by Kevin O'Neill, LLB, MSc

Abstract

Current wisdom has it that twentieth century world politics began with several Great Powers and ended, following the collapse of Communism, with one superpower. This perception is based on two illusions: the disappearance of Great Powers and the disappearance of Communism.

The Great Powers, Arms and Iraqi Oil

In his 2002 “A History of Iraq”, Charles Tripp writes that, during UN deliberations on Iraq after the Gulf War, Iraq targeted two Great Powers, Russia and France, “as members of the...Security Council which were owed roughly $10 billion and $7 billion, respectively, by Iraq, largely for weapons purchased during the [Iran-Iraq War]”. He goes on to state that the Iraqi government signed “a number of agreements with Russia and with French companies for the development of Iraq's oil industry once sanctions were lifted”¹. (Chinese companies have also been favoured by the regime – see Raad Alkadiri, The Iraqi Klondike².)

A more extensive account of Russian and French military aid to Iraq during the Iran war is given in the Library of Congress Country Study of Iraq³. Compiled in the last year of that war, this extensive study by the Library's Federal Research Division (FRD) notes that from 1959 to the publication date, Russia was Iraq's chief arms supplier. In keeping, however, with the Baath regime's independent-minded nationalism, Iraq also sought arms from other sources. As a consequence, “France...came to rank second to the Soviet Union as a source of foreign weapons”. The FRD reports that for France this relationship was important “in order to obtain petroleum imports from the Middle East”.

Nor were these Great Powers merely offloading their hand-me-downs:
“In early 1987, Moscow delivered a squadron of twenty-four MiG-29 Fulcrums to Baghdad...[c]onsidered the most advanced fighter in the Soviet arsenal”; and “Between 1977 and 1987, Paris contracted to sell a total of 133 Mirage F-1 fighters to Iraq...[t]he final batch [being] ordered in...1985 at a cost of more than US$500 million, a part of which was paid in crude oil”. Further French “high-performance items” sold to Iraq included “attack helicopters, missiles, military vehicles, and artillery pieces”, and between 1983 and 1986, “more than 400 Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missiles and at least 200 AS30 laserguided missiles”⁴. The FRD cites Le Monde as estimating in 1987 that from 1981-5, French arms sales to Iraq amounted to 40% of total French arms exports (i.e. US$5.1 billion).

During the 1970s, French exports to Iraq of capital and consumer goods came to billions of dollars. At the same time, French companies won technical assistance contracts including the Osiraq nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha near Baghdad, which was bombed by Israel during construction in 1981. (The FRD does report, however, that “International Atomic Energy Agency...officials...reaffirmed their position...that no weapons had been manufactured at Osiraq”.)

Iraq has also sought the support of a third Great Power, China, in the quest for an end to sanctions, “playing upon the Chinese government's dislike that human rights issues should be used to penalise any state”⁵. Tripp also reports that China has “covertly [been] supplying Iraq with new technologies”⁶.

An idea of the extent to which these three Great Powers stand to benefit from Iraqi manipulation is given by the publication in 2001 by the UN's Office of the Iraq Program (OIP) of figures indicating that, collectively, “French, Russian and Chinese companies...accounted for $5.48 billion of the $18.29 billion of import contracts [with Iraq] approved by the UN since 1997”⁷.

While the Left's accusation that America is willing to trade blood for oil (revived from the 1991 Gulf War) remains unfounded outside of circular arguments, the above history of the Great Powers provides ample support for questioning the sincerity of French, Russian and Chinese opposition to the current war. When these governments maintain that Hans Blix's UNMOVIC inspections were a workable alternative to military action, one is left wondering why all three (plus Malaysia) abstained from Security Council Resolution 1284 which established UNMOVIC in 1999 (see UN Press Release SC/6775). As Charles Tripp comments, “Iraq was encouraged by the fact that three of the permanent members of the Security Council had...abstain[ed], thereby allowing Iraq to defy the resolution.”⁸. Thus UNMOVIC was not admitted into Iraq until November 2002. (It should also be noted that Resolution 1284 was passed by eleven votes to zero.)

Regarding the impact of September 11^th on American policy towards Iraq, Tripp reminds us that “[Saddam Hussein] was the sole Arab leader not to condemn the attacks of September [11], pointing out instead that the United States had brought them on itself”⁹.

International Communism

As the Sunday Times recently reported, the chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray, is a member of the executive committee of the British Communist Party¹⁰. The French and Iraqi Communist parties, along with other European Left-wing parties, made a joint appeal against US-led intervention shortly before the commencement of current hostilities.

After a century which saw Communism deliver 100 million deaths worldwide, the sincerity of Communist calls for “no war” must be treated with extreme circumspection by those, religious or otherwise, who understand “peace” in the Christian sense¹¹. So it is that in a statement published by its Politbureau on 21^st March 2003, the Iraqi Communist Party maintain that, “The removal of [Saddam's] murderous adventurous regime continues to be a basic urgent task that should only be accomplished by the Iraqi people, their armed forces and the patriotic opposition forces that aspire to a unified federal democratic Iraq” (my emphasis). In other words, the death of innocent Iraqis is a prerogative of the Communist Revolution alone.

Not that Saddam's Baath regime is any stranger to Socialism itself. The Baath (Resurrection) Party, also known as “the Arab Socialist movement” (Majid Khadduri, Socialist Iraq¹²), has been in control of Iraq continuously since 1968. It is an offshoot of the pan-Arab Baath movement which was founded in Syria in 1947, with the ideological goals of “socialism, freedom, and [Arab] unity”¹³.

Popular wisdom in Britain has been led to believe that, at the philosophical level, the current war relates to the dispute between Christianity and Mohammedanism. Because, however, the largely Mohammedan Iraqi population rejected the atheism at the heart of Communism, the way was made clear for Socialism only after a great effort on the part of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP)¹⁴. Khadduri further relates, “In the first temporary Constitution [of 1968], not only was Islam recognized as the official religion but also as “the fundamental source of the Constitution”.... In the second temporary Constitution [of 1970], reflecting a step forward toward secularism, only lip service was paid to Islam by stating merely that “Islam is the religion of the state””¹⁵.

Another example of the secular regime's domination of religious elements was the 1980 execution of Shi'i Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and his sister, ostensibly in response to the attempted assassination of deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. Charles Tripp notes that “This was the first time in the history of Iraq that so senior a cleric had been killed”¹⁶. At the same time, notes the FRD, “the Baathists have not hesitated to exploit religion as a mobilizing agent”, for example by including depictions of Saddam in prayer as part of his nationwide poster campaign¹⁷.

The FRD concludes that, at the time of writing at least (1988), “the real tension in Iraq was between the [religious] majority of the population, Sunnis as well as Shias, and the secular Baathists, rather than between Sunnis and Shias”. This assertion is supported by observations that Shia were proportionately represented at all levels of the Baath Party. Furthermore, Saddam's eight-member Revolutionary Command Council included (as it does now) one Arab “Christian” - Tariq Aziz. (Of course, the espousal of Socialist Baathism is as objectionable to practising Christians as it is to Mohammedans.)

The Baath regime advertises its Socialist credentials in the Iraqi Constitution, which declares that the basic objective of the People's Democratic Republic of Iraq is, “the realisation of one Arab State and the build-up of the socialist system” (Art.1), and further that “The State assumes the responsibility for planning, directing and steering the national economy” (Art.12). Thus of course it is essential that “National resources and basic means of production are owned by the People” (Art.13).

One can see in these provisions nothing objectionable to a man such as George Galloway, who felt inspired to sing a paean to Saddam at the time of the first Gulf War, and whose own Labour Party famously amended its constitutional ambition of the “common ownership of the means of production” in 1994. This meretricious proposition of atheistic Socialism is anathema to the Christian principles which form the charitable root of Western property law: “In denying men's natural right to acquire and hold productive property, socialists...would destroy the individual's...responsibility for his own future well-being...which [is] essential to human dignity and personality, and would erect the State into a position of unnatural pre-eminence and power, as if it were prior to the individuals that comprise it”¹⁸.

This sinister truth behind Socialism has been verified empirically time and time again by the numerous Socialist/Communist regimes which have plagued our world for a century, not least Iraq's Baath Socialists. Charles Tripp writes, “The goal [of Hasan al-Bakr, Saddam's predecessor] was to create a basis of dependent support through selective use of the economic powers now vested in the leading members of the regime.... The confiscation of the property of political opponents and...the continuing sequestration of landholdings opened up great opportunities...to bestow favours on some, as well as to demonstrate to others the cost of disfavour”¹⁹. Thus, as Cahill predicts, the economic confiscations of every Far Left movement acting in the name of an imagined “People” in fact provide an elite of real people with the absolute power which corrupts absolutely.

This policy of selective favouritism, however, left Saddam extremely vulnerable at the conclusion of the costly Iran war: “[With a] shortage of funds to keep the wheels of patronage turning...Saddam [in particular] looked to...Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, to...maintain...a high price for oil...[and] to declare that the $40 billion financial aid they had given Iraq during the war...should be considered a grant and not a loan”. On being rebuffed, “the idea of using military force began to take shape among Saddam's circle”²⁰.

Article 28 of the Baathist Constitution includes among Iraq's educational goals, “creating a generation...who struggle against the capitalistic ideology, exploitation, reaction, Zionism, and imperialism.” Opposition to Israel has also been a central objective of the Iraqi Communist Party, which, in the political aftermath of the Six-Day War, congratulated the Soviet Union for its role in “exposing Israel as an aggressor to world public opinion”²¹. Khadduri and Tripp are in agreement as to the allegiance of the ICP to Soviet Moscow²². Given also the fact that Socialism is a European invention, a suspicion begins to emerge that the ICP's opposition to US-led intervention could have more to do with hatred of democracies than a consistent rejection of foreign influence.

The close resemblances between Baathism and ICP Marxism are commented on by the FRD: “Like the Baath, the ICP was an elitist party that advocated socialist programs to benefit the masses and that appealed primarily to intellectuals. Despite these similarities...Baathists tended to suspect the communists of ultimate loyalty to a foreign power, the Soviet Union, rather than to the Arab nation”²³. Broadly speaking, this divergence of world outlooks is what distinguishes European national Socialism or Nazism from international Socialism or Marxism (see for example Zeev Sternhell, Fascist Ideology²⁴).

In a recent episode of BBC's Question Time programme, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan denounced comparisons between Saddam and Hitler as “pathetic”. A cursory review of the two rulers' histories would call Mr. Morgan's bluff on this. On the same programme, but a different episode, London Mayor Ken Livingstone recently asserted, with classic Stalinist audacity, that a Communist dictatorship such as Cuba's was morally acceptable because the country had never had a liberal democratic tradition. Given such statements and Iraq's history, calls for “democracy” in Iraq from the ICP and other Stop-the-War Communists must again be analysed to avoid confusion with Western understanding of that term, particularly given the golden opportunity the Allies now have to support genuine democracy in that nation as they did in erstwhile National Socialist Germany.

No Tyrants for Oil

In his above-referenced article, The Iraqi Klondike, country risk analyst Raad Alkadiri predicts a “black gold rush” when sanctions on Iraq are finally lifted. The Great Powers listed above stand to benefit enormously on the terms negotiated with the current Iraqi regime. Meanwhile, “[i]f Saddam Hussein's government is in place, oil development will contribute significantly to its survival”. I for one am proud that my government will not tolerate continued oppression of the Iraqi people for the sake of lucrative oil contracts. I can say that such a government does in fact act in my name.

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