Back issues

No 1244 3rd August 2004

Putting the boot in is all that the whole Western "democratic philosophy" is really about. Bourgeois criticism of imperialist villainy, though useful, invariably misses this point, - and also the point of seeing the Western powers fall apart in the most unseemly and incoherent squabbling. Scepticism about an inter-imperialist warmongering explosion omits the trade-war crisis and the poor historical perspective now for Third World stooge regimes of the West from its calculation. Empire humiliation is growing, and it must strike back somehow

A senior British civil servant has published part-confirmation of the EPSR's solitary Marxist analysis of WAR and DOMINATION itself as the real aim of the American Empire's Middle East blitzkrieg:

In the 70s, the US agreed with Saudi Arabia that Opec oil should be traded in dollars. American governments have since been able to print dollars to cover huge trading deficits, with the further benefit of those dollars being placed in the US money markets. In return, the US allowed the Opec countries to operate a production and pricing cartel.

Over the past 15 years, the overall US deficit with the rest of the world has risen to $2,700bn — an abuse of its privileged currency position. Although about 80% of foreign exchange and half of world trade is in dollars, the euro provides a realistic alternative. Euro countries also have a bigger share of world trade, and of trade with Opec countries, than the US.

In 1999, Iran mooted pricing its oil in euros, and in late 2000 Saddam made the switch for Iraqi oil. In early 2002 Bush placed Iran and Iraq in the axis of evil. If the other Opec countries had followed Saddam's move to euros, the consequences for Bush could have been huge. Worldwide switches out of the dollar, on top of the already huge deficit, would have led to a plummeting dollar, a runaway from US markets and dramatic upheavals in the US.

Bush had many reasons to invade Iraq, but why did Blair join him? He might have squared his conscience by looking at UK oil prospects. In 1968, when North Sea oil was in its infancy, as private secretary to the minister of power I wrote a report on oil policy, advocating changes like the setting up of a British national oil company (as was done). My proposals found little favour with the BP/Shell-supporting officials, but Richard Marsh, the then minister, pressed them and the petroleum division was expanded into an operations division and a planning division.

Sadly, when I was promoted out of private office the free-trading petroleum officials conspired to block my posting to the planning division, where I would surely have advocated a prudent exploitation of North Sea resources to reduce our dependence on the likes of Iraq. UK North Sea oil output peaked in 1999, and has since fallen by one-sixth. Exports now barely cover imports, and we shall shortly be a net oil importer.

Supporting Bush might have been justified on geo-strategic grounds. Oil and the dollar were the real reasons for the attack on Iraq, with WMD as the public reason now exposed as woefully inadequate. Should we now look at Bush and Blair as brilliant strategists whose actions will improve the security of our oil supplies, or as international conmen?

Should we support them if they sweep into Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia, or should there be a regime change in the UK and US instead?

There were only two credible reasons for invading Iraq: control over oil and preservation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Yet the government has kept silent an these factors, instead treating us to the intriguing distractions of the Hutton and Butler reports.

Butler's overall finding of a "group think" failure was pure charity. Absurdities like the 45-minute claim were adopted by high-level officials and ministers because those concerned recognised the substantial reason for war — oil. WMD provided only the bureaucratic argument: the real reason was that Iraq was swimming in oil.

Some may still believe the eve-of-war contention by Donald Rumsfeld that "We won't take forces and go around the world and try to take other people's oil... That's not how democracies operate." Maybe others will go along with Blair's post-war contention: "There is no way whatsoever, if oil were the issue, that it would not have been infinitely easier to cut a deal with Saddam."

But senior civil servants are not so naïve. On the eve of the Butler report, I attended the 40th anniversary of the Mandarins cricket club. I was taken aside by a knighted civil servant to discuss my contention in a Guardian article earlier this year that Sir Humphrey was no longer independent. I had then attacked the deceits in the WMD report, and this impressive official and I discussed the geopolitical issues of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and US unwillingness to build nuclear power stations and curb petrol consumption, rather than go to war.

Saddam controlled a country at the centre of the Gulf, a region with a quarter of world oil production in 2003, and containing more than 60% of the world's known reserves. With 115bn barrels of oil reserves, and perhaps as much again in the 90% of the country not yet explored, Iraq has capacity second only to Saudi Arabia. The US, in contrast, is the world's largest net importer of oil. Last year the US Department of Energy forecast that imports will cover 70% of domestic demand by 2025. By invading Iraq, Bush has taken over the Iraqi oil fields, and persuaded the UN to lift production limits imposed after the Kuwait war. Production may rise to 3m barrels a day by year end, about double 2002 levels. More oil should bring down Opec-led prices, and if Iraqi oil production rose to 6m barrels a day, Bush could even attack the Opec oil-pricing cartel.

Control over Iraqi oil should improve security of supplies to the US, and possibly the UK, with the development and exploration contracts between Saddam and China, France, India, Indonesia and Russia being set aside in favour of US and possibly British companies. And a US military presence in Iraq is an insurance policy against any extremists in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Overseeing Iraqi oil supplies, and maybe soon supplies from other Gulf countries, would enable the US to use oil as power. In 1990, the then oil man. Dick Cheney, wrote that: "Whoever controls the flow of Persian Gulf oil has a stranglehold not only on our economy but also on the other countries of the world as well."

John Chapman is a former assistant secretary in the civil service, in which he served from 1963-96

Oil and the dollar are the economic specifics but this lifelong British imperialism civil servant obviously is inseparable from the tradition of domineering through empire, keeping the most powerful armed forces to intimidate the natives, and blitzkrieging very forcefully whenever necessary.

But it is precisely the ECONOMIC CRISIS conditions, inbuilt into the imperialist system (see EPSR box), and the endless warmongering engendered by the periodic disastrous market collapses resulting from the cut-throat inter-imperialist competitiveness in slump, — which make the Empire system increasingly hated and no longer tolerable to civilisation, as it is proving today in the Middle East.

The intolerable insanity of the repeated destruction of the planet by war is obscured when the protagonists are described offhandedly as 'needing to go into the Middle East to secure oil supplies and to prevent market damage to the dollar'.

The "free world" imperialists went in to destroy, butcher, and DOMINATE first of all via "shock and awe", and then to dictate terms to a defeated "enemy", — exactly as this senior civil servant admits.

And there were other factors too, — all directly warmongering factors concerning Iraq which helped make it the first big target for the start of this new advanced phase of American Empire warmongering in order to totally make clear and assert the USA's dominance over the world in the hope that all future crisis problems (they will mount rapidly) can be solved to America's benefit and at the expense of everyone else.

Saddam Hussein in Iraq had long begun to fight back against this total American domineering.

And in sentiment, he was prepared to go all the way to all-out war against these imperialist bullies if he could.

Hence he could be slowly built up as a 'monster regime' of some kind who finally "had to be dealt with".

Although the "half a million in his mass graves" and the "barbaric weapons-threat of all kinds including nuclear and the deadliest biological and chemical warfare agents known to mankind, — all deliverable in 45 minutes against the West", — have proved to be complete nonsense, what difference does it make now?

The wished-for demonstration of "shock and awe" devastation has been completed, and Iraq is the American Empire's plaything to do what it wishes with.

Total world power, — and only the Iraqi and other Middle East Islamic anti-imperialists dare to fight back.

From her utterly useless "left reformist" point of view, Naomi Klein gets it wrong too.

She tries to make the obscure "smart" point that the rotten imperialist system is bigger than just the disgusting and aggressive Bush Empire, and that all the extreme scorn on Bush's corruption and stupidity is being over-hyped, thus protecting the rest of the imperialist SYSTEM.

This is grotesquely un-'Marxist' and world-history illiterate.

Imperialism cannot come down without a crisis bringing it down so that it can be overthrown.

But history shows that imperialism has only come down in parts hitherto as a result of serious SPLITS in the imperialist camp, — splits driven all the way to WAR and then DEFEAT for some of the warmongers.

Her phrase:

"but a world united against the US empire isn't necessarily united against imperialism".

Of course not, but it is SPLIT against US imperialism, and vice versa, which is all that matters to begin with, and all that history has ever started with in its struggles so far to rid the world of this dying bourgeois-class tyranny.

She makes the positive points about the need to fight the ENTIRE imperialist system very correctly; and about how utterly reactionary the American Empire will remain, — with or without Bush:

With Kerry in power, European leaders will no longer be able to hide their imperial designs behind easy Bush-bashing, a development already forecast in Kerry's odious Iraq policy. Kerry argues that we need to give "our friends and allies ... a meaningful voice and role in Iraqi affairs", including "fair access to the multi-billion-dollar reconstruction contracts. It also means letting them be a part of putting Iraq's profitable oil industry back together."

Yes, that's right: Iraq's problems will be solved with more foreign invaders, with France and Germany given a greater "voice" and a bigger share of the spoils of war. No mention is made of Iraqis, and their right to a "meaningful voice" in the running of their own country, let alone of their right to control their oil or to get a piece of the reconstruction.

Under a Kerry government, the comforting illusion of a world united against imperial aggression will drop away, exposing the jockeying for power that is the true face of modern empire.

I was ranting to a friend about Kerry's vicious support for the apartheid wall in Israel, his gratuitous attacks on Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and his abysmal record on free trade. "Yeah," he agreed sadly. "But at least he believes in evolution."

But the problem for mankind of the aggressive imperialist bourgeoisie colonising the world and unable to stop collapsing periodically into warmongering chaos which can only be solved by revolution, has already been fully scientifically understood for nearly 150 years.

It is the hard revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism which the world needs back, not the soft Utopian socialism of the pre-scientific era which the Kleins are deluding the world with.

It must begin and end with the economic crisis (see EPSR box). It won't go away. It can only get worse and worse and worse, and the politics it forces the imperialists into will grow increasingly vicious and desperate.

The bourgeois press reports admit to their crisis, but deliberately completely hide the only science on this subject, — Marxism, — and again conceal the inseparable links from crisis management to warmongering, — as admitted above in the Middle East dollar-saving blitzkrieg:

The next four years could be tough for the US — very tough indeed — and it would be fitting if Bush were left to clear up the almighty mess he has created.

There is a precedent. Back in April 1992, Labour lost a fourth election in a row. Given the state of the British economy at the time, it was a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

A witches' brew of unemployment, falling house prices and record bankruptcies meant John Major's government should have been history. The then shadow chancellor, John Smith, however, made the mistake of being honest about plans to raise taxes, with the result that the campaign was dominated by scare stories about Labour's tax bombshell.

In the aftermath of April 1992, there was much gloom in Labour's ranks. If the party couldn't win in such propitious circumstances, the argument went, there had to be a serious question mark over the chances of it ever getting back into power. But political karma meant the Conservatives got their come-uppance when, within six months, Britain was blown out of the exchange rate mechanism.

The sight of the Treasury and the Bank of England impotent in the face of the overwhelming fire power of the markets was the Tory equivalent of the IMF being called in to bail Labour out of a financial hole in 1976. It wrecked the reputation of the Conservatives for economic competence, and it was a humiliation from which the party may never recover.

Labour was lucky. Had it won the 1992 election it was committed to precisely the same doomed strategy of defending the pound come what may. Black Wednesday would have happened, but probably sooner. As the financial crisis to end all financial crises, it would have been the political kiss of death for Labour.

Clearly, the US economy in 2004 is not Britain in 1992. America is not in recession, and unemployment is falling rather than rising. The dollar is not pegged against other currencies, so there is no fixed target for the speculators to aim at. Moreover, if you believe Bush, the economy is just dandy after four blissful years of Republican stewardship.

This, though, is a bit like saying that a sprinter has just smashed the world record in the Olympics while failing to mention the cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs that has been ingested. What has happened to the US economy under Bush is pretty simple. In Bill Clinton's second term America had its own version of the South Sea bubble; share prices for worthless IT companies soared, making consumers believe they were richer than they actually were. When the bubble burst, policy makers merrily responded by creating another bubble, this time in the property market. Interest rates were cut so that consumers could carry on borrowing, while the government did its bit to keep the party swinging by irresponsibly cutting taxes (primarily for the rich).

The result has been predictable. A trade deficit of 5% of GDP is evidence that the US has been living beyond its means, A similar budget deficit shows that the government, too, has been failing to match what it spends with its tax revenues. In any country south the Rio Grande, such a combination would mean that the IMF would be on the scene before you could say "structural adjustment".

The dollar's role as a global reserve currency means that Washington can paper over the cracks for a while by selling government bonds to its creditors. But if the laws of economics can be bent, they cannot be broken.

Much of this is reformist garbage which just does not acknowledge INSOLUBLE problems for the capitalist system which must result in a complete Crash and then Slump; but it indirectly admits the incurably warmongering implications of the Western imperialist system ruling the world for the last 800 years.

Any other country and "the IMF would be on the scene before you could say 'structural adjustment'".

The American Empire instead simply imposes a war on the planet.

Whatever happens then, the American imperialists have worked themselves into an irresistibly belligerent mentality, they are tooled up and ready to go, and the rest of the world is suitably intimidated.

It is an unanswerable way to argue an economic "case", however insane and reactionary.

Alternative reasoning continues half-heartedly around the EPSR that nothing will happen about Iran, that nothing will happen about any other war, and in general that nothing much more will happen dramatically.

This places imperialist bureaucracy and electoral paralysis as the main driving force of capitalist villainy, notoriously incompetent and indolent.

But surely it is the crisis pressures swelling from below and internationally which force the warmongering on.

And in this there is no let up.

Consider the situation in Iraq, as commented on by a former British Ambassador to Libya:

But the impression that the situation in Iraq itself is much improved is down to Iraq fatigue in the media.

The security situation is calamitous. Two recent attacks killed nine US marines; an attack on the Iraqi minister of justice killed five bodyguards; bombings and attacks on Iraqi security forces have caused multiple deaths; targets in Falluja have been bombed by the US air force; foreigners have been kidnapped or executed with the aim of driving foreign troops and foreign companies out of Iraq.

This, however, is the tip of the iceberg. Attacks on US troops are running at dozens a day, frequently accompanied by looting, burning and stoning. It is generally believed in Baghdad that around 1,000 Iraqis leave the country every day for Jordan and Syria because the security situation is intolerable. According to the Iraqi media, gunmen have killed six Baghdad local councillors in the last two weeks and roughly 750 in the last year. Friends of the Americans such as Ahmad Chalabi are discredited; enemies such as the young Shia firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr have their tails up.

Meanwhile, the Butler report, which followed the devastating critique by a Senate committee of the failure of American intelligence, has dominated the headlines. Senior members of the British intelligence community have accused Tony Blair of going way beyond anything any professional analyst would have agreed.

But the media-have allowed themselves to be carried away by the question of secret intelligence, and have ignored equally or even more important questions of policy. Senator Kerry has accused President Bush and his administration of misleading the public about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and specifically about nuclear involvement. They "misled America... And they were wrong. And soldiers lost their lives because they were wrong".

In Britain, now that it is clear that US and British policy has been based on a deception, it is equally clear that Iain Duncan Smith and the shadow cabinet were also deceived. There are plenty of uncomfortable questions to ask about who deceived whom, and Michael Howard has at last said that he couldn't have voted for war in the House of Commons in March 2003 if he had known then what he knows now, though for reasons as yet unexplained he says he is still in favour of the war.

Others have gone further: the Labour MP Geraldine Smith has said: "I feel that I was deceived into voting for a war I was morally opposed to."

The assessment of intelligence is open to debate. But other failings are less easy to explain away. The prime minister should be pressed to say what happened to the detailed plans for postwar Iraq which, he told parliament just before the war, had been worked out with our allies. Perhaps they were part of the State Department plans, which we now know were consigned to the wastepaper basket by Donald Rumsfeld.

The story of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is a disgrace. When will we learn whether Britain has equally disgraced herself? What is clear is that no British minister could survive if he had said, as Rumsfeld said: "Technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva convention. We have indicated that we do plan to, for the most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the Geneva conventions to the extent they are appropriate."

This is where parliament can exercise its influence. Unless we really want to rebuild the British empire, under our flag or the stars and stripes, the only sensible objective now is disengagement in as good order as possible. No scramble to get out, but send no more troops and look for every opportunity to build up Iraqi prestige, authority and responsibility.

Oliver Miles is a former ambassador to Libya and organised the letter signed by 52 former British ambassadors criticising Bush and Blair's Middle East policy

 

COLIN POWELL, the US Secretary of State, admitted during a surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday that the wave of kidnappings was having a "deterring effect" on reconstruction in Iraq, even as he promised measures to speed up efforts.

General Powell met Iraqi leaders yeste[r]day to discuss the unrelenting violence that has bogged down efforts to rebuild the country, scaring off potential investors and targeting Iraqis involved in the massive project. That in turn has fuelled discontent and spurred the insurgency.

As Mr Powell slotted in talks with Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, the Iraqi President, into his regional tour, guerrillas in rebel-held Fallujah, just 35 miles outside the capital, launched a concerted attack on US Marines based just outside the restive Sunni town.

The fighting began when rebels struck at a joint patrol of Marines and Iraqi troops with rifle fire, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

The fire fight was the latest in a series of large-scale confrontations in the past week

THE US has blamed Britain's 'lack of urgency' for its failure to arrest the booming opium trade in Afghanistan, exposing a schism between the allies as the country trembles on the brink of anarchy.

As a record opium harvest fuels the supply of heroin to Britain's streets, the US embassy in Kabul has revealed policy clashes which undermined Tony Blair's pledge to end Afghan poppy cultivation.

'You guys are here because you have a war on drugs,' one US official told The Observer. 'Less than 5 per cent of all opiates in North America come from Afghanistan; I'm here because we have a war on terror. It does produce slightly different emphases. Britain will achieve the results they want in 10 years and that's fast enough for them. We will achieve the result we want only if we do it more quickly.'

Responding to Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell's wish that drugs barons and traffickers be jailed before October's presidential election, the official said: 'Britain's attitude is a little naive. I can name several Afghan government ministers and regional warlords absolutely up to their necks in drugs money. I would not bet on any high profile arrests before the election.'

The war on drugs is seen as key to the allies' attempt to halt Afghanistan's violent disintegration and ensure the election goes ahead after two postponements. The effort suffered another blow last week when Médecins Sans Frontières — whose aid workers have weathered 24 years of Soviet invasion, civil war, Taliban tyranny and American bombing — announced it was pulling out because the country was too dangerous.

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of opiates and supplies the opium base for about 95 per cent of heroin consumed in the UK. Output was slashed by the Taliban during their last year in power in 2001, but rocketed twentyfold in the following two years, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. With another bumper crop this year, leading to cheaper and higher quality heroin in British cities, the recriminations are flying.

The Foreign Office, which leads the international effort and is funding £70 million over three years, was attacked last week by the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, which said: 'There is little, if any, sign of the war on drugs being won, and every indication that the situation is likely to deteriorate, at least in the short term.'

The Foreign Office claims it is developing with the US a 'common agenda and shared commitment for next year across the whole range of counter-narcotics work'. But non-government organisations working in Afghanistan fear that divisions between the allies have done irreparable damage already.

Earlier this year the US State Department's senior narcotics official, Robert Charles, accused Britain of squeamishness during a hearing entitled, 'Afghanistan: are British counter-narcotics efforts going wobbly?' British diplomats were reported to be furious.

But even moderate voices within the US embassy in Kabul have spelled out the gulf between its priorities and those of Britain. The MPs' report last week confirmed that efforts to develop alternative livelihoods for the poppy farmers had yet to produce results. The area under poppy cultivation was forecast to grow to between 90,000 and 120,000 hectares this year, increasing the dependence of farmers on the crop and funding the defiance of central government by regional warlords.

The role of the military — currently at full stretch hunting Osama bin Laden — has been a bone of contention. The American official, who since giving this interview has left the embassy, continued: 'I was struck in our discussions with minister Rammell that the tick list of points from him had not changed one iota from a year ago, and the number one tick list point is always that coalition forces must be more aggressive and we need, in essence, a military solution by going after drugs labs.

'Our military is absolutely apoplectic at the thought of getting anywhere near any of these issues. They don't want to be dragged into a drug war like they were in South America and they don't want to do anything that will make their job harder. There's no question if you could go after the drug trade right now, in any way, shape or form, it's going to cause ripples. If we said fine, we're just going to give away money and attack drugs labs, you don't think that wouldn't cause instability?'

NGOs are angry at the allies' lack of a co-ordinated approach to law enforcement. Paul O'Brien, advocacy co-ordinator for Care International in Afghanistan, said: 'We are concerned the progress they're making is being oversold and the nature of the challenge is being underestimated. The rule of law is where the response has not been adequate. The international force on the ground has refused to take it on because there is insufficient political will.

IRAQ has become al-Qaeda's battleground, with insufficient foreign troops to maintain security, MPs said yesterday. Afghanistan could "implode, with terrible consequences" unless more troops and resources are sent, the Foreign Affairs Committee added.

Its report concluded that the US-led coalition's failure to bring law and order to parts of Iraq had created a vacuum into which criminal elements and militias had stepped. The failure of countries other than America and Britain to send significant numbers of troops had had "serious and regrettable" consequences, the committee said.

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, made a surprise visit to Iraq yesterday and admitted that Washington was becoming increasingly concerned about Iran's attempts to gain influence in the south of the country.

His intervention appeared to have been prompted by repeated warnings by western diplomats that weapons and money have been crossing the border from Iran.

The American Empire can be as comatose as it likes, but how is a humiliation as bad as this in Iraq going to be so easily walked away from, — especially as abandonment will precisely almost certainly only lead Iraq back to a more anti-American regime than was Saddam Hussein's — — for 30 years the USA's most loyal stooge in that Arab region in many ways, who did them huge anti-communist and anti-Ayatollah favours, and was lavishly rewarded by the Americans with armaments of all kinds from the West.

At the moment, more and more imperialist troops, including American, are pouring into the area.

And the burden on the USA looks like increasing too.

The French have just delivered another massive snub to Washington by the withdrawal of Médecins sans Frontières from Afghanistan. It is a calculated insult to the Americans as a conscious revenge for their rotten management of the war in Afghanistan.

Withdrawing this medical service, which has worked widely in Afghanistan for 25 years, will hugely damage America's war efforts there, making all civil administration much more difficult and tempers more frayed.

The US crime has been to threaten the local village population in various areas that if they did not collaborate more with the US forces in giving information about the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then all aid of every kind would be withdrawn from their village, etc, etc, etc.

As a consequence, more and more workers for Médecins and other volunteer Western bodies giving aid and assistance to Afghanistan have started to come under military attacks by the local anti-imperialists. Five MSF workers were killed in direct attacks in June, and the last straw came for the French organisation when it was accused of spying for the American forces, implying that more targeting by local resistance fighters would follow.

One assumption of the perspective that colonial-imperialist bullying of the Third World will just continue spasmodically and in a low key, as it generally does, is that all the major imperialist powers will chip in with some occasional warmongering viciousness each, to spread the burden, as always, etc, etc. And in general, of course, the world-dominant Western imperialist system, so useful to all of them, will repeatedly continue trying to get its act together.

But the continual difficulty with the WTO world trade talks is an OBJECTIVE problem, fundamentally,— not just endless exhibitions of French pique at Anglo-Saxon brutality and arrogance.

Weekend bourgeois propaganda went from the depths of despair at the imminent prospect of another total WTO breakdown, — to wild detailless euphoria over a supposed sudden last-minute breakthrough in Geneva.

But scepticism remains rampant:

Some trade negotiators' and most development groups warned last night the draft was biased in favour of the West and there was much to do to secure a deal that would benefit poor countries.

In an attempt to prevent a re-run of the fiasco in Cancun 10 months ago when the gulf between rich and poor countries proved unbridgeable, the compromise package agreed at the weekend was kept deliberately vague.

Nations will have the right to keep higher tariffs on some of the products they consider most important.

But Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid said: If everything that is written down in that text was agreed, it would be beginning to look better for a lot of the poorest countries.

"The reason I am being so guarded is the commitment on export subsidies is pretty clear and explicit, but there is no timetable — that is the absolutely critical factor."

Celine Charveriat, of Oxfam, said there was little in the deal to guarantee reforms that would help the poorest countries, and the deal overall was disappointing.

The so-called "Doha round" of world trade talks broke down in Cancun, Mexico, a year ago when developing nations walked out after failing to secure a commitment from Western governments to slash the subsidies of $1 billion (£550 million) a day that they give to their farmers.

Third World leaders say that Western agricultural policies drive their farmers out of business, exacerbating poverty and famine.

The clash in Cancun came after a group of 20 important developing countries, including Brazil, China, India and South Africa, mounted an extraordinary challenge to the US, the EU and Japan. With Western authorities refusing to yield, hopes faded for a global trade agreement

The agricultural part of the Geveva [Geneva] compromise was reached after France withdrew its stubborn opposition to a cut in farm subsidies. President Chirac had been resisting the deal, but ordered Herve Gaymard, his Agriculture Minister, to back down when he realised there was no support for the French position from any other EU country.

However, French negotiators comforted their compatriots by pointing out that the US had also made concessions, notably over the symbolic and highly charged issue of cotton subsidies.

Impoverished west African states say that their cotton farmers are unable to sell produce on the world market because of the annual $3.9 billion subsidies received by American producers. Although the US refused to commit itself to a specific reduction in these grants, it went further than it had done before by agreeing in general terms on the need for cuts as a "priority".

The language was similarly hazy with regard to the removal of import barriers for industrial goods — an area seen as. crucial for world economic growth.

After five days of rows in Geneva, the negotiators agreed to continue negotiating over the tariffs placed on imported merchandise. There was also a deal to continue talking about the subject known officially as trade facilitation — the lengthy and often corrupt customs procedures that face firms trying to export produce, notably to the Third World.

But Friends of the Earth said that the US and the EU had made "empty promises" on the key subject of agriculture.

In the first flush of euphoria yesterday, there was talk of a final deal being completed at the next WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005. That is strictly for the birds. Nothing significant is likely to happen for six months as a result of the US presidential election and the arrival of a new European commission. An agreement is at least two years away.

Developing countries may have left Geneva encouraged that the US and the European Union have promised deep cuts in farm support, but they have little concrete yet to show for their efforts. Brussels and Washington are experts in obfuscation and delay, superb at extracting the maximum political advantage from the smallest of concessions. As Oxfam International noted, there are no cast-iron commitments and no clear timetable. The US says, for example, that it will do something about its subsidies to cotton farmers, but is vague about the what and when.

Developing countries would do well to remember how in the last round of talks, which ended in 1993, the west agreed to eliminate protection on textiles, an industry where the low-cost producers in poor countries had an advantage. In the final agreement, the developing world found that access to North America and Europe would be phased in over the course of a decade, with most of the cuts in protection occurring next year.

There is little doubt that the US, the EU and the rest of the developed world will try every trick in the book to limit the concessions they eventually make, but they will find that much more difficult now that the developing world has shown it can act in concert. Brazil, India and China provide the nucleus of a formidable force.

The final message from Geneva is that change to the way the WTO operates is inescapable.

And even if open and direct all-out trade war is averted for another year or two yet, the "over-production" problems caused by the Great Powers insistence on monopoly subsidies for commodity after commodity, — declared to be "of strategic national interest", — will remain endless.

And beyond the inter-imperialist conflict for the preservation of each SEPARATE view of which "essential" protected monopoly-trade interests and connections "simply CANNOT be sacrificed", etc, etc, — other trade contradictions loom too.

The following bourgeois report admits to extreme diplomatic-protocol tension with China, but it is massive trade problems which form the real basis for the never-ending difficulties continually blowing up in the West's relations with the Chinese workers state of proletarian dictatorship, — ultimately almost certainly to be at odds with the West TOTALLY, and on every issue under the sun:

The portraits published on the front pages of China's newspapers were once only of the feelgood variety: smiling politicians, celebrating footballers or preening celebrities. But this week, the country's most famous face was frowning, bruised, swollen and wearing a pair of sunglasses to cover up her blackened eyes.

The battered features belonged to Zhao Yan, a Chinese businesswoman who was assaulted by US customs officials in Niagara, New York, last week after she was mistaken for a drug smuggler.

Since the story was broken on Monday by the US correspondent for the state news agency, Xinhua, Ms Zhao — who has conducted tearful press conferences from her wheelchair — has become a symbol for Chinese feelings of superpower victimisation.

Most of the country's leading papers, including the People's Daily, Beijing Youth Daily and China Youth Daily, have carried almost daily reports of her suffering and her demands for justice and $5m (£2.8m) in compensation from the US government.

The official US line is that a single customs officer, Robert Rhodes, violated Ms Zhao's civil rights — a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. But the victim says more officials were involved in beating, kicking and blinding her with pepper spray.

The Chinese papers were quick to draw parallels with the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

In a China Daily article headlined "Beating of tourist reflects US hypocrisy", Hu Xuan asked whether the "inadequate" US response to the case was a reflection of racism and paranoia about homeland security.

"The Americans can kill anyone they think is a potential threat to their precious lives, or beat an innocent woman half to death on the flimsiest of excuses," he wrote. "Together with their commanders in Washington, they are painting a shameful image of their country."

Ms Zhao's misfortune comes at an awkward time for the two governments. Although Sino-American relations have improved, persistent tensions over Taiwan threaten to undo the gains of the past couple of years. In a recent editorial, the People's Daily — the mouthpiece of the communist party — bristled at US legislation approving arms sales to Taipei. "This is a wanton interference in China's internal affairs and cannot but arouse strong dissatisfaction and indignation among the Chinese people," the paper fumed. The legislation also showed the US to be "placing itself above the international code of conduct".

This is not a matter for debate. Although China has opened up in the past 25 years, its media is still tightly controlled and geared towards stirring up pro-government patriotism and xenophobic nationalism, with the outside world presented as a place to be spurned.

President George Bush has been lobbying Tony Blair over the last few months to veto an EU plan to lift a 15-year-old arms embargo on China.

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, has expressed alarm at the possibility of EU arms being used against American troops in the Taiwan Straits.

China's defence minister, Cao Gangchuan, warned Taiwan this weekend that the People's Liberation Army would "smash" any moves toward independence by the island: "We will never allow anybody to separate Taiwan from China in any form," he added. "The will of 1.3 billion Chinese people cannot be infringed upon."

China claims sovereignty over Taiwan but the US has pledged to oppose militarily any attempt by China to regain Taiwan by force.

The spokesman for the European foreign affairs commission said yesterday that no decision would be made until at least the end of the year. In effect, the decision has been postponed until after the US election in November.

The review has divided the British government's foreign policy makers, with some arguing that Downing Street blundered by agreeing to the review in the first place without realising the implications for Washington.

Others argue that China is strategically important to the EU economically and it would do Mr Blair no harm to distance himself from the US on this occasion.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, last year led a campaign to have the embargo lifted.

Another assumption of the "nothing much is going to happen" school of left-scepticism politics is that the huge financial reserves of the American Empire and Western monopoly-imperialist domination in general, and the vast wealth and cultural attractions of the "free world", will ALWAYS succeed in attracting or creating local stooge regimes to "independently" run things under direct Western instructions, effectively speaking.

But this is certainly no longer anywhere near as true so easily as it used to be, and there might be reason to expect that it is no longer true at all in the long run, — this representing precisely one of the most important historical conditions which are driving this imperialist crisis towards the most explosive revolutionary outcomes of all time.

Saddam Hussein has become this huge problem, tripping up the American Empire, exactly because he WAS a stooge regime, — one of the USA's most important in the world, and for 30 long years of service directly at Washington's command, — but felt he could no longer survive bossing Iraq in Saddam style IF he only carried on JUST being a stooge.

His bid to assert some "independent" glory via his Kuwait seizure (properly reconnecting to its province which was stolen from Iraq by the West early 20th century in deliberate savage oil separatism) was the start of the disastrous developments that the whole Iraq issue has now become for the American Empire.

Intriguingly, the joke new "handover" regime of Iyad Allawi in Baghdad is meant to become a "plausible" new stooge-regime for America in due course.

But look at the slaughtering it is receiving at the hands of Iraq's own people, — dismissed with contempt.

And are not the Empire's troubles just piling up higher and higher and higher in Iraq (and the Middle East generally) precisely because this "stooge option" appears to be no longer historically viable?

Some stooge game-plans still seem a possibility where isolated groups have been long deliberately cultivated by Washington precisely for the purpose of setting up stooge regimes and stooge-power influences which will ALWAYS feel more comfortable in Washington's pocket, and will NEVER join in with the universal local anti-imperialist feelings.

The Jews genocidally colonising Palestine on imperialism's behalf since 1945 in order to keep Arab nationalism divided and intimidated, are one obvious case.

The Albanian mafia in the Balkans to disrupt Serbian nationalism are another.

But a third quite notorious stooge tradition on behalf of American imperialism, the Kurds of Iraq, — are currently demonstrating that their inveterate stooging is no longer going as well as might have been expected, — and may even be falling apart, according to these capitalist press admissions:

But nothing is quite what it seems, and beyond the attractive landscape and the security calm, the Kurdish region has serious unsolved problems. Its leaders try to project a united front in Baghdad and abroad, but few Kurds in the north or Arabs in the south have forgotten that the region's two dynasties spent four of their Saddam-free years fighting a civil war. Indeed one of them, Massoud Barzani, the head of the Kurdish Democratic party (KDP), based in Irbil, even committed the ultimate sin of inviting Saddam's tanks to come up and help him push back the forces of Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had advanced from Sulaimaniya.

US mediation produced a truce in 1998, and last year the armies — known as peshmerga (those who face death) — helped their US protectors to bring down Saddam.

But as long as the two big parties rule their areas like fiefdoms, Kurds fear that the peshmerga will act as intimidators during the forthcoming campaign.

The KDP and the PUK have taken tentative steps to unite the ministries they control in each half of the region. Education, health, and justice have merged, but the more sensitive portfolios of economic planning and police, as well as the peshmerga, remain separate.

The parties' nepotism and lack of internal democracy also cause anger. Some feel that Barzani and Talabani failed to exploit their wartime alliance with the US to extract more concessions on autonomy. If the elections are free, they may show a surge for radical nationalist and pro-independence candidates.

"People are very pessimistic. Kurds felt they had friends abroad but now they don't. The US and the UK have their own interests, and we came out empty-handed," says Bassit Hamaghareeb, the editor of Khak, a monthly magazine.

His magazine supported a drive for a Kurdish referendum on independence from Iraq, which the KDP and the PUK leadership rejected as destabilising.

"I criticise our leadership for not producing a united voice. They meet behind closed doors and are to blame for the slowness of the whole process," he adds. "There is a new generation outside the party sphere which has its own voice but is not included in decision-making".

Asos Hardi, who edits Hawlati, a political weekly, condemns "the false politics of our leaders who didn't tell people what was going on. They had powerful cards in negotiating with the coalition but didn't use them. They should have kept people informed and used pressure from the streets, like holding protest rallies in Baghdad."

Kurdish troops, although nominally under the Iraqi army, will be deployed in the north under Kurdish command. "We will train, organise and control them ourselves," said Dizayee. Kurds will also have a veto on southern battalions coming into Kurdistan. The danger is that, in spite of the rebadging and retraining, the new forces may reflect the geographical split of the old peshmerga. The eastern border guards and battalions would be under the PUK, the western ones under the KDP.

Iraqi Kurds have a grotesque history of repression and brutality under several southern regimes.

With Saddam gone, Kurdistan's leaders have decided to give Arab politicians another chance. They have thrown in their lot with Baghdad and have five ministers in the unelected, US-approved government. They are focused on getting as firm guarantees of autonomy as possible under the new Iraqi constitution, which will be drafted next year.

Compromising with the Arab majority is an understandable strategy but the ground needs to be better prepared. Unless they depoliticise their militias, accept open debate and cease to behave like warlords, the two big party leaders may end up producing a deal with Baghdad which their own people denounce. Yesterday's heroes can become tomorrow's traitors if they fail to change with the times.

Far from imagining a permanently sick world made safe by the most degenerate imperialist-stooge regimes everywhere, especially when beset by global and insoluble economic crisis, it makes much more sense along Marxist perspectives to keep factually totting up how badly Western imperialist domination now plays as a historic force, — even in bourgeois Western eyes:

Mr Blair has invoked moral necessity for every one of the five wars he has fought in this, surely one of the most bellicose premierships in history. The bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, the 74-day bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the intervention in Sierra Leone in the spring of 2000, the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, and the Iraq war last March were all justified with the bright certainties which shone from the prime minister's eyes. Blair even defended Bill Clinton's attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in August 1998, on the entirely bogus grounds that it was really manufacturing anthrax instead of aspirin.

Although in each case the pretext for war has been proved false or the war aims have been unfulfilled, a stubborn belief persists in the morality and the effectiveness of attacking other countries. The Milosevic trial has shown that genocide never occurred in Kosovo — although Blair told us that the events there were worse than anything that had happened since the second world war, even the political activists who staff the prosecutor's office at the international criminal tribunal in The Hague never included genocide in their Kosovo indictment.

And two years of prosecution have failed to produce one single witness to testify that the former Yugoslav president ordered any attacks on Albanian civilians in the province. Indeed, army documents produced from Belgrade show the contrary.

Like the Kosovo genocide, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as we now know, existed only in the fevered imaginings of spooks and politicians in London and Washington. But Downing Street was also recently forced to admit that even Blair's claims about mass graves in Iraq were false. The prime minister has repeatedly said that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies have been found there, but the truth is that almost no bodies have been exhumed in Iraq, and consequently the total number of such bodies, still less the cause of their deaths,
is simply unknown.

In 2001, we attacked Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and to prevent the Taliban from allegedly flooding the world with heroin. Yet Bin Laden remains free, while the heroin ban imposed by the Taliban has been replaced by its very opposite, a surge in opium production, fostered by the warlords who rule the country.

As for Sierra Leone, the United Nations human development report for 2004, published on July 15, which measures overall living standards around the world, puts that beneficiary of western intervention in 177th place out of 177, an august position it has continued to occupy ever since our boys went in: Sierra Leone is literally the most miserable place on earth. So much for Blair's promise of a "new era for Africa".

The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect of sending troops into Sudan is especially odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years, campaigners have chanted that there should be "no blood for oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have noticed that there are huge untapped reserves in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has a clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest foreign investor.

We ought, therefore, to treat with scepticism the US Congress declaration of genocide in the region. No one, not even the government of Sudan, questions that there is a civil war in Darfur, or that it has caused an immense number of refugees. Even the government admits that nearly a million people have left for camps outside Darfur's main towns to escape marauding paramilitary groups. The country is awash with guns, thanks to the various wars going on in Sudan's neighbouring countries. Tensions have risen between nomads and herders, as the former are forced south in search of new pastures by the expansion of the Sahara desert. Paramilitary groups have practised widespread highway robber, and each tribe has its own private army. That is why the government of Sudan imposed a state of emergency in 1999.

But our media have taken this complex picture and projected on to it a simple morality tale of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They gloss over the fact that the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic group and religion as the people they are allegedly persecuting — everyone in Darfur is black, African, Arabic-speaking and Muslim.

Campaigners for intervention have accused the Sudanese government of supporting this group, without mentioning that the Sudanese defence minister condemned the Janjaweed as "bandits" in a speech to the country's parliament in March. On July 19, moreover, a court in Khartoum sentenced six Janjaweed soldiers to horrible punishments, including the amputation of their hands and legs. And why do we never hear about the rebel groups which the Janjaweed are fighting, or about any atrocities that they may have committed?

It is far from clear that the sudden media attention devoted to Sudan has been provoked by any real escalation of the crisis — a peace agreement was signed with the rebels in April, and it is holding. The pictures on our TV screens could have been shown last year. And we should treat with scepticism the claims made for the numbers of deaths — 30,000 or 50,000 are the figures being bandied about — when we know that similar statistics proved very wrong in Kosovo and Iraq. The Sudanese government says that the death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, is not greater than 1,200 on all sides.

And why is such attention devoted to Sudan when, in neighbouring Congo, the death rate from the war there is estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a tragedy equalled only by the silence with which it is treated in our media?

We are shown starving babies now, but no TV station will show the limbless or the dead that we cause if we attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red Cross always said it must be — politically neutral. Anything else is just an old-fashioned colonial war — the reality of killing, and the escalation of violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of altruism. If Iraq has not taught us that, then we are incapable of ever learning anything.

The whole plot stinks. It is coming down, Build Leninism. EPSR

 

Back to the top