Building an effective movement against occupation

Mike Marqusee looks at the challenge facing the British anti-war movement.

Labour Left Briefing, October 2004

Of the many lies we were told about this war, perhaps the biggest was that it came to an end in the spring of 2003. As predicted, the wages of occupation have been death and destruction, mounting by the week.

As the US’s principal military ally, Britain is embroiled to the hilt in the ongoing bloodshed. And as a joint occupying power, Britain is complicit in all the abuses of the occupation, from the torture in Abu Ghraib to the air strikes on civilian populations in Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi and Tel Afur. Yet the British anti-war movement has clearly lost momentum. Compared to the zenith of February 2003, demonstrations have been minuscule.

It was always going to be difficult to translate opposition to an imminent and avoidable war into sustained activity against an ongoing occupation. To some extent the realities of the unfinished war in Iraq have been camouflaged by the silence of much of the British media, not least the post-Hutton BBC. Anti-occupation voices (from either Iraq or Britain) are excluded and the vicissitudes of occupation are treated as technical problems, not matters of politics and principle.

The retrospective focus on missing WMD, intelligence failures and Blair’s lies contributes to the illusion that the immediate question is whether Britain was right to go to war, not whether we should end the occupation. Polls indicate that more people in this country think the war was unjustified now than 18 months ago, but many of them do not support bringing the troops home now.

The discrepancy should not be surprising. Moving from anti-war feeling to anti-occupation action requires some kind of anti-imperialist analysis, which is still not widely shared. Instead we have the liberal illusion that the invasion can be converted after the fact into something benign and responsive to the needs of Iraqis. But in light of recent events, can any honest observer doubt that ending the occupation is the necessary precondition for real reconstruction and self-determination?

Foreign occupation is intrinsically anti-democratic, inherently high handed and inevitably turns to force to resolve its political problems – because in the end its authority rests only on force. The occupiers are not accountable to the people whose land they occupy. The chain of command binds US-UK troops in Iraq not to Iraqis but to the ruling elite in Washington and London, whose priorities have never included the welfare of Iraqis. This is colonial domination, and all over the world people have repeatedly risen up against it.

The anti-war movement has to work to move people beyond their anger over the lies that dragged us into war and toward an understanding of the inevitable brutality of the occupation resulting from that war. In this context, “we” are not the solution; “we” – the US-British military presence – are the problem.

To succeed will require a greater degree of honest discussion across the movement than we have so far enjoyed. As in the past, sections of the left have become mired in a crudely polarised, often ill-informed debate about the resistance. Our solidarity requires that we refuse to concede an inch to liberal imperialism – but that doesn’t mean we cannot question, criticise or even condemn actions by sections of the resistance. We must recognise that this resistance is multi-faceted and in flux and that the evolving reality in Iraq is unlikely to conform to anyone’s preconceived scenarios.

The movement has also been hampered by the fact that the war criminals head a Labour government and the established electoral alternatives are all pro-occupation. New Labour, on this most crucial moral challenge of our time, has sealed effective choice out of the political system. The undoubted opposition within the Labour Party has not been translated into effective pressure. Sadly, the coming conference may well be the third in succession at which the leadership are not held to account for crimes against humanity. Ironically, the quiescence of all but half a dozen Labour MPs means that there has been more protest against the occupation in the US Congress than in the British parliament.

Nonetheless, the anti-war movement still commands potentially huge resources. The priority is to mobilise those resources to remind our fellow citizens at every turn of the horrors being perpetrated in their names, to find ways to bring home the essential injustice of the occupation and rouse the public to demand an end to it.