November 27 — This is being written two days before action is to be taken on what is supposed to be the crucial UN resolution that will empower the U.S. to do "whatever is deemed necessary" in the Middle East. The Pentagon is poised to hurl an assault at Saddam Hussein's military in Kuwait, and, if "necessary," to directly attack Iraq.
Enormous momentum has been built up by the U.S. to get thinly veiled approval from the Security Council for its imperialist military adventure in the Middle East. Secretary of State Baker and President Bush have been hurrying and scurrying, virtually girdling the globe to make sure the necessary resolution is passed with wording that gives the U.S. military the green light.
All of the maneuvering, negotiations and diplomacy are supposedly centered on the UN as the legitimate world body empowered to decide whether there will be war or peace. It is made to appear that the UN is the indisputable world leader and the Security Council its preeminent executive body.
But it is all a colossal hoax, a cynical charade. The UN is being used as nothing but an imperialist tool, a screen behind which the U.S. can hide, a cover so the Pentagon can claim international approval for its war plans.
The U.S. has held seemingly endless discussions with the USSR, as well as with China and other members of the Security Council from the Third World. It seems as though the Bush-Baker team is turning heaven and earth to make sure the resolution gives a protective coloring to each and every member of the Security Council. They'll be on record saying a peaceful resolution is preferable — but the U.S. can decide that "all measures deemed necessary" means it has the right to open its military offensive.
It is now rumored that China may abstain or not vote for the U.S.-sponsored war resolution. That's not the same as a veto, which would be a real contribution to the anti-imperialist struggle. However, by voting for the 10 previous resolutions sponsored by the U.S., China has contributed heavily to giving the imperialist alliance credibility. In earlier years, China would have denounced the U.S. military deployment as an imperialist attempt to rob the oppressed peoples of their wealth and natural resources.
Is the UN really an independent body making the vital decisions on the serious, critical issues of war and peace? Nothing could be further from the truth. These decisions are being made by a small clique of imperialists, organized by the U.S., which has corralled the rest of the world.
It is only necessary to take the briefest possible historical look at the genesis of the UN, and at the real attitude of the U.S. government toward the other nations of the world, to see what is at the bottom of the issue.
The UN came into being as a result of the Second World War, a war in which the USSR, to the surprise of the whole world, defeated the Nazis in most of Europe. At the end of the war, the Soviet Union was on the verge of moving troops not only as far as Korea but possibly even to Tokyo. U.S. historians admit that one of Truman's considerations in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was to prevent Japan from surrendering to the USSR.
This great momentum of the Soviet military was based upon the achievements of socialist construction despite years of hardship and deprivation.
So the victorious Allied imperialists set up the UN as a barrier against the USSR and also as an instrument to hold in check the rising revolutions against the old colonial regimes in all parts of the world. The imperialists also deemed that a world organization was necessary to ward off the impending victories of the Western proletariat against the capitalist governments, as in France and Italy, and the labor insurgency that turned over conservative bourgeois regimes in favor of labor governments, most notably in Britain.
More than anything, they needed some legal stratagem whereby they could continue on the road of imperialist oppression while appearing to unite all nations in a democratic new world order.
But in order to control such an international forum, the victorious imperialists needed a veto power over any and all resolutions this body might pass. To make it somewhat more effective, it was necessary to draw the USSR into it, and also give it veto power. This would lend legitimacy to the concept of a world organization being led by the so-called great powers.
In reality, however, this arrangement gave what amounted to a hereditary veto power to the imperialist countries, which could not forever count on achieving their objectives by utilizing colonial and neocolonial clients.
After 45 years as a world organization, the UN cannot point to one significant world issue where it made an independent decision or to one imperialist intervention that it stopped.
The UN did nothing about the brutal U.S. imperialist interventions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama or the Dominican Republic. It actually assisted in the U.S. war against Korea and the destruction of the Lumumba government in the Congo.
While the U.S. has engineered countless imperialist interventions in the Third World directed against the oppressed peoples, the UN has never helped and doesn't now help any national liberation movement. The sanctions it imposed on South Africa, a state built upon open racism, were of little more than symbolic value. At the very most it has been able to send in a so-called neutral force, usually from Sweden or India, to validate the accomplishments and the victories of revolutionary national liberation movements.
The UN has permitted the Israeli government, a puppet of U.S. imperialism, to carry out endless interventions — amounting to a merciless war — against Lebanon. Israel has continued its genocidal policy against the Palestinians, and all the UN has ever been able to do is pass toothless, sanctimonious resolutions. It has never been able to take any concrete measure against Israel, even when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear facilities without any provocation or excuse.
What has been the attitude of the U.S. to the UN throughout all these many years? It has been scorn and contempt. Whenever it can't get its way fully in the UN, it withholds its dues and assessments as a form of sabotage.
Nothing so much showed U.S. imperialism's contempt for the UN as when one of Reagan's UN representatives openly said at a Security Council meeting that if the UN didn't like it here, they could move.
But now, all of a sudden, the UN has become a heralded world organization! It is now the repository for the settlement of all disputes — most particularly, to sanction the U.S. intervention in the Middle East.
Ever since Aug. 2, the day of the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, the UN has become once again that great deliberative world organization whose executive organ, the Security Council, will decide when or if the U.S. can militarily open its long-prepared attack on Iraq.
Why has the U.S. suddenly turned away from its position of constantly denigrating and sabotaging the UN and become its champion? Why isn't it acting unilaterally, as it has in other counterrevolutionary interventions and wars? Why does it suddenly make it seem that U.S. military strategy is dependent upon UN diplomacy?
The answers to these questions are not only pertinent. They are absolutely indispensable for an understanding of the real driving forces behind the intervention and deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East.
The basis for the intervention has nothing whatever to do with saving Kuwait from the "aggression" of Iraq. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to show that the U.S. was in the midst of negotiations with Iraq and up to a point was willing to go along with an Iraqi move in Kuwait. But that in itself is not the basic answer.
The U.S. deployment of such a huge military and naval force is the result of a secret agreement among the leading imperialist powers. From Denmark to Tokyo, and including France, Britain and Germany, they want to divide up the world's resources, break the back of OPEC, and reduce the Middle Eastern states to the role of vassals, crushing those that try to exercise their sovereignty. These secret agreements are modeled on the notorious Sykes-Picot pact of 1916 between Britain, France and Czarist Russia to divide up the Arabian Peninsula.
It's an attempt to overhaul the world balance of power in such a way that the leading imperialist powers will be able to redivide the sources of raw materials, of oil, of gas, as well as world markets and technology. That would be completely to the detriment not only of the Arabian Peninsula but of the oppressed peoples of the world in general.
That's how the united front of the imperialists was formed: on the basis of a predatory onslaught against the oppressed peoples.
The imperialists, who have been at loggerheads for so much of this century, whose rivalries have even spawned two horrendous world wars, are now in an alliance, but this unity is a rare phenomenon.
What objective conditions convinced them that the time was ripe for such an adventure? The key lies in the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the destabilization and vandalizing of socialist construction in the USSR, a process which has taken on breakneck speed in recent years with the Gorbachev regime's accommodationist attitude toward the U.S.
The defection of the USSR, as well as China, from the anti-imperialist struggle is the key factor enabling imperialism to mobilize for this murderous onslaught.
By no stretch of the imagination could the imperialists have gotten together if both those countries had stood firmly together, as they did in the 1950s, and taken a straightforward anti-imperialist position against the U.S. military deployment.
Had they roundly denounced it as naked aggression, it is doubtful that even the imperialist powers themselves would have permitted the U.S. deployment of such a gigantic military and naval armada. Certainly France and Germany would not have easily come along, notwithstanding prior secret agreements. And Japan too would have hesitated, despite its own secret understandings with the U.S.
All the imperialist powers have their own bilateral secret agreements on how the spoils from a victory over Iraq would be divided. But all are fearful of a revolutionary conflagration that could follow the commencement of military hostilities by the U.S.
The virtual renunciation of the anti-imperialist struggle has been repeated over and over again in the many meetings between Shevardnadze and Baker and Bush and Gorbachev. So it has become almost a commonplace to speak of the collaboration between the Soviet Union and the U.S. as collaboration between two super-powers in alliance against the oppressed.
On the other hand, the prospect of massive insurrections and the overthrow of the puppet client regimes in the Middle East frightens them all. It is reported in the New York Times on Nov. 26 that the frantic pace of U.S. diplomacy is calculated to cut down the time element during which the anti-war movement can organize itself.
Hence the importance of the meeting this last weekend between China and the USSR — a meeting that at another time might have been construed as an attempt to broaden and consolidate socialist relationships. Of course, commerce and trade between the two have increased dramatically over the last few years. But their relations today are not based on a revival of mutual aid in the construction of socialism. Both countries have moved away from that kind of cooperation.
The meeting between Moscow and Beijing might have held out some hope that China and the USSR would restrain the Pentagon from its adventure in the Gulf. But this is a very thin reed to rely on.
If the U.S. rounds up the majority of the UN Security Council behind its resolution, and claims the political and diplomatic support of the USSR and China, then these two formerly firm pillars of the socialist camp will have caved in to U.S. imperialism, will have aided and abetted this conspiracy to divide the world markets, sources of raw materials, etc., in exchange for some kind of quid pro quo for themselves.
China already has obtained promises that Washington will lift the sanctions imposed as a result of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square counterrevolution. But the USSR, which has been in the forefront of condemning Iraq, thus far has not been able to get material concessions that are in any way commensurate with the enormous crime it is committing by supporting U.S. imperialism politically and diplomatically. Nevertheless, Gorbachev continues to be most vociferous in his political support for U.S. goals.
The UN is nothing but a screen behind which the imperialists are carrying out their predatory schemes.
But there is also fear among the imperialists of rising revolutionary resistance which can lead to successful insurrections against the pro-imperialist regimes in the Middle East. This new round of worldwide anti-imperialist struggles, along with a rising anti-war movement in the United States and a simultaneous working class upsurge, doesn't augur well for imperialist intervention.
On the contrary, growing resistance to national and racist oppression along with the resurgence in the labor movement opens up the widest possible area for an all-around struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression. Such a development can have only the greatest historic significance for the destiny of the international working class and socialism.
Last updated: 23 March 2018