The Real and Unfolding Story of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

Dipankar Bhattacharya

Wars are nothing but continuation of politics by other means.

This old piece of wisdom is true for all wars. But seldom has the political content of a war been as transparent as in the case of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
The nauseating Anglo-American alibis – that Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed a security threat to America, that Iraq therefore had to be disarmed thoroughly and immediately and that the only way to achieve this goal of Iraqi disarmament was to oust the evil regime of Saddam Hussein – could cut no ice with the world opinion. For once the overwhelming majority of UN members, including permanent and temporary members of the Security Council, refused to succumb to the Anglo-American insistence on invasion of Iraq. Wary of a UN rejection, the war mongers shelved every notion of international law to launch one of the most unequal and unjust wars in world history. Sure enough, they codenamed it “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, once again trying to sell hi-tech mass slaughter as a dole of freedom for a people ravaged by relentless strafing and sustained economic embargo. But the world had already decoded it as “Mission Iraqi Recolonisation”. The slogan “No blood for oil” had already been deeply embedded in popular consciousness across the world.
Bush’s War Stinks of Hitler’s Politics
It is human nature to look for historical parallels and references. Indeed, a parallel was readily available – Junior Bush’s war could have easily been likened to the Gulf War fought a decade earlier by his father. Sections of the pro-war media which probably felt a little ashamed to use the official codename did describe the war as Gulf War II. But around the world, people immediately remembered a much more sinister parallel. Bush’s declaration of war on Iraq reminded people of Hitler’s proclamation of war on Poland on 1 September 1939.
Fascism or Nazism is the term that is increasingly being used to describe Bush’s militarist mission to create a unipolar world where the words of an American President would be the ultimate global law. It has become impossible to treat Iraq as an isolated instance, everywhere people are looking at it as just a test case, as a trial run. As the CNN and BBC discuss the possible theatre of the next war, the world wars are back in public discussion. Indeed, Mr. James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA has described the present war as World War IV – he treats the cold war as the third world war – and has warned that “this fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us.”
While Mr. Woolsey is candid enough to put the present war in its real perspective, he downplays the greater similarities of the present war with the Second World War scenario than with the framework of cold war. Indeed the complete contempt shown by the Anglo-American axis for the UN takes us back to the pre-UN situation, that is to say, to the era of the Second World War. And now with the forcible American occupation of Iraq, the world is increasingly being thrown back to the League of Nations era when victorious powers of World War I used to be granted mandates to administer foreign territories.
Following World War II, the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders had clearly established the framework of international jurisprudence for dealing with wars of aggression: “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The trials had rigorously upheld the doctrine that “planning and launching an aggressive war is illegal, whatever may be the factors that caused the defendants to plan and to launch (such a war). Contributing causes may be pleaded by the defendants before the bar of history, but not before the tribunal.” The US government knows it very well that it is guilty of waging an absolutely illegal war and this is precisely why it refuses to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
The only law Washington accepts is the jungle law that ordains ‘might is right’. The only language the US recognises is Orwellian Newspeak: War is Peace. Occupation is Liberation. Plunder is Reconstruction. Washington is also aware that its war on Iraq is bound to attract the inescapable analogy with the role of Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War. This is why American propagandists are now trying to perfect the ‘pre-emptive ideological strike’ by painting Saddam Hussein as Hitler and Ba’athist Iraq as Nazi Germany!
From ‘Iraq Liberation Act’ to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’
Bush’s Iraq war has indeed been in the making for quite some time. For the last several years, the idea of invasion of Iraq was being constantly discussed and debated in American ruling circles. In 1998, the American Congress had even passed an Iraq Liberation Act. There is a clear line of continuity between Clinton’s statement while signing the ILA and Bush’s final proclamation of war. Here is what Clinton said on October 31, 1998: “The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region. … The United States looks forward to a democratically supported regime that would permit us to enter into a dialogue leading to the reintegration of Iraq into normal international life.”(emphasis added). Of course, he did not forget to add, with characteristic superpower arrogance, that “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else.”
Compare this to Bush’s proclamation of March 16, 2003: “The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations. He is a danger to his neighbours. He is a sponsor of terrorism. He is an obstacle to progress in the Middle East.” While indicting the Bush administration for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we must not lose sight of this strong streak of continuity in American foreign policy between Clinton’s Democratic government and Bush’s Republican regime. Clinton’s statement had made it amply clear that the US looked to the Security Council’s efforts only as an interim arrangement “to keep the current regime’s behaviour in check” till the regime was finally changed. The clamour for a change of regime of Iraq to ensure Iraq’s reintegration into normal international life (read ‘reintegration into the American scheme of things’ or in one word ‘recolonisation’) has thus been the common refrain of the US foreign policy.
To secure a change of regime, the Iraq Liberation Act authorised the US government to lend all possible support to ‘a democratic opposition’ in Iraq. In the same statement Clinton also mentioned that ten days ago he had signed into law the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999, which made $8 million available for assistance to the Iraqi democratic opposition. Yet after more than four years, this democratic opposition was still nowhere near achieving the cherished US objective of regime change and the US therefore pushed the war button to do the needful!
War as an option to engineer a regime change and ensure Iraq’s reintegration into normal international life was always written into the US foreign policy and the government of the day only had to choose the appropriate moment for pressing the war machine into action. This is why one found a near-total consensus among the Democrats and Republicans on the question of going to war. If any debate ever surfaced within America’s mainstream politics it was not around Bush’s decision to launch the war but around Rumsfeld’s strategy of winning a swift victory when the US troops seemed to face some initial hiccups midway through the war campaign. In Britain too, the two major parties of British capital, the Tories and Labour, displayed a remarkable convergence despite the fact that many Labour MPs did question and oppose the war.
The US Quest for Full-Spectrum Dominance
The war on Iraq may fly in the face of every tenet of human civilization and international law, but the US has already developed a new doctrine to justify not just this one war but any future war of aggression and occupation that may follow. The Iraq war will be remembered as the first instance of application of America’s national security strategy which revolves around the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Noam Chomsky has rightly pointed out that even the phrase ‘pre-emptive strike’ is a deliberate understatement for the current American policy and that the term ‘preventive war’ would be a better description. The word pre-emption presupposes an imminent threat while the national security strategy adopted in September 2002 underscores the need to “adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” Indeed what the strategy advocates is not pre-emptive strikes against imminent threats, but decisive action – multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary - against “emerging threats before they are fully formed.”
The strategy also openly declares that “to contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of US forces.” The basis of this national security strategy, which interprets external domination as internal security, is defined as “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests,” an American ‘newspeak’ for comprehensive global hegemony in a unipolar world.
Like the war on Iraq, this doctrine of war masquerading as America’s official national security strategy had also been on the anvil for a long time. Way back in 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and American victory in the Gulf War, Dick Cheney, the then Defence Secretary, had started articulating an aggressive and unilateral approach that would secure American dominance of world affairs by force. The U.S., Cheney insisted, must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging its leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
The strategic planning continued through the Clinton years with funding from the military-industrial complex, energy companies, and right-wing foundations. Over time, those working on these new plans evolved into the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), established in 1997 with members Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz at the helm, a neo-conservative think-tank dedicated to the vision of US world domination through military conquest of what it calls “the new American frontier.” In September 2000, three months before Bush took office in January 2001, the PNAC updated and refined Cheney’s original version into a new report entitled: “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century” calling for developing America’s ability to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.” The report advocated unprecedented hikes in military spending, American military domination of the Gulf region (Saddam or no Saddam!), toppling of non-complying regimes, abrogation of international treaties, control of the world’s energy sources, militarization of outer space, total control of cyberspace, and the willingness to use nuclear weapons to achieve “American” goals. In the language of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, this is America’s exciting total war to secure full-spectrum dominance!
Capital Needs Market, Imperialism Needs War
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, the Americans have been giving us one fancy hypothesis after another – the end of history, clashes of civilisations, the retreat of nation-states, the information revolution, the new economy, free trade and so on and so forth. Some of these hypotheses, especially the economic ones, have been repeated so very often that they have almost acquired axiomatic status in popular perception like the laws of nature. The notion of massive cross-border capital flows softening and eventually breaking down rigid national barriers was taken so seriously that even some of the anti-globalisation best-sellers wanted us to believe that the world’s sole superpower is also being subjected to a systematic erosion of the authority of its nation-state. Only the other day a book like Empire was being hailed as the Communist Manifesto of the era of globalisation, the book that dared declare that “the United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over.”
But as we can now see so very clearly, all this while imperialism was really busy not just developing its repertoire of instruments of economic domination but also constantly upgrading its war machine (the military-industrial complex) and its doctrines of war. While the ‘principle’ of retreat of nation-states has been used to facilitate a massive invasion of the market, it has now been supplemented with the notion of ‘rogue states’ whose sovereignty, we are told, is eminently dispensable. The entire thrust of the so-called war on terror has been directed not so much against those ‘shadowy networks of terror’ as against nation-states who are selectively accused of sponsoring terrorism and then ravaged and savaged like Afghanistan and Iraq to facilitate their reintegration into what constitutes ‘normal international life’ for Washington. Incidentally, all these ‘rogue states’ are very rich in energy resources (oil and natural gas) and are invested with considerable geo-strategic significance.
Amidst all the talk of information technology and new economy, it is oil, as every child today knows, that has been at the centre of the war on Iraq. Oil remains the single most important source of energy for the foreseeable future, accounting for nearly 40% of the world’s fuel mix. The US with a daily consumption of some 20 million barrels accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s total oil consumption, but its domestic production is declining and remains below 6 million barrels a day. This means the US is suffering from growing import dependence (70%) and with production in non-OPEC countries having already peaked, it will once again be the OPEC that the US will have to increasingly depend upon. In other words, the US will continue to be haunted by the spectre of the great oil shock of 1973 when many in the US and the whole world had first discovered the existence of the OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries had been formed at a meeting held on September 14, 1960 in Baghdad – yes Baghdad – by five Founder Members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela). The OPEC had inflicted a terrible shock (shock and awe!) by placing an embargo on oil exports to the US in protest against America’s support for Israel. It is therefore not difficult to understand the growing American obsession with oil and why the Middle-East has emerged as America’s most favourite theatre of war.
Petrodollar Imperialism on the Rampage
There is of course more to the oil story than merely production and consumption. The US had managed to overcome the first oil shock with a combination of measures – diversification of import sources (nearly a third of American oil imports are now from Canada and Mexico), engineering bitter wars among OPEC members (Iran-Iraq war, for example), patronising client regimes within the OPEC (Saudi Arabia, for instance, which produces a third of the OPEC’s total output and has not just the biggest oil reserves but also significant spare production capacity) and last but not the least, exploiting the petrodollar phenomenon to the hilt. Two-thirds of world trade is dollar-denominated and the oil trade has been almost exclusively so. Billions of these petrodollars have found their way back to the US enabling the US to run a huge and permanent current account deficit. It has been noticed that the size of the current account deficit is almost as high as the annual military spending of the United States. In other words, it is on borrowed money that the US continues to flex its awesome military muscles and keep the oil-rich ‘rogue states’ in check. With the advent of the euro, a potential rival to the dollar was born and Iraq’s recent decision to sell its oil exclusively in euros had the potential to prop up a powerful petroeuro that could give the US a close run for each of its petrodollars. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela had all started dropping hints about a possible switch over to the euro.
The war for oil is as much a war for petrodollar and let us not forget that American imperialism is in the last instance petrodollar imperialism. The hegemony of the dollar plays a key role in sustaining the American empire. Lenin and his contemporaries had noted the transition from export of commodities to export of capital as a characteristic feature of imperialism. But dialectically, just as competition led to monopolies and then to a more fierce competition among monopolies for still greater and more intense monopolisation, the export of capital has also undergone a dialectical negation. Thanks to the till now unchallenged supremacy of the dollar, the US is able to suck in capital from all directions and has emerged as the biggest debtor country in the world. It is a debt the US hopes it will never have to repay as long as the dollar remains the world’s most ubiquitous and powerful international currency (‘a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests’!). And if the strength of the dollar cannot be adequately backed by America’s increasingly stagnant economy, the US can always fall back on the world’s smartest military machine.
Indeed, the oil oligarchy that now rules America has also been most organically related to America’s ever expanding military-industrial complex. Vladimir Slipchenko, one of the world’s leading military analysts, says the testing of new weapons is a “main purpose” of the attack on Iraq. He reminds us that “In May 2001, in his first presidential address, Bush spoke about the need for preparation for future wars. He emphasised that the armed forces needed to be completely high-tech, capable of conducting hostilities by the no-contact method. After a series of live experiments – in Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan – many corporations achieved huge profits. Now the bottom line is $50-60bn a year.” It is also reported that in August, the Bush administration will convene a secret meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including “mini nukes”, “bunker busters” and neutron bombs. Generals, government officials and nuclear scientists will also discuss the appropriate propaganda to convince the American public that the new weapons are necessary.
Oil, petrodollar, military-industrial complex and then megabuck ‘reconstruction’ orders … every logic and dynamic of US imperialism leads inexorably to war and more wars. And to be sure as US imperialism accelerates and intensifies its expansionist thrust, it also turns ever more repressive and reactionary in its domestic domain. The Bush-Blair war on Iraq is preceded by years of untrammelled economic neo-liberalism initiated under the Reagan-Thatcher alliance and is aimed as much at reshaping Iraq and the Middle-East as the domestic economics and politics in the US and the UK. In the US, political analysts and activists call it a merger of corporate power and an increasingly militarist polity comparable to the original Mussolini model of fascism.
Nations Need Liberation, People Want Revolution
If imperialism continues to reproduce and reinforce the chain of crises and wars, it also leads to stronger domestic protests, more intense inter-imperialist rivalry and sharper anti-imperialist resistance. Who could have imagined that a war on Iraq would trigger such a massive and sustained upsurge of global protests, a movement that the New York Times had to acknowledge as the world’s other superpower? A global upsurge which has been more visible in the West than in the Arab or Islamic world, giving a crushing rebuff to Huntington’s mischievous and racist recipe of clashes of civilisations? Who could have imagined that the unprecedented and overwhelming convergence of global support for the US in the wake of September 11 would be stripped down within a year to a minuscule ‘coalition of the willing’? Who could have imagined that the day after the Anglo-American axis claimed victory in Iraq, thousands of Iraqis would hit the streets in every major city of Iraq demanding an immediate end to foreign occupation?
Cynics will of course say that the anti-war movement has failed to stop the war, that France and Germany are now busy to appease the US, that after the fall of Iraq third world governments would now be even more desperate to comply with the American Empire, that secular Iraq (some posthumous recognition, at last!) is now all set to relapse into Islamic fundamentalism and social retrogression. This cynicism is a defeatist, opportunist response to cries of imperialist triumphalism and sections of the liberal-labour coalition in every country are susceptible to this infection. Luckily, the incidence and intensity of this infection is now on the decrease. More and more people can see and feel for themselves that there is another way of not just looking at the situation but also responding to it and in the process transforming it.
It is important to remember that the Franco-German opposition to, or rather isolation from, the war stemmed from a different basis than the global popular opposition. The Franco-German or “old European” position is dictated by serious conflicts of interest with the Anglo-American axis, a growing contention for profit, influence and power. Economist Michel Chossudovsky has rightly identified three main areas of conflict between the Anglo-American and the Franco-German axes: (i) Defence and the military-industrial complex, (ii) Control over oil and gas reserves, and (iii) Money and currency systems. This split in NATO or EU or what is broadly called the West is yet another stunning refutation of the Huntington hypothesis of clashes of civilisations!
In the arena of defence industry, while the British Aerospace systems is now firmly aligned with the big five US weapons producers, the Franco-German military-industrial complex has got a boost with the rise of the European Aerospace and Defence Corporation (EADS) and with the signing of military cooperation agreements with Russia. As for contending interests in oil and natural gas, the Anglo-American giants (BP-Amoco, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Mobil, Shell) had so far been more or less absent from Iraq while Baghdad had oil deals with Russia and France. Now American companies are gleefully waiting for a large-scale entry so they can bring Iraqi oil under their control and scuttle or at least truncate Iraq’s contracts with France and Russia. Control over Iraq would not only mean control over Iraqi oil but also more secure and uninterrupted access to the strategic oil resources and routes in the entire Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean region. This ‘oil spill’ will also allow the US to renegotiate its ties with Saudi Arabia on still more favourable terms. And then there is this well-known rivalry between the well-entrenched dollar and the emerging euro.
The consolidation of US occupation or domination in post-Saddam Iraq is only going to fuel, and not minimise, the many-sided contention between the Anglo-American and European powers (especially France, Germany and Russia).
Much has been written about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Many people with strong anti-war sentiment also seem to share the prejudice that would seem to suggest an organic relationship or correspondence between Islam and religious fundamentalism and terrorism. For example, we had this picture of Russian anti-war protesters carrying placards that showed Bush with a Ladenesque beard and hair and labelled as “Terrorist No. 1”. At a time when the whole world has learned to recognise the face of Bush as the most identifiable face of terror and barbarity, as the twenty-first century avatar of Hitler, why does he need the appearance of a Laden to be declared as “Terrorist No. 1”. We are sure the same pro-US intellectuals and media managers who are today celebrating the sights of “Shia freedom” in “liberated Iraq” will soon start railing against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.
As Marxists, we do not have any problem in understanding the renewed appeal of Islam among the people of Iraq. This is a country where communist and pan-Arab nationalist trends had long been weakened as a result of systematic suppression. This is a country that has been at war almost uninterruptedly for more than two decades. This is a country that has seen millions of people get killed and maimed through systematic strafing and sanctions. Under such circumstances it is not difficult to understand why large sections of the Iraqi people are turning to Islamic history and tradition to assert their innate sense of freedom and dignity in the face of severe imperialist aggression and Anglo-American occupation. As Marx had said way back in 1844, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
Speculations are rife as to the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guards. Whatever may have happened to them, it is true that the romantic notion of Baghdad turning into Stalingrad has certainly not been fulfilled. As an Iraqi activist has rightly pointed out, it would have been most foolish on the part of the Iraqi forces to try and copy Stalingrad. Iraq’s condition in this most unequal war was far worse than that of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, at least the Russians did not lack ‘bread, bombs and bandages’ as the Iraqis did. But then if Baghdad 2003 has not been a repeat of Stalingrad 1943, it has also not been a repeat of Berlin 1989. The situation in Baghdad today is not defined by the contrived spectacle of American marines pulling down the grand statue of Saddam Hussein, or the US-sponsored loot and destruction of Baghdad’s historical monuments and records, but by the growing protests of ordinary Iraqis against the Anglo-American occupation of their land. The accumulated anger of the Iraqi people will now be directed entirely at the Anglo-American occupation forces and their Iraqi collaborators.
Iraqi activists see a stronger parallel between today’s Iraq and Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. Just as Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan could not be stopped then by the Americans and their allies, no country or alliance has succeeded in stopping the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. But then the Afghan misadventure proved to be the terminal folly of the Soviet Union. Can the US imperialists escape the long-term consequences of their Iraq expedition?