The 'war on terror'- 5 years after

By Savas Michael-Matsas

On the 5th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the beginning of imperialism's so-called "global war on terror", the U.S. President George W. Bush, in his public statement, accepted that that five years after America "is not safe" but, nevertheless "safer". A few days later, the publication, in New York Times on September 26, 2006, of sections of a leaked key document, the United States "National Intelligence Estimate" (NIE) - a consensus document by sixteen relevant US intelligence services- demolishes the Presidential claim: it concluded that the occupation of Iraq created "a recruitment tool of new generations of radical Islamists" and "has worsened the position of the United States in its war on terror". The pessimistic prognosis drawn by the NIE is that the current bad situation will be even worse for US in 2007. In other words, the NIE joins almost of mainstream analysts who agree that the US led terrorist war, in its first phase, has failed.

An interesting point to pay attention on is the date itself that this intelligence report initially was issued: April 2006. Developments afterwards, in Afghanistan, Iraq and, above all, Lebanon have surpassed by far the worst predictions made by the NIE and they have proven again that Bush Jr. is the biggest liar that has ever occupied the imperial throne in the White House.

The U.S. imperialist war drive, following 9/11, has failed so far to achieve its real strategic aims- to control and reshape the political map of the Middle East, the richest region in the world in oil and gas resources, in the borders of Russia and China, and to establish its supremacy against its rivals in Europe and Asia, on new terms, in the post Cold War chaotic world. Even worse: the military aggressions and occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine, and, more recently, Lebanon produced a generalized, uncontrollable destabilization, fierce resistances, social upheavals and popular rebellions. The vast space from the Mediterranean to Central Asia has been transformed into a theater of indefinite war and a deathtrap for imperialism and its willing/non willing allies and stooges.

Afghanistan

From 2003 onwards, U.S. military and its NATO allies, the British, Canadian, Italian, Dutch, Greek etc. occupation forces in Afghanistan forming the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) had announced a "spring offensive to wipe out the remnants of Talibans". The spring offensive never came; in its place, in 2006, the Taliban offensive came putting enormous pressure on the 36.000 strong imperialist troops and making them retreat, abandoning the south and south east of the country under the control of the Afghan insurgency.

The ISAF troops are forced repeatedly to call in air power to counter the determined and repeated assaults of the insurgents. As a British soldier puts it: "We are flattening places we have already flattened, but the attacks have kept coming. We have killed them by dozens, but more keep coming, either locally or from across the border. We have used B1 bombers, harriers, F-16s and Mirage 2000s. We have dropped 500lb, 1000lb and even 2000lb bombs. At one point our Apaches [helicopter gunships] ran out of missiles they have fired so many. Almost any movement on the ground gets ambushed. We need an entire battlegroup to move things." (See Kim Sengupta, "Soldiers reveal horror of Afghan campaign", Independent, 13 September 2006). The air attacks are unable to stop the assaults by the mujahedeen [guerilleros] but they have as a result huge civil casualties, spreading the popular hatred and anger against the foreign invaders.

NATO generals, the British PM Tony Blair, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumshfeld and others have urgently asked for reinforcements but the political crisis back home prevent these calls to find an echo in the various NATO members( with a notable exception: under these conditions of escalating military confrontations, the Centre Left Prodi government in Italy with the help of the Rifondazione Comunista led by Bertinoti, including with the crucial vote of its 'left opposition' group "Sinistra critica" in the Senate had voted to extend the Italian military presence in Afghanistan.)

In his interview in CNN, General Musarraf made the crucial point that the Occupation NATO forces and the Karzai puppet government in Kabul were confronted not just with a Taliban guerrilla activity but to a generalized "Pashtun uprising by the people». Until August 2006, the rapidly evolving counter-offensive of the Afghan insurgency had been covered only in specialist defense journals and in some specialized web sites( for ex. openDemocracy); but the increasing number of casualties among ISAF troops has broken through into the bourgeois establishment media, speaking now about "Losing Afghanistan: The Rise of Jihadistan"(Newsweek, cover for the international edition of 2 October 2006) or about "Losing the War on Terror"( Washington Post, 11 September 2006).

Pakistan: a new Afghanistan?

Imperialism's aggression in Afghanistan not only failed completely to control this country and the entire Central Asia, as it was its real goal, but it "succeeded" also to destabilize the pro-imperialist military dictatorship in neighbor Pakistan, a dramatic development having a devastating impact on the entire Indian subcontinent.

The tensions building up between Washington and Islamabad manifested themselves in the recent interview by General Musharraf when he revealed the Bush Administration's threats in September 2001 to "bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" if it does not collaborate properly and immediately to the "war on terror". The Musharraf military regime complied but five years later the entire edifice is falling apart.

Islamist political influence becomes all powerful, proliferating in Coranic schools as well as in the Army and, above all, in the Pakistani Secret Services, deeply involved for decades with imperialist infiltration and interventions into Afghanistan, including the propulsion of the Talibans to power, during the conflicts between the warlords following the departure of the defeated Soviet Army.

An important step was taken with the treaty agreed between the Musharraf regime and the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, under Taliban control. The Pakistani forces have retreated from the area, in August 2006, leaving it as a sanctuary, training centre and support base to the Afghan insurgency, while thousands of detainees were freed from the Pakistani prisons. This event provoked sharp commentaries by U.S. and British intelligence officers that "Pakistan is the new Afghanistan (Shaun Gregory, "Pakistan on edge", 25 September 2006). The house journal of U.S. neo-conservatives, the Weekly Standard ( see David Gartenstein-Ross &Bill Roggio, "Pakistan Surrenders", 2 October 2006) concludes ". the gains of the past five years were reversed in mere weeks with the loss of Waziristan and the release of 2.5000 fighters."

One of the reasons explaining why the Pakistani regime abandoned Waziristan and engineered the "Talibanization" of the frontier provinces, apart from the military casualties that it had by the insurgents and the accommodation with the pro-Taliban tribal leaders, was the rebellion in Baluchistan. Pakistani forces were re-deployed in this region, rich in resources and with 6.5 million poor, because the popular Baluchi rebellion has powerfully escalated against the corrupt Pakistani government and the ruling families plundering the wealth of Baluchistan.

The hated Musharraf dictatorship, caught between popular rebellions and imperialism's growing suspicions sees its future, if any, bleak as never before.

Iraq out of control

Three years of war and occupation, popular resistance and counterinsurgency, devastation and torture, "regime change" and fake elections for a puppet "government" have left Iraq in chaos and ruins but out of imperialist control. The U.S. troops and their allies cannot secure even the closest space out of the perimeter of their military bases. On August 16, a senior U.S. marine-corps intelligence officer, Colonel Pete Devlin, in his report documents the loss of control by U.S. forces of the Anbar province, on the west and south west of Baghdad, a large swathe of land right up to the Syrian border connecting also the country with Jordan and Saudi Arabia (see Thomas E. Ricks "Situation Called Dire in West Iraq, Washington Post, 11 September 2006).

In Anbar province are situated major anti-Occupation resistance centers such as Fallujah and Ramadi. Fallujah became world wide known as the site of a major marine-corps offensive in April 2004, which was repeated, on a much larger scale, in November of that year when a joint US army/marine corps force destroyed three quarters of the city's infrastructure and killed at least 5,000 people. At the time, the Bush administration claimed that Fallujah was the most important centre of the entire Iraqi insurgency, which was declared "defeated" with the occupation of the city in November 2004. But, even when the U.S. operation in Fallujah was still underway, the insurgents not only escaped from the invaders but also managed to take control of much of the city of Mosul. Months later, despite the transformation of Fallujah into a mass of ruins surrounded by elite military troops and roadblocks, insurgent activity continued in the city. The same happened in the city of Ramadi, where attempts to control insurgency failed miserably.

The US military approach to winning the war in Iraq was based on a sustained policy of "clear and hold", a process of clearing a city, town or district of insurgents and then holding it with a combination of US and Iraqi collaborators forces. The fate of Fallujah, Ramadi and of the entire Anbar province demonstrates that this strategy failed. The report by Colonel Devlin implies that the problems in Anbar province actually go well beyond "insecurity": the US have lost control of the province.

Anbar is not an exception. Another strategically important region, Diyala, composed of a mixture of Sunnis, Shias and a Kurdish minority, is considered a "Taliban Republic" (Patrick Cockburn, "A Journey into the 'Taliban Republic' Where the Militias Rule Unchallenged", Independent, September 25, 2006).

As the imperialists lose their main means of military and political control over the Iraqi people, they use ethnic strife and sectarian religious divisions to fuel a civil war, trying to defeat the resistance by its own inner splits and by dismembering the country. Unfortunately, ethnic- sectarian violence is rising. Death squads already are operating both on the Sunni and the Shia side while the Kurdish leaderships cynically use their Peshmergas on the benefit the US occupiers, threatening even other Kurdish forces such as PKK to not "interfere" and "create problems to the Baghdad regime" of puppets.

Although very destructive, ethnic-sectarian civil war as a method of imperialist control has its own limits. Despite Talabani's and Barzani's servile collaboration with US imperialism, the unresolved Kurdish problem affects deeply the relations between Turkey and imperialism. It affects also Iran, a country with which the Bush Administration plays a contradictory and dangerous game, combining hysteria on the Iranian nuclear program and war threats with cooperation through the Iraqi Shiite political formations, such as the so called "Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq"-SCIRI, under the direct control of Teheran.

After the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein Baathist regime in Iraq by imperialism and intervention in Afghanistan, the mullahs' regime in Iran was "freed" by its antagonists in Baghdad and Kabul, the Baathists and the Talibans, and emerged as a hegemonic regional power overshadowing Saudi Arabia and scaring all the local rulers. For Iran's national bourgeois interests, and despite his extremist rhetoric, Iran's President Ahmadinejead collaborates closely with the US puppet governments in Iraq and Afghanistan and uses Iranian influence through SCIRI and Ayatollah Sistani to "moderate" opposition to occupation, promising to the Shia majority in Iraq the control of the country and of its oil resources in the South.

But nobody should forget that the Iraqi Shias had fought fiercely against the Iranian Shias during the catastrophic for both countries Iraq-Iran war. Their religious sectarian allegiance did not prevail then because the Baathist regime through the nationalization and centralization of oil resources had established a certain scale of redistribution of oil revenues to the Shia South as well. This centralization and re-distribution mechanism was destroyed by the US war and occupation, by the privatization drive and the plundering of the national resources by the multinational companies that followed.

The driving force of ethnic- sectarian strife is not faith to ethnic identity or about who was the real successor of the Prophet Mahomet but the antagonism between elites to grab oil revenues, against the interests of the majority of their own communities. For this reason, centrifugal forces are growing within the Shia community, including the Mahdi Army of Muktad al Sadr.

To unite all the communities of the people of Iraq against the forces of Occupation, fro freedom and independence, a program is needed to expropriate the oil and all national resources, under workers control and to plan production and distribution of revenues according social needs, beyond any division of ethnic or religious character. A program of national and social liberation can and should be advanced by the working class and its vanguard, organized in a revolutionary Party against all forms of fratricidal slaughtering fuelled by the US imperialists and their agents. Permanent revolution against the oppressors, not mutual extermination of the oppressed is the way out from the present bloody chaos.

Lebanon and Palestine

The second Lebanese war on July 12-August 14, 2006 has been not solely major military-political defeat for the Zionist State of Israel but also the most important defeat, so far, of US imperialism in its State terrorist "war on terror"( see Declaration of the Executive Council of the CRFI "The world situation after the Zionist aggression in Lebanon", September 4, 2006) The myth of the invincibility of the IDF, the fourth strongest war machine in the world, fully assisted by world's greatest military and economic superpower, the United States, received a fatal blow at the hands of an Arab popular militia of a few thousands fighters, dedicated to their cause, well trained and disciplined by their Party, Hezbollah. Zionism as a settler State and project has plunged in a crisis of historic dimensions. At the same time the entire Middle East strategy of the Bush Administration- the core of the project of the "war on terror"- received a devastating blow. In the beginning of the aggression, the US secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, full of arrogance and cynicism in front of massacres such as Qana's, has spoken about "the birthpangs of a new Middle East". Financial Times, the authoritative voice of the British ruling class, in an editorial, rightly pointed out that "Washington may be confusing 'birthpangs' with death-rattle" (July 26, 2006).

In an interview in Clarin (August 28, 2006)), Itamar Rabinowitz, Israel's former ambassador in Washington, now in the Tel Aviv University, used, in passim, the reference to the recent war as "the Lebanese version of the Spanish civil war"-i. e. as the dress rehearsal for a wider international war confrontation for word hegemony. In 1936 the Spanish civil war was for the Nazis and the Axis fascist forces the dress rehearsal for the coming World War II. This time, US imperialism claims to wage an "indefinite global war on terror", particularly against "islamofascism"; the Zionist invasion in Lebanon had as its aim the destruction of Hezbollah, considered (falsely) as "the long arm of Iran", as an initial step towards confrontation with Iran itself and the entire "Axis of Evil", extended from Teheran and Damascus to Pyong Yang and Caracas.

It is obvious that this delirious strategic plan ingloriously failed and backfired. Hezbollah remained military intact and politically all powerful, more influential than ever, as it was shown by the more than one million strong public rally of its supporters in Beirut addressed by a defiant Nasrallah in September; the popular masses all over the Arab and Muslim world found a source of inspiration for new rebellions against imperialism, Zionism and the local corrupt, pro-imperialist regimes; Iran emerged as regional hegemonic power; Syria made an important geopolitical comeback, just one year after the forced departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon; and the United States and Israel, as former US president Jimmy Carter has said(Perfil, September 17), remain now more than ever isolated in the world.

Zeev Schiff, the most famous Israeli military commentator, rightly pointed out (Haaretz, August 22): "One of the main conclusions of the war against Hezbollah should be that the combat capacity of the ground forces of Tsahal has been blunted by years of serving as a police force in the Palestinian Territories [.] The 'Palestinian model' had served as the guide to the units engaged in the bloody combats in Maroun Al-Ras and Bint Jbeil [in South Lebanon]. They entered the battlefield as in an operation in Gaza". And they were defeated.

It is one thing to act as a brutal and brutalized police force terrorizing, torturing, killing innocent civilians, women, children and elders in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons and checkpoints or, even, to confront ill-armed guerrilleros and a totally different thing to confront a genuine people's liberation war.

This is a lesson for all cases of imperialist occupation- in Palestine or in Iraq or Afghanistan; the strongest Armies on the planet, the US, British, Israeli and NATO occupation troops are totally unable to control people in rebellion. The foreign conquerors are demoralized as their own conquested lands become a moving sand and they are surrounded by mass hatred and the rebellious morale of the local population, in which the insurgents "swim like the fish in the sea", as Mao's famous dictum says.

The Zionist State actually continues the same self-defeating strategy of repression and killings, police intimidation and torture. Its only hope now is the implementation in occupied Palestine of the same tactic as the US in occupied Iraq: to fuel civil war between Fatah's "moderates" and Hamas Islamists, exploiting the organic weaknesses of both wings of Palestinian Arab nationalism, secular and religious, and their lack of a real strategy of national liberation. Within the Israeli Jewish population anxiety and anger for the results of the war are now make an explosive mixture with social tensions produced by the dismantlement of the welfare state and mass impoverishment. While Zionist right wingers try to exploit the situation and confusion still prevails, the ideological and moral crisis deepens. Nobody can overlook the fact that the anti war movement was increasing as the war in Lebanon developed and, at the end, more anti-war demonstrators have mobilized in Israel (from 10.000 the second week up to 50.000 in Tel Aviv, early August) than in the entire Europe.

The phony 'inquiry' on the inglorious military expedition in Lebanon assigned by PM Olmert tries to cover up the disastrous record of the IDF generals and of the Kadima-Labor government. The government has not collapsed immediately after the defeat only because there is no real alternative to it. Netanyahu's Likud is no less discredited than Olmert's Kadima or Peretz's Labor.

Zionism is in a historical impasse. As the above mentioned Declaration of the EC of the CRFI stresses "The project of a 'secure national home for Jews' fraudulently presented as a solution for the problem of anti-Semitism, in fact the building of a settlers' state by expulsing the local Arab population from its land, definitely proved to be a catastrophe for the Palestinians and the Arabs as a whole, and a death trap for the Jews themselves [.] The Israeli Jewish workers are in a crossroads. Either with the Zionist butchers, the warmongers, the corrupt bourgeois politicians, the Israeli ruling class and US imperialism leading them inescapably into a historic catastrophe or with the nationally and socially deprived Palestinian masses against imperialism, Zionism and its militarist State. There is no peace without the fulfillment of the Palestinian national aspirations, which necessitates the transformation of the entire region on new social and political bases: the opening of the road towards one secular democratic and socialist Republic in the entire historical territory of Palestine in the perspective of a Socialist federation of the peoples of the Middle East."

"Barbarism" vs. "Civilization"?

The series of serious setbacks and defeats that imperialist "war on terror' has faced during the last five years, particularly in 2006, has created conditions of political regime crisis at home, in Europe(for ex. Spain, Italy, Britain) as well as in America. The sharp clash between the intelligence agencies and the White House, from the Plame scandal/CIAgate to the leak of the NIE, the growing quarrels within the Bush Administration itself, the non stop crises within and between the Republicans and the Democrats, particularly as the November midterm elections are approaching, the conflicts between the executive, the Legislative and Judiciary branches of power, reflect deep rifts amongst he ruling capitalist elites in relation to the war, its (mis)management and the systemic crisis as a whole. Political regime crisis in the metropolitan countries drive more and more the ruling classes to co-opt and integrate in their survival strategies, including in their war crimes, the Left, both reformist and self-proclaimed 'revolutionary". It is not an accident that Socialist and Communist Parties and sections of the 'far left' in France and Italy have supported "their" imperialist governments in their "peace keeping" policy in the military occupation of Lebanon according to the 1701 UN Resolution.

The refusal to fight back these capitalist governments to overthrow them and open the road for workers governments and Socialism transform sectors of the Left and of the "anti-globalization" movement into parts of a system in disintegration and a mechanism of its ideological defense in a period of its greatest crisis of legitimacy.

Some representatives of the Left have more confidence to the health of the capitalist system than its open supporters on the Right. Even the emblematic ideologist of neo-conservatism, Francis Fukuyama, the pseudo-prophet of the 'End of History' after the collapse of the Soviet Union, abandoned ship. In his last book "After the Neocons-America at crossroads" (Profile 2006) sharply criticizes Bush Administration's conduct of war against Iraq and stresses that "the broader attempt to combat terror is ill-served not only by the war but also by the neoconservative project of democratic reform in the Middle East".

This war driven all sided crisis does not diminish the dangers, on the contrary; the lunatics in the White House and the Pentagon have intensified the warmongering, making Iran a privileged demonized target, without excepting North Korea or even Chavez's Venezuela. Washington speaks more and more deliriously on war against "islamofascism" that "conspires to establish a Caliphate from Spain to Indonesia"!!

While pronouncing wild statements against "islamofascists" abroad, the US rulers at home, reduce bourgeois democracy into a farce. Civil liberties are shrinking; "Patriot Act" 's State of Emergency is perpetuating itself and a new legislation was introduced by the US Congress extending Police State methods and legalizing torture. The European Union governments (with Tony Blair's Britain at head) follow to the steps of their transatlantic friends in their islamophobic terrorist hysteria. The Pope Benedict Ratzinger, with his anti-Islamic poisonous remarks gave his benediction to the new Crusade.

History's irony is that this entire lunacy is presented and ideologically justified as a clash of "Western Christian civilization" with Islamic and other civilizations considered as a sheer "barbarism". For the rulers of North America and Western Europe and for their apologists, the only real civilization is that which has established Auschwitz in the past and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in our days.

They present their imperial delusions as the "fight of modernity against pre-modern barbarity", focusing unilaterally and distortingly in some traditionalist aspects of the revolt of the oppressed. The revolutionary awakening in Asia, in the Middle East, in the "backward", indigenous areas initially can and do borrow from the past ideological forms and traditional forms of life that imperialist capitalism destroys with unprecedented barbarity.

Shia militias, Sunni insurgents, Pashtun in uprising, Baluchis in rebellion, indigenous peoples and aboriginals in revolt etc. enter again the arena of modern history. The revolt of the "barbarians" is a rebellion against the actually existing barbarism of a decayed world system, capitalism, realizing thus a really civilizing, necessary historical task. It marks not solely the entry of the popular masses of Asia and of the so-called "Third World" into modernity, as in the previous centuries, but the crisis of the modern world itself in the epoch of capitalist decline: the struggle of the demands of modernity itself to get rid of the chains of the capitalist conditions that assisted its birth some centuries ago and now, in their decline, threatens the life and all the cultural wealth of humanity.

The so-called barbarians can and should defeat the real barbarians in the imperialist West but not on the level and with the exhausted resources of the past. Their liberation from the "civilization' of Abu Ghraib depends on the methods and means of the emancipatory future: world Socialism. Their strategic ally is the world working class, particularly in the metropolitan countries, which should be emancipated from their bureaucratic leaderships tied to the imperialist machine.

The impact of the world capitalist crisis in the metropolitan centers themselves has already driven millions in struggle in Europe and in America. Fallujah and Beirut are not alone: the youth rebellions in Paris and all over France, the "si se puede" movement of millions of Latino immigrant workers in Los Angeles and all over the United States in spring 2006 demonstrate it.

As the 1917 October socialist Revolution had united the revolutionary East to international Bolshevism, a re-founded Fourth International, continuing the uncompleted work of October has to unite the exploited and oppressed in East and West, in North and South in a world wide revolutionary struggle, program and organization for the universal human emancipation.