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Issue No. 172 | 28 March 2003 |
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Vale: Rule of Law
Poetry: If I Were a Rich Man Interview: League of Nations Industrial: 20/20 Hindsight Organising: On The Buses Unions: National Focus History: The Banner Room International: The Slaughter Continues Legal: A Legal Case For War? Culture: Singing For The People Review: The Hours Poetry: I Wanna Bomb Saddam Satire: Diuretic Makes Warne's Excuses Look Thin
The Soapbox The Locker Room Guest Report Seduction Bosswatch
 Statement on Labor's Response to WarTom's TantieShameless ExtremistsBarbarians at the GateMore War CommentBack-Slapping Bob
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Letters to the Editor Tom's Tantie
Dear Comrades, As usual, Tom Collins' righteous indignation (Workers Online #171) leads him to almost exactly the wrong conclusions. He waxes eloquent about the evils of terrorism & tyranny, but then assumes that he has made a case for the US conquest of Iraq. He has, however, failed to consider the real (as distinct from the proclaimed) motives of the US govt and the real (as distinct from the proclaimed) consequences of the war for the people of Iraq. First, the motives of the US govt: * Tom's passionate denunciation of terrorism was, unfortunately, far too abstract to be of practical use. If we are to apply his admirable opposition to terrorism to concrete examples on a consistent basis, we would have to include the Ku Klux Klan & the Christian fundamentalists who bomb US abortion clinics. On the level of State-sponsored terrorism, we have the Israeli govt's decades-long campaign of assassination of their opponents (&, more recently, anyone who's in the same building as those proclaimed opponents) and the US govt's mining of ports in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Also worthy of mention is the US support of and assistance to many of the most horrendous massacres of the post-WWII period, including Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973 & the current ongoing slaughter in the death squad "democracy" of Colombia. And finally, no list of State-supported terrorism would be complete without mention of Afghanistan, where the US supported the same people it opposes today, because they were fighting a Soviet-backed goverment. Osama bin Laden, it has been pointed out, learnt his bloody trade in a CIA-financed terrorism school. If war & conquest are the appropriate responses to the crimes of the Iraqi govt in terrorising its people & its alleged potential crimes in assisting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, which force is Tom suggesting should wage war against the US & its clients? * Tom's equally passionate denunciation of tyranny was also far too abstract to be of practical use. Once again, we have to be consistent & concrete. How about if he turns his attention to such US clients as Saudi Arabia (an absolute monarchy where women aren't even allowed to drive, let alone vote), Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Morocco, and a whole swag of Middle East sheikhdoms sitting on fair-to-middling sized oil fields? In reality, the fact that there is not a single Arab country which has a passably functioning democracy can be put down to the consistent US govt opposition to such a phenomenon for over 50 years. And don't get me going on the consistent US govt support for terror-and-torture regimes in Latin America from the 60s to the 80s. If, apart from Colombia, they're gone now, it's no thanks to Uncle Sam! Once again, if war & conquest are the appropriate responses to Saddam's tyranny, which force is Tom suggesting should wage war against the US & its clients? Next, the consequences: * Saddam's regime, detestable as it is, had no motive to engage in terrorism before the US govt launched its invasion. For all the hype about his potential to arm terrorists & his alleged links to Islamic fundamentalists, Saddam has been running the most resolutely secular government in the Arab world and the fundamentalists are his bitter opponents. As many have, no doubt, previously pointed out, perhaps the most effective way of turning a mainstream Iraqi Moslem lad into a fundamentalist terrorist would be to bomb his country back into the Stone Age, conquer it and run it as a US colony, flogging off oil at bargain basement prices to gut OPEC & keep US sales of SUVs breaking records annually. More importantly, the US govt's own policy of State terrorism would only be strengthened by the conquest of Iraq. Stand by for the world's sole superpower engaging in the 21st Century version of gunboat diplomacy. "Do as we say, or we'll flatten your country & replace you with a government which will" fits any reasonable definition of terrorism that I can find. * A US victory in Iraq will merely result in the exchange of one military dictator for another. The difference is that the dictator to come will be a US general, not an Iraqi one. After playing around with the Iraqi opposition in exile (itself a motley crew of cut-throats & spivs) for years, the US has settled for keeping Saddam's regime as intact as possible, but without Saddam. They'll get rid of Saddam, his family, his cabinet & the top two people in every department, but apart from that nothing will change - except, perhaps, for the worse. Saddam's secret police, about which the US govt is telling us all such gruesome stories, will stay on; Saddam's dungeons will be kept in business; Saddam's Republican Guard will be kept intact; and so on. They'll need these things, since they won't be running the country in the interests of the people of Iraq - no way. They don't even run the US in the interests of the North American people, for Christ's sake! Rather, the people of Iraq will be acutely aware that their country is being bled for the benefit of others and Uncle Sam will need Saddam's full apparatus of repression in order to stop the Iraqi peoples from doing something about it. As I said at the start of this letter, Tom has reached almost exactly the wrong conclusions. I was careful, however, to include the word "almost", for he agrees with us Lefties on one thing, even if he doesn't know it. We've been opponents of Saddam's bloody regime for decades, from long before Uncle Sam turned against him. In fact, most people on the Left who knew about the Middle East opposed Saddam since the day he came to power in a CIA-organised coup in the 1960s. And, contrary to what Howard & co would like everyone to believe, most of us on the Left still oppose Saddam. Since we don't want the people of Iraq to go from the frying pan into the fire, however, we insist that the right to depose a dictator resides with his subjects, not with a self-appointed globocop reminding us all that imperialism is still with us. It is the working peoples of Iraq - from the Kurdish north, the Shiite south and the central Mesopotamian region, who hold the key to their own liberation. When they rise up, the workers of Australia, North America & all industrialised countries must be beside them, for as surely as the sun rises in the East, Uncle Sam will be against them. Greg Platt
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