The various enquiries into the events leading up to the
Iraq war keep showing up more of the dubious ways the government tried
to get voters' support for a war which was launched in defiance of
their own international law and the United Nations. But however much
Blair's back is to the wall, he can (and does) always make the excuse
that even if the actions of Britain and America are not justified in
any other way, the regime of Saddam Hussein was so terrible that no one
can be sorry that Bush and Blair sent their armies in and threw him
out. Almost all wars can be justified by pointing out how bad the other
side is. All capitalist governments do unpleasant things: that is the
inescapable nature of capitalism. So whenever two capitalist powers go
to war, each can make a strong case against the other, by alleging how
shocked they are about all the repulsive things the enemy has done.
When hostility ripens into open warfare, each side's ruling class does
even more terrible things to the other side, destroying its towns and
slaughtering its people. This gives both belligerent countries even
more propaganda points to make. Before long, each side is claiming that
it only started fighting in the first place because (in some miraculous
way) it could see what barbarous actions its enemies were going to be
guilty of in the war. In other words, the propaganda of each hostile
country claims that it only went to war because of the atrocities
committed during the war on the other side.
The truth, however, is exactly the opposite. It is not the atrocities
which lead to war; it is the war which leads to the atrocities. What
happens, over and over again, is that a government, reacting to the
pressures inseparable from capitalist (and other private-property)
societies, treats some of its citizens very badly. Then the government
gets into a war against other states; only to realize that its previous
ill-treatment of this or that minority has simply provided a ready-made
fifth column for the enemy. In other words, if the enemy should make a
successful attack on the home territory, there are many citizens of the
home country who would almost certainly prefer the enemy to win, and
therefore might well engage in sabotage or guerrilla attacks on the
home forces. If the war begins to go badly, the government and its
supporters become terrified that they will loseand will therefore be
killed (either by the enemy or by knives in the back) or at least
driven into poverty and exile: terrified of such an impending fate,
they turn on those whom they have previously ill-treated, and murder
them.
Armenian massacres
The massacre of the Armenians, in Turkey in 1915, came about in this
way. The Armenians lived in eastern Anatolia, close to the Turkish
centre of the Ottoman Empire, and often showed rebellious tendencies.
There were demands for independence. In addition the Turks were
Muslims, and the Armenians Christians, which gave an excuse for more
villainy: nothing is so bad that religion will not make it worse. The
Turks treated the “disloyal” Armenians very badly, to the extent of
killing many thousands of them in the 1890s. Then in 1914 the first
World War broke out, and Turkey joined in on the side of Germany.
The Russians advanced into eastern Anatolia, and were helped by many
Armenians, wanting revenge against the Turks; and on top of that,
numbers of British and Australian troops invaded Gallipoli, in
north-western Turkey, in April 1915 (after a naval attack in February).
With the country being invaded, the Armenians were obviously a danger
to the Turkish authorities, and action was taken to nullify that
danger. Many of the Armenian men were massacred, and the women and
children were sent on forced marches to the deserts of what are now
Syria and Iraq, robbed, raped, harassed and injured continuously, and
most of them died. Estimates of the number who perished vary; the
Armenians say 1,500,000 or more, the Turks say “only” 600,000. Many
accounts of the massacre treat it in isolation, as if it was merely the
result of Turkish (and Muslim) wickedness; in fact it started almost on
the exact day in April 1915 that the Allies landed at Gallipoli.
Presumably this separation of the two events is to maintain the fiction
that the war was because of the atrocity, rather than that the atrocity
was because of the war.
Second World War
Another horror of the same kind was what is now called the Holocaust.
The Germans were treated very badly after the first World War. For many
years they were execrated as pariahs who were solely responsible for
the war; a continuing blockade caused much suffering, and the demand
for “reparations” caused runaway inflation, so people who had worked
hard for years to make small savings saw them reduced to nothing. The
Nazi party gained popularity by offering someone else to blame: the
Jews, who were in a minority in many countries, not having their own
state, and who therefore were ideal scapegoats. Hitler was in power
from 1933, and began the regular and open ill-treatment of the Jews; in
1935 the Nuremberg Laws made the German Jews second-class citizens,
e.g. closing the professions to them.
Anti-semitism was not particularly frowned on in Britain at the time,
and two years after the infamous Nuremberg Laws, in 1937, Churchill
said that “he hoped Great Britain would have a man like Hitler in times
of peril” (quoted in the Times obituary of Leni Riefenstahl, 11
September) . Besides that, Poland at the same time, under the
anti-semitic regime of the dictator Pilsudski and his successor
Smigly-Rydz, treated the Jews even worse (and even joined in Hitler's
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938); yet Britain actually declared
war in 1939 in order (it claimed) to defend this totalitarian
anti-semitic state. For some time Germany seemed to be winning the war,
conquering much of Poland in 1939, then Denmark, Norway, Holland,
Belgium, and France in 1940, and Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941; but in
June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, and after early successes, his armies
became bogged down, at the same time as America entered the war in
December 1941. It became clear that Germany was in for a long and
potentially disastrous struggle against many powerful enemies, in which
large numbers of Jews, not only in Germany but also in the conquered
countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, would not surprisingly be
hoping for a German defeat.
The next step could have been forecast: the Wannsee Conference (in
Berlin) of leading Nazis, in January 1942, decided on the “Final
Solution” – the murder of the entire Jewish people. Probably six
million Jews perished, as well as the same number of other people whom
the Nazis claimed to think were inferior. This monstrous crime, carried
out in the years 1942-5, is now often given as the reason for Britain's
declaration of war in September 1939. In fact it was the other way
round; the conflicting interests, arising inevitably out of capitalism,
of a number of European and world powers, led to the war: and the war
led to the atrocity.
The third case of this kind is of course Iraq. The various conflicts in
which Iraq has been involved recently, arising from the inexorable
conditions of capitalism, such as the desire of each particular
country's ruling class to make the most profits from oil, and its
efforts to extend the territory over which it rules, have lasted for no
less than twenty of the last twenty-three years. The war against Iran
raged from 1980 to 1988. Then Saddam Hussein's attempt to conquer
Kuwait in 1991 led to the first Gulf War, which ended with the first
President Bush leaving Saddam in power, for fear that his overthrow
would lead to a much greater role in the Middle East for Iran, which
the US regarded as a greater threat than Iraq. But the war and the
deaths resumed in a slightly different form, by means of continuous air
patrols over Iraq territory and by economic sanctions, which UNICEF
thought had brought about the deaths of nearly half a million Iraqi
children under five.
All these hostilities, including this second Gulf War of 1991 to 2003,
however much they might be blamed on the then Iraqi leadership,
resulted in those leaders having the same mindset which has been
discussed above: the fear of disaster for their regime, and death for
themselves. This frame of mind leads automatically to atrocious
behaviour from rulers, and Saddam Hussein has been no exception:
jailing opponents, a ubiquitous secret police, the torture and murder
of suspects.
Saddam Hussein has been just as bad as many other rulers across the
world (including many with whom Britain and America are allied). But
for Blair now to claim that he went to war because of this behaviour is
putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. The horrendous
regime of Saddam Hussein was a by-product of the two Gulf Wars of
1991-2003, not the other way round. If you want to have done with
barbarous dictators like Saddam Hussein, it's a waste of time to go to
war: others will spring up everywhere. Get rid of capitalism, the
fertile soil which produces endless numbers of dictators and
atrocities.