The Anglo-American military build up against Iraq must be strongly opposed by all socialists. The British supporters of the International Trotskyist Opposition condemn this imperialist warmongering and call upon socialists, and all those who are opposed to this war, to mobilise a mass movement of resistance.

We condemn the breathtaking hypocrisy of the British and American media which is now launching a war against a tin-pot tyrant whom they installed and supported as their stooge against Iran when it was seen as the main enemy of imperialism in the early 1980s. The imperialists have always sought to keep Iran and Iraq, the two largest and most populous Middle Eastern nations, divided and thus subjugated. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Western imperialism backed Iraq against Iran which had just toppled one of imperialism’s main stooges in the region, the Shah.

The Iranian revolution of 1979, had unleashed not only a powerful upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism, but also a wave of working class mobilisation. The conflict between the Shah, and the Iranian bourgeois nationalist interests which opposed him in the revolution, was essentially about the degree of independence which Iran should have in relation to the Western imperialist powers. The Shah was the lackey of imperialism, its sycophantic agency within Iran, and represented a comprador wing of the Iranian ruling elite; his opponents wanted more political and economic independence from the West, more elbow room and space, to develop their own Iranian bourgeois nationalist interests. Of course, the revolutionary mobilisation necessary to overthrow the Shah contained within it the danger that the working class and the poor peasants would not stop at the stage of overthrowing the Shah. The bourgeois nationalist interests behind the Islamic fundamentalist movement wanted to use the masses as a stage army to be manipulated for its narrow purposes. It wanted a temporary mobilisation of the masses for limited purposes--the overthrow of the Shah. The danger for the bourgeois opponents of the Shah was that the workers would continue an on-going struggle, a permanent revolution, until such time as they had gotten rid of all of their oppressors, including the bourgeois nationalists who were overthrowing the Shah and, beyond them, the Western imperialist bourgeoisie, in conjunction with their fellow workers in Europe, North America etc.

Having successfully used Saddam as a local battering ram to knock the wind out of the sails of resurgent "anti-imperialist" Islamic fundamentalism in Iran during the 1980s, the West has attempted, in the 1990s, to neuter the military power built up by Iraq during the preceding decade. In the Gulf War, imperialism mobilised the other Middle Eastern countries, who feared Saddam’s growing military strength, in a war to re-assert its domination over the region, in a context of decline of Soviet power and influence in the region. The Iraqi elite, like the Iranian elite and Third World elites in general, also, from time to time, seek to assert control of their domestic affairs. Previously, Iraq had been able to use the power of the Soviet Union as a bargaining chip in these attempts. In the 1990s, however, this room for manoeuvre has been severely curtailed. This tips the balance of forces strongly in favour of imperialism Disputes over oil production quotas and pricing are very much tied up with the conflicts of interest between the Iraqi national bourgeoisie on the one hand and imperialism and its feudal lackeys in Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms. Even a casual glance at the map of the Persian Gulf region shows that, in terms of geographically location, Kuwait is in fact the natural seaboard, the severed littoral, of Iraq. This severing of the country resulted from the arbitrary carve-up of the region by Britain in the aftermath of the First World War, when the Turkish Ottoman Empire collapsed. As in countless other regions of the world from northern Ireland, to Bengal to Singapore, the British re-drew national boundaries in their own narrow, neo-colonialist interests to ensure that the economies of these countries would be condemned to a distorted and constricted development. This distortion and constriction was an inevitable result of the severing of the urban metropolises from the rural hinterlands, of the cutting-off of landlocked countries from their natural geographic port outlets and seaboards. The seizure of Kuwait by Iraq was, from this historical point of view, a war of restoration of national integrity and liberation from the mediaeval yranny of the feudal oligarchy of emirs and sheikhs, the most sycophantic props of imperialism in the region. One does not have to be an apologist for bourgeois nationalism, or to be blind to the past (and possibly future) role of Saddam himself as an agency of imperialist stability in the region, to recognise that, in a conflict between Western imperialism and its feudal lackeys in the region, and a Third World country seeking to restore national integrity, it was necessary to be unequivocably on the side of Iraq.

As Trotsky argued in the thirties, in a conflict between "democratic" Britain and "fascist" Brazil, it is necessary to be on the side of Brazil. The hypocritical Western media claptrap about Iraqi "brutality", "expansionism", "warmongering" and "weapons of mass destruction" etc., is used to blind the western working class to the real issues. The sophistication of the western media is not to be underestimated in manipulating the opinions of not just the working class, but also its vanguard, including the far left. The Western Trotskyist movement is not immune from the pressures on it from the manipulation of liberal opinion by the media. This was seen clearly during the Malvinas/Falklands War when some Trotskyist groups in Britain called for the withdrawal of Argentine troops from the Islands. It was seen again during the last Gulf War when a sector of the Trotskyist left in Britain called for withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait at the beginning of the conflict as the media hysteria at the invasion reachd its height. It was seen again even more clearly during the Yugoslav conflict, when many Trotskyist organisations in Britain echoed the demonisation of the Serbs and sided with imperialist-backed Croatia and Bosnia. Significantly, many of the groups that were the most shrill in demonising the Serbs, in moralistic terms, during the Yugoslav War have now either organisationally, or politically, collapsed. The present conflict appears to the left as an unprovoked attack on a Third World nation, which has suffered long enough from war and economic sanctions inflicted on it by predatory imperialist bullies. The left in Britain seems, at present, to be clear about the issues and not deflected into moralistic cul de sacs. But all this could very easily change.

The British Supporters of the ITO call for: ¨ the defence of Iraq against Western imperialist aggression! ¨ imperialist troops out of the Gulf ¨ in the event of war breaking out, the defeat of imperialism and victory to Iraq! the immediate ending all sanctions against Iraq! ¨ A massive aid programme of food and medicines given unconditionally!