{"id":921,"date":"2019-03-09T00:18:22","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T00:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=921"},"modified":"2019-10-21T00:55:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T23:55:00","slug":"the-middle-east-connection","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/the-middle-east-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"The Middle East Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article has been reproduced from the Socialist Standard<\/em> (October\n2001), the monthly journal of The Socialist Party of Great Britain<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

\n\u201cThe first war of the 21st Century\u201d was how Bush has described the \nevents sparked off by the suicide \u2013and murderous \u2013 attacks on the World \nTrade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September.\n A chilling reminder that, under capitalism, things are going to be no \ndifferent this century than they were in the last. But Bush’s claim was \nnot entirely accurate, since the attack on America that Tuesday was the \ncontinuation of a conflict that has been going on for half-a-century, \nirrupting from time to time in open warfare: the struggle for the \ncontrol of the oil resources of the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ameria didn’t share in the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire after the \nFirst World War but managed to get a foothold in the Middle East with \nthe establishment of the state of Israel in 1949 as a colonial outpost, a\n puppet state peopled and run mainly by European immigrants to serve as \ntheir proxy gendarme in the region. Rivalry between the Western powers \ncontinued \u2013 and still continues \u2013 throughout the period but fifty years \nago they were joined by a new rival: a section of the lcoal capitalist \nclass. In 1951 the Mossadeq government in Iran nationalised the oil \nindustry \u2013 and was overthrown in a Western-engineered coup. Then the \nAnglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 for nationalising the Suez \ncanal, at the time the main trade route for bringing Middle East oil to \nwestern Europe. Then the Yon Kippur war of 1973 at a time the post-war \nboom was coming to an end and which helped accelerate this. Then the \nGulf War, ten years ago, to take back the Kuwaiti oilfields which Iraq \nhad grabbed from the West, a war which has continued ever since at a \nlower level of intensity with regular bombings of Iraq by US and British\n warplanes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conflict in Chechnya too had an oil dimension, since a planned \npipeline to get Caspian Sea oil out westwards made control of Chechnya \nof strategic importance to Russia. In fact, the collapse of the Russian \nstate capitalist empire re-opened the Caspian oilfields to Western \npenetration and control, bringing Afghanistan into the equation as a \npossible alternative route via Turkmenistan for a pipeline to get \nCaspian oil out without having to pass through Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The West’s rivals for the control of the Middle East oilfields and \nthe trade routes to get the oil out, as well as of the strategic areas \nand points to protect these, have been sections of the local capitalist \nclass in the region. The ideology they used, to begin with, to get a \nmass following was an anti-imperialist nationalism which had a leftwing \ntinge and even employed a \u201csocialist\u201d terminology. This was the ideology\n of Mossadeq in Iran, Nasser in Egypt, of the Baathist regimes in Syria \nand Iraq and of the PLO in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is still a significant political force but, since the 1980s, has \nmore and more been challenged by Islamic fundamentalism as the ideology \nof those who want local capitalist, rather than Western imperialist, \ncontrol of the oil resources of the Middle East. A key factor in this \nchange was the triumph of the \u201cIslamic revolution\u201d in Iran in 1979. But \nnot to be neglected is the influence of the long-established \nfundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia which, while not anti-Western, \nused a part of its oil rents to wean Arab militants away from leftwing \nnationalism. This had been encouraged by America as part of its struggle\n with Russia for world hegemony. It is now a notorious fact that Osmana \nBin Laden \u2013 a billionaire member of the extended Saudi royal family \u2013 \nwas armed by America and sent into Afghanistan to fight against this \ncountry falling under Russian control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That those who attacked America on 11 September should have been \nIslamic fundamentalists was therefore no surprise. This has become the \nideology of many of those in the predominantly Muslim countries of the \nMiddle East who want to wrest control of the oil resources of the region\n from the West for the benefit of local capitalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The West’s reaction has been revealing. A grand coalition is being \norganised to combat \u201cterrorism\u201d. But not terrorism in general. The \nWestern powers are not concerned about the Tamil Tigers or ETA or the \nIRA or the various South American guerrilla groups. They are out to get \nIslamic fundamentalist terrorism because this is the rising ideology of \ntheir rivals for control of the Middle East oilfields. This, not \nterrorism in general, is the threat to the supply of this key resource. \nRussia has no problem in joining this coalition since its oil supplies \ntoo have been challenged by the same movement, as in Chechnya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one accurate thing Bush, Colin Powell and the US media have said \nabout the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon was that it was an \u201cact of\n war\u201d. It was. The latest act in the 50-year struggle for the control of\n Middle East oil. This of course is not how they see it, or rather, how \nthey present it. For them it is an attack on \u201ccivilisation\u201d and \n\u201cfreedom-loving people everywhere\u201d and (Blair’s favourite) \u201cdemocracy\u201d. \nIt is appalling, virtually unbelievable, that any human being would \nhi-jack an airliner full of people and deliberately fly it into a tower \nblock where thousands more worked. It is also true that the \nestablishment of Islamic States everywhere would undo the Enlightenment \nand plunge the world back a thousand years (and has done so in \nAfghanistan). But this is not the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Islamic fundamentalists who flew those planes would indeed \ncompletely suppress freedom of thought and speech and replace ruled by \nelected politicians by the rule of ignorant and obscurantist priests, \nbut those who trained and sent them weren’t attacking America because it\n was \u201cdemocratic\u201d. They would still have attacked America even if it had\n been a fascist dictatorship or a Christian theocracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Socialists of course appreciate the existence of secular, political \ndemocratic forms, limited as we know they are, and wouldn’t want to see \nthese replaced by an Islamic State. But \u201cdemocracy\u201d as an ideology is \nsomething different. It is based on the idea that everybody living under\n a democratic state (as a state allowing the election of certain state \nofficials) share a common interest. This is a lie that socialists \nchallenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under capitalism, whatever the political form, society is divided \ninto two classes with conflicting interests: those who own and control \nthe means of production and the rest of us who have to work for them. \nThis is not changed if the excluded majority are allowed to vote for \nthose who run the political side of capitalism \u2013 and who define the \n\u201ccommon interest\u201d, inevitably since they are governing on behalf of the \ncapitalist class, as in fact the interest of that class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Blair and the others call \u201cdemocracy\u201d is not genuine democracy, \nwhich can only exist in the classless context of a society based on the \ncommon ownership and democratic control of the means of production. \nTheir democracy is the inevitably limited and narrowly political \ndemocracy that is the most that can exist under capitalism. But, in any \nevent, it is not even this stunted, political democracy that is at \nstake. It is oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the line-up in the next \u2013 military \u2013 episode in the continuing \nstruggle for control of the oil resources of the Middle East is, on the \none side, a section of the local capitalist class using Islam to rally \nmass support and, on the other, the Western capitalist powers using \n\u201cdemocracy\u201d as their ideology to win mass support for war. But \u201cIslamic \nState\u201d versus \u201cDemocracy\u201d is only the ideological smokescreen disguising\n the real issue at stake: control of oil resources and trade routes. It \nis not an issue worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class \nblood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Socialists we declare our opposition to both sides in this war and\n call on the working class of the world to unite to bring capitalism to a\n rapid end so that no more lives are sacrificed to further the economic \ninterests of rival sections of the world capitalist class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ALB<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Back to the Politics index<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

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This article has been reproduced from the Socialist Standard (October 2001), the monthly journal of The Socialist Party of Great Britain \u201cThe first war of the 21st Century\u201d was how Bush has described the events sparked off by the suicide \u2013and murderous \u2013 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-921","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2621,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/921\/revisions\/2621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}