Usa, Irak, democratici Wsws 05-12-01
Bush e Democratici appoggiano la continuazione della guerra in Iraq
Editoriale WSWS
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Appoggio
bipartisan in USA alla guerra contro l’Irak confermato da recente
intervista del democratico Lieberman (Connecticut) al WSJ, che parla di
“reale progresso” in Irak grazie all’occupazione americana; - ciò nonostante, quest’anno gli attacchi della resistenza irachena siano passati da 150 a oltre 700 la settimana;
- e nonostante il riconoscimento che per la ricostruzione poco sia stato fatto per “troppo denaro sprecato o rubato”;
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L’accordo di base di Democratici e Repubblicani all’occupazione
americana riflette il consenso dell’oligarchia finanziaria e delle
frazioni predominanti della borghesia; -
per queste
frazioni i profitti economici e i vantaggi strategici valgono il prezzo
in vite umane e i $6MD di spese belliche mensili; - nel recente vertice del Cairo leader sciiti, curdi e sunniti hanno chiesto un calendario di disimpegno americano.
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La
“strategia per la vittoria” è delineata da Seymour Hersh, sul New
Yorker: il Pentagono starebbe pensando a una riduzione del contingente
americano parallela ad un uso più intensivo dei bombardamenti; - Con il calo delle forze sul terreno, aumenterà il livello di violenza e il numero delle vittime irachene.
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I bombardamenti aerei sono stati i responsabili di una quota rilevante
delle oltre 100 000 vittime civili dal marzo 2003. -
Paventato
il possibile utilizzo dei bombardamenti a favore delle unità militari
irachene sciite contro i sunniti, come già sta accadendo sul terreno.
I democratici cercheranno di impedire che le elezioni di mezzo termine divengano un referendum sulla guerra in Irak.
Bush, Democrats back protracted war in Iraq
a substantial majority of the population supporting a withdrawal of US
troops from Iraq, the Bush administration and its Democratic allies
have joined forces in an attempt to intimidate the American people into
accepting a protracted and bloody colonial war.
The
bipartisan campaign in support of the war was summed up by back-to-back
statements from Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) and
President Bush, both of them proclaiming a “strategy for victory” in
Iraq.
realization among broad layers of the American population that the
government deliberately dragged the country into a war of aggression
based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction and bogus links between Baghdad and terrorism.
The
sea-change in attitudes towards the war has been fueled by the mounting
death toll of American troops—now standing at 2,110—as well as the
exposure of the Bush administration’s criminality, from its
indifference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina to the CIA leak case
and the expanding web of corruption scandals engulfing the Republican
Party.
dissension within the top ranks of the military gave rise to the call
earlier this month by Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania,
a retired Marine colonel and longtime supporter of the Pentagon, for
the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq within six months. The
proposal, coming from someone who had supported every US military
action since Vietnam, threw the White House into crisis and prompted
the latest public relations campaign.
The
great advantage that the administration still enjoys is the support for
the war from its ostensible opposition—the Democratic Party. The basic
unity of the Democrats and Republicans in support of the US occupation
reflects the broad pro-war consensus within the financial oligarchy,
whose essential interests are defended by both parties.
in the political establishment and the top ranks of the US financial
and corporate world understood from the outset that the purpose of the
war was not to counter a terrorist threat, much less promote
“democracy,” but rather to utilize overwhelming American military power
to impose US hegemony over a region that contains much of the world’s
oil resources. The predominant sections of this ruling elite
still see the vast profits and strategic advantages over America’s
economic rivals that such control would yield as worth the price being
paid in blood—both American and Iraqi—as well as the $6 billion in monthly war spending.
is what underlies the bipartisan alliance between the Democrats and
Bush in support of continuing what is, in the most profound sense, a
criminal war. It also accounts for the indifference of both parties to the antiwar sentiments of the majority of the American people.
This
alliance found its most noxious expression in the column written by
Lieberman for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, the most
consistent voice of the Republican right. Lieberman claimed that “real
progress” is being made in Iraq as a result of the US occupation and
that the US neo-colonial operation is somehow giving the Iraqi people a
“modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood.”
If,
indeed, the odds are 27 million to 10,000—that is, 2,700 to 1—why are
160,000 US troops needed in Iraq, and why are they incapable of
suppressing the resistance, or even securing the center of Baghdad? Lieberman
doesn’t bother to explain this incongruity. Nor does he explain how the
“10,000” continue not only to fight, after the US occupation forces
have killed or imprisoned many times that number of Iraqis, but have
escalated their actions—with insurgent attacks increasing from 150 to over 700 a week in the last year.
cites opinion polls that supposedly show 82 percent of Iraqis “are
confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now.” No doubt
many Iraqis cannot imagine how things could get any worse.
Lieberman does not mention the polls showing 80 percent of Iraqis wanting US troops to leave the country, nor the
recent meeting in Cairo of rival Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders, who
drafted a consensus statement demanding the “timetable” for a US
withdrawal that both he and Bush claim is unthinkable.
he chides the American people for giving in to “pessimism” about the
war. He attacks some members of his own party in Congress for being
“more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq
almost three years ago… than they are concerned about how we continue
the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.”
the Bush administration dragged America into the war three years ago is
hardly a matter of irrelevant ancient history. The invasion of 2003 was
a war crime in the strictest sense of the term—an unprovoked war of
aggression, the basic crime on which the leaders of Nazi Germany were
convicted and executed. The administration lied about the reasons for
the war, attempting to terrorize the American people into accepting it
by claiming that Iraq was threatening US cities with a nuclear
terrorist attack.
be launched on this basis, with no real opposition from the Democrats,
demonstrates the degree to which the ruling elite is utterly
contemptuous of the democratic rights of the American people. No
“progress” in any sense of the word can come out of such a criminal and
predatory venture, only new and greater crimes.
Lieberman
boasted that during his recent visit to Iraq he saw the strategy of
“clear, hold and build” at work. “Progress in ‘clearing’ and ‘holding’
is being made,” he said.
The word “clearing” is
the English equivalent of the word used by the Nazis, “ausrotten,” to
describe their “clearing” of Eastern Europe of Jews and all others who
opposed their military occupation. It is a policy of mass expulsions of
civilian populations and murderous repression, as seen in Fallujah and
elsewhere.
Democratic senator was compelled to acknowledge that little has taken
place as “too much money has been wasted or stolen.” He
delicately avoided specifying by whom, as he would have been compelled
to name politically connected contractors upon whom both he and the
administration rely for support.
column amounted to a preview of Bush’s speech the following day, and
the president reciprocated by quoting the Connecticut senator
approvingly for his rejection of any timetable for withdrawing US
troops. He neglected to include Lieberman’s somewhat franker
assessment that the US military presence “will need to be significant
in Iraq or nearby for years to come.”
reprised the same scare-mongering that was used to justify the war in
the first place, equating those resisting the US occupation in Iraq
with Al Qaeda terrorists blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on
New York City and Washington.
fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle,”
Bush declared. “They would be plotting and killing Americans across the
world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq,
Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American
people.”
and destroying the enemy in Iraq”—the bombing of cities, the killing of
families at checkpoints, the detention and torture of the thousands
rounded up and imprisoned at Abu Ghraib and other prison camps—has
created an inexhaustible supply of recruits for the resistance.
Washington’s claims that those fighting the US occupation are Al Qaeda
members who have migrated to Iraq are belied by the failure to capture
or kill any significant number of such “foreign fighters.”
spelled out that even if significant numbers of US troops are
withdrawn, the war against the Iraqi people will continue. “While our
military presence may become less visible, it will remain lethal and
decisive, able to confront the enemy wherever it may organize,” he said.
Quoting current and former Pentagon and intelligence officials, Hersh
writes that plans for a reduction in the number of US troops deployed
in Iraq have been coupled with proposals for a more intensive use of American airpower against Iraqi resistance—in other words, a campaign to bomb the Iraqi people into submission.
Already,
US warplanes have dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives
on Iraqi cities and towns in attacks that are responsible for a large
share of the more than 100,000 civilian deaths since the March 2003
invasion.
the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are
withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi
fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”
proposal to provide US air support for Iraqi army units raises the
disturbing prospect of ethnic-based Iraqi units calling in air strikes
against political rivals. This is already happening on the ground, as Hersh’s article makes clear.
his speech at the Naval Academy Wednesday, Bush cited the recent siege
of Tal Afar in northern Iraq as a vindication of the use of US-trained
Iraqi military forces. “Iraqi units conducted their own anti-terrorist
operations… hunting for enemy fighters and securing neighborhoods,
block by block,” Bush declared. He quoted an Iraqi soldier as saying,
“All we feel is motivated to kill the terrorists.”
predominantly Shiite Iraqi forces were “rounding up any Sunnis on the
basis of whatever a Shiite said to them. They were killing Sunnis on
behalf of the Shiites.” The officer noted that those doing the
killing included a Shiite militia unit led by a retired US Special
Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the
officer told Hersh.
sickening reality of the “strategy for victory” that is advanced by
both Bush and the Democrats. It amounts to support for death squads,
retaliatory bombing and ethnic cleansing. What is
being prepared against the Iraqi people is a mass slaughter aimed at
bleeding the country white. Whether this involves the killing of half a
million Iraqis, a million or two million, the American ruling elite is
prepared to pursue its war crime in Iraq to whatever level is required
to suppress opposition to US domination of the country and its oil
wealth.
opposition to the war, Bush told his audience of Navy midshipmen, “When
you’re risking your life to accomplish a mission, the last thing you
want to hear is that mission being questioned in our nation’s capital.”
He continued, “I want you to know that, while there may be a lot of
heated rhetoric in Washington, DC, one thing is not in dispute: The
American people stand behind you.”
reality is that the debate in Washington is the palest reflection of
the mass opposition to the war among the population as a whole. The
Democratic leadership, while raising for its own opportunist and
cynical reasons questions about the administration’s conduct of the
war, has rejected demands for an end to the occupation.
What
passed for Democratic opposition to Bush’s speech came from Senate
Minority Leader Harry Reid, who chided the president for having “once
again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in
Iraq.”
repeated polls have demonstrated, the issue is not a strategy for
“victory” or “success.” The issue is bringing the troops home from
Iraq. Many millions of people recognize that this war is a crime and
are morally outraged by the way it was launched, the continued violence
against civilians in Iraq, and the killing and maiming of American
soldiers to secure the profit interests of the oil monopolies and the
US financial elite.
American population is politically disenfranchised. Its views and
aspirations find no serious reflection within the US two-party system.
“strategy for victory” promoted by both parties means not only a
continuation of the carnage in Iraq, but new wars of aggression to
establish the global hegemony of US imperialism. The struggle against
the war in Iraq and the new wars that are being prepared can be carried
forward only through a decisive break with the Democrats and the
building of a new, socialist party that fights for the independent
political mobilization of the working class, both in the US and
internationally, against imperialism.
the upcoming 2006 midterm elections. Once again, as in 2002, the
Democrats will seek to prevent the vote from becoming a referendum on
the war in Iraq. Those who wish to build a genuine movement
against the war—one that will force the withdrawal of troops from
Iraq—must draw the appropriate political conclusions from the
bipartisan alliance of the Democratic and Republican parties.
before the widest possible audience a socialist alternative to war,
social reaction and the assault on democratic rights. It will put at
the center of its campaign the demand for the immediate and
unconditional withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq, and the
holding of all those who plotted this war both politically and
criminally responsible.
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