War, Imperialism and Revolution

For those who believed that the overwhelming demonstration of US military power in Afghanistan and Iraq would “shock and awe” the rest of the world — and particularly Washington’s foes and aspiring rivals — into accepting its goal of making the 21st century a “new American century” of US political and economic global domination, 2006 was not a good year.
Not only has Washington become ever more bogged down — at the current rate of nearly three billion dollars and 20 soldiers’ lives a week — in a now publicly acknowledged failing counterinsurgency war in Iraq, but a resurgent Taliban has exposed the fragility of what gains have been made in Afghanistan since the US-led military campaign ousted the group from power five years ago.
Meanwhile in Lebanon, a US-backed Sunni-Christian government finds itself under siege from an opposition alliance between the secular Christian-based Free Patriotic Movement, the Lebanese Communist Party and the Shiite-based Hezbollah movement, which has emerged from the July-August US-Israeli war against Lebanon stronger and more confident than ever.
In 2006 the two surviving members of US President George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” — North Korea and Iran — continued to defy Washington. North Korea ended its longstanding moratorium on testing its ballistic missiles on the Fourth of July, thus making its own rather defiant contribution to the fireworks traditionally associated with Washington’s Independence Day celebrations. Apparently dissatisfied with Washington’s appreciation of this display, Pyongyang defiantly conducted its first nuclear weapons test four months later
In April, Iran announced that it had successfully enriched uranium and subsequently dismissed US and European demands, in blatant contradiction to Iran’s supposed “inalienable rights” under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that it indefinitely halt its enrichment program..
The year ended with Washington securing a UN Security Council resolution imposing economic sanctions on Iran, that is a freeze on the foreign financial assets of 10 Iranian organisations and 12 Iranian individuals involved in Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. However, the final resolution, the outcome of four months of diplomatic haggling, was so watered down at Russia’s and China’s insistence and provides so many exemptions to the mandated sanctions as make them meaningless. As the December 28 New York Jewish Weekly observed: “The UN sanctions package for Iran might have come with one of those labels so familiar from other seasonal deliveries: some assembly required, teeth not included.”
Thus, according to paragraphs 12 and 13 of the resolution, funds of the designated organisations and individuals are frozen except in two cases:
1. If the funds are needed to meet regular expenses.
2. If the funds are needed to meet extraordinary expenses.
The resolution also bans the export to Iran of all material and equipment related to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, except for material and equipment specified in all contracts signed before the resolution was adopted,
Perhaps the biggest blow to Washington’s imperial ambitions came on November 7 when the majority of US voters used the mid-term congressional elections to indicate their opposition to the Bush administration’s war policy.
While the warhawks predictably claimed that the results reflected more the US public’s lack of confidence in the way Bush had carried out the Iraq war policy than on the policy itself, a battery of opinion polls in both the run-up to the elections and immediately afterward found that a large majority of US voters believe the administration’s belligerent foreign policy had made their country — as well as the rest of the world — less, rather than more, secure.
On December 7, for example, the Centre for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland released the results of a survey that found that 6 out of 10 US voters believe that threatening foreign governments with “regime change” makes them more likely to develop weapons of mass destruction to defend themselves. When told that North Korea has offered to eliminate its nuclear weapons in exchange for a US nonaggression pact, and asked if Washington should accept this North Korean offer, 7 out 10 US voters said yes.
Three-quarters of those surveyed thought that Washington should seek “to build better relations” with Iran rather than trying to pressure it “with implied threats that the US may use military force”. Fifty-five per cent were in favour of the US agreeing to Iran’s demand that it be allowed to enrich uranium under United Nations supervision to the low levels necessary for nuclear power.
With regard to Iraq, the survey found that 58% of US voters believed the US military presence was provoking more violence than it was preventing. Seventy-five per cent want all US troops withdrawn within one year.
In direct opposition to this, Bush reportedly plans to put an extra 20,000 US combat troops into Iraq in 2007, with most of them being deployed to “stabilise” Baghdad. This has already been tried before and failed. As part of Operation Forward Together, between August and October last year, US combat troop strength in Baghdad was doubled with an extra 14,000 US soldiers being deployed there. The increased number of US military patrols and raids throughout the city had little impact on the scale of the anti-occupation insurgency. All it did was lead to a surge in the US casualty rate — from 48 US troops killed in July to 65 in August, to 72 in September and 110 in October. In November, the US troop death toll fell to 79 — still almost double the level in the months before the July-October Baghdad offensive. It then jumped again with 118 US soldiers being killed in December, making that month third deadliest for the US forces in Iraq since the occupation began in March 2003. The two previous deadliest months were April and November 2004, when 135 and 137 US troops were killed. In both of those two months, the US occupation forces suffered high casualties during bloody assaults on the heavily defended rebel city of Fallujah, 55 kilometres west of Baghdad.
The reason why a 20,000 “surge” in the size of the US occupation force in Iraq will not enable Washington to defeat the anti-occupation insurgency was revealed by the results of a survey of Iraqi public opinion taken in the second half of 2006 by the US State Department and by the University of Maryland’s Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
The September 27 Washington Post had reported that, according to a US State Department survey, in Baghdad “nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if US and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65% of those asked favouring an immediate pull-out”.
The Post’s report added that interviews with “Baghdad residents in recent weeks suggest one central cause for Iraqi distrust of the Americans: They believe the US government has deliberately thrown the country into chaos … to create an excuse to keep its forces here.”
This was confirmed by the PIPA survey, conducted on September 1-4. It found that an “overwhelming majority” of Iraqis “believe that the US military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing”. This view was held by 78% of Iraqis — by 82% of Shiites and a near-unanimous 97% of Sunnis.
The PIPA poll also found that 61% of Iraqis approved of insurgent attacks on US forces — up from 47% in January. Support for attacks on US forces among Shiites had risen from 41% in January to 62% in September. Support for such attacks among Sunnis was 92%, up from 88% in January.
Bush’s plan to deploy an extra 20,000 US combat troops runs counter to the public comments made by General John Abizaid, the Pentagon’s top Middle East commander, in testimony given on November 15 before the US Senate armed services committee. Abizaid said the US Army and Marine Corps simply do not have enough troops to sustain a larger force in Iraq for very long. “We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect. But when you look at the overall American force pool that’s available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the Army and the Marine Corps”, he told the committee.
Over the course of 2006, US commanders have grown increasingly alarmed about the burden long deployments in Iraq are placing on the regular army. General Peter Schoomaker, the US Army’s chief of staff, warned Congress last month that the active-duty army “will break” under the strain of current Iraq war deployments.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell, a retired US Army general who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993, told CBS TV’s December 17 Face the Nation program that “the active army is about broken” and that the US was “not winning, we are losing” the war in Iraq. Commenting on proposals for a “surge” in US troop strength in Iraq, Powell said: “There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.”
While the majority of ordinary Americans, like the majority of ordinary Australians, are opposed to the war in Iraq, the big challenge facing Marxists and other antiwar activists in both countries is to turn this passive opposition into activity, into mass protest. The experience of the struggle against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s demonstrated that only when this happens on a sustained basis will it led to active resistance by the working-class youth who make up the ranks of the imperialist rulers’ armies to being passive cannon fodder, thus causing the collapse of the imperialist military machine as a reliable fighting force.