Imperialist Troops Out of Iraq!

Statement by the Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International

IMPERIALIST TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ!

Full Support to the Iraqi Popular Resistance to

End the Occupation!

For the Unity in Struggle of the Oppressed Masses of the Middle East and the World Anti-War and Workers’ Movements to Defeat Imperialism!

1.
The fall of Baghdad and of the Baathist regime marks a turning point but not the end of the war between imperialism and the oppressed masses.

The mightiest war machine in the world, the U.S imperialist Armed Forces assisted by the British troops, following three weeks of massive military operations and indiscriminate air bombings against civilian targets, finally had entered into the capital of a devastated former colonial country. Iraq is a nation whose total Gross National Product equals 15 percent of the GDP of the state of Washington. And its annual defence budget was $1.4 billion, as compared with $400 billion for the United States. “Only the morally atrophied can cheer such a victory” Anthony B. Robinson rightly writes “ or portray it as Vice President Cheney has as "one of the greatest military campaigns in history."(Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 18, 2003).

After a major victory, the forces of counterrevolutionary order used to declare triumphantly “order reigns in Warsaw, in Paris, in Berlin”. Washington and London have declared after their invading armies entered the Iraqi capital that they brought “freedom” and “democratic order” to their victims. Actually, they brought terror and chaos. After their ridiculous attempt to stage a pathetic “welcome by liberated locals” has collapsed, the invaders gave the green light to looters and then to the arsonists: the capital of Arab civilization saw its invaluable cultural treasuries, monuments, museums and libraries to be vandalized and then put on fire under the supervision of the new Genghis Khan invading hordes. The goal is obvious: the Yankee barbarians seek to demoralize the Iraqi population and their supporters worldwide. But only the impressionists and the apologists could accept in its face value the official propaganda of the U.S. Pentagon.

The New imperialist World Order does not reign in Baghdad.

2.
Manifestations of popular hatred and hostility to the Occupation forces are multiplied in every place, in every city from Mosul to Basra, from Baghdad to Nasiriya.

In the capital of Iraq, only in a few days after the occupation of the city, a crowd demonstrated demanding “bread for all, elections now”. Daily demonstrations with the slogan “Americans go home” are taking place in front of the Palestine Hotel, in Baghdad, the building used now as headquarters by the U.S Occupation forces and until recently the site used by foreign journalists, deliberately attacked by an American tank.

The American GIs had to open fire to disperse a demonstration in Mosul; 20 thousand have demonstrated in Nasiriya against the imperialist-organized gathering of the collaborators with the Occupation; Quislings are confronted either by a shouting revolted crowd as in the case of the stooge Chalabi or by the people’s dagger as in the case of a collaborator Shiite cleric in Najaf, executed inside the mosque. Suicide bombing attacks in checkpoints and acts of guerrilla warfare are reported everywhere, everyday (by al Jazeera and other media in the Arab-Islamic world. Fox, CNN and the other “mainstream” imperialist TV networks prefer to keep nearly a blackout about what is going on in the new battlefields).

The Occupation forces discover the bitter truth that it was much easier to overthrow militarily the Saddam regime than to confront and subjugate an entire people who hate the serial killers of its children and elders. Now it is extremely actual and accurate the statement made by Leon Trotsky on June 30, 1940, when Hitler’s armies had occupied most of Europe: “Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable […]…an army of occupation is demoralized in an atmosphere of universal hostility […] One can expect with assurance the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder magazines”(We do not change our course, Writings 1939-40).

Demoralization in the occupation imperialist army has started during the war itself. The Christian Science Monitor quoted one 3rd Infantry Division soldier saying, "For lack of a better word, I feel almost guilty about the massacre. We wasted a lot of people. It makes you wonder how many were innocent. It takes away some of the pride. We won, but at what cost?"(17/4/03)

Iraq is already transformed into a powder keg –and with it the entire Middle East region. American imperialism has to face an Intifada in Iraq on a scale, which will supersede what the Zionist forces of occupation already have experienced in the West Bank and Gaza.

A neo-colonizing project cannot but follow the lines of fragmentation, according to ethnic lines, of this multiethnic, multicultural Arab country; at the same time colonial oppression creates conditions for a unifying struggle, where all the oppressed ethnic groups come together to fight the common enemy. The Shiite majority not only in the South and the heroic resistance of Basra but also in Baghdad had already shown that its hostility to the Anglo-American invaders competes with that of the Sunnis. A united crowd of Sunnis and Shias joins the daily demonstrations in the capital. The North is destabilized as well. The Kurds will pay again a heavy price for the capitulation of their leaderships that functioned as mercenaries of Bush and Blair in the name of the legitimate Kurdish national aspirations, which now are betrayed once more. The U.S. occupation regime has put under its military control Mosul, Kirkurk and their oilfields and it will move to abolish even the relative autonomy existing so far in Iraqi Kurdistan. Washington seeks a new ‘understanding’ with Ankara for the future of the region, bridging the drift opened by the war. If no agreement is reached then Turkey, a major bastion of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, the Balkans and Caucasus and the axis Ankara-Tel Aviv, is in danger, at a moment that the over-indebted Turkish economy is bankrupt and its political system in crisis. In case of agreement the clash of the American and Turkish forces with the Kurds is inescapable with grave implications both in Iraq and in Turkey.

The Anglo-American invaders, in the first phase of the war, had paid a heavy price from the fact that they fetishized their high tech weaponry and politically underestimated the “human factor”, their enemy and the popular reactions. Now they are entangled in a labyrinth of insoluble political contradictions both in Iraq and in the region.

The massive military presence of U.S imperialism in the heart of the Middle East will not solve by itself these contradictions. War still continues in devastated Afghanistan, more than a year after the US forces have declared victory and established a Ghost-government, which controls less than a part of Kabul. The military control of Iraq will be far more difficult. The limits of the efficiency of the imperialist machine was demonstrated beyond any doubt even in the battle to control the smallest of the Iraqi Arab cities, the port of Um Qasr…The most difficult part for the invaders starts after their provisional and partial victory.

3.
By occupying Iraq, U.S. imperialism plans to re-shape the entire political map of the Middle East- a far more ambitious, arrogant and extremely difficult project than the conquest and control of an Arab country. Arrogance blinds: the Bush Administration, following the fall of Baghdad, immediately started the war threats and pressures on Damascus.

The direct aim is to lead to capitulation the Syrian regime obliging it to cease any support to the Hejbollah fighters in Lebanon, who had kicked out of their country both the American and the Zionist troops, as well as to surrender to the terms of the Zionists on the Golan Heights and the Palestinian Question.

A war against Syria cannot be waged without involving Israel, something that both Bush Sr. and Jr. tried to avoid in the 1991 as well as in the 2003 wars against Iraq. If the Zionist Army is directly involved the “roadmap for a Palestinian State” promised by Bush Jr. in the beginning of the war to spread illusions among the Arabs and to try to end with the Palestinian Intifada through a kind of an Oslo II process will be compromised; above all a war confrontation with Syria could not but expand into a generalized new Middle East conflagration with unknown consequences.

Rather than putting an end to the Palestinian Intifada, the new stage of American aggression in the region destabilizes all the traditional pro-imperialist Arab regimes and local ruling classes, particularly in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Israeli protectorate, Jordan. Following the new war, the splits inside the regimes and between the regimes and the people are rapidly deepening in all the Arab East and in Iran, Iraq’s traditional foe as well as partner in Bush’s “Axis of Evil”.

Imperialist “peace” is nothing else than the continuation of war with other means. The Bush Doctrine declaring an “indefinite war on terrorism” is leading to more colonial wars, civil wars, anti-imperialist uprisings and popular revolts, embracing the entire region and expanding internationally.

4.
In the current interim period of imperialist “peace” all the vultures of capital, first of all the French and German “peace-loving” imperialists and the EU come to demand to share the war spoils in the name of “rebuilding” Iraq and under the disguise of a central “humanitarian” role for the UN.

Schroeder met Blair in Hanover to bury (for the time being) the dispute of the past and make a deal for the future; Chirac had a 20 minutes telephone talk with Bush trying to persuading him about “the pragmatic approach” of France; and the EU meeting in Athens, celebrating its extension to 10 new members, including the pro-American satellites in Eastern Europe, issued a Statement of the Presidency, nominally held by the Simitis Greek government, which is actually drafted and agreed by France, Germany, Britain and Spain and imposed to all other EU State members, burying the old disagreements on the war and asking for a share in the post war pillage.

The United States arrogantly refuses any concession and asks Germany, France and Russia to “cancel their demands on Iraqi debt as a contribution to the rebuilding of the country…” The inter-imperialist antagonisms, which emerged before the war and are manifestations of the systemic crisis that generated it, have not disappeared but in a disguised form continue to develop and to sharpen.

The cynical role of the French-German “axis of peace” and the political subservience of the internally split EU to the US expose all those in the European Left and “far left”, including the organizing reformist elite of the European Social Forum, ATTAC, the right wing of the movement against capitalist globalization, and their allies in the ‘United Secretariat’ who praised the “pacifist” role of the European Union and tried to attach the movement in the tail of European imperialism. The war has exposed all those like Bernard Cassen, the founder of ATTAC-France and still the dominant figure in it, who deplored the fact that the anti-war struggle and not the “vision of a new social and democratic Europe” had dominated the ESF meeting in Florence, Italy and the 1 million strong march on November 7, 2002, or those, like Michael Hardt, the co-author of ‘Empire’, who had criticized the fact that the movement against capitalist globalization had merged with and was superseded by the international anti-war movement against American imperialism.

5.
An event of historic significance was precisely the emergence of the unprecedented world anti-war movement involving tens of millions of people, particularly among the younger generation, in constant political action. Following the historical landmark of the worldwide demonstrations of February 15, the movement against war and imperialism gave also expression to all the social grievances and social anger from the devastating impact of the protracted capitalist crisis on jobs, wages, pensions, health, education, living conditions of the working class, the youth and of the poor popular masses in all the capitalist countries, both in the center and the periphery. It is this social depth that gave impetus to the biggest anti-war rebellion from the time of the Vietnam War and even from the end of World War II. This movement is here to stay and needs to be developed into an all sided mass revolutionary struggle to overthrow the capitalist governments and the system generating this wave of barbaric and ever more catastrophic wars.

The causes of the war and of the social rebellion against it are not conjectural but structural, deeply embedded in the world contradictions of Capitalism that plunges the system as a whole, including its strongest and hegemonic part, American capitalism, into crisis and historical decline.

6.
The massive robbery of the Iraqi oil wealth cannot give a way out to the unprecedented crisis of over-accumulation of capital hitting the US, Europe and Japan and fuelling the trends towards depression and deflation. When the total fictitious value of the financial derivatives in US economy reaches the astronomical height of $ 128 trillion and the US GNP is about $10 trillion, this nearly 12fold gap gives an indicator of the decline and parasitism of US Capitalism on the world economy. It gives also a picture of the urgent need driving American imperialism to impose a new form of world domination in the post Cold War chaotic world against all its current and potential rivals. The lunacy of the ‘neo-conservative’ gang of Pearle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney code-named “Project for a New American Century”(PNAC), whose draft was finished already in 1997, the year of the world Crash centered in Asia, has a logic in its madness: the logic of a social system, which has become historically outmoded and irrational. It is not an accident that even in circles of the Wall Street, as Financial Times reports, the U.S. Crusade for world hegemony is called “Hegemonic Decay.”

As the Movement for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International has stressed from the beginning, the “indefinite series of wars” promised by the Bush Jr. Administration is driven by the world capitalist crisis. It is neither a manifestation of the “irresistible ascent of an unchallenged, unique, global superpower” nor a “reaction initiated by the September 11, 2001 terrorist blows in New York and Washington”. September 11 accelerated the events; it did not change their direction. The financial bubble had bust in the Wall Street long before it and the Enron debacle, coinciding with the default of Argentina, the biggest in the history of world Capitalism, demonstrated clearly that the world capitalist crisis had entered an irreversible phase as well that the center of this world crisis is in the United States itself. The U.S imperialist “ war on terror of indefinite duration” is an attempt to re-shape all the relations between classes and between States according to the urgent needs of the crisis and decline of American and world capitalism. And the crisis will deepen further the next period, as the IMF has officially predicted.

7.
This permanent war drive is accompanied by permanent State repression, by a war against the civil liberties and all the democratic and social rights of the workers and the exploited at home. The Patriot Act II is on the agenda in the US and a series of new ‘anti-terror” laws are introduced in the EU countries. As the case of the Greek “socialist” government shows, the names and fingerprints of youth, particularly of schoolchildren, arrested during the recent anti-war demonstrations, were immediately communicated to Interpol, all the European intelligence agencies and the FBI. Undoubtedly it is a sign of the preparations of the Capitalist State and the bourgeoisie to meet in a sharpening international class struggle the new forces that have joined massively active politics the last period.

The working class and particularly its revolutionary vanguard have to prepare as well.

More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, world capitalism could not rejuvenate itself, resolve its crisis nor open a new stage of historical development, overcoming its historic decline. finance Globalization failed to stop the unfolding of the capitalist contradictions and their explosion leading into an unending series of devastating war catastrophes, from the previous Gulf war and the wars destroying Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

From their meeting in Genoa in 1997, the Trotskyist Parties and organizations that launched the campaign to re-found the Fourth International have stressed the need to answer the intensification of the capitalist crisis by fighting for the regroupment of the vanguard all over the world into a revolutionary workers’ International, which will fight to continue and complete the work started by the 1917 October Revolution, the first act of the world socialist revolution.

The current war and the on-going struggle in the Middle East and internationally make this task even more urgent than before.

End the occupation of Iraq! Imperialist troops out of Iraq and all the Middle East!

Dismantle US, NATO and all imperialist military bases!

Solidarity and full support to the Iraqi resistance! No to colonization, down with a Quisling rule, for a workers’ and peasants’ government in Iraq!

Down with the collaboration of the Kurdish leaderships with imperialism- only the unity in struggle with the Iraqi Arab people to defeat the invaders can secure the right of self-determination of the Kurdish people.

For the rebellion of the Arab people, for the unity of all of the oppressed masses in the entire Middle East, from the Atlantic to the Gulf, from Palestine and Kurdistan to the Arabian Peninsula and Iran to defeat imperialism! For a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!

Down with Zionism, victory to Intifada! Down with all imperialist schemes and “roadmaps” to strangle the Palestinian liberation movement and fragment the Palestinian people into Bantustans. For the right of national self-determination of the Palestinian people. For a secular Socialist Palestine in its entire historic territory, where Palestinian Arabs and Jews will leave together in peace.

Defend North Korea, Syria and Iran from imperialist intervention!

Dismantle Guantanamo; free all war prisoners of imperialism! Down with the Patriot Act, all “terrorist” legislation and the Police State! Hands off the civil liberties and the social rights of the people!

For the political independence of the working class and of its allies in the anti-war movement from all imperialist and bourgeois agencies. Down with American and European imperialism! Down with NATO and the EU, for the United Socialist States of Europe!

Defeat Yankee interventions in Latin America: No to the Plan Colombia, defend the Venezuelan revolution; defeat the Yankee imperialist provocations and threats against the Cuban revolution! For a new Argentinazo, for the extension of the Argentinean revolution in all Latin America and its socialist unity.

Down with all the Capitalist governments of the warmongers and their accomplices! For workers power, the only guaranty for peace!

For the world socialist revolution, the only alternative to the barbarism of decayed Capitalism!

For the refoundation of the Fourth International, the World Party of socialist revolution!

MOVEMENT for the REFOUNDATION of the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
April 18, 2003


Distributed by Workers Action (US)

A Trotskyist group in political sympathy with the MRFI

San Francisco email sf_adam at rocketmail.com

Detroit: email vorps at yahoo.com