BY PAUL D'AMATO
CHICAGO — Ted Glick, a leading antiwar activist, recently wrote an article titled "The United Nations and Iraq", which makes the most coherent case for a phased withdrawal of US troops and its replacement by a UN-led occupation. He argues that we must take "a position beyond 'US Out' and 'Iraq for Iraqis'".
For Glick, however, "beyond" doesn't mean adding on to these demands, but negating the demands themselves. Glick argues that immediate US withdrawal will produce chaos and civil war. "It is reasonable to expect that an Iraq left to itself to sort out its form(s) of governance if/when the United States leaves would be an Iraq that would experience significant internal struggles, including armed struggles and possibly civil war", he writes.
Lurking behind these arguments is the fear that the Iraqis might erect an Islamic state if the US withdraws too quickly. Glick proposes that there be some kind of phased US troop withdrawal, followed by a UN-led occupation force — "perhaps a joint UN/Arab League force, without any US or UK participation", he suggests, that would run Iraq for an unspecified time until Iraq could be handed back to its own people.
The first thing to be said about this argument is that both the US and the UN are responsible for the chaos in Iraq, dating back decades. How can we argue that the destroyers of Iraq — both the US and the UN — be allowed to stay in this country another day? For what purpose?
The US intends to stay as long as it takes to suppress the resistance and put in place a regime and an army that will be faithful to US interests. Every extra day that the US is able to spend in Iraq is a day it moves closer to that goal.
If we replace a real analysis of what is being done to Iraq with wishful thinking about a kinder, gentler occupation, we're merely giving cover for it. Glick insists that this demand isn't the same as supporting President Bush's call for "UN participation on the ground in Iraq while the US continues its occupation. The peace movement must be clear and firm in its opposition to this plan."
But the only condition on which the US will accept greater UN involvement is on the basis that the US retains command and control of the occupation. As in the 1991 Gulf War, the UN would be a fig leaf to cover US authority, nothing more.
Secondly, we should be clear that a call for any kind of occupation is a pro-occupation position — i.e., a denial of the right of self-determination for the Iraqi people, on the grounds that Iraq must not be left "to itself".
If the UN were to take control of the occupation, what in fact would this mean? First of all, the US and Britain are on the main governing body of the UN, the Security Council. Therefore, any demand for a UN occupation without their participation is a contradiction in terms.
And what of the other permanent members of the Security Council — China, France and Russia? All of them are vultures, hovering over Iraq in the hopes of extracting concessions from the US — i.e., a piece of Iraq's oil wealth, in return for their support.
Glick himself admits that the advocates of immediate withdrawal argue "very accurately" that "the United Nations is complicit in the Iraq tragedy via its imposition of economic sanctions for 12 years prior to the 2003 US invasion, both of which have devastated Iraqi society". He also concedes, "And they argue — with legitimacy — that the UN going into Iraq this summer while the US was occupying the country was a mistake, giving support to that occupation".
Yet in spite of this record, Glick asks us to support a UN occupation of Iraq. In effect, he is asking Iraqis to accept the murderers of their children as rulers over their nation in order to prevent chaos!
The idea that Iraq is in need of some kind of "enlightened Western intervention to solve their problems" — to quote a response to Glick that activist Lucy Herschel wrote on the United for Peace and Justice email discussion list — "is another version of the 'White Man's Burden'. From British colonialism, to the CIA helping Saddam Hussein into power, to the US occupation and its UN endorsement today, Western intervention is the main thing standing between Iraqis and their ability to run their own country democratically", Herschel wrote.
The justifications for colonialism have always run along two interrelated lines. First, the "natives" are not capable of managing their own affairs; and second, "abandoning" them would lead to further brutality and dictatorial rule. "To abolish the colonies", remarked the right-wing German social democrat Eduard David in a debate on colonialism in 1907, "would mean giving them back to the native peoples. What then would occur in the colonies? They would not experience humane rule but a return to barbarism."
What is disconcerting is how much this argument is reflected in Glick's reasoning. The assumption of the "white man's burden" is that the big powers (for it is they who run the UN) have both the moral authority and the political right to intervene to "sort out" the rest of the world — and secondly, that they are capable of intervention for something other than the purposes of plunder.
The experience of the Vietnam War taught antiwar activists to be "knee-jerk" anti-imperialists, opposed to Uncle Sam sending troops anywhere. The US then launched, under the guise of "humanitarian intervention", a series of interventions designed precisely to erase the "Vietnam Syndrome" — from Somalia to Kosova. A whole section of the left bought into the reasoning that the US is capable of benign intervention in certain instances.
As soon as we in the US, whatever our intentions, begin making our opposition to the conquest and occupation of Iraq conditional, then we are in practice acknowledging the right of the US and other powers to decide Iraq's fate. In effect, we would be saying that we are "for" Iraq's independence from US and foreign rule, but only on the condition that the Iraqi people can behave themselves.
The argument that a US withdrawal might strengthen political Islam in Iraq is upside down. US imperialism is in large part responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region.
Over the last century, the US government has attempted to use various means — from dictatorial client regimes, to Islamist proxy armies (in Afghanistan) to direct military intervention — in order to protect its oil interests. It alternately backed Islamist movements as a counterweight to secular anti-imperialist movements, and it has now turned on the Islamist organisations.
But the continued US dominance of the region breeds Islamic opposition. A precondition for the development of a secular, democratic society in the Middle East is the complete end of imperialist control over the region.
Those like Glick who put forward a UN occupation argue that the movement must offer "realistic" solutions to the US occupation. But it is Glick and company who are unrealistic — in believing that the UN could be a benign force, rather than what it really is: the light blue coating over a red-white-and-blue occupation.
"When Glick talks about the 'best of a series of bad options'", writes Herschel, "he completely discounts the idea that the solution to Iraq's problems could come from within Iraq itself."
The solution for Iraqis cannot come from above — through the mechanism of one or another combination of imperialist powers. It can only come through the struggle of ordinary Iraqis themselves — and from mass movements outside Iraq linked together with them in international solidarity.
[From Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 1, 2003.
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