War is Business, Business is War

Dave Whyte, University of Leeds

‘It was not until each country got attacked that they said , ‘Maybe Winston Churchill was right.’ Maybe that lone voice expressing concern about what was happening was right’ (Donald Rumsfeld justifying a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, August 2002)

One of the most bizarre features of the various propaganda efforts in the preparation for the latest all out assault on Iraq is the frequent bandying around of references to WWII figures. Whilst politicians and media sources in the West frequently compare Saddam Husein with Hitler, the Iraqi leader himself has been quoting speeches by Winston Churchill1. Bush, also having been compared to Hitler by the Saudi2 and Iraqi press3 - and perhaps more famously in the west by German Justice Minister Herta Daeublker-Gmelin4 - is a known Churchill obsessive, with a bust of the British war leader in pride of place in the Oval Office. All the indications are that Bush is desperate to attract comparisons between himself and the recently anointed ‘greatest Briton in history’.

Those who know anything about the origins of the Iraqi nation know precisely how closely our greatest statesman is bound to its history. It was Churchill who, as Secretary for War and Air, was in charge of the military control of Baghdad and Basra when the region’s natural resources were carved up between Britain and France after WWI. The British occupation was far from popular, and required brutal suppression of the local people. Another British war hero, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, referring to British blanket bombing of Kurds and Arabs in Iraq in 1920, bragged:

‘They know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within 45 minutes a full sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.’

The villagers’ crime was that they dared to object to the imposition by the British of a bogus royal family. When we consider that this ‘regime change’ imposed by the British was undertaken explicitly to guarantee British companies’ control of the oil spoils that lay beneath the desert, Rumsfeld’s appropriation of the Churchillian tradition is wholly legitimate. History repeats itself indeed.

Of course, the historical narrative that seems to dominate current war-mongering hype in the West is not that of the brutality of British economic imperialism or the advancement of British corporate interest between the wars. A far more common narrative in the Western press has been the consistent reference to Saddam as the new Hitler. And more often that not, such remarks are made in the context of the Halabja massacre at which at least 5,000 Kurds and Iranians were massacred by chemical gas bombing. It is possible to argue Churchill equally deserves comparison with the butcher of Baghdad for suppressing anyone who got in the way of the empire. Indeed it was Churchill who famously instructed that no mercy be shown to the Kurds and Arabs in southern Iraq:

‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.’6

But another, more accurate historical comparison can be found in the connections between the forces that sustained and provided impetus to both Saddam’s and Hitler’s regimes. Both regimes of pursued a policy of genocide. More than this, it was a policy that was actually only made possible with the support of western corporations. The attacks on Halabja required French mirage fighter planes and artillery sold to them by South African and Austrian corporations. Between 1980 and 1988, Iraq was the largest retail buyer of arms in the world, supplied by both Soviet and Western arms manufacturers.7 In just 5 years, the Reagan and Bush (snr.) administrations granted 771 export licences to Iraq, most for ‘dual technology’ supplies which had a military use.8 Some had a chemical weapons use, such as VX gas and the drug pralidoxine. US firms also shipped to Iraq biological materials including bacillus anthracis (the organism that causes anthrax), West Nile fever germs, clostridium botulinium (the agent that causes botulism poisoning), salmonella and e-coli.9 The UK ‘arms to Iraq’ inquiry which implicated Matrix Churchill hardly scratched the surface.

An astounding array of western corporations lined up to profit from building Saddam’s chemical and biological armoury. One report, published in 1990 by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre10, collated evidence that had already been published in different sources. The report documents a total of 207 western firms from 21 countries implicated in production of chemicals and missile parts sold to the Iraqis for illegal poison gas and nerve gas warfare. And this is only the companies that were caught! Amongst those firms are some household names: Daimler-Benz; Phillips Petroleum; BP (Germany); Siemens; United Steel and Strip Corporation; Hewlett Packard and a subsidiary of Fiat. After the Gulf War in 1991, members of the US armed forces filed a class action in Texas indicting US companies who had supplied Iraq with the technology to create chemical and biological weapons. Among the companies named were Bechtel, M.W. Kellog, Dresser Industries and Interchem Inc.11

The close relationship between western capital and Hitler’s Nazi regime is perhaps less widely documented. But the equipment and technical resources required to send millions to the gas chambers by the Nazis was also supplied by western corporations. Edwin Black’s excavation of the role of IBM reveals the astounding truth of how the US corporation developed the sorting machines capable of identifying, processing and the leading to their slaughter the victims of the concentration camps. Without this technology, it is unlikely that the Nazis would have been capable of killing 6 million. And unless they had used Hitler’s Germany as a fertile testing ground, it is also unlikely that IBM would have emerged to dominate the IT market in the 20th century.12

In 1946, a British court in Hamburg tried and sentenced to death two representatives of a German corporation for supplying to the Nazi regime for use against civilians, the chemical Zyklon B. They claimed lack of awareness of the use to which the chemical would be put. This is a legal precedent that at the very least raises questions about the legality of western firms arming Iraq with chemical and biological agents. Some argue there are similar grounds for legal action against the corporations that continue to provide governments with chemical weapons.13

Despite the claims made by the supporters of neo-liberal ‘turbo-capitalism’, there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ about the global march of capitalism. Neither is there any popular support for the paralysing model of development enforced by the World Bank/IMF. In fact the degree to which opposition exists is starkly demonstrated by the reliance of western corporations upon military force to sustain and open up ‘free’ markets for them. The intimate, indeed mutually necessary, relationship between business and conflict, always treated like some kind of secret affair, is now well and truly out of the closet. This is obvious to anyone who has watched any US television news in recent years. Currently the coverage on all of the US network news channels of the potential war on Iraq is juxtaposed with a constant reporting of the rise and fall of stocks in Wall Street and in the NASDAQ. Business news and war propaganda are given constant blanket coverage to the point that after a few minutes viewing, they become almost indistinguishable. Forbes Business magazine run a show on Fox News Network on Saturday mornings. A recent headline debate on this show asked the question: ‘Would it be better for the stock markets if we bombed bin Laden or attacked Iraq?’ The conclusion to the debate was the consensus amongst the array of prominent business ‘experts’ that since bin Laden would be more likely to launch another terrorist attack on the US and therefore inflict a sudden shock on the markets, that the US should go for al Quaeda first and then turn its attention on Iraq. The experts all nodded sagely and agreed that Saddam, despite Iraq’s oil reserves, was less able to inflict permanent damage on the markets. The Forbes on Fox anchor tied up the programme by pointing out: ‘I guess we are going to get both of them in the long run - hitting both of them makes good business sense.’ It is a position with which Churchill would no doubt have agreed wholeheartedly.

1 Dawn International, Internet Edition 12 August, 2002 (http://www.dawn.com/2002/08/12/int1.htm)
2 Anti Defamation League, press release, New York, 24 September
3 Straits Times, Singapore, 10 October, 2002 (http://straitstimes.asia1.com)
4 The Washington Times online, 20 September 2002.
5 cited in Cockburn, A and Cockburn, P (1999) Out of the Ashes: the resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: HarperPerrenial. It was this blanket bombing technique, developed in its infancy in Iraq, that used to full effect against the fleeing and defenceless people of Dresden in 1945. The blanket bombing combined preliminary high explosive bombing sorties to remove the roofs from buildings, followed by targeted bombing of phospherous devices into houses, factories, offices, schools and and hospitals aimed at spreading fire as rapidly as possible. It is thought that between 150,000 and 200,000, mainly elderly people, children and women were slaughtered in three weeks; a casualty rate that dwarfed the death toll exacted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
6 Pilger, J (2002) The New Rulers of the World, London: Verso.
7 Broader, J (1990-1991) Arming Iraq, Nuclear Times, 30-33.
8 Gonzalez, H (1992) Statement of the Chairman to the US House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Washington, 27 July.
9 Those exports are documented by a US Senate Committee Report which is summarised in an article published in Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 1 December.
10 Timmerman, K, (1990) The Poison Gas Connection: western suppliers of unconventional weapons and technologies to Iraq and Libya: a special report commissioned by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Paris and Los Angeles: Middle East Defence News and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre
11 Berbstein, D (1998) Made in America, San Francisco Bay News, 25 February.
12 Black, E (2001) IBM and the Holocaust: the strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s most powerful corporation, London: Little, Brown.
13 Timmerman, K, 1990, The Poison Gas Connection (see footnote 10)