This Year in Review: 2003 Year in Review: 2003 The year 2003 marked a turning point in world history. US imperialism, with the complicity of all the major powers, launched a brutal and illegal war against Iraq. Defying the will of the majority of the world’s population—millions of whom took to the streets in protest—the imperialist powers, driven by insoluble economic contradictions, escalated a campaign of military predation and world conquest.

The drive to war

The year began against the backdrop of impending war and deepening economic crisis. In the course of nearly 700 articles, the World Socialist Web Site analyzed the fundamental causes of the unfolding disaster and elaborated the only viable perspective for the defeat of American militarism. In “On eve of US war against Iraq: the political challenge of 2003,” published January 6, the WSWS Editorial Board warned that the administration of George W. Bush had already made the decision for war. There is nothing Baghdad could do, including the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to avert a US invasion. Bush’s talk of Iraqi violations of UN resolutions are transparent pretexts. Washington’s aim is not the “disarming” of Iraq or even the removal of Saddam Hussein, but rather the occupation of the country and the seizure of its oilfields. The occupation of Iraq would not be the last war led by the American ruling class with the aim of maintaining its position of global dominance: The same rationale that underlies the war against Iraq will inevitably lead to wars against Iran, Syria and other countries in the region. The US drive to dominate the world’s oil supplies will lead to increasingly fierce conflicts with more powerful nations, including Russia, China and America’s great power rivals in Europe and Japan. A US conquest of Iraq will initiate a process whose ultimate outcome will be a third world war. To justify its act of aggression, the Bush administration employed increasingly brazen lies, centered on the claims that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). On February 5, US Secretary of State Colin Powell made his infamous address to the United Nations Security Council. In a statement the next day, headlined "Powell's UN speech triggers countdown to war against Iraq,” the WSWS Editorial Board subjected his brief for war to a thorough analysis, noting that it “was predicated on a colossal lie: that the coming invasion is about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad’s supposed threat to US security and world peace.” Within the United States, Bush relied on the media and the Democratic Party to sell these lies to the American people. The mass media seized on Powell’s speech to unanimously proclaim that it was an “irrefutable” indictment of the Iraqi regime. The WSWS noted that a number of liberal commentators were obliged to write their declarations of unconditional support for Powell’s claims before the secretary of state had finished speaking. The New York Times referred to Powell’s remarks as “the most powerful case to date.” The Times own reporters played a critical role in promoting the lies used by Powell and the Bush administration. Times correspondent Judith Miller, functioning as a Pentagon mouthpiece, published a series of sensational stories purporting to substantiate the existence of chemical and biological weapons. Times chief foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman personified the cynicism and reaction of the liberal establishment in its efforts to cloak the administration’s aggression in “democratic” garb. No significant section of the Democratic Party opposed this criminal plot, with Sen. Joseph Biden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein immediately declaring Powell’s speech “unanswerable.” John Kerry, who would be the Democrats’ candidate for president in 2004, declared that it was necessary to “face up to the threat of weapons of mass destruction,” while urging the Bush administration to solicit international support in any military action. The Bush administration was also given critical assistance by other major powers, particularly Britain, led by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. In a series of intelligence dossiers, Blair put forward increasingly dire claims, including the assertion that Hussein had sought uranium from Niger for possible nuclear weapons and that he could deploy WMD within 45 minutes (prompting the Sun headline in September 2002: “Brits 45 Mins from Doom”). The slowly unfolding nightmare of the war preparations provoked mass opposition around the world. On February 15-16, the largest antiwar protests in history took place. More than ten million people marched in over 60 countries and 600 cities, with demonstrations taking place on every continent, including Antarctica. The demonstrations included 3 million people in Rome, the single largest antiwar rally in history. One-and-a-half million people attended a rally in Madrid, and 1 million took to the streets of London. In the United States, at least 225 separate demonstrations took place, with 400,000 marching in New York City. The New York Times commented nervously that the demonstrations showed “there may be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” In “An event of world historical significance,” the WSWS noted that in the aftermath of the coordinated international mobilization “all pretense of democratic political legitimacy for the war … has been irrevocably shattered.” The eruption of mass protests only underscored that this sentiment did not find any organized political expression. The sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and their supporters distributed the leaflet “The tasks facing the anti-war movement” which called for a turn to the working class on the basis of a fight for a socialist program. In the US, not only the Republicans, but also the leading Democrats are to a man supporting the war. In Europe, even those governments and parties that reject a military strike at this point accept the American war aims as plausible and legitimate… The anti-war movement must be transformed into a powerful political movement of the working class. This requires a program based on an understanding of the causes and driving forces behind this war. Not unity at any price, but clarity is the demand of the hour. The statement stressed that, if it were to be successful, opposition to war could not be subordinated to parties standing “with one or both legs in the camp of the bourgeois order—not only the Democrats in the US, but also the Social Democrats, the Greens, the German PDS, the Communist Party in France and the Democratic Left in Italy.” The war preparations against Iraq exposed mounting conflicts between the major powers. Tensions ran high when French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin blocked attempts by the US to obtain the approval of the UN Security Council for an invasion of Iraq. France and Germany had no principled objections to this war, however. The the WSWS wrote, in opposition to the “left” French group Attac, “If France is a ‘pacifist’ in the current crisis, that is because it finds itself outgunned and has no choice at the moment but to pursue diplomatic efforts to curtail US ambitions. Given transformed circumstances, nothing would prevent Paris or Berlin from launching its own predatory wars of conquest.”

The invasion of Iraq

The world’s population watched in horror as American imperialism and its criminal accomplices commenced the annihilation of Iraqi society. “March 21, 2003 is a shameful day in US history,” wrote the WSWS, as Bush’s “shock and awe” blitzkrieg campaign transformed Baghdad into an inferno. Unsurprisingly, the Iraqi population did not welcome the invading troops as liberators, and bitter guerrilla warfare was waged in many cities. On March 21, the day of the invasion, the WSWS published a statement by Editorial Board Chairman David North, “The crisis of American capitalism and the war against Iraq,” which began: The unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States is an event that will live in infamy. The political criminals in Washington who have launched this war, and the wretched scoundrels in the mass media who are reveling in the bloodbath, have covered this country in shame. Hundreds of millions of people in every part of the world are repulsed by the spectacle of a brutal and unrestrained military power pulverizing a small and defenseless country. The invasion of Iraq is an imperialist war in the classic sense of the term: a vile act of aggression that has been undertaken on behalf of the interests of the most reactionary and predatory sections of the financial and corporate oligarchy in the United States. Its overt and immediate purpose is the establishment of control over Iraq’s vast oil resources and reduction of that long-oppressed country to an American colonial protectorate. The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, illegal under international law developed in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. North wrote, “The ‘war of choice’ being launched by the Bush administration is in no legal sense fundamentally different from the decisions and actions for which the Nazi leaders were tried and hanged in October 1946.” The American ruling class carried out the invasion of Iraq to seize control of Iraqi oil as part of a broader strategy to utilize military force to counter US capitalism’s economic decline. Unending war served as well as a mechanism for directing increasingly explosive tensions within the United States outward. The attempt to resolve the crisis of American capitalism through imperialist aggression, however, was doomed to failure: Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society. Administration officials and proponents of war predicted a “cakewalk,” with American troops greeted as liberators. Within days of the invasion, however, resistance to the invasion shattered the propaganda of a “liberation” war. Not long after the dust had settled around the stage-managed toppling of the statue of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the “Battle of Baghdad” was declared over, the initial opposition of the Iraqi masses developed into a full-blown insurgency, which would last for years. The reality of the increasingly tenuous grip held by the imperialists over the country was illustrated in August, when a truck bomb killed the UN’s chief representative in Iraq, Sergio de Mello. For the Iraqi people, the invasion marked a new period of catastrophe, in which an entire society was torn apart. In “The rape of Iraq,” published a month and a half after the invasion, the WSWS compared the war to the brutal conquests carried out by the Nazis throughout Europe in the 20th century: Today Iraq lies in ruins. A campaign that can better be described as a massacre than a war yielded combined civilian and military casualties that number in the many tens, if not hundreds of thousands. Hospitals, schools, power facilities, water and sewage services, trash collection and every other section of infrastructure required to sustain life in a highly urbanized society have been smashed. Cholera and other diseases have reached epidemic proportions. The editorial examined in detail the corporate interests at stake and the plans for the privatization and looting of Iraqi resources. This “war for democracy” would eventually turn countless millions of Iraqis into refugees, orphans, invalids or corpses. The hypocrisy behind the phony WMD pretext became brutally evident in the use by the imperialists of cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons against the Iraqi population. In May, Bush proclaimed victory and the end of major combat operations in Iraq in his notorious “Mission Accomplished” speech. After being presented with this fait accompli, the UN Security Council quickly fell into line and voted to sanction the continued military occupation of Iraq by the US and Britain, providing absolution for “past, present and future” crimes. As the war dragged on, the WSWS continued to expose the phony “anti-war” stance of France and Germany, which were seeking to use the UN merely to increase their own influence, gaining access for European companies to Iraq’s oil and securing a role for European concerns in reconstruction projects. While German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder adapted his political rhetoric to the strong antiwar sentiments in the German population, he and his coalition partner, the Greens, soon supported the occupation and permitted the US war machine to operate out of Ramstein Airbase, which served as the most important hub for deploying military personnel and supplies to the war zone. When it became undeniable that Iraq had never possessed any WMDs, the imperialists’ web of deception unraveled. Calls for an inquiry into British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s role in developing the war’s phony pretexts were initially met alternately with cover-ups and whitewashes. However, after the suspicious death of whistleblower and UN weapons inspector David Kelly, demands for an investigation resulted in the Hutton Inquiry, which provided irrefutable evidence of the lies by Blair and senior British officials. Upon the capture of Hussein later in December, members of the Bush administration and media called for the swift trial and execution of the nation’s former leader. “There are good reasons for Washington to want to avoid any public prosecution of Hussein,” the WSWS noted in an editorial comment. “Indeed, his regime’s greatest crimes against the Iraqi people—the Iran-Iraq war, the suppression of the Shiites and Kurds, etc.—were carried out with Washington’s active support.” The integral role played by the media in laying the groundwork for the war reached its logical conclusion once the conflict finally began: both in its unprecedented and obedient censorship of the human suffering imposed on Iraq and in its willing participation in the invasion of hundreds of “embedded journalists.”

A world in crisis

International Committee of the Fourth International

Culture and the Iraq War