The United States’ dirty war in the Gulf

Ray Nunes, February 1998

The hypocrisy was glaring: on one side a vast military machine was poised to carry out a blazing attack designed to cause mass destruction against a small, third world country. The pretext for this slaughter campaign: Iraq must not be allowed to produce weapons of mass destruction! But even the US Generals had to admit that Iraq, in all likelihood, would not be able to shoot down even one US plane. All the while the pro-US imperialist media kept up a steady flow of war propaganda that Iraq posed a threat to world peace.
At the time of writing (late February) the immediate threat of a US-led bombing campaign (and possible invasion) against Iraq has eased but not disappeared. Hundreds of imperialist troops remain in the Gulf with a huge arsenal of weaponry.
‘American interests’
In this latest crisis the United States has talked about ‘American interests’. Well, just what are America’s interests?
· Firstly, world domination. That was the reason for the Gulf War in 1991 – not defence of Kuwait (see our panel The Hidden History of Kuwait). The collapse of the Soviet bloc opened new opportunities for the United States to strengthen its position as the number one world dominator. A secret Pentagon document leaked to the New York Times of March 8 1993 revealed the US world domination plans referring to the ‘fundamentally new situation’ arising out of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The document went on to say, ‘The new internal environment has also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression – the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in US global leadership.’ The US was the sole superpower and intended showing the world just that. The present aggression is a continuation of that policy.
· Secondly, control of Middle-Eastern oil is dear to imperialist America’s heart. The US wants to make it clear to the Arab masses that it’s ‘New World Order’ safeguards the US oil corporations’ continued plunder of the region’s resources.
· Thirdly, American interests involve maintaining Israel as the enforcer of United States’ policies in the Middle East. To this end the US gives Israel $3 billion a year in financial aid.
War through sanctions
The US-led war against Iraq didn’t end in 1991, it has continued through to the present with the use of sanctions. An estimated 1 to 2 million people have died because of the sanctions, and countless thousands are suffering disease and malnutrition. The seven years of sanctions against the Iraqi people constitute one of the most barbaric crimes against humanity in recent times. For Washington it is of no concern that a few million people die, after all it is well practised when it comes to such crimes. (See adjacent panel on US acts of war since World War II).
Undisputed top warmonger
The facts speak loud and clear: America is the world’s number one aggressor. In the Vietnam war the Americans killed over a million people and tried to bomb the country back into the stone age. But the Vietnamese used the tactics of people’s war (developed by Mao Tse-tung) and the world’s biggest superpower was humiliatingly defeated.
Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua the US armed and aided the Contra counter-revolution and blockaded the country for ten years causing massive hardship. The author of this article was in Nicaragua in 1987 and saw the widespread child malnutrition caused by the blockade.
In 1983 the US invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow its left wing government. Then followed the invasion of Panama in 1989 where thousands were killed in a blitzkrieg. That war had nothing to do with getting rid of President Noriega – that was just a pretext, after all, Noriega was a US puppet and assisted the CIA in its drug dealing industry – and had everything to do with retaining control of the Panama canal and carrying out weapons testing. The Gulf War of 1991 has already been mentioned, but that invasion was soon followed by the invasion of Somalia in 1993. At no time has the US relaxed its policy of aggressive world domination. It seeks to dominate economically, politically and militarily.
US world’s no. 1 bully
It is with undisguised glee that the United States’ military has amassed its vast array of high-tech weaponry on Iraq’s border. One of the primary aims of the 1991 invasion of Iraq was to test out the latest weapons. Once again the military has a lot of new technology it wants to test. These include deep penetration bombs which can travel to a depth of 100 feet; global positioning satellite (GPS) technology, which as the name suggests uses satellites to determine position; and new ‘stand off’ weapons such as the long-range cruise missile (THE SLAM) carried by the Navy’s carrier-based F-18 Hornet. These missiles cost $720,000 each, proof that war is not only terrible, it is terribly profitable to the arms manufacturers. The military also wants to test the modifications it has made to its so-called ‘smart bombs’ and missiles. What better opportunity to test all these when the enemy has nothing to fight back with? That is the attitude of the world’s number one bully.
The latest Gulf crisis is taking place in a slightly different context to that of 1991. The US position is relatively stronger as Japan and Germany have lost some ground economically. But this time there are signs of contradictions within the imperialist bloc coming to the surface. The US could not gather the same support for an invasion as it did in 1991 and the UN was not quite as quick to back the US plans. But those differences do not alter the fact that the United Nations is still dominated and controlled by the United States. In practice it serves as a front for US imperialism. It should not be forgotten that the UN has been the enforcer of sanctions these past seven years.
As for the US/UN demands to continue inspecting Iraq, ‘former UN weapons inspector Raymond Zalinskas admitted that UN inspectors had already seen all reasonable weapons sites and had destroyed whatever potential existed. Only by killing all the Iraqi scientists, he said, could the U.S. do more’. (Workers World Service).
NZ plays lapdog to USA
The New Zealand government has played its usual role of junior partner and lapdog to US imperialism throughout the crisis. While constantly applauding the United Nations the Government did not bother to wait for its’ talks with Iraq to conclude, so eager was it to join the US-led military build up.
Mrs Shipley, like the bourgeois politician she is, played a deceptive role over the sending of New Zealand troops. At first she denied the SAS troops would be in a combat role, but that was soon exposed as false. She was also quick to parrot Clinton’s propaganda by claiming that some of Iraq’s so-called ‘presidential palaces’ were as big as the city of Christchurch! Anyone with half a brain could see that this was the Hitler big-lie technique and, indeed, a few days later Associated Press releases debunked this nonsense, reporting that the ‘palaces’ were in fact villas, warehouses and other buildings in a variety of sites amounting to an area of just 32sq km in total.
Not every one was taken in with the war propaganda. Even New Zealand Herald columnist, Simon Collins, declared New Zealand was in a ‘shameful, hypocritical situation’ over Iraq. ‘We have lined up behind an outside power which has been quite happy to use the world’s biggest weapon’s stockpile to prop up unpopular regimes whenever it suits its interests.’ He went on to point to the fact that Iraq cannot have ‘any but the most basic weapons’. (25.2.98).
Hands off Iraq!
In the Middle East the Arab masses have rallied to support the Iraqi people. There have been mass demonstrations and the corrupt leaders of the puppet regimes have been forced to declare opposition to a US invasion. If they did otherwise they could face rebellion at home.
The current agreement leaves intact the sanctions and forces the Iraqis to accept continued inspection. On its borders is a huge war machine ready to launch more war on the Iraqi people at a moment’s notice. A high-tech imperialist war machine can be defeated by people’s war, as was shown in Vietnam, but the leadership for such a struggle does not exist in the Middle East, let alone Iraq. For the Iraqi people there is no end in sight to their suffering. They have been made the object of US war games in its plan for world domination.
For too long this country has been a party to a very dirty war. Here in New Zealand we should demand: All imperialist troops out of the Gulf! No New Zealand troops for attack on Iraq!