The Iraqi resistance’s impact on the U.S. midterm elections

The Iraqi resistance’s impact on the U.S. midterm elections

In Portuguese: O impacto da resistência iraquiana nas eleições dos EUA

Three years of resistance by Iraqis to the criminal U.S. war and occupation have now shaken up Washington. U.S. voters angry over the disaster unfolding in Iraq, a decline in workers’ living standards and the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security and other social services handed a “thumping” to the Republican Party in the 2006 midterm elections, in Bush’s own words. Democrats won a clear majority in the House of Representatives and a narrow one in the Senate.

To see the usually aggressive and arrogant Bush gang squirm and retreat after this defeat has elated the vast majority of the world’s people. Then it got even better. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, considered the architect of the war on Iraq and the figure most closely associated with its tactics, with “shock and awe” and with the tortures of Abu Ghraib, was dumped and replaced.

The key issue of the election was the war, and the Republican setback was interpreted widely as a voter rejection of the war and ongoing occupation of Iraq, and in general of the Bush leadership.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that this electoral change will of itself end the criminal occupation of Iraq or lead to a substantial change in the goals of U.S. imperialism’s foreign policy. Without a mass struggle to end the occupation, however, U.S. troops can be expected to stay in Iraq a long time. To see why this is so, it helps to take a long view of the role of elections in the class struggle and especially that role within the United States.

Marxist view of elections under capitalism

The key Marxists tenet on bourgeois elections can be found in the writings of Friedrich Engels, who wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that “universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state." Lenin later cited this phrase in “State and Revolution” to make it clear that the workers’ movement had to smash the capitalist state -- its army, police, courts, etc. -- in order to bring about a change in which class directed society. This could not be done simply by being elected into office.

The 1998 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or that of Evo Morales more recently in Bolivia bring Engels’ phrase to mind. The mass of the people in these countries have indicated they are ready for change, but the election itself is insufficient to bring about this change. That U.S. imperialism is aware that the class struggle is concerned with state power was shown by Bush’s decision Nov. 9 to “quietly grant a waiver that allows the United States to resume training militaries from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries.” (USA Today, Nov. 10)

In the United States, however, elections in general have far less significance than even what Engels described, giving little opportunity for workers to choose a serious alternative. Not since 1912, when Socialist Eugene Debs obtained 900,000 out of 15 million votes cast or 6 percent, or perhaps 1920, when Debs won about the same 900,000 out of 26 million cast while campaigning from jail, have working-class parties been able to play a significant independent role in U.S. national elections. The U.S. capitalist class, at the dominant center of world imperialism at least since World War II, has had enough wealth and power to impose its monopoly in the electoral arena.

In U.S. elections, only the Republican and Democratic Parties compete on a national scale. The Republicans are most closely associated with the corporate rich. The Democrats’ constituents also include trade union leaders and more participation of African Americans and other oppressed nationalities. But both are pro-capitalist parties and both single-minded defenders of U.S. imperialist interests. They compete for the privileges that go to whichever party successfully defends the interests of the ruling class.

The two capitalist parties are united especially in aggressive U.S. foreign adventures and guilty of crimes of genocidal scale. The Republicans recently led U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the last 61 years, the Democratic Party has presided over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the attack on Korea, the escalation of the war against Vietnam, and the bombing of Yugoslavia.

U.S. elections biased against poor, workers, oppressed

That voting is optional and elections are held on non-holidays encourages abstention in general and discourages poor people and especially African American, Latino and Indigenous people from voting. The proportion of eligible voters who actually voted in 2006 was considered high, yet it was only 40.4 percent.

U.S. elections rules are filled with anti-democratic biases. There is no proportional representation in voting, as each election is winner-take-all. The Senate has 100 members, two from each state; this means a state like California with a population of over 36 million elects the same number of senators as does Wyoming, with its half million population. The House of Representatives has 435 representatives, one elected from each district of roughly equal population. But even there, the Republican Party has distorted their geography to favor more conservative and reactionary sectors of the electorate.

Some 10 million non-citizen workers have no right to vote even though they are an important part of the working class in the U.S. and highly aware of political issues, as this year’s huge May 1 demonstrations for immigrant rights showed. Nor can 5.5 million ex-prisoners vote in most states in this country -- along with the 2 million in prison they make up almost 4 percent of the potential electorate. Biased voting rules and unequal enforcement of identification procedures all work together to weigh the elections against the cities, against the poor, against the African American and Latino population, who are more likely to support progressive candidates.

On top of all this, the ruling class has a monopoly on the mass media, and modern U.S. elections are completely dependent on television advertising. Thus candidates must accumulate vast amounts of money even to attempt to compete, which ties them to those who can make big campaign contributions. Presidential elections cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Senate races can cost tens of millions.

This all turns the electoral arena into one of the most difficult areas to raise independent working-class politics. Only under conditions of a broad upsurge of struggle can the elections lead to a breakthrough. Or when there is a sharp battle within the ruling class during a crisis, as happened this year.

Iraqi resistance provokes split in ruling class

By imposing a stunning defeat on the U.S. attempt to conquer and control Iraq, the Iraqi resistance also caused a split of crisis proportions within the U.S. ruling class. This class had supported the Bush gang’s aggression against Iraq when it looked like an easy victory. At that time they thought the Bush leadership as decisive, overriding softer imperialist allies and critics. After three years, the Iraqi people’s resistance has exposed all the weaknesses of the Pentagon and stretched the U.S. military to the breaking point. The U.S. Army is demoralized and unable to easily attract new recruits. The officer corps is in rebellion against Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership of the Pentagon. Under the pressure of these defeats, the ruling class started to view the Bush gang as narrow-minded, incapable of listening to criticism and generally incompetent.

Three developments began in the spring and summer of 2006 that came together at the time of the election to bring about the setback for the Bush administration.

First, the “Iraq Study Group,” led by James Baker, a senior adviser to the George H. W. Bush Sr., administration, and former Democratic Congressperson Lee Hamilton was set up last March to find a way for U.S. imperialism to reverse its defeat in Iraq or at least to reduce its losses. For its proposals to be even discussed by the executive power, this group needed first to eliminate Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Former CIA Director Robert Gates, who was named to replace Rumsfeld, is also from the administration of the first Bush and was a member of the Iraq Study Group.

Second, the Democratic Party decided to run its national campaign by constantly criticizing the Bush administration’s management of the Iraq war and keeping Iraq at the front of the media. The national election itself became a sort of referendum on the Iraq war. Bush and Dick Cheney locked onto a “stay the course” position and accused the Democrats of wanting to “cut and run.”

The Democrats avoided taking a clear anti-war position themselves. Two-thirds of the Democratic Party candidates, in 45 of the most closely contested House races, not only opposed withdrawal from Iraq but opposed so much as a timetable for pulling out. Only one, Peter Welch from Vermont, supported bringing the troops home in 2006. Nevertheless, the perception was that the Republicans were pro-war and the Democrats wanted to end the war. This greatly helped the Democrats.

Third, the Iraqi resistance stepped up its fighting, and especially stopped U.S. troops from subduing Baghdad. October fighting alone killed 105 U.S. troops in Iraq. Also, for the first time, sections of the corporate media began to give regular publicity to the growing casualties among U.S. troops in Iraq and the instability of the Iraqi puppet regime. Popular revulsion over the Iraq war, which had existed since the Iraqi people began a determined resistance against the unpopular and brutal U.S. occupation, grew to new levels.

As an indication of the shift in the ruling class toward the Democrats brought about by the failure of the war effort, the Democrats collected $25.9 million in contributions in one 18-day period in October, more than the Republican’s $18.6 million. Usually the Republicans raise significantly more in contributions.

In that same month, Pentagon generals and top politicians, including former supporters of the war like Sen. John Warner of Virginia, openly expressed their pessimism about the outcome of the war. Two days before the election, a joint editorial in four leading newspapers with close ties to the military called for Rumsfeld’s resignation. The papers -- the Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times -- are published by the Military Times Media Group, a subsidiary of the Gannett Co., and widely distributed on military bases around the world.

People oppose the war

This split in ruling circles over the war and the growing ruling-class disillusion with the Bush administration’s mismanagement opened a space for ordinary working people to express their own opposition to the war. And they did. In exit polls on Election Day, over 60 percent of voters disapproved of the Iraq war. In about a third of Massachusetts’s towns, a popular referendum calling for a U.S. withdrawal also won approval from about 60 percent of the half-million people voting. An even higher percentage approved a similar referendum in Chicago. And the vote for the Democrats itself was itself propelled by hostility to the war, to Bush’s attack on Social Security, to the factory closings in the Midwest and loss of the better paid, unionized jobs.

The anti-war and progressive movement, however, has no reason to expect the Democrats to take serious anti-war measures. The main message of the Democratic Party leadership now is that they await the report from the Iraq Study Group and that the U.S. Iraq policy must change.

To force the Bush gang to take a step back on Iraq, its ruling-class opponents had to appeal to the anti-war sentiments of millions of people. Since the internal ruling-class battles will continue to delay a resolution of the Iraq crisis, there will continue to be a need – and an opportunity – to arouse mass intervention to bring an end to the war and occupation.

The challenge for all progressives in the U.S. and for the anti-war movement in particular is how to take this setback for Bush and turn it into a consistent struggle in the factories, schools, offices and streets to really challenge both the new Congress and the old White House and end the occupation of Iraq.

*Catalinotto works with the international department of the IAC in the New York office.

Posted December 12, 2006