Iraq: Their Regime Change and Ours

The Bush administration's clumsy attempt to connect al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein in a run up to Gulf War II is transparent pretext. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld describes the evidence linking the two as virtually incontrovertible, with the minor caveat that such damning "proof" as he might have would not hold up in court. "We're not going to have everything, "he averred, "beyond a reasonable doubt." After months of trying to establish the existence of a relationship between the Iraqi president and bin Laden, the CIA itself was also forced to admit that it had come up empty handed. This is not surprising. The largely secular Baathist regime and Islamic fundamentalism, although united in their symmetrical opposition to every fundamental tenet of democracy and social justice, stand at political loggerheads with one another. The central political article of the jihadist faith, that secular Muslim regimes are a source both of oppression and ecclesiastical corruption, is hardly conducive to a long-term alliance. Since the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, every Arab regime tainted by the import of ideology -- political or cultural -- from the West that renders it averse to subordinating its laws to Sharia, or which associate their existence with Western interests, has been targeted for destruction. The failure in particular of the secular Arab regimes to improve living standards and to provide more democratic rights to the masses is triumphantly portrayed by the fundamentalists as having exposed the bankruptcy of Western style modernization and development.

This, it is true, would by no means preclude in principle a temporary entente of convenience between Iraq and al Qaeda, provisionally united in opposition to a common enemy. It merely repudiates the actual political evolution of the past decade of Mid-East political history. Just such a hypothetical working alliance had an actual predicate. By initiating the war to contain and roll back the Iranian revolution in 1980, armed by the U.S. and bankrolled by the conservative Gulf states, Saddam Hussein (and the State Department) became the not so inadvertent shield of Wahhabi fundamentalism, one of the chief inspirations for al Qaeda, against its Shi'ite rival. Insofar as Wahhabism could remain domesticated in service to Riyadhi wealth, and Saddam recast as a military imam, this alliance could be maintained and Iranian fundamentalism prevented from penetrating the Arabian peninsula. It could be successfully recruited to destabilize the Soviet Empire at its soft underbelly in Afghanistan. This alliance was only then broken when, under the threat of Iraqi expansionism, Saudi Arabia flagrantly redeployed both its oil wealth and Islam in service to the United States during Gulf War I thereby squandering its imprimatur as defender of the faith in the eyes of the most unbridled and extreme ranks of fundamentalism.

This was the unintended, though not entirely unpredictable, consequence of the American military intervention. Had the sanctions against the Iraqi occupation regime prevailed, a telling precedent might have been set against the Israeli, Syrian, Turkish and Indonesian occupations, similarly in breach of UN resolutions, that could have strengthened the grip of democracy as an independent force within the Muslim arc. It might have pried open the Pandora's box encasing the inequitable distribution of Arab oil wealth, a question demagogically and self-servingly raised by the Iraqi annexation itself but resonating widely through the popularly held belief that this maldistribution is externally imposed and maintained. However, this was dismissed as a non-option insofar as such sanctions would not have been under the sole control of the U.S. Moreover, insofar as this would have laid the predicate for further sanctions that, with the exception of the hypothetical Syrian application, might have compromised America's allies, raised larger democratic issues and imperiled America's financial interests, this entire approach was summarily scotched. The Arab masses were thereby further polarized. Iraqi expansionism seemed to represent the sole alternative of freedom from Western domination and U.S. diktat, but a freedom devoid of any larger, meaningful emancipatory democratic content, an empty Third-Worldist anti-imperialism, and, in the end, no viable alternative at all.

YET THE BRIEF SUCCESS ENJOYED BY SADDAM as "champion" of the Arab have-nots was symptomatic of a seething political unease, a troubling sign of the tenuous consensus that holds sway in the Arab world. The unequal distribution of resources and the lack of rights of migrant workers in the oil-rich nations feed and sustain a simmering resentment against the Gulf centered ruling classes. Saddam's defeat shook loose from its discredited Saudi state moorings Islamic terrorist elements later to coalesce with similar non-state clerical forces in the wider Arab world as favored contender to the fallen mantle of Arab nationalism. These fundamentalists offer the Arab masses a claim to dignity rooted not in democratic openings with the promise of mass political power and social equality, but in an orderly, patriarchal, morally pure nationalism freed from outside domination and domestic corruption; a dignity in which both traditional and secular forms of authority and subservience are replaced by the paternal superintendence and guidance of the clerisy.

For all its grandiose posturing the American ruling class has utterly failed to grasp the method and purposes of this ascendant force. Obsessed with the bizarre notion that al Qaeda aims to conquer the West, to nullify our institutions and uproot our freedoms -- fantastical flights of the imagination more suited to further stoking public fears and squelching political debate than to actual analysis -- and intoxicated by grand pronouncements of a clash of civilizations, the American Establishment has blinded itself to the connection between the ends and means of mass mobilization arising from these terrorist assaults. Terror is a product of social dislocation, but where masses are passive, terrorism cannot activate them. Appealing to a wide strata of the urban middle classes marginalized by globalization, and peasant migrants of the shanty towns of the Arab cities, still operating on a pre-urban level of political consciousness, fundamentalist terrorism aims to expose and discredit the alliances between Western elites and the existing Arab ruling classes by driving a wedge between Arab client elites and their inflamed subjects. Its actual platform is to dismantle secular education, end land reform, further subordinate women, destroy any and all independent working class organizations and to use the oil wealth to further entrench themselves as the new masters of society. But because Islamic fundamentalism is so flagrantly unable to mobilize this constituency on the basis of a concrete program of amelioration, it must rely on provoking ever more dramatic levels of repression and bloodshed in response to its carnage and to reap and hegemonize the traumatized outrage that will arise in the wake of these debacles. It aims to expose the link between the repression of the mass street resistance by the Arab regimes which will surely arise, and the political services such repression provide in the context of the broader American war effort.

The Bush administration was mesmerized by its quick victory in Afghanistan. But all that the collapse of the Taliban demonstrated was simply that they were a marginal force, reinforced if not imposed by the Afghani Arabs of al Qaeda and by Pakistan, with only the thinnest of domestic support. The U.S. commanders were, nevertheless, prepared to bomb Afghanistan for months and would not have flinched from jeopardizing as many civilian lives as victory might have warranted nor from turning over the country to famine and disease should a quick victory have proved elusive.

The U.S. fully anticipates a repeat performance in an upcoming war with Iraq. But Iraq is not Afghanistan and street to street combat through the city of Baghdad -- covered every bloody step by Al Jazeera -- promises a grisly and horrific show for the Arab East. The Iraqi military machine has garnered considerable experience in urban combat, not only in the war with Iran, but also in putting down its own domestic uprisings in the wake of the first Gulf War. It will, moreover, undoubtedly make every effort to open a second front against Israel, which, under Sharon, a total stranger to the weapon of self-restraint, may well parlay this aggression into a pretext for mass expulsions of Palestinians from the occupied territories. So, while the Bush administration plans to conquer Iraq, it may soon find itself reckoning with an Arab street red-carpeted for al Qaeda. Were there a vibrant and healthy Arab Left such masses in motion might offer socialists an opportune moment for revolutionary democratic struggle against both camps. Instead the forthcoming war can be expected to metastasize and entrench the spoors of Islamic terrorism through every city and town of the Arab world, completing the scenario inadvertently initiated by the first Gulf War.

Of this, American policy makers still seem blitheringly clueless. Cheney said on August 26, "Forcing Saddam from power would bring freedom to Iraq, bring peace to the region, boost Arab moderates, cause extremists to rethink violence and help the Israeli-Palestinian peace process." They remain fixated on tearing asunder a nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Baghdad, as if oblivious to the temporary symbiotic alliance that such a future war would immediately engender. Of the "larger" insistence that Iraq may furnish al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction this, if sincerely believed, would be the height of political incompetence on the part of Iraq, a weakening of the instinct for self-preservation which Saddam has rarely exhibited. For it would allow a sworn enemy of Arab secularism, a twisted Arab secularism that Baathist Iraq surely embodies, to gain control over weapons which might equally be turned against the regime itself, were the war averted.

However, it is more likely that the Bush Administration does not believe any of this. It has had to manufacture this connection, where none exists, for a very simple reason. Iraq has no air force, no pilotless drones or navy. It has no intercontinental ballistic missiles. It has, in other words, no conventional delivery system whereby weapons of mass destruction could effectively terrorize the American public. Islamic terrorists, on the other hand, have succeeded where Iraq left to its own devices could not. How then, short of employing a team of Hollywood script writers, can Iraq, hitherto successfully deterred, be repackaged as a mortal threat to American life, other than by insisting that Iraq has the means -- through its al Qaeda "conduit" -- to deliver weapons of mass destruction by unconventional methods?

This goes to the question of how Bush has gone about selling the war. It is a curious, but oft noted fact that this Administration, for all its perfervid concern over Baghdad's real or imagined acquisition of a nuclear arsenal, has been woefully indifferent to actual, concrete measures which would halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As Dr. Eric Chivian, co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War queried, "[I]f the administration is so concerned about the dangers of mass destruction, then how can we explain its lukewarm support for the Nunn-Lugar Act, which serves to dispose of Russian nuclear weapons-grade material so that it does not fall into the wrong hands; its sabotaging of the 30-year old Biological Weapons Convention by unilaterally rejecting the verification and enforcement provisions; and its cut by 93 percent of the funds sought by its own Department of Energy to guard American nuclear weapons, weapons material and radioactive wastes from terrorists?"

Before the Gulf War the best intelligence indicated that Iraq was 8 to 10 years away from developing a nuclear weapon. After the war, international inspectors learned that the regime had been much closer. The regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993. The inspectors discovered that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a workable nuclear weapon and was pursuing several different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.

What is left out is this. Before the war Iraq had the use of fissile material in the reactors transferred to it by the Soviet Union and France, and which were under the inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was then indeed perhaps six months away from having the capacity to produce a nuclear device. This material was subsequently removed from Iraq. Today it does not have the capacity to produce material for a nuclear program or to enrich uranium with centrifuges, because all such facilities were destroyed in the first Gulf War or by the inspectors. It has no nuclear power and therefore no fissile material. Attempts to purchase such material in the quantity and quality needed for a bomb have failed in the past and there is no reason to believe that it could succeed in the future, especially if attempts to prevent their proliferation were zealously policed. The International Atomic Energy fact sheet of April 25, 2002, entitled "Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Program" recorded that "[T]here were no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the productions of amounts of weapons-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." This reaffirms its 1998 conclusion that it "has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." Moreover, enriching uranium requires a substantial infrastructure and power supply that would be detectable by U.S. spy satellites. No information of any such detection was ever offered.

Arguments that Saddam's weapons' program constitutes a casus belli was tarnished further by the recent revelations of North Korea's acquisition of nuclear arms, a problem of added urgency, one might think, given that North Korea also possess long-range ballistic missile capability. It has a million member army equipped with chemical and biological agents. And it presents a direct threat to Seoul and to the American bases in South Korea. Despite all this, the Bush administration has yet to satisfactorily propound the political mechanics by which the imperative of "pre-emptive" war is required against one member of the axis of evil, when the wheels of diplomacy are fully expected to suffice in tackling the seemingly far greater threats of another member of that now famous axis.

Yet, what of the other Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Scott Ritter who was the UN arms inspector in Iraq from 1991-8 wrote that "[u]nder the most stringent on-site inspection regime in the history of arms control, Iraq's biological weapons programs were dismantled, destroyed or rendered harmless during the course of hundreds of no-notice inspections. The major biological weapons production facility -- al Hakum, that was responsible for producing Iraq's anthrax -- was blown up by high explosive charges and all its equipment destroyed. Other biological facilities met the same fate if it was found that they had, at any time, been used for research and development of biological agents." Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that "[t]he shelf-life and lethality of Iraq's weapons is unknown, but it seems likely that the shelf-life was limited. In balance, it seems probable that any agents retained after the Gulf War now have very limited lethality, if any." Sarin and Tabun have a shelf life of five years. Even if the 20,000 munitions feared to have been filled with these agents had been successfully hidden by the Iraqis, they would be in Ritter's words, "nothing more than useless and completely harmless goo."

The two exceptions to the rule of biological weapons degradation are mustard gas and VX nerve agent. However, Unscom oversaw the destruction of all but 800 or so of Iraq's mustard shells. Iraq claims that the rest were destroyed by U.S./UK bombardment. This contention cannot be verified. But Ritter, again, noted that, "A few hundred 155mm mustard shells have little military value on the modern battlefield. A meaningful CW attack using artillery requires thousands of rounds. Retention of such a limited number of shells makes no sense and cannot be viewed as a serious threat."

Similarly, Unscom inspections revealed that Iraq had some, but not all the advanced equipment needed to produce VX agents. Although the Iraqis had denied the existence of production facilities for VX, Ritter's people unearthed remnants of just such plant and equipment in a field that had been buried during the Gulf War bombing and subjected it to forensic archeology to determine that whatever had been made was also destroyed. Ritter, again: "The research and development factory is destroyed. The product of that factory is destroyed. The weapons that they loaded up have been destroyed. More importantly, the equipment procured from Europe that was going to be used for their large-scale VX nerve agent factory was identified by the special commission -- still packed in its crates in 1997 -- and destroyed. Is there a VX nerve agent factory in Iraq today? Not on your life?"

What then are we to make of Bush's assertion that, "surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons"? Even Ritter acknowledges that Iraq was technically capable of relaunching its weapons manufacturing capabilities within six months of his 1998 departure. It would, however, have had to start from step one, having been deprived of all equipment, facilities and research because of the work of Ritter's team. It would have had to establish new clandestine front companies to procure the necessary complex of technology and tools. Has Iraq succeeded in reestablishing these international links? Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has oft noted in answer to such queries that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." As if in answer to this stupefying casuistry, Ritter states that "[I]f Iraq was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof" because chemical and biological weapons emit vented detectable gasses and nuclear weapons generate gamma ray emissions that are perceptible via satellite.

THIS BY NO MEANS SHOULD SUGGEST that the criminal Iraqi regime should be taken at its word. It has oppressed its own peoples and menaced its Iranian, Arab and Israeli neighbors. It is, according to Samir al-Khalil's definitive The Republic of Fear, a direct offspring of European fascism borrowing from it its racism and anti-Semitism, its use of terror, its fuehrer principle and its deification of the warrior blood cult. Before the inspectors were expelled, Saddam had made every effort to misdirect, thwart and impede the verification process at every juncture. Iraq still maintains sufficient scud and al- Hussein missiles, with a range of 400 miles, to wield a credible threat to its neighbors. And it has been reliably reported that Iraq has built a new ammonium perchlorate plant with material illegally supplied by an Indian company and that a new rocket test stand has almost certainly been completed in breach of UN sanctions.

This is just what should be expected and is all the more reason for an urgent and timely resumption of the inspection process. Saddam has, in the past, been ineluctably driven to the cause -- if "cause" under these circumstances is not an exercise in self-parody -- of Arab unification by the regime's own internally generated imperative; the cyclical need to loot and plunder beyond its immediate borders, despite immense reserves of oil, to extricate the regime from its last failed military misadventure at consolidation through expansion. Thus the regime by dint of its own fascist dynamic has an unbreakable addiction to aggression, war and to the acquisition and production of the implements of war. Capitalism, of course, exhibits the same tendency, but this remains relatively latent insofar as the impulse to war must be subordinated to the compulsion of capital accumulation. Fascism, at its most virulent, reverses the centrality of these two impulses because capital accumulation here exists primarily to propel the engines of war and repression. That is why Bush administration's detractors do themselves and their cause no service should they, in their haste to condemn the administration's rush to war, deny this inescapable fact and its equally unavoidable corollary that the only hope of finally dislodging these predatory social and economic impulses resides in regime change. The critical questions for socialists, indeed for consistent democrats, are regime change by whom and for whom. A peace movement that stands for peace and only for peace -- one that disassociates itself from the cause of freedom and satisfies itself with juggling the status quo -- invariably sows the seeds of its own later isolation and disillusionment.

Clearly the U.S. is manipulating world opinion by consciously distorting the actual concrete threat to world peace beyond any measure of reality. This distortion has in turn become the backbone for the imposition of new and crippling UN conditions on Iraq prior to the reintroduction of the inspectors, thereby threatening a devastating military strike against Iraq on the thinnest of "better safe than sorry" veneers. But if there is no clear and present danger -- for an Iraq which is effectively trisected and no longer controls its airspace or its waterways, an Iraq which rests on an economy that has never recovered to the pre-Gulf War I level and which is hobbled by external debt obligations and imposed war reparations is surely, by every conceivable calculation, an Iraq that is contained-- then why war and why now? And how is this expected to contribute to the "war on terror," against Islamic jihadists? War may be an effective means of disposing of a single ruler, of stopping the aggressive designs of one or more powers, but especially under these circumstances it is a much less reliable weapon against the spread of ideology. Yet this would, one might think, be critical to any sane calculation of foreign policy in which public safety was the first order priority. For at its conclusion the looming war will, if anything, only leave the American people less secure and less free if the uninvited victor is al Qaeda.

But this administration dismisses "containment" as an unnecessary concession to Cold War thinking; an anachronism predicated on the rough symmetry of military might that does not apply in the Middle East context. And it understands -- whether it levels with the American public or not -- that a quick victory over Islamic fundamentalism is quixotic, if not utopian. Its real aim is to seize the opportunity to secure American corporate interests and assets by a stark expansion of military bases and stations, beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, so that this, as well as other, regions might be directly policed. In Bush's words: "If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge" (emphasis added). The logic of "pre-emption" which so dominates this administration is a logical outgrowth of this strategy. It is being simultaneously implemented with less fanfare in South America, where Special Forces advisors are to be deployed to protect the 500-mile pipeline across eastern Columbia that transports 100,000 barrels of oil daily for Occidental Petroleum. And it no doubt explains the rush to install American troops in Georgia and the Philippines. It has, in any case, also lowered the threshold against unprovoked transborder aggression, setting an ominous precedent easily translatable to the conflicts over Kashmir and Georgia insofar as they harbor Chechen rebels.

It is therefore little wonder that this administration has offered the American public no exit strategy from this second Gulf War. It quite simply has no intention of any immediately foreseeable departure. Saudi Arabia is seen as having disqualified itself as the central prop of Western interests by virtue of its role in the 9-11 bloodbath. The direct superintendence of the Iraqi oilfields therefore presents itself as the best way to bypass this thorny situation and side-line Riyadh by transforming Iraq into an outsized military outpost, recentering it as the primary staging grounds of American power in the Middle East. Gulf War II would, then, mark the end of the client state role in the system of Western domination, now judged to require an unmediated hands-on approach. This United States has laced the region with a network of military bases extending from Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Yemen, to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and as far north as to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in the Caucuses. That is perhaps also why American officials stated that even if American pressure prompted a coup in Iraq, the United States military would still enter and secure the country (NY Times, October 11, 2002). Expanded Iraqi oil production would enhance American leverage over Saudi Arabia, break the cohesion of OPEC and, it is hoped, provide a powerful stimulus to Western economies freshly awash in cheap Iraqi oil. Regime change would position the United States for an anticipated future confrontation with Iran and Syria while providing a living example of what may await them if they refuse to toe the American line. This rather blatant power play is evidently acceptable to a cash-strapped Russia insofar as the U.S. secures Iraqi compensation for the $12 billion in outstanding loans and the $4 billion owed Russia for transporting Iraqi oil.

And this lesson is not lost on the Syrians and Iranians, both of whom fully grasp that an occupied Iraq would provide a platform for the projection of American military might throughout the region. It is for this reason that they have, of late, begun an intensive collusion with Hezbollah to disrupt the upcoming conflict by amassing thousands of surface-to-air missiles along the northern Israeli border. In the likely event that hostilities intensify, pressure could be shifted from Iraq by miring the United States in quelling a burgeoning Arab-Israeli conflagration. Thus Iran, which is by every measure on the verge of shaking off its clerical straightjacket, is being propelled back by America's gunslinger tactics into an alliance with the very centers of Arab tyranny that forces authentically committed to the priority of democracy would otherwise be weaning it from.

And of a post- war Iraq? The Bush administration's track record is pitiable with respect to "nation building" if judged by its performance in Afghanistan. Until recently, the State Department remained close to the Iraqi National Accord, composed chiefly of defectors from Saddam's military and security services, because of its intelligence links with the CIA; while the Defense Department leaned towards the now monarchist-tinged Iraqi National Congress. For all its idealist posturing about sponsoring a representative democracy which would renounce weapons of mass destruction and emerge as a beacon of change within the Arab world, the "war party" has become increasingly wary about gambling with the disorder and anarchy that such commitments might entail. It has evidently dawned even on them that installing by American armed might exile leaders, with no roots in Iraqi society, would likely be received as a transparent farce. The interagency rivalry is therefore beginning to recede behind the emergence of a new realism, more consonant with the tenor of the emerging "internationalism" of the right. In its first stage this would involve a military occupation rather than a provisional government, with little role for the opposition forces that the U.S. had previously promoted. Robert D. Kaplan has captured the mood of the Bush administration with his call to "forswear any evangelical lust to implement democracy overnight in a country with no tradition of it." Instead, he proposes that the United States' goal "should be a transitional secular dictatorship that unites the merchant classes across sectarian lines and may in time, after building of institutions and the economy, lead to a democratic alternative." In the meantime of course, the occupation forces would control the second largest proven reserves of oil, nearly 11 percent of the world total. The transitional regime, which would presumably transplant the occupation in time, "would grant us the right to use local bases other than those in the northern, Kurdish-dominated free zone." Kaplan, in his November 2002 Atlantic Monthly article, worries only that the American public, spoon-fed the reassuring pabulum of Iraqi liberation, might not have the "stomach for imperial involvement" that the new "idealism" of the Bush administration and its ideological cohorts now want it to digest.

Neither Bush nor the "lesser-evil" Democrats have fully understood that American insecurity has increased at the same time that its military power has become overwhelming and unchallengeable. It is the American public that appears out in front of both insofar as it has been reluctant to support an American invasion enacted in the teeth of worldwide opprobrium. This might have given the Democrats leverage in raising substantive opposition to the Administration's war preparations, or to have at least provided the cover behind which it could raise the possibility of the crisis being stage-managed by the Republicans for crass electoral purposes. But these opportunities were spent solely in raising procedural objections that the Bush administration quickly neutralized. Democrats fled as if from a burning house at Washington Representative Jim McDermott's suggestion that the President had misled Americans to fashion support for its war initiative. Even the Spratt amendment, which would have required the President to return to Congress for authorization of a military strike if the United Nations failed to endorse the United States, went down to defeat. Ultimately it was apparent to all that the top Congressional Democratic leadership was in an alliance with the White House in propelling the pro-war resolution. From here the path ahead became obvious to the Administration. UN input was invoked to assuage public concern, that is recruited mafia style and strong-armed into the revelation that it could either endorse the American war initiative or abdicate altogether its say in the unfolding business of global affairs.

It is not that the Democratic leadership are scoundrels, or at least, not solely. It is rather that they take seriously their function as superintendents of the class interests of the American Establishment. This places them in a perpetual quandary. As that institution closest to the American rank and file -- its trade unions, its oppressed minorities, its civil libertarian and peace movements -- the commitment to democracy that this attachment necessarily entails stands in perpetual tension with American imperial interests that it also must defend. That circle has habitually been squared by championing a form of social imperialism unique to the Democrats and which has distinguished it from the more traditional military oriented imperialism of the right-wing. Democratic programs such as the Marshall Plan and the so-called "humanitarian" interventions in Haiti and Kosova, for instance, would have been inconceivable, and were often carried out in opposition, to the Republicans. Still, Clinton-era liberalism pioneered the way for recasting America as a potentially benign imperial power by their denunciation of U.S. military inaction when atrocities abroad occurred. In so doing, they contributed handily to the interment of the so-called Vietnam syndrome and paved the way for George Bush's America-as-global-vigilante. And as Democratic corporate commitments have grown to dominate and overwhelm its base, the tension that gave rise to social imperialism has begun to unravel ever rendering the party a simply less bellicose version of Republican unilateralists. This has left the Democrats conspicuously susceptible to the charges of waffling and inconsistency, which are not inaccurate assessments of the effect that this fragmentation has had on Democratic political coherency in the realms of both domestic and foreign affairs. Similarly, the decades long infusion of neo-conservative defectors to the Republicans has gradually reshaped that party into an activist interventionary caricature of liberalism, with a uniquely zealous program forthrightly committed to refashioning the world, or at least that part of the world deemed vital to American interests, on a market-oriented footing and to do so with conscious ideological indifference as to whether this advances democracy and human rights. Richard Haass, director of the State Department's policy-planning office summarized, "Supporting an authoritarian leader who is a modernizer and is willing to gradually loosen the reins -- that essentially should be our policy."

THE DEMAGOGIC AND CONSCIENCELESS EXPLOITATION of the Iraqi "threat" cannot diminish its political potency. By any sober evaluation, Saddam Hussein is in no position today to terrorize anyone other than his own population. But corporate dominated communications empires, which continuously enforce a concept of reality that substitutes stereotypes and canned formulas for an awareness of the true meaning and source of the ills that plague the American public, labor overtime to refashion the American community into an elite driven mass. A recent poll attesting to a provisional victory in this regard has disclosed that 66 percent of the American population believes, in the absence of an iota of proof, that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The corporate media more generally obscure precisely how this Administration is in the process, reinforced by the logic of imperial pre-emption, of fashioning a world increasingly incompatible with domestic public safety and individual security while ostensibly inscribing these very concerns on its war banners. Rarely can be found even the suggestion that in its military response, the Bush regime is likely to provoke a bloody backlash of fear and hostility that will give aid and comfort not to the forces of enlightenment and freedom abroad, but to their most implacable opponents; a backlash that will then reverberate domestically in a tidal wave of suspicion and USA Patriot Act-inspired repression.

What is truly remarkable is that in an atmosphere so saturated with confusion and political tension -- and absent virtually any organized oppositional forces -- a spontaneous grassroots peace movement could still blossom. It all the more defies expectations because the blatantly imperialist contamination of the public domain should reliably be expected rather to reinforce the habits of servility and to ease the way for the militarist mentality to become the regulator of political discourse. This has of course transpired to a degree, as gauged by the recent election returns. More remarkable, on the other hand, for being wholly unanticipated were the avalanche of emails and telephone calls in support of Senator Byrd's anti-war Congressional peroration and the massive rallies and demonstrations arising on short notice in New York and Washington DC, and peppered throughout innumerable smaller locales across the nation. A sizeable minority it would seem is gripped by the healthy conviction that Bush's rush to war has more to do with his Administration's failings, its lack of legitimacy and the resulting insecurities with respect to its hold on power as it does with any imminent threat from Iraq.

Precisely because there is little or no permanently mobilized American opposition, its peace forces necessarily arise on an ad hoc, semi-pacifist and peacenik basis in response to circumstances not of its own making. They therefore enter the world in a spirit of resistance and moral condemnation, but lacking the ideological coherency needed to organize and structure that consciousness in the form of a systematic political alternative. The movement has, in other words, only partially and provisionally separated itself from the ideological orbit of the Establishment. It laudably embodies a latent Third Camp sentiment, of an alternative from below to the world of war and barbarism, that does not need to be created from scratch, but has still yet to become manifest. It is to the ongoing activity of resistance that socialists look to as a counterweight and corrective to the conservative and defeatist consciousness that lingers in the illusions that sections of the peace movement may retain in Democratic liberalism. The programmatic job for socialists is to show in concrete how the beginning and intermediate points of resistance can be fulfilled only by a more conscious anti-capitalist orientation. This means, in other words, to relentlessly expose the real nature and aim of all war blocs and to insist that only in joint struggle with democratic peace forces abroad and especially in the Middle East can a real Third Camp alternative find its voice. It is the only program in which peace and freedom are not cynical covers for the brutal realities of capitalism, fascism and jihadist fundamentalism.

The forces of the Left are minuscule, that of the peace movement merely diminutive. But on the shoulders of these opposition forces rests the responsibility of restraining the Establishment from its next horrific military adventure and the toxic political fallout that will surely ensue. Third Camp socialists cannot and must not allow the nascent peace movement to be lured into open or concealed solidarity with the other forces of reaction and war -- Baathist Iraq or Islamic fundamentalism. This is a specific snare that reactionary and authoritarian forces -- the Stalinist Workers World Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party, forces wholly alien to the ideals, sentiment and motivations of the emerging anti-war movement -- may take advantage of a leadership vacuum and insert themselves into the movement's front ranks as organizers and spokespersons. On this socialists must be abundantly clear. In a world dominated by predatory social alternatives, which engage and propel one another as if interlocking gears in a juggernaut of death, we must offer a consistent democratic alternative not only against our Establishment, but also against all who would hijack the movement for other, antithetical, aims.

Eleven years of U.S.-led sanctions have done nothing but deflect the anger properly inspired by Saddam's criminal regime toward the West. They have thereby transformed the West into the co-oppressor, along with the regime itself, of that beleaguered nation. We are therefore duty bound to demand, why after all this -- and ignorant as one might be of the stated intentions of the occupation to come -- would any Iraqi, any Arab, trust the motivation of an American-led coalition in his or her liberation? Why wouldn't the thought of Western armies on the march deposing Arab regimes and securing oil fields be less than awe-inspiring? Why should any Arab pay heed to the condemnation of Islamic intolerance by an American regime that embraces Christian fundamentalism at home and aligns itself with Jewish settler fundamentalism in the Middle East? Terrorized and betrayed in all directions, it is only to be expected that the Arab world would turn inwards. Islam is the only indigenous force, not completely disgraced, addressing the anxieties and fears of the Arab street.

Yet, the evidence demonstrates that political Islam is remarkably fragile and jealous of its position in the Arab world. As the Rushdie affair demonstrated, Islamists seize with panic when merely confronted with the prospect of ridicule or blasphemy. Like Stalinists, they repeatedly comb through the ranks to uproot ideas and attitudes that are incompatible with their dogmas or that challenge the authority of their leading lights. They cannot engage on the level of ideas and rational debate, where they risk ongoing humiliation and defeat. These are not the responses of a movement confident of its prospects. A religion, a belief, a creed that needs to resort to violence, loyalty, conditioning and coercion is telegraphing its own insecurities. This is why a Trotsky, as emblematic of all critical, revolutionary and free thinking champions had to be relentlessly hunted down and eliminated by Stalinism and why a similar inquisitional bent is hard-wired into the brittle jihadist worldview.

Left solidarity therefore plays a multidimensional role. In raising the flag of anti-imperialist solidarity, it must relentlessly expose precisely how the Bush administration is working in abject defiance and at complete cross-purposes with the legitimate security concerns of the American people. And to the Arab masses it must show a radically different Western face, one that unashamedly links together the democratic struggles of both peoples for a future free of coercion and oppression and which makes its pitch above the heads of Arab dictators and would-be Islamic tyrants, without accommodating to the social-imperialist residue of American liberalism. It must call for the dismantling of all U.S. military outposts. It must champion the national rights not only of Palestinians but also of Kurds, not only of the Lebanese but also of Sudanese Blacks and North African Berbers. It must demand the right of Arab workers to organize and it must carefully monitor and protect the free speech rights of all, including fundamentalists. It must abandon cultural relativism and align itself forthrightly with Arab feminists and it must demand the release of dissidents in the Arab world. And, insofar as Islamic fundamentalism has declared war on atheism, it is all the more incumbent that the Left champion the causes of free-thought heresy and freedom of conscience. Socialists and Western leftists must do everything possible to support conditions conducive to a religious Reformation in the Islamic world, to assist the Arab peoples in freeing themselves of Islamic afterlife fantasies and to expose the notions of sin and evil, of taboos and oppressive social codes that act as bulwarks of the religious power structure, not guideposts of human fulfillment. This is a tall order, but a Left that does not alibi, critically defend, or appease any form of reaction, Western or Third Worldist, can alone provide the peace movement with a clear, activist and internationalist program for change.

Contents of No. 34

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