On the execution of Saddam
The execution of Saddam, orchestrated by USA imperialism and implemented by its ignoble local puppets, was in the first place an insult – a show of arrogance against the people and workers of the Arab-Muslim world and their stubborn anti-imperialist resistance.
It was used by the real dictators of the world to reaffirm their traditional threat: "Despite the difficulties that we are facing in our policy of enslaving the area, the hanging Saddam shows the inevitable fate of anyone who refuses to bow down before our orders". And they acted with their usual all-white/Western/"Christian" racist manner based on their own laws, their own constitutional charters, and their own "universal human rights": i.e. their own supreme and untouchable interests in universal exploitation and dominion. They first arrogate to themselves the right to establish and designate who are the "criminals", and then the right to judge them and punish them.
This "right", based on the legacy of colonialism and the weapons of mass destruction available to it, has been claimed by all of the Western powers without exception. It is true that some Western governments (including that of Italy) have expressed their disagreement with the execution of Saddam, considering it an "error". But the argument for and against the death penalty is nothing more than a dispute as to the most suitable means for achieving the ends that all of the imperialist states and all of the centres of financial and mass media power in the West are pursuing in competition with each other: crush the anti-imperialist resistance of the working masses in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran and the entire Arab-Muslim world, and get their hands on these countries’ labour and oil resources.
This discussion and this division matches the discussion and division that characterised imperialism in 2003, when it came to deciding whether or not it was opportune to invade Iraq. in order to achieve the same result of "punishing the criminal" and "liberating the Iraqi people", the "doves" Chirac and Schroeder opposed the bombs, tanks and military occupation chosen by the hawks Bush, Blair and Berlusconi, in favour of the "peaceful" and "bloodless" path of sanctions, isolating the regime, and so on. It is a discussion and division that exclusively revolves around how to complete the slaughter and enslavement of the Iraqi people that began with the more than 10-year-long embargo agreed upon and implemented by all of the imperialist countries and the UN, and which killed more than a million Iraqis, including half a million children – and they still have the loathesome hypocrisy to claim they are against the death penalty!
However, imperialism did not manage to bend Saddam or most of the leaders of the past Iraqi regime. On the basis of the principles of their national dignity and pride, Saddam and many other Ba’athist leaders did not respond to the advances made to them by the occupiers, and spurned the machinations that the puppeteers would have cobbled up with their "repentance" or admission of guilt. And so, denied the possibility of being able to use a living Saddam and recycle him like Abu Mazen, they showed his head hanging from a noose in front of the Iraqi people and working Muslim masses in order to achieve the same end of weakening their resistance and, above all, fomenting and sowing divisions and fractures between the oppressed masses of Islam, between Shiites and Sunnites, and between Arabs, Kurds and Iranians.
Saddam’s head is a card that imperialism has tossed into the field in which it is bogged down as it attempts to avoid the ruin of defeat. The idea is to spread division upon division; to weave plots and hatch schemes in which to entrap the various bourgeoisies and their servants by means of flattery or by stimulating their wretched appetites; and to pour salt and acid into the wounds opened between the peoples and states of Islam that, because of its class nature, no national bourgeois regime can ever heal.
The case of Saddam Hussein is a perfect example. In 1980, on the grounds of claimed national (but really petty) interests, he started a war against an Iran that had just come through its great popular insurrection of 1979, which had dethroned the Shah and thus brought down one of the principal bastions of imperialism in the region. And it was by means of that attack – and there is one of the true crimes of Saddam, conveniently forgotten by some of the romantic anti-imperialists here in the West – that Iraq’s rais aided and abetted the designs of imperialism and the Arab regimes quaking with fear at the revolutionary wave moving out from Iran. That particular piece of counter-revolutionary work did not earn him any lasting recognition in the "international community" (of wolves…), but it did contribute to re-opening a deep and painful wound between Iraq and the Iranian nation and its Shiite populations, and one that continues to weigh not only in Iraq but throughout the Islamic world.
Saddam’s attack on Iran was no "mistake", but fully consistent with the nationalist policy of the Ba’ath party, which aimed at liberating the "Arab nation" from the dominion of imperialism without liberating the Middle East and the entire world from the capitalism on which that dominion is built. And which deluded itself of being able to do so by means of the impossible inclusion of Iraqi and Arab capitalism in the worldwide capitalist market, made "fairer and more supportive" as a result of its opposition to Western power centres, such as the real clashes represented by the nationalisation of oil, the 1973 increase in the price of oil, and the 1990 overthrow of the Kuwaiti monarchy, servant of the West.
On the embers of the divisions among the working masses created by the war between Iraq and Iran, and artfully rekindled by the West and its policy of "cooperating" with this or that national bourgeoisie in turn (it whould be remembered that Italy sent its military fleet to "protect" Saddam when, at a certain point towards the end of the eight long and terrible years of war, it seemed that Iran might win), imperialism is now copiously spreading it salt in order to ensure that the oppressed of diffrent countries, different races and different religions remain cannon fodder, remain divided and remain without their own organisation, in order to ensure that their uncontainable revolt does not spread towards the centres of capitalism that are the root cause of their misery and oppression.
With the execution of Saddam, it is now choreographing the next steps in its macabre dance around exploited Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites. The national-bourgeois Islamic regime of Teheran is pleased and satisfied that "justice has been done", and pretends to be unaware that this "justice" is controlled by Washington, the Pentagon and the world centre of "arrogance" – as Khamenei and Ahmadinejad so delicately like to call imperialism; and it is now preparing to manipulate the exploited Shi’ites it manoeuvres against imperialism in its own wretched national interests.
The end for which imperialism is driving with the objective help all the bourgeois regimes in the area (each with its own miserable interests, and all deftly orchestrated by a West that will not hesitate to strike them too) is a war between the exploited along the lines – but on a much vaster scale – of the civil war in Lebanon during the 1980s.
However, this summer, it is precisely Lebanon that has given us a glimpse of the only possible way of avoiding the slaughter of the proletariat and its capitulation to imperialism: to establish a unified mass popular resistance that goes beyond religious and national barriers. We have seen the enormous potential for the fight against imperialism smouldering in the working masses of the Arab-Muslim world. The tragic experience of the Iraqi Ba’ath party shows that such potential can only be fully expressed if the proletariat and the disinherited of the Arab-Muslim world are prepared to count exclusively on their own strength, without entrusting their claims and their fight to the direction or collaboration of their bourgeois classes (including those with a certain national pride). It is necessary for them to open up their own path towards a policy capable of undermining the basis of imperialist domination and capitalist social relationships. It is precisely for this reason that the current clash in the Middle East calls upon the working masses to overcome the limitations of the organisations that claim to speak on their behalf, such as the Hezbollah, Moqtada al Sadr, Hamas, or Al Qaeda itself, because all of them, albeit in different ways, share the national-bourgeois approch to the fight against imperialism that was characteristic of the Iraqi Ba’ath party
This task directly involves Western workers because it has to do with their own struggle to defend themselves against the capitalistic attack of which they are also a target and their own fight for social emancipation. The Western war of aggression in the Middle East, and its so far (!) bloodless attack against the conditions and "rights" of wage workers in Western countries, are two sides of the coin, and must be rejected together. And they can be rejected, but only provided that the workers here do not give any support to the "point of view" of Western governments, be they hawks or false doves; provided that they finally shake off their indifference towards the resistance of peoples who, despite the most tremendous difficulties, are also fighting for us by fighting against our common enemies; and provided that they turn to fight for the immediate withdrawal of Western occupying troops from the entirehole Arab-Muslim world, without any "ifs" or "buts".
Over recent years, many workers and young people have demonstrated against the "infinite war" and other effects of globalised capitalism. It is now necessary to resume that vital drive with much greater conviction and force, and overcome all of the "ifs" and "buts" that have hampered and devitalised it from the inside, allowing the leaders centre-left and their "radical" appendages to deflect it toward supporting the imperialist policies of Prodi’s current government. What a show was offered by the leaders of the no globalisation and no war movement, with their more or less explicit approval of the government’s position concerning the execution of Saddam or, at most, their "criticism" of Italy’s and Europe’s insufficient (even military) independence of the United States! On the contrary, it is necessary to denounce and fight against the oppressive policies advanced by Prodi’s government in the Middle East under the misleading banner of "mediating between the combatants" and "peace". It is necessary to draw up a ruthless balance of the reasons that have led the no war and no globalisation movement to its current impotence and drifting with the tide, analyse the underlying causes of the "infinite war", and construct the coherent perspective required to fight against it. It is necessary to support the anti-imperialist struggle of the workers and disinherited in the Middle East – whoever their leaders may be at the moment – in order to help them avoid the mortal risk of implosion, and begin a political discussion between the two "proletarian shores" of the Mediterranean about the strategy with which to confront our common imperialist and capitalist enemies.
1st January 2007