US and British Imperialism occupation of Iraq.

This is what a war for oil looks like (subhead)

130,000 British and American troops are in action in Iraq from a total force of 250,000 in the Gulf. The Allies have launched 725 Tomahawk missiles, flown 18,000 sorties, dropped 50 cluster bombs and discharged 12,000 precision-guided munitions. That’s $3bn worth of ammunition. There have been at least 1,254 Iraqi civilians deaths, 57 Kurdish deaths and 5,103 civilian injuries. 3,650 Iraqi combatants were killed. 8,023 Iraqi soldiers have been taken prisoners of war.

So far, 0 weapons of mass destruction have been found and no direct links between the Saddam Hussein regime and Al Qaeda have been proven.

1,500,000 people in southern Iraq have no access to clean water. 200,000 children in southern Iraq are at risk of death from diarrhoea. 17,000,000 Iraqis are reliant on food aid.

600 oil wells and refineries are now under British and American control. This has cost the US $20bn so far, and is expected to rise to $80bn. Britain has put £3 billion aside for expenditure on the war. In sharp contrast with the cluster bombing of densely populated areas, soldiers moved cautiously in to take control of the oilfields without setting them alight. In sharp contrast with the rhetoric of liberation, the US and British troops stood aside and watched the looting and burning in the first days after the crumbling of Saddam’s regime. This is occupation. This is what a war for oil looks like.

International Socialist Resistance (ISR) has chosen to organise actions internationally around the 1 May. What better occasion to express our condemnation of the US-led occupation of Iraq than on 1 May, a day of workers’ struggle and international solidarity. What better occasion to campaign for an alternative to the capitalist system of greed, profit and war than the 1 May, and to retie the knot with the revolutionary traditions of past Mayday actions and demo’s.

The outbreak of war met with huge protests in many countries over the world. In Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, England/Wales, Germany, Greece, Ireland North and South, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States to name but a few. In Germany alone 150.000 students and school students came out on day X. In many countries we, the youth organised in ISR, led the way with school students and students committees against the war. In the months before the war started we actively campaigned for strike-action on day X. We initiated debates, rallies, strikes and demonstrations. We raised the necessity to campaign for the right to strike for students where they came under attack from school boards, the media or the traditional politicians. ISR wants to build on the experience and traditions of the anti-war movement. The actions on Day X were a testimony of the rising of the youth. The massive demonstrations, school students’ and student strikes, baffled the ruling classes with the power and radicalism of a new generation.

A new generation that will combine an answer to imperialist aggression and war with an answer to the onslaughts of the big business governments on our rights and living standard. We are not the carefree generation X. Attacks on the right to a free education, full employment, social services and social security like unemployment benefit, threaten our future. As a result ever-growing numbers of youth live in poverty.

Within 24-hours the television pictures of Iraqis ‘celebrating’ the end of Saddam Hussein’s rule where replaced by images of the horrible humanitarian consequences as looters moved into hospitals and set fire to public buildings. The sinister attitude of the invading armies was made even clearer when they moved in to protect the Ministry of Oil and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior but stood aside when it came to protecting the civilian population, the hospitals or restoring access to water and electricity.

The US has made it clear they intend to introduce a puppet regime in Iraq. Each of the 23 ministries will be headed by an American with Iraqi advisers. The retired US Lt-General Garner was flown into Baghdad last week (22 april) as the head of the so-called Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). He is there to hand out the multi-billion dollar contracts to American and British multinationals and to oversee to creation of an Iraqi government that will serve the interest of the Pentagon, the White House and Downing Street. These yes men do not represent the people of Iraq. The Pentagon’s protégé to head a future Iraqi government Chalabi is another example of how the Bush administration wants to bring democracy to Iraq. Chalabi has lived outside Iraq for the last 45 years! In 1989 he fled from Jordan in the boot of a friend’s car after being accused and convicted in his absence for fraud and embezzlement of £40m ($ 60m) over the affairs of the Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan. This is the self-proclaimed ‘liberator’ the Americans want to force on to the Iraqi people. This is not liberation it is occupation.

The premeditated showdown with Iraq has always been conceived by George Bush and co. as a war, not for democracy or human rights, but for the economic and strategic interests of US Imperialism, especially the oil-companies.

When Saddam sent his people into a devastating war with Iran between 1980 and 1988 it was the US who intervened from 1982 onwards to prevent an Iranian victory in the war. On the principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" they armed the Baath-Party regime. When Donald Rumsfeld paid an official visit to Saddam in 1983 the Iraqi army was using chemical weapons (against Iranian troops and against the Kurds in Northern Iraq) on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions. The US didn’t care about democracy and human rights back then. They cared about their own interests. Looking at the Arab regimes that are the present day ‘friends of the US of A’ in the region, it is very difficult to pretend that they care about democracy and human rights now. The ruling elites of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Egypt hardly preside over democracies let alone allow their people basic human and political rights.

The occupying forces and part of the Western media like to portray Iraqi society as backward, partly blaming it on the Iraqi people themselves that they lived under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. They do this to attempt to legitimatise the invasion as the liberation the Iraqi people who, it is claimed, wouldn’t have been able to organise the removal of Hussein’s regime of their own accord. They try to cover themselves in the cloth of moral superiority bringing Western style democracy to the ‘backward’ Middle East. In fact the only genuine movement of the Iraqi people the US and Britain would have welcomed would have been one that coincided with their timetable and interest. When the Shia population of Southern Iraq rose in 1991 Bush senior stood back while Saddam’s forces massacred the insurgents and resorted to even more systematic, vicious repression. Bush senior called for an uprising but left it bleeding to death as he followed the advice of the US generals not to go to Baghdad to topple the regime.

The subsequent installation of 12 years of crippling UN sanctions further weakened the power of the Iraqi working class and youth to fight the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Only a popular mass movement with genuine representation of the religious and ethnic minorities could have removed Saddam without opening the path of disintegration and strife. That this is possible has been shown when the Iraqi masses moved in 1958 to free themselves from another repressive regime. Their mass uprising was successful in removing a British colonial administration, which was particularly oppressive employing air raids and chemical gasses against uprisings of the Kurds and other minorities. The example of how Milosovic in Serbia couldn’t be removed by three weeks of NATO bombings in 1999 but had to flee an uprising by the population is testimony to the power of the working class, the youth and the downtrodden layers of society.

Today the US and Britain have taken control of the country’s wealth and resources. They expect a minority of Iraqis to collaborate to get their hands on a few crumbs of the spoils of the conquest. The price they will have to pay is to take part in the game of ‘divide and rule’ setting religious and ethnic minorities against each other. Ordinary Iraqis will hate them for it.

Proven Iraq oil reserves are currently put at 112 billion barrels. The country has the second largest oil-reserves in the world. The US is campaigning to lift the sanctions regime imposed by the UN, on American request, so they can get the oil flowing again. Major contracts have been awarded to US firms, especially White House cronies like Halliburton, the oil services group once run by Vice President Dick Cheney. The majority of the oil revenue will disappear into the pockets of American and British multinationals. France, Russia and Germany are getting extremely nervous at the prospect that they will miss out on the spoils and are trying to use the UN as a backdoor to get their hands on some of the contracts. A senior US diplomat explained the US position in The Independent (London 17/04/03) "The hawks in the Bush administration feel they were badly burnt by the failure to get the [UN] Council’s backing for the war and are determined to stop the people who blocked them from getting their hands on the pie".

Ultimately the Iraqi people will pay the debts of Saddam Hussein. The revenue of oil will be used to pay back foreign lenders, countries and banks, who made fortunes selling Saddam anything he wanted, from golden washbasins for his palaces to armoured vehicles for his army. The Iraqi debt is estimated at US$ 10.500 per capita. On the basis of capitalism the vice of the financial markets, the multinationals and the imperialist governments on the Iraqi people is guaranteed.

The wealth of Iraq should belong to the Iraqi people. Under the regime of Saddam Hussein the oil industry was state-owned, the oil wealth disappeared into the pockets of the dictator, his family and their cronies. The oil companies should be brought under democratic public ownership with workers management and control, as a first step to bring all major industries under democratic public ownership. The revenue can be used to build public services, social security, and free education to guarantee a decent living standard for all.

US imperialism has achieved its war aims. The people of Iraq may be facing turmoil and starvation, but Iraq's oil is firmly under US control. When it comes to furthering the interests of US multinationals Bush and Blair have very deep pockets, but spending money on improving the lives of ordinary people is a different story. According to the UN, the one billion people on the planet without clean drinking water could be provided with it for $40 billion - half what Bush has already pledged for the war on Iraq and its aftermath. And only a measly $2.4 billion of the astronomical sum that US imperialism are spending on this war will go to reconstructing Iraq - the rest will be spent on occupying it.

And the losers in this war will not only be the poor and oppressed of Iraq - working class people in the US and Britain will also lose out. Already, the capitalist economic crisis in the US has meant that two million Americans have lost their jobs over last two years. The response of the Bush government has been to wage war at home as well as abroad - with tax cuts for the super-rich, and cuts in welfare, services and education for everyone else. And it is guaranteed that Bush will not expect the multinationals to pay for the war on Iraq. Instead he will increase the burdens he has already laid on the majority of the US population by increasing taxes for the working and middle classes. The hypocrisy of the representatives of big business never ceases to amaze. As the war in Iraq began, members of the US House of Representatives gave speech after speech praising US soldiers and passed a resolution declaring their support for the troops. Then they voted to slash veterans’ benefits.

Worldwide the education of young people is being cut back for all but the children of the super-rich. The idea of free education is being destroyed. Our school classes are becoming more overcrowded, books and equipment are being cut back and fees are becoming more expensive. Our governments tell us that they have no choice but to cut - they do not have the money. Yet it is a different story when it comes to war. For example, in Britain the New Labour government has abolished the maintenance grant for higher education students and forced them to pay fees for their courses. As a result the numbers of working class students completing their courses has dropped dramatically. But the £3 billion New Labour have already pledged for the war on Iraq would be enough to abolish the university fees and re-introduce a student grant of £4,200 a year. Blair has described doing this as 'Utopian'. For him it is, because Blair, like Bush, represents big business - so for him the profits of the oil companies and the other multinationals will always take priority over the education, welfare and wages of ordinary people.

In Germany the Shröder government has spoken out against the war on Iraq yet has begun a general offensive against the living and working conditions of workers’ and youth. Workers in the public services are being forced to work longer hours for the same pay. Unemployment benefits, health services and pensions are under attack. The youth and workers are asked to keep the profits to a minority of shareholders flowing.

The relative short duration of this war will be used to try and prove that the US is all-powerful and that any popular resistance is futile. That young people, especially, should grow up and learn to accept the ways of the world. But the anti-war movement has shown that there can be more than one superpower in the world. Bush and his administration may seem overtly optimistic about their power to shape events in the world; the way they have tried to clamp down on the anti-war movement in the US shows a different picture. The American ruling class came under pressure as the anti-war movement made clear that this war only represented the selfish interests of a tiny section of US society, the capitalist class.

The global mass indignation has left an undilutable mark. Inevitably the anti-war movement is smaller now than the high point of 15 February. However, as the economy sinks into crisis, as working class people and youth will be asked to pay the cost of the invasion through their taxes and through cuts in public and social services; the rising of the youth against the war will stand out as an example for the new movements that develop. It will be repeated in struggles against new wars, it will be repeated in struggles against the future plans of governments and companies.

This summit of the seven richest countries in the world plus Russia will go ahead in Evian, France. From the 1 - 3 June this "summit of the peace", as it is called, will discuss the division of the war conquest between the major imperialist powers. France and Russia, in particular, will press for the UN to play a bigger role in the reconstruction of Iraq. The idea being that the US and Britain shouldn’t be allowed to keep the loot for themselves.

Chirac nor Putin have clean hands when it comes to bloody wars, imperialist interventions or the introduction of repressive laws at home. While the eyes of the world where fixed on Iraq, France has intervened militarily in the Ivory Coast and Russia has persisted with a particularly bloody and brutal intervention in Chechnya.

We support the mass mobilisation against the G8 summit called for by a vast coalition of organisations. You can join the ISR contingent in Evian. Contact the ISR internationally or a national ISR group to see if you can travel with us to the anti-G8 protests.

Join International Socialist Resistance

ISR has been launched as an international, anti-capitalist, and socialist youth movement by a number of international youth organisations: Elevkampanjen/Youth Against Racism in Europe (Sweden), International Verzet/Résistance Internationale (Belgium), International Verzet (Netherlands), Socialist Youth (Ireland), International Socialist Resistance (Britain), and International Resistance (Greece).

We bring together young people from all over the world to struggle against global capitalism. We are a broad, inclusive, and democratic socialist youth movement.

While building for international demonstrations against capitalist institutions like the IMF, World Bank, WTO or EU, we will also link-up with the day to day struggles in communities, schools and workplaces - against cuts, job losses, and privatisations etc.

But we are not just against globalisation, neo-liberalism and capitalism. We are in favour of a socialist society based on the needs of humanity, not profits: a democratic socialist society.

We appeal to all those who want to see an alternative to capitalism to join us. Whether you already consider yourself a socialist or you are interested to hear more about our ideas, this new campaigning organisation is the place for you.