The bitter fruits of US foreign policy?
By Clive Bradley, in London


Much of the Left has attempted to explain the atrocity in
New York as the 'bitter fruits of US foreign policy' - the
headline in Socialist Worker; or to claim that the 'root
cause' of the attacks is 'imperialism', the desperation of
the dispossessed masses, particularly in the Middle East, in
the face of imperialism (and Israel, etc) and so on. Of
course, any socialist understands what this means, and
partly endorses the sentiment. The US is a big power used to
throwing its weight around; its government is responsible
for many deaths, many horrors. Certainly, in so far as some
people in the Middle East, for instance among the
Palestinians, evidently rejoiced - at first, anyway - when
the news broke, it was because of deep frustrations and
anger.

But this analysis is timeless. US imperialism has been doing
awful things for a long time. And arguably, it has done much
worse things in the past. To go back only within the limits
of my own lifetime, the Vietnam War and the associated
bombing of Cambodia were great horrors. The bombing of Iraq
and the slaughter of unarmed Iraqi soldiers on the road to
Baghdad was only 10 years ago, and a great horror. Yet these
despicable imperialist acts did not result in a catastrophe
like the attacks on New York and Washington. The media
repeatedly congratulates we British on being 'used to'
terrorism.  Yet no IRA attack was ever vaguely on the scale
of what happened on 11 September.

For the argument that this was 'the bitter fruit of US
foreign policy' really to explain anything would require us
to believe that a) US foreign policy is substantially worse
than it was in the past, and b) 'the masses', particularly
in the Middle East, are qualitatively more 'desperate' than
they used to be, and c) the latter is because of the former,
or at least that the US symbolically represents the source
of that desperation in a new way. Yet none of these things,
surely, are true. The US is distinguished now by being the
only superpower, but its actions can hardly be construed as
worse than in the past. It is unclear in what sense the
masses of the Middle East are more oppressed by American
imperialism than they used to be. If they are more
desperate, for sure it is because there has been no
progress, no real change, except for the worse -
economically - for many of those masses, as the gap between
the world's rich and poor gets wider all the time. The
current fighting in Palestine is due to frustrations born of
disappointments with what looked like progress and turned
out not to be. And Israel is backed by America. But it is
not clear why this alone might lead to the growth of
'Islamic fundamentalist' groups across the region - nor why
similar groups, in different ideological clothes, do not
exist in other parts of the 'third world' where things are
equally desperate.

Something else must be at work to explain why groups like
Osama bin Laden's exist, why they have an audience now among
some of the masses of the Middle East but not before, and
why an atrocity such as that on 11 September can occur.

Post War decolonisation

At the end of the Second World War, the Middle East was
still, largely, controlled by the old colonial powers. The
creation of Israel in 1948, through war in which three
quarters of a million Arabs were dispersed, threw an
ideological fly in the ointment which has never been sorted
out. As the colonial powers withdrew or were driven out, the
USA, strong after the war, moved in as an economic
force. The - also strong - USSR also moved in, in a
different way.  The two superpowers vied for influence. In
the 1950s a powerful Arab nationalist movement emerged,
which took on a Stalinistic flavour as it nationalised
foreign capital - most dramatically in Egypt, where Nasser
declared 'Arab socialism' the objective. There were
political Islamic groups (again, primarily in Egypt, where
they were persecuted), but there was little talk of Islam in
these movements.

In Iran, too - not an Arab country except for a small
national minority - there was a nationalist movement which
confronted the colonial power, Britain, paying for its
impertinence with a CIA- backed coup. Nasserite Arab
socialism was pretty much exhausted by the end of the 1960s,
following a disastrous defeat by Israel in 1967. Saddam
Hussein's regime in Iraq (the bastard child of a powerful
popular revolution in 1958) was the right-wing fag end of
that nationalist revolt, taking power in 1968. By the end of
the 1970s, the rhetoric of 'anti-imperialism' in the sense
it was understood in the 'fifties was already decaying, as
regimes - again, most strikingly Egypt under Sadat - made
friends with the USA.

Then, within a year of each other, came two events. The
first was the Iranian revolution, the second the USSR's
invasion of Afghanistan.  Suddenly the phrase 'Islamic
fundamentalism' was on everyone's lips.  These events marked
the collapse of the post-war picture of the region. Secular
nationalism, allied to the USSR, disintegrated. On the one
hand, regimes which had been the product of that phase of
history moved closer to the United States; on the other,
Islam proved an ideology which could oppose both US-backed
regimes (Iran), and Soviet-backed ones (Afghanistan). Then,
of course, with the collapse of the USSR itself, the picture
became different again. What I have described is
over-generalised - certain regimes, like Syria and Libya,
remained committed to 'fifties nationalism long afterwards;
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was always peculiar. But this is
the general picture, nonetheless.

Where did 'Islamic fundamentalism' come from? Khomeini's
regime in Iran did not appear from nowhere; politicised
Islamic groups go back to before the Second World War. Nor
was Khomeini's victory assured: Stalinised leftist movements
were extremely strong at the beginning of 1979; there was,
briefly, the possibility of an independent working class
movement, and even proto-workers' councils in Iran. But the
mullahs, led by Khomeini, seized power and defeated other
social and political forces. In Afghanistan, Stalinist
forces were fantastically isolated as a result of top-down
reforms, and soon faced a revolt which became dominated by
Islamic groups.

Failure of secular nationalism

Much of the Left was taken very unawares, for instance, by
Khomeini - including ourselves. The movement led by the
mullahs was interpreted as a version of the old-style
nationalism of the 'fifties (with a religious twist), rather
than something new and deeply reactionary.  The Iranian
Left, trapped in a false image (which would have been false
even if they had not misunderstood Khomeini) paid for their
confusions with their lives and the destruction of their
organisations. 'Islamic fundamentalism', however, was not
merely an ideologically less attractive variant of old-style
nationalism. The US-backed Shah had implemented various
capitalist reforms which had enraged the traditional ruling
class - especially the mosque.  Although Khomeini was able
to dominate a coalition of social forces, he and the mullahs
themselves represented this displaced and furious old ruling
class - taking revenge.

Even where some of the vocabulary of old-style Stalinised
nationalism was used ('imperialism', for instance), the
Islamists meant something quite different. They meant the
whole of Western civilisation. In the 1950s and '60s, with
some justification, the socialist Left could support Arab
(and also Iranian, etc) nationalism, even though the regimes
involved were not in the slightest democratic in the
parliamentary sense. That phase of nationalism - along with
such movements elsewhere - included, at their heart, an
effort by the peoples of colonial or semi-colonial countries
to throw off oppressive foreign yokes in the name of
freedom. In the advanced capitalist countries, socialists
could reasonably suppose that in supporting such movements
they were contributing to the greater good of humanity, a
world of greater equality between nations, and so
on. Within, for instance, Arab countries - hypothetically,
for there have never been any genuinely socialist movements
there - socialists could see themselves as part of the
general movement, a critical, independent movement fighting
for working class independence and leadership, and never
simply subsuming themselves into nationalism, but still,
adopting part of the national movement's programme as their
own.

Rise of fundamentalism

Movements like Khomeini's were something else entirely. The
Iranian Left's error in supporting Khomeini, which most of
them did, was not merely an old-fashioned Stalinist popular
frontist error, lining up behind a treacherous
bourgeoisie. Rather, they supported the old, anti-capitalist
in a reactionary sense, ruling class. From the Khomeini-ite
perspective, the Left was part of 'imperialism', because
socialism is part of Western civilisation, consequently to
be massacred with relish. There was no part of the
Khomeini-ite project which overlapped with socialism.

This aspect of Islamism is writ large in the attack on
America - a profoundly chauvinistic assault in which not
only is no distinction made between government and people,
but any such distinction would seem, to them, conceptually
beyond comprehension.

It would not be true to say that old-style post-war
nationalism was not chauvinistic; far from it. But the
Islamist movements which have gained substantial ground in
Palestine, Lebanon, and so on over the last twenty years are
a different beast entirely. (Sudan, for example, has a long
'fundamentalist' tradition; but as in Egypt, the Islamic
groups are quite different to the old Muslim Brotherhood).
The question is how such groups could have grown. 'US
foreign policy' doesn't explain this at all. If one were to
take the 'desperation' of the masses as a constant, the
growth of 'fundamentalism' is to be explained by events
within the Middle East, not by 'imperialism'.

Secular nationalism, from Nasser to Arafat, proved to be an
unmitigated failure. Political independence did not improve
the lot of the masses. 'Arab socialism' and its imitators
ran out of steam.  The Middle Eastern bourgeoisies, on the
whole, turned to Western capital as a way out of their
economic impasse. Even the vast wealth generated by oil,
especially in the 1970s, resulted only in a handful of rich
sheikhs, not an improvement of the lot of the dispossessed
poor. Stalinism failed, and then the USSR itself collapsed,
leaving those USSR-oriented 'communist' movements in
disarray. For example, among the Palestinians, in the 1970s
and '80s there were various relatively strong Stalinoid
groups; all of these have collapsed.

The Middle East - meaning the Arab world from Morocco to
Iraq and eastwards to Afghanistan - has never had any
working class movements as such a thing might be understood
in, for example, Latin America, let alone in Western
Europe. The only exception, and it is a partial one, is
Iran. There has never been, in any of these countries, a
movement of any size based on the working class. Such groups
as have called themselves 'socialist' have been
Nasserite-nationalist or Stalinist or a mixture of the
two. For sure this is partly because of the lack of a social
base for such a movement. Egypt has a large working class;
Iraq also. Only in Iran have there been movements which are
recognisably the kind of movement out of which a socialist
tradition might emerge, and it has failed to do so there as
well.

The flowering of secular nationalism after World War Two
shows that the power of Islam now does not derive from the
intrinsic piety of these societies. 'Muslim' countries are
complex things; 'Islam' is a complex thing. The image in the
West of all these millions of people as obsessively
mosque-going fanatics is indescribably false. 'Islamic
fundamentalism' is the tragic marriage of, on the one hand,
a section of the poor who were failed by secular
nationalism, and on the other, a section of the mosque
embittered by the encroachments of capitalism which seized
its chance. Within this marriage, the latter - the
reactionary social classes - are wholly dominant.

The oppressiveness of US (and other Western, such as
British) imperialism is a constant factor in the lives of
the people of the Middle East. So too the oppressiveness of
their own undemocratic regimes. The attack on America cannot
be explained by 'imperialism', except in the sense that this
can explain anything and therefore nothing. Much more
accurately, the growth of Islamism has to be explained by
the failures of nationalism, therefore of the local
bourgeoisies - and in a profound sense, the failure of
democratic socialism to make the slightest inroad into the
region.

The world is disappearing into a black hole of mutually
exclusive chauvinisms. Bush talks of 'good against evil'
precisely mirroring the worldview of the Islamists. In
Israel/Palestine, as the lamentable 'peace process' has
collapsed, you find a microcosm of this whole thing: most
Israelis don't seem to want to know why poverty-stricken
Arab youth might enlist with Hamas, they just want to make
sure they don't get blown up by suicide bombers; the
poverty- stricken youth have given up on any rapprochement
with the 'Jewish state' and want to destroy the Jews. It
would be a dialogue of the deaf, except a dialogue
presupposes at least a few words that both can understand.

Nowhere do the prospects for socialism seem bleaker than in
the Middle East. But as the Middle East becomes the
epicentre of a global 'war against terrorism' this is not
only a comment on the region itself. The task of finding a
way to speak to those dispossessed masses, especially the
youth, and break them from the reactionary Islamist forces,
is of incalculable importance. If the Left continues to be
irrelevant to events in the Middle East, the future of the
world is bleak. On the other hand, if the Left talks banally
and timelessly about the crimes of imperialism, it will fail
utterly to win the hearts and souls of workers in rich
countries. The socialist Left has never been so weak. Yet we
are, potentially, a voice of sanity and in a sense of
moderation, desperately needed.