Empire Notes

As the election season draws to a close and it begins to seem possible that someone will win, it’s time to turn our thoughts once more to the overwhelming reality that will face us on November 3 no matter who wins – the continuing U.S. war on Iraq.

I have spoken and written often of the ways in which the invasion of Iraq was in the broad line of development of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era, especially in the last quarter-century. Previous administrations, Democratic and Republican, have been fairly open about the centrality of controlling Middle East oil to the postwar system of U.S. global hegemony. Most recently, Clinton’s 1998 Desert Fox campaign was an attempt at regime change, though an extremely cautious one with no “boots on the ground” and little chance of success.

These similarities are important to understand, in part because they suggest how little difference there might be in the final aims of Bush or Kerry, whoever wins, in Iraq.

In another way, the occupation of Iraq is dramatically out of the line of all post-Vietnam-War U.S. policy; this is of great importance as well because it suggests why there is far more potential for resistance and opposition than there has been for any war since the Vietnam War.

In a line, the difference is that this war on Iraq, like that on Vietnam, is a colonial war. Of all the wars in between, only Afghanistan has that character, but that war is mostly an afterthought and a diversion.

What does this mean? Well, colonialism itself ranges from the purest settler colonialism, like that of the British in North America or of the right wing of Israeli Zionists – here, the idea is elimination of the native population from the land and replacement with white settlers -- through intermediate forms, like the Boer and the English in South Africa or the Spanish in South America or the French in Algeria, where there’s a significant settler component but the native population is not surplus, but rather a key source of cheap and highly exploitable labor – to colonialism in which the settler component is nonexistent or irrelevant, like the British in India or the United States in South Vietnam.

The U.S. policy in Iraq belongs to this last category.

In this context, a colonial war is a war to build political support for a government, whether with a white or a brown face, that is clearly foreign-imposed, foreign-supported, and designed to do the will of a foreigner – and in which foreign troops are essential to its support.

In such a war, every single native is a potential enemy. There is no easy way to tell your friends from your foes; they all speak some language you can’t understand. And your friend today may be your foe tomorrow.

In such a war, the technological advantage of Western forces is partially nullified. They are taken out of their high-tech fighter planes set down on the road stopping cars, searching people for weapons, and randomly opening fire.

These differences are politically relevant in two profound ways:

The vulnerability of the white forces is greater and their body count is higher.

They have to get their own hands dirty. They can’t revel in the antiseptic slaughter from the sky of hundreds at a time so far away that they need not know or care what’s happening. And they can’t just have a few professional killers training or overseeing native troops who do all the raping, torturing, and butchering.

There may be no moral distinction between murdering someone yourself and hiring someone to do it, but it created a great difference in consciousness and thus a great political difference.

The morality of an imperialist nation is always of necessity at ease with standard techniques like aerial bombing of civilian areas and support of proxy forces that rape and torture. But when our own forces do it, it fundamentally violates even the jaded moral principles of an imperialist nation. That’s why even many conservatives could not dismiss the Abu Ghraib atrocities; that’s why, for the last six months, as the antiwar movement has slept, we have lived through and partly lost one of the greatest possibilities for a political opening that we’ve had in 30 years. Abu Ghraib should have been this war’s My Lai.

The key in moving forward and rebuilding an antiwar movement on a mass basis is to understand this basic fact. The anti-Vietnam-war movement was profound because it didn’t just oppose the war on Vietnam but used it as a springboard to expose a sickness in our society in a way that anyone with an open mind could appreciate. That sickness is still there and nakedly exposed now in Iraq for the first time since Vietnam; that is the source both of a national tragedy and perhaps of national hope.