Reprinted from the July 25, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper
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A CALL TO ANTI-WAR FORCES: STRONG ACTION NEEDED TO STOP U.S. WAR ON IRAQ

By Brian Becker

[The writer is a co-director of the International Action Center and a spokesperson for the ANSWER coalition.]

It is imperative that all progressive working class and anti-war organizations try to stop the pending U.S. war against Iraq.

These progressive organizations should base their strategy and tactics on the assumption that the administration of President George W. Bush is determined to attack Iraq and replace the current government with a puppet regime, like the one that exists in Afghanistan.

Despite this Bush administration goal, however, there exist sufficient potential deterrents--in the U.S. and around the world--that could still prevent a new invasion.

A war on Iraq is a war of imperialism against an oppressed, formerly colonized people. It is a war for Big Oil against a country that dared to nationalize its oil fields and tried to use the revenues from that oil to help Iraq emerge as an independent, modernizing regional power in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. This area contains two-thirds of the world's known oil reserves.

Working people must not be taken in by the war propaganda of the White House. It's just propaganda aimed at justifying aggression against Iraq.

Ten years ago, an authoritative Pentagon policy study was leaked to the New York Times, which published it on March 8, 1992. It was reportedly drafted by Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense. The U.S. strategists made it clear they would accept no challenge to U.S. domination of any world region.

Bush and the Pentagon are planning a war, but not because they fear Saddam Hussein's potential to develop weapons of mass destruction, or because they are sickened by the undemocratic nature of the Iraqi government. Washington supports dictatorial monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It sends $15 million a day to Israel while that government has invaded Lebanon, occupied the Palestinian territories and created a large, illegal arsenal of nuclear weapons.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR AS PRELUDE TO INVASION

The Bush administration has recently stepped up a full-scale psychological war against the Iraqi regime and the people there. It is going out of its way to create an aura of inevitability about the coming conflict. This is a coordinated, high-profile campaign designed to split the Iraqi government as a prelude to U.S. military action.

From July 11 to 13, a CIA-supported gathering in London of hundreds of Iraqi military and political foes of Saddam Hussein announced a virtual government in exile. Notably present at the meeting was Jordan's number two leader, Crown Prince Hassan. Although Jordan has publicly opposed a new war against its larger neighbor, the Western media on July 12 widely reported that the pro-U.S. monarchy has "agreed secretly to allow U.S. special forces to operate from two of its air bases" when the invasion takes place. (The Herald of Scotland, July 12)

Other lead articles have appeared in the major press of U.S. allies with screaming headlines like that in the July 16 National Post of Canada: "Iraq is bound to lose, quickly, completely." On the same day British Prime Minister Tony Blair went out of his way to tell the members of Parliament that his government will not be compelled to discuss with them any British participation in the coming war.

On July 14, Paul Wolfowitz, now the Pentagon's second-ranking official and a leading cheerleader for the war, held a press conference in Turkey--a likely site from which the U.S. attack would be launched--announcing that Turkey would reap "economic" benefits from the overthrow of the Iraqi government. Turkey is experiencing a severe economic crisis and its government was on the verge of collapse even as Wolfowitz was putting on his widely covered saber-rattling media performance.

IMPACT OF "LEAKED" WAR PLAN

The administration's psychological war, or Psyops as it is known in military parlance, began with special intensity when a top secret, five-inch-thick dossier detailing plans for an invasion of Iraq with 250,000 troops was "leaked" to the New York Times. The Times on July 5 featured the story prominently on the front page. Its follow-up editorial two days later did not dispute the legality or rightness of the planned aggression--as it did so famously with the publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in June 1971 that increased public opposition to U.S. policy in Vietnam. The Times follow-up editorial to the July 5 Iraq invasion story only called for the tactics of the war plan to be debated in Congress and elsewhere.

Since the Times story on July 5, the print media and television have been dominated by a discussion of the tactics of the coming war. Should it be a large-scale invasion of hundreds of thousands of troops or a lightning-fast special forces operation accompanied by strategic bombing? The debate, limited exclusively to what would be the "best tactics," is designed to leave everyone-in Iraq and among the public at home--with the distinct impression that the military conflict is unavoidable, inevitable and thus impossible to resist.

Which raises the question of who leaked the classified document to the New York Times in the first place?

"The Observer of London has been told that the leak ... came from within the Pentagon, from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top professional soldiers who drew it up in the first place," wrote The Observer newspaper on July 14.

CAN THE WAR BE STOPPED?

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are creating an aura of inevitability around the war with two audiences in mind. They are hoping to split the Iraqi military-hoping that sections of the Iraqi High Command will defect rather than face certain annihilation. But Bush and company are also trying to demoralize any, at home or abroad, who desire to challenge the war before it starts.

Bush and the Pentagon know the history of the Vietnam War and they are actually frightened by the potential of massive anti-war resistance from Washington, D.C., to the streets of Cairo and Amman.

While the centers of bourgeois liberalism are playing their usual frightened and collaborationist role in the face of the ultra-militarists, the genuine progressives and anti-imperialist fighters need to do everything in their power to mobilize grassroots opposition on every campus, high school, workplace and community.

While Bush slashes funds for education, housing, jobs and health care, he is calling on the sons and daughters of the working class to kill and be killed in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula for the sake of ExxonMobil, Texaco, Chase, Citibank and his corporate constituents. This war doesn't have to happen. Now is the time for the anti-war movement to intensify its mobilization among working and poor people, and especially young people--including those in uniform.

All anti-war forces should unite right now to launch an energetic and determined mobilization of the people--in the United States and around the world. It is time to remind the war-makers of the inevitability of resistance to their plans for slaughter and destruction.

- END -

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