a resolution authorising the attack on Iraq was an impressive display of their integrity.
Letís be realistic, however. Bush and his associates have so far shown as little regard for the UN and world opinion as Hitler and his associates showed for the League of Nations and world opinion. Those of us who are old enough to have been part of the Vietnam solidarity movement will remember that ultimately it was US public opinion that brought the war to a halt, and what turned US public opinion against the war was the escalating number of troops coming back in body bags. But such a development is not likely today, given the new cowardly policy of blowing babies to bits from a safe distance, which is based on the crude macho assumption that brute force will inspire ëshock and aweí rather than anger and contempt.
In fact, it was the US-UK troops who got an awful shock when they were met with stiff resistance from Iraqi troops and hostility from the population. Having been deceived by the lies of their leaders, as well as reporters who are too deeply ëembeddedí in the Pentagon-White House propaganda machine to be able to distinguish fact from fiction, these soldiers apparently believed they would be welcomed as ëliberatorsí. Excuse me, but from out here it looks as if they donít know the meaning of that word. Itís true Saddam Hussein killed some 5,000 Kurds with the support of the US and UK, and letís say he killed 15,000 more of his own people. That would add up to 20,000, and make him a mass murderer. Desert Storm killed 200,000 Iraqis, and the subsequent sanctions 1.5 million more. That adds up to 1.7 million, 85 times more than the maximum killed by Saddam, and now US-UK forces are engaged in multiplying that number. Is that what they mean by ëliberationí?
Even the lame excuse of ëcollateral damageí wonít do in this case. Thatís like armed robbers (the Bush-Blair axis and their troops) claiming that in the process of trying to kill the owners of the house they were robbing (Saddam and his troops), they accidentally killed their children (Iraqi civilians) who got in the way. Even if they genuinely did not intend to kill the children, would any judge or jury say they were not guilty of the murders? Much less commend them for ëliberatingí the children, even if the parents used to beat them? Yet this is the garbage we are expected to swallow, and which presumably those who support the war do actually swallow. If in the process of committing one crime (Aggression) the invaders also commit others (War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity), this is neither collateral damage nor liberation but mass murder, and they are guilty of at least three of the core crimes (the fourth being Genocide) that the International Criminal Court (ICC) was set up to deal with.
The problem with US public opinion is neatly summed up by the statistic that some 42 per cent of the US public apparently believes that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A cartoon shows Bush circling the ëQí in IRAQ and the ëQí in AL QAEDA and drawing a line between them to demonstrate proof of a link, but even this is less illogical than the actual evidence he offered: Osama bin Ladenís speech in which he denounced Saddam as an infidel! If 42 per cent of the US public sees this as proof of a link, and many more support the US invasion even if it means killing thousands or millions of Iraqis in their own country, what can we do? Clearly, systematic brainwashing has deprived these people of the power of logical thought and moral judgement, and therefore appeals to reason or ethics will not work unless they are jolted into re-examining their assumptions. In fact, the actual beginning of the war had the opposite effect, rallying public opinion behind their leaders in the US, Britain and Australia. Watching people being killed on television is obviously a popular pastime among a section of the population in these countries. Opponents of the war in the US and allied states have done a magnificent job mobilising protest within those countries and channellising worldwide protest to put pressure on the UN, but this is not enough.
We should remind ourselves at this point that the war will not end if Iraq is conquered: it will merely move elsewhere, just as it moved to Iraq once Afghanistan was conquered. A likely next candidate is Iran, which is just feeling its way back to democracy after the US overthrew Mossadeq half a century ago, since a democratic Iran is as much of a threat to US hegemony now as it was then; in fact, what the US did then was exactly the same as what it is trying to do now: carry out ëregime changeí in order to take over the countryís oil resources and hand them over to US companies. The longer the war goes on, the more innocent victims there will be, and the more there will be a terrorist and fundamentalist backlash worldwide. Moreover, other states may be tempted to follow the example of the Bush axis, and invade territory they wish to annexe or colonise. (Israel, of course, has done it already.) The entire world could descend into chaos. So it is in the interests of everyone (except for relations and associates of Bush who have oil and armaments interests) to end the war as soon as possible.
The only way to put a definitive end to the war is to force Bush and Blair to withdraw their troops back to their own countries and keep them there. But how can this be done? How is it possible to control a rogue state with huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction which is on a megalomaniac mission to conquer the world? In particular, what can those of us in developing countries do? Some of our governments have spoken out courageously against the war while a few have distinguished themselves by backing it, but most have evaded the issue by saying, in effect, ëWe are helpless, thereís nothing we can do.í And we tend to go along with that, gripped by feelings of helplessness and despair as we watch innocent people being crippled and butchered; we feel defeated even as we go on our anti-war demonstrations and vigils. We need a force strong enough to defeat imperialism, but what could that possibly be?
Using globalisation against imperialism
Use globalisation against imperialism? But arenít they the same thing? Let me explain what I mean.
Of course globalisation and imperialism can mean the same thing if that is how they are defined. But in that case, why use this relatively new word, globalisation, to refer to a phenomenon that has been around for centuries? If, on the other hand, we are talking about something genuinely new, we need to specify in what ways it is different.
This is not the place to go into lengthy theoretical debates about imperialism, but it is useful to note that in all the classical Marxist texts, imperialism involves political and military domination over territory and peoples outside the imperial nation. This is seen as arising from the nature of capitalism itself. Different theories emphasise different aspects: the requirement for an expanding market to sell capitalist commodities and realise the surplus value created by wage labour, the need for an unending supply of raw materials, or the export of capital and exploitation of cheap labour in order to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Max Adler and Lenin concurred in seeing imperialism as stabilising capitalism not just economically but also politically, by enabling the bourgeoisie to extend better wages and conditions to the proletariat in the imperialist countries, and thereby convince them of a community of interest between employers and workers.
However, once more or less the whole world has been colonised, imperialism itself becomes a fetter on the further expansion of capital. Each empire is an enclave which acts as a barrier to the expansion of capital from the others, as well as an obstacle to industrialisation in its own colonies. The success of independence and national liberation movements in the latter part of the 20th century, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union (which can also be seen as a process of decolonisation), were thus preconditions for a new phase of capitalism which is in many significant ways different from the imperialist world order. For example, countries like South Africa, Brazil, India and others have achieved a considerable degree of industrialisation; there are reverse flows of investment from former colonies to former imperialist countries, small as yet but growing; there are new players in financial markets, notably pension funds; and above all, information technology has revolutionised communication, and with it production. It is this new phase of capitalism which is generally referred to as economic globalisation, and often seen as being inseparable from US imperialism. However, a closer look shows that although economic globalisation certainly coincides with the rise of US imperialism, they are not the same thing, but are in fact opposed to each other.
Recently, the US economy has not prospered. And the reasons are not hard to see. The rate of accumulation, which measures the health of a capitalist economy, depends not only on the rate of profit but also on what proportion of surplus value is reinvested in capital goods and products (including services) for mass consumption, and what proportion is spent on the consumption of the capitalists. The latter portion constitutes a drain on the economy, a dead loss. This portion has risen massively, especially under the Bush administration. In 1970, the income of a CEO in the US was 20 times that of an ordinary worker; by 1998, this had shot up to 419 times that of an ordinary worker! (See www.gritty.org) As the Enron scandal and its aftermath showed, CEOs are ripping off companies while employees suffer the consequences. That is a huge deduction from capital which could otherwise be invested in modernising and boosting the economy.
Then consider armaments spending. When the British ruling class hunts and kills foxes, the guns and horses are paid for out of surplus value. When the US state pays to hunt and kill human beings in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, the missiles, warships, helicopters, aircraft and armed forces are paid for partly out of what might be called ësocial wagesí (state expenditure on health care, education, and so on), and partly out of surplus value ó not just the surplus value generated by the armaments industry, but surplus value deducted from other branches of production. So although the armaments industry may be minting money, this is at the cost of pulling down the overall rate of accumulation in a big way. Militarism, which was an asset in the epoch of imperialist expansion, becomes a liability in the epoch of globalisation.
By doggedly trying to pursue a policy of imperialism at a time when globalisation has made it obsolete, US leaders have run their own economy into the ground. In only one respect has US imperialism served the interests of the US population, although at the cost of people in other countries: through US control over the IMF and World Bank, and the establishment of the US dollar as world currency, it forces the rest of the world to pay for its adventures and cover its losses.
Apart from economic globalisation, there has also been cultural globalisation. Most people think of this as meaning the spread of Coca Cola and McDonalds, ignoring a much more profound change that has been taking place since the end of WW II. This is the recognition of universal human and democratic rights, and the establishment of institutions that are supposed to promote and defend them. Some of the basic facets of this new global culture are the belief that all human beings are entitled to equal respect and concern, equal rights and opportunities; the recognition of individual accountability and responsibility for actions, as against the barbaric practice of collective punishment; and acknowledgement of the oneness of humanity which demands solidarity with all those whose humanity is violated, wherever they are. The acceptance, through the UN, that these principles should operate both within and across countries ó that, for example, the unprovoked attack by one state on the people and territory of another is aggression, which is a crime in international law ó marks a new stage in human history, however flawed the institutions and machinery for implementing them might be.
The ideas, of course, are not new: they have been around for a long time. In the first Book of Kings, there is a story in which King Ahab and his wife Jezebel get Naboth killed in order to take possession of his vineyard. God sends the prophet Elijah to ask, ëHave you killed, and also taken possession?í and to predict horrible deaths for the murderous expropriators. (Obviously Bush, Blair and Sharon, currently engaged in killing and taking possession of other peopleís lands, do not believe in the God of Elijah.) Religions like Buddhism and Christianity preached equality, universal love and liberation from oppression, and philosophers like Kant worked out humane and democratic principles to govern interactions between ëcitizens of the worldí. But such ideas had never been embodied in an institution, nor could they be during the epoch of imperialism, which can only be justified by a racist belief in the inferiority of the colonised. They had to await the advent of globalisation before they could take shape more concretely.
The feeling that globalisation marks a momentous change in the world system is shared by many; it is expressed, for example, in The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi (Verso, 1994) and Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (Harvard University Press, 2000). I would agree with Arrighiís thesis that US hegemony is waning, but disagree that it is simply giving way to a new cycle of accumulation with its centre in the Far East. Here Negri and Hardt seem more correct in their belief that a tectonic shift is taking place in the nature of capitalism itself, with a new, multilateral system emerging; however, I would not agree with their contention that the US has a central role to play in this new system. There seems to be no essential difference between US imperialism and the older varieties, apart from the fact that, emerging at a time when decolonisation was taking place throughout the world, it has had to cover its naked colonialism with a fig-leaf of fake democracy. Even a cursory look at the regimes it has sponsored makes it very clear that the aim is to overthrow democratic regimes and install authoritarian ones. The most recent example is their attempt to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. The reason is obvious. A democratic regime, by definition, strives to uphold the rights and interests of the people who vote it to power, but this is not compatible with upholding the interests of an imperialist power engaged in oppressing those people. Therefore, no democracy.
The fig-leaf keeps falling off, even today. At first, the rationale for pounding Afghanistan into rubble was supposedly to find Osama bin Laden. He was not found, and yet the operation is claimed as a victory. The only conclusion we can draw is that the real purpose was to install a puppet regime that Bush could control. In Iraq too, the original purpose claimed was to destroy Saddam Husseinís alleged weapons of mass destruction. Yet as soon as weapons inspections seemed likely to establish the absence of such weapons, it suddenly became regime change: once again, the installation of a regime Bush can control. Unstinting support for Israelís settler colonialism in Palestine while paying lip-service to the idea of a Palestinian state is another example.
Underlying all this is blatant racism. Everything the Bush team says and does expresses the conviction that we natives are less than equal, our lives are expendable. The outrage at the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US compared with the justification of subsequent US terrorist attacks on Afghanistan that killed a larger number of civilians. Harping on about Iraqís weapons of mass destruction without mentioning that the US has vast stockpiles of them, and has used them to slaughter a much larger number of people. The doctrine of the pre-emptive strike: can you imagine the outcry if Iraqis, rightly anticipating an attack on their country, had carried out a pre-emptive strike on the US? Suddenly remembering the Geneva Conventions when five US prisoners of war are shown on TV, whereas hundreds of Afghani prisoners of war can be massacred with impunity, and we are repeatedly treated to the spectacle of others being tortured at Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay.
Indeed, far from being an architect of globalisation, the Bush regime in particular has been its greatest obstacle. They have opposed every attempt to put in place machinery that can protect human rights and the environment globally, whether through the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the Land Mine Treaty, or the Rome Treaty of the International Criminal Court. Their objection to these and other similar attempts is that they apply equally to all countries, including the US. These people ó and that includes the mediapeople who parrot statements by Bush et al. uncritically, the section of the US population that supports them, and cronies like Blair, Aznar, Berlusconi and Howard ó havenít a clue what democracy means, because they have failed to grasp the basic principle that underlies it: human equality.
Such pre-modern attitudes are anachronistic, indeed reactionary, in a globalised world. Where capitalism has no more room to expand geographically, it can grow only by drawing into its labour force and market the pauperised masses who barely survive in squalid shanty-towns or die of starvation in rural areas. This in turn requires democracy, a genuine respect for the rights of the marginalised millions, as human beings and as workers. And capitalism will continue to be in crisis so long as profligate expenditure on armaments drives down the rate of accumulation. We have history on our side when we use globalisation against imperialism.
How to do it
That brings us back to our strategy. In fact, one part of it is so obvious that literally millions of people around the world have adopted it already, and that is to insist that the UN must uphold international law. The fact that (despite a ëdirty tricks campaigní by the Bush administration) the Security Council did not pass a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq is an early victory for the strategy. This challenge to US domination of the UN would never have been achieved without the massive worldwide anti-war campaign which has used e-mail and the Internet ó the life-blood of globalisation ó in original and imaginative ways.
However, that was only the first battle in a long-drawn-out war. It is still immensely important to keep up the pressure on the UN, both through demonstrations and through the appeal for an emergency session of the UN General Assembly (envisaged by ëUniting for Peaceí Resolution 377 of 1950) to characterise the unprovoked invasion of Iraq as an act of Aggression and order a ceasefire, the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq, and a resumption of weapons inspections. The UN should not be allowed to legitimise a regime in which the US or UK play any role whatsoever, because that would amount to rewarding aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity; in fact, it should take the position that so long as foreign troops remain in Iraq, the war continues. And of course it should withdraw the sanctions against Iraq that have killed an estimated one-and-a-half million civilians, more than half of them children, and strengthened the dictatorial power of Saddam Hussein over the Iraqi people by giving him control over food supplies.
It is worth reiterating that the UNís failure to control terrorist states militarily does not discredit it. If an overwhelming majority of General Assembly members vote for a withdrawal of foreign troops and Bush and Blair ignore them, this does not make the UN irrelevant. On the contrary, what would make the UN irrelevant (and many of us felt earlier that this had already happened) is if it simply rubber-stamps the foreign policy of the US. It now has a chance to redeem itself as an institution standing for a just and democractic global order, and must not be allowed to let it slip. As the New York Times observed, a new super-power has emerged ó world public opinion ó and for the first time has challenged US domination over the UN. Attempts by the Bush mafia to sabotage an emergency session of the General Assembly to discuss the war by using diplomatic staff in South Asia (and no doubt other parts of the world) to browbeat our governments (Thalif Deen, The Sunday Times, 30.3.03, p.15) testify to their fear of this powerful rival; all the more reason why world public opinion must continue to press for such a session, which would be a significant step towards the democratisation of the UN. And among our most potent weapons in this struggle are, once again, e-mail and the Internet, in combination with the efforts of the brave reporters ó including the foreign peace activists who have stayed in Iraq, Al-Jazeera reporters, and correspondents like Robert Fisk and Rageh Omar ó who continue to bring us the truth about the war (especially the harrowing accounts of civilian casualties) at the risk of their own lives. We need to download, translate and disseminate this information as widely as possible.
But what about economic globalisation? How can that be used to stop the war? It is by now well known that the US economy is in a mess, so heavily in debt that any developing country in a similar state would have the IMF and World Bank breathing down its neck to implement austerity measures. Bush, on the contrary, is splurging an estimated billion dollars a day on this war. How can he do it? By using US control over those very same international financial institutions, of course. But this would not work if the rest of the world didnít support the dollar by recognising and using it as the de facto world currency. If that support is withdrawn, the dollar will crash, and Bush will not be able to continue paying for his war.
The sad fact is that many individuals and governments who categorically oppose this war nonetheless pay for it indirectly, and we in the Third World are among the worst culprits. Because our currency is not accepted outside our own country, we are forced to buy foreign exchange even when we go abroad to visit relations, attend meetings, or as migrant workers. For the same reason, our governments have to keep foreign exchange reserves. But this doesnít mean we have no choice but to use US dollars, although it often looks like that! For example, many visa application forms specify that you must have so many dollars as a condition for being granted a visa. So you end up buying dollars in order to travel from India to Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, which is crazy (though not quite so crazy as the fact that in order to get from India to Pakistan or vice versa, you have to go via Dubai!)
Why canít we, and our governments, use regional currencies for regional travel and trade? For travel further afield, we can use other hard currencies ó the euro, for example. And a quick and easy way to make a transition to a multi-currency world economy is for major exporting nations to pay for imports with their own currency. For example, if all the oil-exporting countries pay for imports in their own currencies, and agree to accept one anotherís currencies as well as euro in payment for oil, other countries will be glad to accept their currencies since they need to import oil, and we would have a multi-currency world overnight. That would not only be a huge boon to us in oil-importing countries (because we could use the money earned by our exports of tea, fruit, vegetables, garments, labour and so forth to these countries directly for oil imports), it would also enable the exporting countries to develop their own economies rather than servicing US world domination. (This is a modification of a proposal made by Henry C.K. Liu, ëUS dollar hegemony has got to go", Online Asia Times, 11.4.02).
According to Aijaz Ahmed (Frontline, 15-28 March 2003) and others (Paul Harris, Geoffrey Heard, William Clark), the worldís largest trade is the oil trade, and if the oil-producing countries choose to abandon the dollar, as Saddam Hussein himself did in November 2000, the dollar will collapse. If this is true ó and it sounds very convincing ó then the very public rape of Iraq is designed to deter other OPEC members from following Iraqís example. Like a room full of women faced with Jack the Ripper, these countries have three alternatives: lie down and submit without a struggle, fight alone and get raped, or get together and overpower the rapist collectively. The use of Kuwait as a base for attacking Iraq and Prince Saud al-Faisalís appealing to Saddam Hussein to step down rather than calling for a withdrawal of Anglo-American forces (Daily News, 2.4.03, p.16) indicate that the Kuwaiti and Saudi leaderships favour the first option. Other governments have not been equally supine, but it will take considerable pressure from their people to make them resist collectively. An added bonus of this strategy is that it will help to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict: without billions of dollars of US financial and military support, Israel will be forced to recognise Palestine and live in peace with it.
Even for non-oil-producing Third World countries, relying on a sinking currency for their foreign exchange reserves is a risk they may not be able to afford. Governments of the Arab League, Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Non-Aligned Movement have unanimously opposed this war, and now the time has come for them ó quite literally ó to put their money where their mouth is, although again, this will not be achieved unless we put pressure on them. And then there are countries to which the US is indebted and which oppose the war. Thus far they have kept extending the line of credit because it allows them to export their products to the US, but this, too, allows Bush to carry on spending money he doesnít have on a criminal war. If these countries start calling in their debts, it would add to the pressure on the dollar and make it that much more difficult to continue the war.
Solidarity is neither altruism nor self-interest, but is based on the understanding that our own interests are linked inextricably with those of others, and this is a case where solidarity makes sense. So long as we and our governments continue to use the US dollar as world currency, we allow the US state to fund the war by printing more dollars, and thereby collude in the murder of our brothers and sisters in Iraq. But we are also acting against our own best interests, by being dependent on the currency of a nation whose economy is in such a wretched state. Disengaging the world economy from the dollar may involve some immediate costs, but these are negligible compared with the costs of the alternative, a long-drawn-out war. ëAustralian central bank board member Warwick McKibbin estimated the war could milk $240 billion from the global economy in 2003,í says a Reuters report (The Daily News, 27.3.03, p.24) - and that is only the tip of the iceberg. The war would in effect act as a pipeline draining away the worldís surplus value into the pockets of the US arms industry and bankrupting everyone else, including many industries in the US. The result would be worldwide economic devastation, whereas the result of discontinuing the dollar as world currency will be a healthier, more multilateral global economy.
Refusing to use the US dollar (except within the US itself) can be seen as a form of guerrilla warfare - hitting at the enemy where it is weakest - or as satyagraha, non-violent non-cooperation with injustice and oppression: it has elements of both these strategies which have successfully been used in past freedom struggles. For us in the Third World, this is not a new situation: we have been colonised before, we have fought for liberation before, and we know that the powerless can defeat the powerful with the right strategy. What is different is that earlier it was a case of national struggles, whereas now the struggle is global.
Opponents of the war in countries where the state is either waging or supporting it (the US, Britain, Italy, Spain, Australia, South Korea, The Philippines, etc.) can draw up their own strategies of ëguerrilla warfareí or civil disobedience; there have already been impressive examples of the latter, with schoolchildren playing a prominent role. The case of the three British soldiers who were sent back from Iraq for protesting that the war is killing civilians is another example of non-cooperation with terrorism (Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, 31.3.03). The answer to those who object that such actions endanger the lives of US and UK troops in Iraq is that the only honourable way to safeguard their lives is to bring them back immediately (especially given the high rate of self-inflicted casualties, which must be deliberate if Rumsfeldís claims of pinpoint accuracy are to be believed!). It should also be pointed out that while a few corporations like Halliburton are profiting from the war, millions of ordinary people in the US, UK, and other coalition countries are among those who are paying the price, as are other segments of US business, like airlines.
However, the most urgent and powerful argument for bringing the troops back immediately is that weapons of mass destruction are being used in the war on Iraq, not by the Iraqis but by the US, and are affecting not only the Iraqis but also British and American troops. The use of depleted uranium (uranium 238) in the first Gulf War has resulted in a 30 per cent post-war casualty rate among US troops, not only causing cancer in the combatants, but also leading to birth defects in the children born to them subsequently. Army Major Doug Rokke, who saw his close friend and many others die of the after-effects, says, ëItís a crime against humanity to use uranium munitions in a war, and itís devastating to ignore the consequences of war. These consequences last for eternity. The half-life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in IraqÖ[U]ranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care provided for everyoneí (ëThe War Against Ourselves,í YES Magazine, Spring 2003). People with any modicum of humanity would be horrified to learn that the Iraqis are being subjected to all this. And even racists in the US and UK who support the war may think again when they realise their own troops are being sent to what Major Rokke calls ëa toxic wastelandí with ëgas masks and chemical protective suits that leakí.
Given the circumstances, the struggle by Iraqi forces to oust the invaders has to be seen as a liberation struggle similar to the Vietnamese one. And whether one approves of them or not, suicide bombers targeting the US-UK invaders are NOT terrorists, since their actions are aimed at combatants, not civilians; it is the invaders, engaged in the cold-blooded murder of unarmed civilians, who are the terrorists, and fighting against them can accurately be defined as self-defence. Paradoxical though it may seem, Iraqi forces are currently at the forefront of the fight against global terrorism, while the US and UK have joined Israel as the foremost terrorist states.
Opponents of Saddam Hussein in Iraq have a particularly difficult task, ensuring that in getting rid of the small-time gangster they donít put themselves under the control of the big-time Godfather. Most are aware of this: for example, in the eyes of Shia Ayatollah Sistani of Basra and other southern Shia Muslims, the US-UK forces constitute ëthe greater Sataní. In the north, US military commanders have told the Kurds in no uncertain terms that they must put themselves under US command, and Russian intelligence sources claim a secret agreement of the US with Turkey not to support the formation of a Kurdish state, nor prevent 40,000 Turkish troops specialised in combat against Kurds, now massed on the border, from entering Kurdistan while Kurdish troops battle the Iraqis outside their own territory (www.Iraqwar.ru, translated by Venik). Even without this information, it would be naïve in the extreme to think that the US has any interest in ëliberatingí Shias or Kurds, given what happened in the aftermath of the last Gulf War. However, democracy in Iraq should certainly be one of the goals of the struggle, and it will be easier to achieve once the US is out of the picture and the sanctions are lifted.
What next?
Why capitalist globalisation and not a post-capitalist world? Two reasons, I think. One is that the potential for capitalist expansion has not yet been exhausted. There is plenty of room for capitalism to grow, not extensively but intensively, by incorporating billions of those who are currently unemployed or under-employed into its labour force in order to produce surplus value for it and simultaneously provide a huge new market. A policy of global Keynesianism, combined with a peace dividend, could be the springboard of a new boom. If occasionally we hear World Bank officials talking about democratisation and human rights, that is not necessarily hypocrisy; it could be that a few smart people have realised this is the only way forward for capitalism.
The other reason is that the agents who could bring about a revolutionary transformation going beyond capitalism have yet to emerge. Take a good look around the world and youíll see what I mean. Wherever you look you see racism, sexism, ethnic supremacism, religious communalism, attacks on human rights and democracy. The South Asian subcontinent is a good example. At a recent meeting in Bombay to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the Gujarat massacre, in which hundreds of Muslim women and girls were tortured and raped and two thousand Muslims were killed, a speaker from Ahmedabad said that with a few exceptions, there was no remorse among the majority Hindus, only hostility towards the victims. This is borne out by the fact that the BJP government, which sponsored the pogrom, was re-elected with an increased majority in December. Meanwhile dalits are being raped and killed every day in routine caste atrocities. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, attacks on minorities are on the increase, and the idea that women are human beings with equal rights is an alien one among large sections of the population.
At first sight Sri Lanka appears to be the exception, with its ongoing peace process, and it is certainly heartening that an overwhelming majority reject ethnic hatred and violence. And yet, if you look beneath the surface, all is far from well. An estimated 12,000 children have suffered forcible conscription by the LTTE in the North-East (University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), Special Report No. 16, 18.3.03, p.15), while in the South, police torture of detainees, including children and perfectly innocent people, is routine (Ranga Jayasuriya, Daily News, 27.3.03, p.7). Meanwhile, the horrific massacre of 24 Hindus in Kashmir has once again highlighted the threat of nuclear war on the subcontinent, with trillions of rupees being spent on nuclear missiles while people die for lack of food and water. Apart from the US and UK, our part of the world is where weapons of mass destruction are most likely to fall into the hands of terrorists.
Left anti-imperialists who think that all these problems are traceable to US imperialism are simply living in denial. No doubt the US state has on many occasions promoted these divisions and authoritarian political movements for its own ends, but it could only make use of material that already existed. Those of us who are actually trying to combat such attitudes are only too aware how deep-rooted and widespread they are, even among workers. Letís not put ourselves down: we are quite capable of producing our own fascistic monsters along with their mass followings, we do not have to rely on anyone else for this!
The situation in other parts of the world is no better; even governments who quite rightly oppose the attack on Iraq are not all shining examples of respect for human rights and democracy. Hardly anywhere do we find a culture based on the belief that all human beings are entitled to equal respect and concern, equal rights and opportunities, the recognition of individual accountability and responsibility for actions, and acknowledgement of the oneness of humanity. Only billions of people all over the world who have internalised these values would be capable of bringing about a social transformation going beyond capitalism. It will take many years of working with children, youth and older adults before this is achieved. That is why we need a period of peace and global democracy under globalised capitalism.
The first step towards that is to stop the attack on Iraq from developing into World War III. It may sound impossible, but if all of us around the world who oppose this war work together, we can do it. We can defeat their culture of cruelty with our solidarity.
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