August 8--Vilification of Third World leaders opposed to U.S. intervention in their respective countries is not a new phenomenon in U.S. politics. But it reaches absolutely absurd heights when it comes to the Arab people.
The lies and slander against Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956 reached dizzying heights after he tried to take over the Suez Canal and the British and French organized a naval armada to stop him.
However, when the imperialist powers' intervention subsided the popularity of Nasser in Egypt was overwhelming. Mass support was so wide and deep, especially among the most exploited and oppressed people, that it became necessary for even the gutter tabloids to pull back purely out of political expediency.
In the contemporary era, Col. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq have shared the kind of vilification that Nasser experienced. At present, the imperialist press, especially in the U.S., seems to have pulled out all stops in slander, deceit and vilification in the case of Saddam Hussein--criminal, terrorist, bum, tyrant, madman, etc., etc. ad nauseam.
What is really his crime? The annexation of Kuwait, a fabulously rich source of the oil billions flowing to the West?
There is no end to the Niagara of crocodile tears for tiny Kuwait against the bully Saddam Hussein. The moral effluvial over the illegal annexation flows almost as rapidly as the Niagara of tears for what is assumed will be the terrible fate of the Kuwaiti people.
Illegal annexation--from California to Hawaii
Illegal annexation and occupation--that, we are told, is "the'' issue. But who is doing the loudest talking? Who is sending a naval and air armada equipped not just to retake and occupy Kuwait, but probably enough explosive power to kill millions of people?
It's the the same capitalist government that illegally annexed California, Utah, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Is that not so?
Weren't these lands taken by force and violence? Did the Native people agree in any shape, form or manner to these annexations, illegal in every respect? And shall we say immoral? Or does morality enter into the calculations of an expansionist capitalist power?
How long ago is it since Hawaii was annexed to the U.S. and its people suffered a genocide of a most incredible character? This annexation took place not in the immediate vicinity of the U.S. but thousands of miles away.
And what about Alaska? Did the Inuits formally ask to become a state of the U.S.? Or was it part of a deal between two predatory robbers--the U.S. and czarist Russia--one of whom needed cash more badly than the other? The people had no say in the matter and still do not to this day.
Was Louisiana the result of a mass movement to become part of the United States? Or was it also the result of a deal to purchase the territory and subsequently become a state?
So far we are only dealing with the states of the U.S. But what about Puerto Rico? The Virgin Islands? Samoa? Guam? And those are only the ones directly annexed as U.S. territories.
Then there are areas like the independent country of Grenada. Its revolutionary government was the beneficiary of a gratuitous intervention by the U.S., which almost all the world condemned.
European powers built by annexations
All the European states--France, Germany, Italy, Spain--all the great states of modern imperialist Europe are the result of amalgamations and annexations. Over the years there have been divisions and redivisions. Nevertheless the big European powers by and large include a goodly number of annexations that have been absorbed into the leading states and become integral parts of them.
Britain still controls a part of Ireland. Scotland and Wales might have been independent countries except for the expansionist ability of the English. All of this constitutes the stages in the development of capitalism and its ultimate conversion into imperialism.
The many splits and unifications in Europe even today are legion. Europe is not united. Efforts, such as those by the European Economic Community, to build a united Europe and abolish customs and duties at some future time would do nothing more than transfer the capitalist contradictions into the framework of a single economic or political organization. It does nothing to stop exploitation and oppression of the workers, or the imperialist drive for new markets, or the robbery of superprofits from the sweat and blood of the oppressed countries.
The early annexations and amalgamations were accomplished in Europe as part and parcel of the bourgeois democratic revolution, spearheaded by the great French Revolution of 1789.
A Napoleon for the Arab people
Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser and subsequently became the subservient tool of U.S. imperialism, was once in a heated debate with Col. Qaddafi. Sadat asked if Qaddafi thought he was Napoleon. It would not have been too far amiss for Col. Qaddafi to have answered that he would like to do for the Arab people what Napoleon's conquering army did for Eastern Europe.
One of the truly progressive achievements of Napoleon was that his army, coming mostly from the peasantry with many peasant generals, abolished serfdom and feudalism and threw out some of the rottenest of monarchies. That was the progressive side of the Napoleonic wars.
Nasser, Qaddafi and now Hussein face a similar problem. The problem is how to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution the Europeans experienced centuries ago. But the Arab people have been obstructed by imperialist colonization. The irrational divisions of the Arabian peninsula were devised to suit foreign capitalist economic interests. Most significant in terms of economics and finance as well as geopolitical considerations is the empire of oil that the U.S., Britain and some of their allies still own and control.
To unite the Arab people in the effort to oust U.S. imperialism is a first condition for the emancipation of the workers and peasants as well as the rest of Arab society from servitude to landlords, compradore elements and the remnants of ancient clan dynasties who are beholden to the imperialist powers.
In trying to convey the Arab quest for unity, a writer in New York Newsday (Aug. 7) gives this example:
"Sheik Hail Sror, a dignified, elderly man whose family is of Bedouin, or nomadic, origin, retired last year as a member of the Jordanian parliament. Twenty years ago, Sror was a senator in Syria, and his first cousins, the Iraqi Srors, held important positions in Baghdad. Other family members live across the desert sands in Saudi Arabia. `We are all really just one family and one nation,' says the sheik."
Arab unity in the struggle against imperialism does not necessarily mean wiping out the national independence of legitimate states or unwarranted amalgamations and annexations. Those matters are to be dealt with solely by the Arab people themselves. Of course, amalgamations, separations or divisions, to be regarded as progressive, must be free of any form of national oppression or domination of one nationality over the other.
Under some circumstances, it may become necessary in the struggle against imperialism to oust imperialist puppets or occupy territory in the immediate vicinity where imperialism has strongly embedded itself with native royalist bourgeois compradore elements. If the only way to remove them is through the use of revolutionary force supported by the mass of workers and oppressed peoples, then it will be done.
Peaceable measures are of course preferable. But imperialist colonialism rarely gives way to peaceable methods. Its entire history is of the use of unmitigated force and the cruelest violence.
Completing the bourgeois democratic revolution
The effort to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution in the conditions of imperialist domination and military intervention lays the basis for the transition from the bourgeois democratic phase directly into the socialist revolution. And this transition facilitates the socialist revolution.
One of the tasks of socialist revolution is to free all nationalities of oppression and exploitation by others. Imperialism sows divisions that help it garner superprofits, as it has in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and as it would certainly like to do in the Soviet Union as well.
The Arab people are not the only ones menaced by imperialism in the Middle East. The effort of the U.S. to make the Mediterranean Sea a U.S. lake has put the Middle East in danger of military intervention for many years now. No country there is safe.
Few are free either from U.S. domination or its terror. The first duty of the progressive and working class movement in the U.S. is to call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. warships, troops and planes from the entire Middle East area. As has been pointed out again and again, the terms of the NATO treaty are supposed to be effective only for the North Atlantic states in the North Atlantic. Europeans and the U.S. have no business under that treaty of even being in the Mediterranean.
If ever there is a legal argument available to bolster a political struggle, this ought to be the easiest of all. The NATO treaty refers only to the North Atlantic, not the Mediterranean. How come so few of the bourgeois journalists ever refer to this?
USSR and China vote with the imperialists
A new phenomenon has arisen in this crisis. Not only has the U.S. achieved a united front with its imperialist European and Japanese allies. It has also drawn in China and the USSR.
The vote by the USSR and China in favor of the UN Security Council resolution againt Iraq, which was initiated by the Bush administration, is not only unfortunate but disappointing to millions of workers and oppressed people in the Arab world and far beyond, who have oftne looked for help to the Soviet Union.
This distinguishes the current array of forces against Iraq from what happened in earlier economic and military confrontations by the U.S. in the Middle East.
In 1958, the Iraqi Revolution exploded against imperialist domination, prompting the Eisenhower administration to begin naval maneuvers.
The government of China at that time characterized the significance of the Iraqi Revolution as of the magnitude of an atomic bomb, in the sociological sense.
What stayed the hand of the Pentagon then? It was the solidarity of the USSR and China in denouncing the Eisenhower administration for its interventionist plans.
Chinese-Soviet solidarity at that time was also joined by the governments of Nehru in India and Sukarno in Indonesia. There was also worldwide support in many oppressed countries. This solidarity did much to hold back the Pentagon.
Not just a question of oil
What accounts for the difference now?
Some may find the common denominator to be oil. The USSR is said to be the world's biggest oil producer. As such it has a stake in seeing that an embargo is placed against Iraq; that might conceivably facilitate the USSR's marketing efforts abroad.
China is also a major oil producer, producing more each year than Iraq or several other Middle East oil states. According to the U.S.-based Energy Information Administration, China produced almost a billion barrels of oil in 1988, putting it in the top five oil producers in the world.
But to say competition in oil production is the fundamental reason the USSR and China joined U.S. imperialism in the UN vote for sanctions against Iraq is to take a crude and narrow economist view of the situation.
In the first place, in the earlier crises the USSR was also a huge oil producer as was China. But neither joined the imperialist countries--not even during the Arab oil boycott of 1973.
The fact that the USSR and China are oil producing countries in some dimension is at best a peripheral fact. The real basis for their vote in the UN Security Council arises from a turn in the world struggle.
More specifically, it is the first test since the worldwide setbacks for socialism in Eastern Europe. The Gorbachev administration is trying to take the view that the Cold War is over, and accommodate itself to U.S. imperialism's dominance in world affairs. Gorbachev wants to disengage the Soviet Union from confrontation with imperialism with regard to the national liberation movements and the struggles of oppressed peoples.
The Gorbachev administration has capitulated in the worldwide struggle between capitalism and socialism. It has set this adventurous course in order to save itself from the disaster of pursuing bourgeois economic reforms. These reforms have not only slowed down industry but also resulted for the first time in a decline in the gross national product and labor productivity in the USSR.
As for China, its basis for joining the U.S. imperialist initiative in the UN is an attempt to get out of the isolation imposed on it by the U.S. since it crushed a counterrevolutionary uprising last year.
How long this strange alliance will hold is another question in view of plans of the Pentagon to militarily intervene.
The USSR is also sending warships into the area. The capitalist press is explaining this as part of the new political accommodation with the U.S. We hope not. The USSR has done this previously when the U.S. sent in its warships. It was regarded as a defensive measure since the U.S.'s nuclear-equipped ships could more easily reach the USSR from the Mediterranean and the Arabian Gulf. So, it may be an ambiguous military maneuver that the USSR's ships are in the same area as U.S. warships. They may not necessarily be there to facilitate the U.S.-NATO military aggression.
Danger of a wider conflagration
For the present, however, the danger lies in the possibility that the imperialist brigandage could turn into a world conflagration, despite promises that the Cold War has ended.
The U.S. objective in the Cold War has always been to keep oppressed peoples in Latin America, Africa and Asia subjugated under the yoke of finance capital and the super-profits it garners. For decades the USSR has stood in the way as an obstacle to U.S. imperialism and, together with Peoples China, acted as a brake on the U.S. in its drive for economic and political dominion over the globe.
Can the fact that China along with the USSR and its allies are supporting an imperialist venture make that much of a difference?
Let us not discount the inherent contradictions in imperialism, which make it vulnerable to a worldwide anti-imperialist and working class upsurge. At each step in the development of capitalism the working class and the oppressed masses generally have been the single most potent force to not only restrain capitalist imperialism's inherent tendencies to expand, but to overthrow it.
On Aug. 4, 1914, who thought that three years later the absolutist czarist government of Russia--the gendarme of Europe and bulwark of reaction that always had the support of European capitalism--would be overthrown and all of Europe would be aflame with revolutionary working class struggle?
If U.S. imperialism and its NATO allies are ready to take the kind of catastrophic plunge in the Middle East they are planning, they will ultimately suffer the same consequences. Imperialism is a colossus. But it has clay feet.