Internationalist Group banners in NYC protest against Iraq war, 18 March 2006. (Photo: Sue Kellogg)

JANUARY 23 – The U.S. invasion has turned Iraq into a killing field. The slaughter has reached horrific proportions. Yesterday, just as the first wave of American reinforcements arrived, supposedly to boost security, more than 130 people were killed and over 200 injured just in the Baghdad area. Eighty-eight died in a bombing of a busy market for second-hand clothing frequented by Shiites. While the imperialist military commanders and their puppet Iraqi “government” are holed up in the Green Zone, the occupation troops are not only gunning down Iraqis with abandon, they are also taking hits. Over the weekend, more than two dozen U.S. soldiers were killed, 12 of them in a helicopter shot down over a Sunni neighborhood of the capital. U.S. president George W. Bush’s vaunted “surge” just went down the tubes.

This Saturday, January 27, the “peace movement” is coming to Washington, D.C. The organizers’ aim is to pressure the Democratic Party. “The voters want peace. Tell the new Congress: Act Now to End the War,” says the flyer of United for Peace and Justice (UPJ). End the war? How? They aren’t even calling for immediate withdrawal. The transparent purpose is to get the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives to make some antiwar gesture. Right now the Congressmen and women are planning a “non-binding” resolution against the troops increase. Big deal. They certainly aren’t about to cut off funds for the war that they have supported from the outset. Voters last November may have thought they were voting for peace by electing Democrats, but what they will get is more war. The Democratic Party is now the main war party in the United States as they maneuver for the 2008 presidential election.

Ever since 2002, the leaders of the peace movement have referred to the invasion of Iraq as “Bush’s war.” The issue was presented as a matter of budget priorities: “money for jobs, not for war,” butter instead of guns. But the fact is that from the outset, Iraq, like Afghanistan before it, has been a bipartisan war, supported by both the partner parties of U.S. imperialism. No quantity of pacifist speeches, invocations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or singing “Give Peace a Chance” will succeed in pressuring the ruling class to get out of the Near East. U.S. troops will stay in Iraq until they are forced out. There will be a lot of talk this weekend about “speaking truth to power.” This is absurd. The capitalist powers that be already know the truth. The only language they understand is power, and the working class has the power to bring the capitalist economy and the imperialist war machine to a grinding halt. What it needs is leadership, revolutionary leadership that is prepared to take power from rulers who threaten the future of humanity.

Imperialism is not a policy, it is a system. It is dying capitalism, on a course of mass destruction, producing nationalist bloodbaths and war after imperialist war throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. And imperialist war abroad leads to racist police-state repression “at home.” The U.S.A. PATRIOT Act with its “sneak and peak” break-ins, warrantless wiretaps and opening of mail, the mass arrests at protest demonstrations, police executions of black and Latino minorities, round-ups and deportations of thousands of immigrants, particularly from the Near East and South Asia, “Minuteman” vigilantes and construction of a wall along the Mexican border – all this is part and parcel of imperialist war. Going hand in hand with this is a war on labor, as Democrats and Republicans militarize the docks in the name of “security,” railroad workers in Chicago are fired by CSX due to Homeland Security checks while Goodyear and Raytheon managements hardline it against strikers accused of undermining the war effort.

Yet instead of mobilizing labor’s strength, union bureaucrats look to the Democrats to bail them out. By this point, many major unions and numerous labor federations across the country have come out against the Iraq war. Workers just about everywhere in the country are opposed to the war. The AFL-CIO, which steadfastly supported every imperialist war from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan, responded to pressure from below with a tepid statement in 2005 that spoke vaguely of “rapidly” withdrawing U.S. troops. But while various leftists and antiwar groups hailed this statement, it in fact accepted the government’s rationale for occupation, blamed the Iraqi insurgents for terrorizing the Iraqi people and Saddam Hussein for destroying the country that the U.S. has laid waste to. A fight against the imperialist war requires a fight to oust the pro-capitalist labor fakers Yet groups like the Labor Party and social-democratic U.S. Labor Against the War limit themselves to peace crawls and lobbying elected officials.

It’s high time to turn massive working-class opposition to the war into militant labor action. The Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International, calls for workers strikes against the war. Coordinated antiwar plant gate rallies, lunchtime and stop work meetings can be a first step. Unionized transport workers should “hot cargo” (refuse to handle) war materiel. These are the kind of tactics that class-conscious workers have used the world over against colonial and imperialist wars. In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, train drivers in Scotland refused to move a munitions train, while antiwar protesters joined with rail workers stopping and chasing military supply trains around northern Italy. In the U.S., at the height of the invasion, police fired on protesters and dock workers at an antiwar protest in the port of Oakland, injuring a half dozen longshoremen and arresting 35 (see The Internationalist No. 16, May-June 2003).

Serious struggle against the war will necessarily extend to within the armed forces themselves (see “Not One Person, Not One Cent for the Imperialist War Machine,” in this issue). A number of soldiers and officers have refused orders to go to Iraq, such as Lt. Ehren Watada, currently undergoing a court-martial trial. Earlier this month, press conferences were held in Norfolk, Virginia and Washington, D.C. to announce an “Appeal for Redress” by over 1,000 active-duty and reserve military personnel calling for “prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq.” The Appeal is couched in patriotic rhetoric and directed to Congress, and it is a far cry from the underground papers and antiwar soldiers groups that surfaced during the Vietnam War and are chronicled in the recent movie, Sir! No Sir! But even the present “volunteer” U.S. armed forces are not immune to unrest in the ranks, particularly as soldiers come to see themselves as an oppressor force, trapped in a dirty colonial war deeply resented by Iraqis and vastly unpopular in the U.S.

Class-struggle action against the war should seek to draw in all sectors of the oppressed. Students should organize to drive military recruiters out of the high schools and off the campuses. In the face of major atrocities and escalation there should be mass walkouts and school shutdowns. Mobilizations in minority neighborhoods can unite black, Latino and immigrant working people in common action against the racist war and the capitalist politicians who unleash it and fund it. At immigrant rights protests over the last year the Internationalist Group has uniquely emphasized that you can’t fight racist anti-immigrant hysteria without fighting against the imperialist war that spawns it, from World War I to today. Ultimately, there is not one single tactic that can “put a stop to war,” like the general strike that anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists dreamed of at the beginning of the last century.

The only “antiwar movement” that ever stopped a war was the Russian Revolution of 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party under V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The Bolsheviks’ program in fighting against the imperialist world war was key to preparing revolution. While reformists and centrists pushed pacifist appeals to lay down arms and pressure imperialist governments for a peace without annexations, the Russian revolutionaries called to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” In the same vein, the League for the Fourth International calls for class war against imperialist war. Since, in von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” it is necessary to struggle against the war politically. While popular-front peace groups invariably feature “antiwar” Democrats on their speakers platforms, it is necessary to break with all the capitalist parties (Republicans, Democrats and minor parties such as the “red-white-and-blue” Greens) and to build a revolutionary workers party.

The bottom line is, since it is imperialism that keeps generating war after war, it will take international socialist revolution overthrowing capitalism to put an end to the endless slaughter.

The 2003 attack on Iraq, like the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, was sold as part of a global “war on terror.” In fact, it was and is a war to terrorize the planet into submission to the diktat of U.S. imperialism. It was supposed to be a walkover: initial plans called for withdrawing substantial numbers of troops within three months and most within a year. Instead, four years later, U.S. forces are ramping up to the level at the time of the invasion, over 150,000, plus thousands of mercenary “contractors” and an Iraqi puppet army of 130,000 soldiers. Yet still they haven’t been able to put a dent in the entrenched insurgency, while tit-for-tat massacres by Sunni and Shiite suicide bombers and death squads have launched a sectarian civil war. The results of “Plan A” were summed up in the title a book on the Iraq war by Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks, Fiasco (Penguin, 2006). The new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus told Congress this week that the situation was “dire” and not to expect improvement any time soon. Referring to the “surge” that Petraeus is supposed to implement, military analyst Andrew Krepinevich (author of The Army and Vietnam) commented: “If this is Plan B, we’d better start working on Plan C.”

In fact, the Bush administration already has a “Plan C,” for nobody but nobody expects “Plan B” to work. The Shiite fundamentalist regime installed by the United States is supposed to ensure “reconciliation” with the Sunni minority that ruled Iraq since its foundation by the British after World War I? Not a chance. The Iraqi “prime minister,” Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, opposed an increase in U.S. troops in Baghdad because it might mess up his plans for “ethnically cleansing” the capital and driving Sunnis out at gunpoint. He stood up Bush, the most powerful imperialist leader in the world, at a formal dinner in Amman, Jordan last November and didn’t show up for a press conference in Baghdad to announce the “surge,” which the U.S. president claimed was an “Iraqi plan.” As for an alternative plan, the political analyst Joe Klein commented in his column in Time (22 January): “Plan C has to be a smart, detailed withdrawal from Iraq that doesn’t leave chaos and regional war in its wake.” It isn’t, and it doesn’t. The administration’s Plan C is to escalate the escalation by attacking Iran. The White House war planners think they can keep the blowback limited, but it wouldn’t be their first miscalculation in the Iraq theater.

The fact is that Plans A, B and C were all cooked up by the same chefs, the coterie of neo-conservative ideologues who were calling for a war on Iraq as far back as the mid-’90s. War secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith may be gone as their doctrine of invasion/occupation by a “lean” military force turned into disaster. But the point men for the latest administration “strategy” are the neocon armchair generals William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Last May, Kagan was calling for a troop “surge” and war threats against Iran in an elaborate “how to” do it “Plan for Victory in Iraq” (Weekly Standard, 29 May 2006). In September, Kristol was pushing for a resolution for the use of force against Iran. The White House rejected the idea of asking Congress for a war powers resolution as a lost cause, but adopted the strategy. “Ex”-CIA Iran specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht declared that there had been a “tidal shift” of opinion of policymakers on military action against Iran and it was “highly likely the Israelis will launch a strike before the end of George Bush’s presidency” (London Daily Mirror, 4 January). An Israeli strike would be “backed up by American and possibly British air support from Iraq” even at the risk of  “sparking a military explosion in the Middle East.”

In the last month the U.S. has repeatedly escalated provocations against Iran. In mid-December, American forces arrested four Iranians in Baghdad who were later released at the insistence of the Iraqi “government,” which said they were diplomatic envoys. On December 23, the United Nations voted to impose economic sanctions on Iran over its program to develop nuclear energy. In his January 11 address announcing the escalation of U.S. troop levels in Iraq, Bush issued a threat that was seen as a “declaration of war” in Tehran, declaring: “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.… We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.” Hours later, U.S. special forces stormed an Iranian office in Erbil in northern Iraq, arresting six diplomats and provoking a gunpoint standoff with Kurdish forces who are normally Washington’s closest allies in Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a statement saying the attack had been authorized by Bush personally. So with hundreds of U.S. soldiers being killed by “improvised explosive devices” consisting of a couple of 155 mm shells strapped together and set off by a cellphone, garage door opener or egg timer, Washington is once again on the warpath looking for high tech weapons in the region and searching for a Ho Chi Minh Trail in the middle of the desert (no need for defoliation here).

It is standard strategic doctrine for military forces the world over to judge threats by the potential adversary’s capabilities rather than simply its declared intentions. And the U.S. has been sharply increasing its forces in the region capable of striking Iran. In his January 11 speech, Bush announced the dispatch of a second aircraft carrier strike group to the region, equipped with scores of combat aircraft, cruise missile firing ships and Patriot anti-missile batteries. Such forces have nothing to do with fighting insurgents in Iraq and everything to do with preparing a confrontation with Iran. Under the headline, “Next Target Tehran,” a British strategic analyst wrote in the London Guardian (15 January) laid out the U.S. battle plan:

“Weapons of mass destruction will provide the rationale for military action, though it won’t be limited to attacks on a few weapons factories. It will include limiting Iranian retaliatory capability, using bombers to destroy up to 10,000 targets in the first day of any war, and special forces flying in to destroy anything that’s left.

“In the aftermath, the US will support regime change, hoping to replace the ayatollahs with an Iran of the regions.”

So after busting up and laying waste to Iraq, U.S. war planners intend to break up Iran as well. Bush’s saber-rattling against Iran caused consternation in Congress. Senator Joe Biden warned Secretary of State Rice that if the administration thinks “they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran and Iraq, that will generate a constitutional confrontation.” But Bush & Co. figure the Democrats’ bark is worse than their bite, and are proceeding undeterred with their escalation plan.

From the outset, the architects of the U.S. terror war have tried to provoke a wider conflict. The playbook is familiar. This is Richard Nixon announcing that he has a plan for peace in Vietnam and then attacking across the border Cambodia. But Cambodia was a small, defenseless country while Iran has a large army, a large population, lots of missiles and lots of oil. The neocon/Israeli plans for war with Iran  have been causing consternation among the Pentagon brass for months. Top generals have been leaking their concerns to Seymour Hersh, the top-flight investigative journalist who exposed the cover-up of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, revealed the huge Israeli nuclear arsenal and broke the story of the sadistic Abu Ghraib torture center in Iraq. Hersh reported (in “The Iran Plans,” New Yorker, 17 April 2006) that the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to get the option of tactical nuclear weapons removed from the Iran battle plan, without success. Just because a few “wimpy” five-star generals and admirals have qualms about setting off a regional conflagration doesn’t phase the Christian fundamentalist fanatic in the White House who believes that god ordered him to invade Iraq, or the Zionist war hawks in Tel Aviv with their Masada complex who would risk incinerating the world in order to “secure” Israel.

Early last summer, the Bush regime gave Israel a “green light for the bombing operation” in Lebanon, even before the mid-July border incident with Hezbollah that became the pretext for launching the Israeli attack (Seymour Hersh, “Watching Lebanon: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war,” New Yorker, 21 August). But tenacious and well-equipped Hezbollah forces fought the Israeli army to a standstill, so a beefed-up United Nations force had to be brought in to occupy southern Lebanon, acting as border guards for the Zionist state. Simultaneously, the U.S. launched a war against Islamic fundamentalists in Somalia using the Ethiopian army as proxies. While the Ethiopian invaders achieved quick success with a lightning invasion in late December, their troops are seen as occupiers by the Somali population and already there have been several clashes with protesters leaving numerous dead.

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International, following the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky and the early Communist International, stand four-square for defeat of the U.S. terror war and defense of the Iraqi and Afghan peoples, Iran, the Shiite population of southern Lebanon and the Somalis under attack by U.S. imperialism, its NATO and Israeli allies and proxies such as Ethiopia. We defend Iran’s right to obtain nuclear arms or any other weapons needed to combat the imperialists (and also for the North Korean deformed workers state which faces nuclear blackmail by the U.S.). Revolutionary Marxists hail every real blow landed against the U.S./British colonial occupiers and their puppet forces in Iraq and Afghansitan, as well as against the Zionist army in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. At the same time as we defend the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples, we condemn indiscriminate terror against civilian populations in Iraq and Israel proper. Unlike a number of left groups who hail the “Iraqi resistance,” Iranian mullahs’ regime and Lebanese Hezbollah as well as the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas, our stance for military defense of the semi-colonial countries and peoples against imperialism does not imply the least political support for the Islamic fundamentalist (Sunni or Shiite) and Arab nationalist leaderships. 

These bourgeois (and even semi-feudal) misleaders have in the past allied themselves with the imperialists and would do so again, if U.S. rulers gave them half a chance. Recall the alliance between Islamic mujahedin, including Osama bin Laden, and the CIA in provoking and fighting against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The Islamic Republic in Iran makes common cause with Western fascists in denying the Holocaust and whipping up anti-Semitism. In fighting imperialism tooth and nail, proletarian revolutionaries in the Near East must politically combat these arch-reactionary forces who attack ethnic and religious minorities, imprison women in the veil, and have jailed and have murdered communists by the thousands. Standing on the program of permanent revolution, Trotskyists look to the multi-ethnic and multi-national working class throughout the region, including Arab, Kurdish, Iranian and Hebrew-speaking workers, to fight against their Islamic, nationalist and Zionist rulers for a socialist federation of the Near East. To overcome the Sunni-Shiite bloodbath in Iraq, it is necessary to unite Iraqi workers in common struggle against the imperialist occupiers, as well as supporting Iranian workers under attack by the mullahs’ regime.

In the United States, the struggle against the war in Iraq has been channeled through a number of antiwar coalitions, each of which is led by one or  a couple of left organizations. United for Peace and Justice (UPJ) is led by the social-democratic Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CoC) and the ultra-reformist Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA); the Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) is led by the International Action Center (IAC) and its parent, the Stalinoid Workers World Party (WWP); International ANSWER is led by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a split-off from the WWP; and theWorld Can’t Wait (WCW) coalition, which also participates in the UPJ, is led by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP); the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) is led by the social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO).

Although the several pacifist coalitions have plenty of organizational differences and squabbles, in their fundamental politics they are nearly identical. They all are forms of a “popular front” by which reformist left groups subordinate the workers movement and opponents of imperialist war to the ruling class by means of a formal alliance with one or another bourgeois sector. Thus each of the coalitions have their own favorite capitalist politicians. If the TONC/IAC gets Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich on its speakers platform, the UPJ will bring up Rev. Jesse Jackson (or Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.). World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime! is endorsed by several Democratic Congressmen, including John Conyers, Major Owens, Bobby Rush and Maxine Waters as well as Al Sharpton and Brig. Gen. (Ret) Janis Karpinski, the commandant of the Abu Ghraib torture prison who “saw the light” after she was made a sacrificial lamb by the Pentagon tops. The result (and intended purpose) of these pop-front coalitions is that the program of revolutionary struggle, for class war  against imperialist war, is carefully excluded.

The speakers outdo each other in promising to “support our troops,” proclaiming that “peace is patriotic” and making clear that their concern is to defend the interests of U.S. imperialism from the mess that George Bush got them into. They talk of “money for education, not for war,” as if this is a dispute with the Congressional Budget Office over spending priorities rather than a bloody imperialist slaughter. Above all, in one form or another they all call for “troops out now” as their main demand (although the UPJ, the most right-wing of the antiwar coalitions, often fudges that). Certainly, the U.S. forces should get the hell out of Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the rest of the Near East, and Africa, and Latin America, the Philippines, South Korea, etc. But the key question is how they get out.

Revolutionary Marxists have insisted with Lenin and Trotsky that the ony way to stop imperialist war is by overthrowing the capitalist-imperialist system through workers revolution. We seek to drive the imperialists out of Iraq and elsewhere through mobilizing workers struggle, from the Near East to the imperialist heartland. The popular-front peace movement, in contrast, is consciously appealing to a section of the ruling class (including not a few generals) who want to pull out of Iraq in order to stave off a catastrophe for U.S. imperialism. We already saw what this can lead to in the Vietnam War. As soon as U.S. troops were pulled out in 1972, the antiwar movement simply disappeared, even though it took three more years for the Viet Cong to win the war, which Trotskyists and every other genuine opponent of imperialism hailed. And although the Pentagon had to pull back for a few years, unable to intervene directly in Angola for example, by 1980 the U.S. launched a new Cold War against the Soviet Union over Afghanistan.

Many of the popular-front leftists in fact sided with imperialism over Afghanistan, supporting the Islamic counterrevolutionaries in the name of national independence and anti-Sovietism. Trotskyists, in contrast, hailed the Red Army intervention in defense of a regime that freed women from the veil and educated young girls. Many of the bourgeois forces who opposed the losing Vietnam War enthusiastically supported sending American troops to Kosovo in 1999, when Bill Clinton declared war on Yugoslavia in the name of “human rights.” And many continue to support the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan today. As then Trotskyist James Burnham noted in a 1938 pamphlet, The People’s Front: The New Betrayal:

“Most significant of all is the application of the People's Front policy to ‘anti-war work.’  Through a multitude of pacifist organizations, and especially through the directly controlled American League against War and Fascism, the Stalinists aim at the creation of a ‘broad, classless, People’s Front of all those opposed to war.’... They rule out in advance the Marxist analysis of war as necessarily resulting from the inner conflicts of capitalism and therefore genuinely opposed only by revolutionary class struggle against the capitalist order; and, in contrast, maintain that all persons, from whatever social class or group, whether or not opposed to capitalism, can ‘unite’ to stop war....

“The truth is, of course, that through the People’s Front, the Stalinists are making ready to support the government, and to recruit the masses for such support, in the new imperialist war.”

And, indeed, by the time the imperialist Second World War came around, a war for redivision of the planet between the various colonial powers, the former “peace movement” lined up solidly behind Franklin D. Roosevelt, the war aims of U.S. imperialism.

The fundamental truth proclaimed by Lenin in World War I remains valid today. As the Bolshevik leader wrote in his 1916 pamphlet, Socialism and War: “A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war, and cannot fail to see that the latter's military reverses must facilitate its overthrow.... Socialists must explain to the masses that they have no other road of salvation except the revolutionary overthrow of ‘their own’ governments, and that must take advantage of these governments' embarrassments in the present war precisely for this purpose.” Then and now, the road to peace lies through international socialist revolution, and to lead that struggle we must above all build a revolutionary workers party and reforge a genuinely Trotskyist Fourth International. n