1-19-07, 9:03 am
G.W. Bush is preparing for his state of the union address, popping up on TV to push his Iraq policies, which he has “conceded” have not been without fault in recent months. Trying to make sense of what G.W. is saying is a little like peeling the proverbial union to find the center. Or maybe a 1960s hippie listening to Tiny Tim sing Tip Toe Through the Tulips. Bush becomes so square he's hip, so fragmented he's far out, so out of touch with any reality that might break out singing Yellow Submarine and who would know the difference?
At the risk of sounding ridiculous myself, I will, because the issues are so significant, take Bush seriously and try to evaluate the deepening disaster to which he remains oblivious.
First the Taliban, the brutal clerical fascist force that Ronald Reagan and GW's dad put into power in Afghanistan through their contra war in the 1980s and early 1990s are “surging” against NATO troops across the Pakistan border, as they did against the Afghan Communist led government and the Soviet army a two decades ago.
Pakistan, a military dictatorship, remains our “ally,” even though it has sold nuclear technology to regimes that the U.S. regards as “rogue states” and has within its business, military, and intelligence ranks active supporters of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the official enemies the U.S. is fighting in its war against terrorism.
Saudi Arabia has been the financial center and Pakistan the recruiting center for groups who have launched terrorist attacks on civilians in the U.S. and other countries and continue by all accounts to be committed to further attacks. All serious analyists contend that these groups are stronger today then they were at the time of the Iraq invasion because of the Bush administration policies in Iraq. To all this, Bush has nothing to say to the American people.
His policy if it can be called a [policy is to continue to protect and run interference for his feudal and corporate oil buddies in Saudi Arabia and to encourage General Musharaf, the Pakistani dictator and Daily Show guest, to do more against the Taliban-Al Qaeda forces and to cheerlead for Musharaf when his government makes a raid and/or captures a group of terrorists (rather like the corrupt cops who would raid a gangster club to keep the citizenry happy every now and then while they continued to accept bribes from the gangsters).
A terrible situation currently exists in Afghanistan, where the U.S. did have some justification, allies, and widespread support for its military action, given the savagery of the Taliban regime and its direct involvement and open alliance with Al Qaeda. The Bush war in Iraq has led to a much more dangerous situation for the people of Afghanistan, for whom a Taliban restoration would quite probably mean mass murder.
But Bush isn't saying much about Afghanistan, where the government his administration established is denouncing Musharaf for aiding and abetting the Taliban forces. Instead, he is talking a lot about Iraq and about the fight for democracy in that country.
Now there are many definitions of democracy that people through the world have come to believe that in that have nothing to do with what Bush and tragically most contemporary U.S. policy makers are talking about. These definitions connect democracy to both real political freedoms and rights and economic and social rights. Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms were perhaps the best example for Americans of progressive views (in some respects they merged both capitalist and socialist definitions of democracy) of such definitions of democracy, along with Roosevelt's advocacy in his last re-election campaign (1944) of an “economic bill of rights.” (Today the Communist Party, USA, in its call for “Bill of Rights Socialism,” advocates an updated and much more advanced version of Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights).
The Four Freedoms were: Freedom of Speech and Expression: Freedom of Every Person to Worship God in his Own Way: Freedom from Want: and Freedom from Fear.
If Bush and his policy planners applied the Four Freedoms to Afghanistan, they would see that Afghans had none of these freedoms under the Taliban and certainly have gained far less of these freedoms under the present government than they would have if the invasion of Iraq had not been the administration's first priority.
Iraqis perhaps had religious freedom under the rightwing dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but little else. Today, Iraqis may have greater formal freedoms of speech and expression than under the Baath regime, but this is of little value in a context of death squads, arbitrary searches and seizures, kidnappings and murders for either political reasons or criminal gangs seeking profit. As for freedom of religion, Iraqis of the two major Muslim denominations face what Americans would consider hate crimes against their mosques on a daily basis, along with terrorist attack on both clergy and laity (the Christian minority has also suffered heightened persecution and many have fled the country since the occupation).
The Bush administration has through its policies condemned millions of Iraqis to far greater want than they suffered under the previous regime as the population literally seeks to feed and clothe themselves on day to day and unemployed workers waiting in shapeups for jobs that may never come also face the possibilities of terrorist bombings that may cost them their lives.
Fear of course is everywhere. For Iraqis, it defines their daily lives as the U.S. military forces seek to protect themselves and their surrogates. Also, that Bush proclaims his commitment to “democracy” in Iraq at the same time that reports in the U.S. and global press from serious analysts state that he is getting ready to get rid of the Prime Minister, Maliki, that his “democratic process” installed, because Maliki is beholden to the Shia clerical warlord, Sadr, is almost surreal, unless one remembers that U.S. governments in the Caribbean and Central America defined “self-determination” for countries like Cuba and Nicaragua as the right of those countries to have governments that did what U.S. business and government interests wanted.
Actually, the Iraqi Communist party has some suggestions for a resolution to the crisis which most Americans would, if the label Communist were not in front of them, agree with much more than what Bush is putting out. These suggestions offer a way out of the disaster for both the Iraqi and American peoples.
These suggestions include establishing a clear timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, keeping the various regional powers (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia) out of the country's internal development, protecting both the oil and the rights of Iraqi working people, and providing assistance to those forces who are working to establish an Iraqi society which will enable Iraqis to live with a sense of both confidence and security (in effect, to live with Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms).
These are the policies that American progressives should support, not those of GW Bush and not those also of some left opportunists in the U.S. who have jumped on the bandwagon of immediate U.S. withdrawal and have largely ignored the situation on the ground in Iraq.
The weakness of the American left historically has encouraged both fierce factionalism and opportunism of both left and right varieties. The historic role of the Communist party, when it led working class forces in alliance with the center to win great victories for the working class in the 1930s and 1940s, was to overcome to a considerable extent these divisions and the various forms of opportunism and help to make the broad left into an effective force in U.S. politics. That is needed again today.
Today some left opportunists have found it convenient to denounce the Iraqi Communists as allies and agents of the U.S. occupation, and their supporters in the U.S. as Trojan horses in the anti-war movement here. (“Trojan horse,” one might remember, was the term that Martin Dies, the founder of HUAC, used for the CPUSA, an example of the fact that the far right and the far left sometimes think along similar lines).
What these forces ignore, or rather refuse to see since it conflicts with what they wish to see in the U.S., is that much of the resistance to the U.S. occupation is reactionary, not progressive, and comes from remnants of the former Baath regime, clerically based paramilitary forces loyal to various clerical leaders, and local, regional and tribal warlord groupings, and of course the Al Qaeda group, which espouses a virulent rightist ideology that is not only anti-secular but also anti Shia Muslim and all other Muslims who do not conform to its theological dictates. To believe that an immediate unilateral U.S. withdrawal from an escalating disaster that the Bush administration has brought to the Iraqi people would not magnify that disaster is to enter into a world of political fantasy.
To believe also that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” which is at the root of such thinking is immature in the extreme. Revolutionary changes are made by mobilizing masses of people on a program that they can see will give them a chance to radically improve their lives, not terrorizing them into submission. The Ba'ath regime killed tens of thousands of its political enemies, including Communists, labor activists of all kinds, Muslim religious opponents of various backgrounds, Kurdish opponents of various political backgrounds, and rival nationalists.
Except for Iraqi Communists and the Iraqi left, none of these other groups has any program to unite and advance the struggles of the Iraqi people, only programs to fight their opponents and the U.S. occupation with both guerilla attacks on military and police installations and terrorist attacks against Iraqi civilians. U.S. forces are increasingly onlookers seeking to protect themselves as a multi-faceted “civil war” (not a civil war of the traditional kind between two factions or regions, but many groups and factions in and outside of the existing government attacking each other and anyone else whom they choose with relative impunity) becomes the reality for Iraqis.
It is time that the anti-war left in the U.S. begin to listen seriously to Iraqi Communists and the Iraqi labor left (the Iraqi Federation of Workers) instead of either ignoring or “red-baiting” them. Working class internationalism means that we must fight a two front war against U.S. imperialism in Iraq represented by the Bush administration, but also against policies that would turn post occupation Iraq into, at best, a version of pre occupation Iraq and at worst a perpetual war zone, where regional powers and the U.S. NAT0 bloc both cut deals with each other and fought each other over the nation's oil.
Such a policy, a two front war by U.S. anti-war activists against both the Bush administration and those who are blind to the realities in Iraq and/or willing to sacrifice the Iraqi people to their political agendas, offers a way out for the Iraqi people and the beginnings of an anti-imperialist foreign policy for the American people. Such a policy would also provide left “state of the union” answer to Bush's coming and very predictable State of the Union defense of his policies.
Please Norman Markowitz's addendum to thi s article here: .
