MARCH 2008 sees the US and UK armed forces and governments irreparably damaged as a result of their failure to subdue the Iraqi people in five years of a ruthless and murderous occupation of Iraq.
This defeat has irreparably damaged them, making the Republicans unelectable in the US, while forcing Blair out of the premiership of the UK, and forcing US and UK military commanders to admit that their forces are now stretched and damaged beyond immediate repair and in no state to mount a new ‘shock and awe’ war against the government and people of Iran.
It is now not just a question of thousands of killed and tens of thousands of very seriously wounded imperialist soldiers, but of the tens of thousands that have been destroyed mentally by being turned into anti-human killing machines for imperialism.
The imperialist armies have been fought to a standstill, by the Iraqi and now the Afghan fighters, while hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of billions of pounds have been expended with zero to show for it.
In fact, emerging out of the debacle is a political and economic catastrophe of historic proportions with oil now at over $100 a barrel, with basic foodstuff prices rising at a record rate, while the price of gold, the only real measure of value under capitalism has risen to over $1000 an ounce.
With its banks crashing, imperialism, especially US and UK imperialism are bloody and bleeding. They are facing a war on two fronts to make their working classes bear the full brunt of their own capitalist crisis, while they continue to be driven along the road of ‘solving’ all their problems by recolonising Iran and surrounding the Russian Federation.
The decision by Bush and Blair to attack Iraq to grab its oil and reorder the world for another hundred years of US-UK domination will rank alongside Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR as one of the greatest mistakes of imperialism.
They were absolutely convinced that everything was in their favour.
Iraq had been exhausted by the war that the US had urged it to make on Iran from 1979 to 1988, and since 1990 had suffered UN sanctions which killed over 1.5 million Iraqis. In 1991 the US, during its first Gulf War, made a massive attempt to bomb Iraq ‘back into the stone age’, by destroying its entire infrastructure.
From 1990 to 2003 Iraq was progressively weakened and bled by hunger and disease caused by UN sanctions.
Bush and Blair believed that Iraq was a sitting duck, especially since they knew it had no weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld theory was that their army would be in Baghdad in weeks, the Iraqi government, civil service and army would be disbanded and the entire country and its oil would just fall into their hands.
They reckoned without the revolutionary intervention of the Iraqi masses, who defended their country, fought them to a standstill and refused to be cowed by imperialist atrocities such as the Abu Ghraib concentration camp. They got in easily and now they find that they cannot get out, since they have created the conditions for a new Iraqi revolution that will sweep through the Middle East.
There is not the slightest doubt that US and UK imperialism will be driven out of Iraq.
However, the imperialist leaders are still seeking to hang on there and are even planning a new attack on Iran.
This is where the British workers will have to show that they have learnt the major lesson of the Iraq war. This is that even million strong demonstrations cannot stop an imperialist war – the government just responds by dumping the democratic facade into the bin!
To stop this war, and the coming war with Iran there will have to be a general strike to bring down the Brown government and to bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bankers and bosses and bring in socialism, withdrawing all British troops from the Gulf, the Middle East and central Asia.
This is the lesson of the five years since March 2003.
The Iraqi masses have fought the imperialists to a standstill and now the British workers have to complete the job with a general strike and a socialist revolution at home.
