What are the underlying reasons for the war? Is it just because we have an “oil man” in the White House, or a bunch of power-hungry politicians hell bent on ruling the world? Or is it something more fundamental about how the world is run?
As the war on Iraq moves closer and closer, the real reasons behind the war – the US’s attempts to increase its world domination and get its hands on Iraq’s oil – are being revealed to millions around the world.
How much clearer can it get? We have been told for the past 8 months that the aim of the US and Britain was to “disarm Iraq” and “destroy Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction”. But not one shred of evidence has been found to support the idea that Saddam has “illegal weapons programmes” or any “weapons of mass destruction”. Nor will it be. The UN resolutions, the weapons inspectors and the record of Saddam’s regime were only smokescreens to hide the real aims of the war.
What are the underlying reasons for the war? Is it just because we have an “oil man” in the White House, or a bunch of power-hungry politicians hell bent on ruling the world? Or is it something more fundamental about how the world is run?
If it were just because we had bad leaders like Bush and Blair, the solution would be very easy. Let’s kick them out of office and replace them with leaders who won’t wage war. If we were to look only at the last few years of history, that might be a reasonable assumption to make. After all, Blair led the charge to declare war on Serbia in 1998 and was quick to join Bush in waging war on Afghanistan. Both are obviously warmongers.
A permanent feature?
But if we look at the past one hundred years, we’ve seen an unprecedented growth in technology and economic development.
At the same time we’ve also seen the biggest ever growth in inequality between rich and poor. We’ve also seen wars become an almost permanent feature of human society. There has not been a war-free decade in the last 100 years. More people died in wars in the 20th century than all the rest of human history put together
The system we live under, capitalism, is the root cause of most of the world’s problems, and war is an inherent feature of it.
Under capitalism, the resources, the products of the world, and the means to produce them are controlled by a small number of capitalists. The other 5 billion of us are forced to work for this tiny elite either in factories, offices or on the land. In return for this “privilege” we get a wage at the end of the week. For the billions who live outside the rich Western countries, this wage, if you’re lucky enough to have a job, is barely enough to live on.
It is a system that runs on competition, and decisions are made on the basis of profit. Different companies all compete for market share. They come up with different products not to meet human needs but so they can carve out a bigger market share and make a bigger profit. Nike competes with Adidas and Reebok to sell us different coloured trainers and track suits. Music companies compete to sell us more bland manufactured music like Gareth Gates, Will Young. Britney Spears or Pink. The music is secondary; all that matters is what can be sold and how much profit can be made.
Competition is so important to capitalism that it tries to introduce it in to every part of society. So hospitals compete for patients, universities and schools must compete for students. Public utilities like water companies and train services are privatised and broken up into smaller companies so they can compete for customers.
The end result of this is higher bills, a declining standard of services and lower wages for those who work in the industry. It makes us compete for jobs, housing and food even though there is more than enough to go around. It is a system that puts the profits and the interest of the big corporations before the needs and interests of billions of people.
Imperialism
A result of all this competition is that weaker firms either go bankrupt or get taken over by bigger ones. As companies grow (in many cases into monopolies) they not only compete in their own countries but they start to compete with companies all over the world for access to markets, access to cheaper sources of labour and resources like oil. For example not only does Sainsbury compete with Tesco, but both compete with the US supermarket giant Wal-Mart which owns Asda.
The end result of this competition on a global scale is that nation states start to compete for the right to exploit the world’s resources and people, and this is what leads to war.
In 1916 the Russian revolutionary Lenin described this period, where capital and wealth are concentrated into a few hands leading to competition between a few nation states for the control of the world, as imperialism. It was the attempt to re-divide the world for exploitation between the imperialist powers that caused the First and Second World Wars.
Using the theory of imperialism as a guide Lenin illustrated the imperialist nature of the first world war with example of “a slave owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave owner who owned 200 slaves for a more ‘just’ distribution of slaves”.
Logic of the world
This has been the logic behind the pattern of wars in the last century. A few rich countries dominate and control the resources of the rest of the world. They no longer do this through having formal colonial empires, like those once possessed by Britain and France, but through the more informal means of chaining entire nations through debt-slavery and swallowing up the economy by the First World’s multinationals.
Occasionally, the imperialists quarrel amongst themselves over their share of the loot – leading to wars like the two World Wars of the last century. Occasionally, the slaves rebel against their masters and fight for their independence, leading to wars like Vietnam’s long war against French and US imperialism. And occasionally, the imperialists wage wars of conquest against countries whose leaders don’t know their place or refuse to play their game – like the first Gulf War or in Nicaragua.
The reason countries like China, France and Germany seem opposed to the war on Iraq, is not because they want peace, but because they’re in competition with the US and don’t want to see the US in control of the Middle East.
In mid January, a US commercial intelligence agency with close connections to state intelligence sources published an interesting report about the present negotiations between the US, the European powers, the Arab governments and Iraq and the interests of the competing powers.
It said, “The motives of the anti-war nations are far from humanitarian. Many of the same countries that were agitating for war against Yugoslav President Milosevic suddenly find war with Iraq intolerable. Their real motivation is fear that the United States, once it occupies Iraq, not only will dominate the region, but use Iraq as a base from which to extend its control throughout the Arabian Peninsula, with inevitable political and economic consequences.”
Many people said that sanctions on Iraq after the last Gulf War in 1991 – which have killed at least 1.5 million Iraqis, half of them children – was just war carried out “by economic means”. And the flip side of this argument is also true. War serves the “normal” interests of economic aggression by another means.
US domination
For over 20 years the US has been on a political and economic offensive. It has used institutions like the World Bank and the IMF to batter down trade barriers and force third world companies to open up their economies to exploitation by US and other western multinationals.
Corporations like Nike, Gap, MacDonalds and Starbucks are open for business across the Third World, and their products are often produced in disgusting sweatshops where workers – including children – work long hours for a pittance.
In return for so called “loans” or “aid” Third World countries are forced to pay billions back in interest to the major western banks and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. India spends more on servicing its debt than on schools and hospitals.
Countries like the US use the control of this debt to pressure Third World countries in to accepting what ever the west wants. Not only do they maintain control by having all the money, but the US also backs its economic control with the threat of military intervention. After the war on Iraq the US will continue to use its unrivalled military force to pursue its own economic and political interests at the expense of its rivals like the EU, Japan, Russia and China.
More wars to come
This is why we can expect more, not fewer wars to come. The major European and Japanese corporations will not sit idly by and let US corporations dominate the world. They will pressure their governments to take on the US and the fight for their interests. This will only increase the rivalries that already exist and will further the likelihood of war between the imperialist powers.
But as global capitalism and the threat of war has spread across the world, so too has the resistance to it spread. In December 2001 the people of Argentina rose up and brought down their pro-IMF government. In Peru, plans to privatise the water supply were met with a massive general strike.
The anti-capitalist protests in Seattle, Prague and Genoa brought hundreds of thousands of people on to the street to protest against the economic policies of the western imperialists. Millions have taken to the streets to protest against the war on Afghanistan and millions more will fight back against the war on Iraq.
More and more this movement of resistance is coming together across the world. 60,000 met at the European Social Forum last November in Florence, to plan, co-ordinate and begin the fight back against the imperialists and their policies. It was at the ESF that the call was put out for an European wide demonstration against the war on Iraq.
Out of this growing anti-capitalist and anti-war movement must grow a movement of revolutionary workers and young people who understand and can convince others that the only way to stop war for ever is to get rid of the system that causes it – capitalism.
