The author, an Iraq War veteran, is the candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. He delivered the following speech while representing the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) at the Peace Island Conference on Sept. 2 at Concordia University, St. Paul, Minn., which coincided with the protests at the Republican National Convention. The PSL is a member organization of ANSWER.
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Michael Prysner
Sisters and brothers, I want to thank those who organized the demonstration and the important conference here. My name is Michael Prysner. I’m representing the ANSWER Coalition and I’m an Iraq war veteran. I was with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division and was deployed in March 2003 as part of the invasion force. Based on my direct personal experience, I have gone through a major political transformation. The government that I once believed in, the army that I once believed in, I now recognize to be an agent of imperialism, representing the banking elite in the pursuit of their profit and their domination, not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world.
I am representing the ANSWER Coalition today because National Coordinator Brian Becker, the scheduled speaker, was required to be in the U.S. federal district court in Washington, D.C., for a major civil rights and civil liberties litigation against the government.The focus of this conference is on solutions, which I think is good. The focus of my specific talk is to be U.S. strategy regarding Iran.
I think that everyone here knows the U.S. has been menacing Iran, that the U.S.-Israeli settler regime has been conducting menacing war games against Iran, and that they have imposed economic sanctions against Iran. I think—or at least I hope—that everyone knows the candidates of both capitalist parties have repeated over and over again that they will “do anything” to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. All of the imperialist media, the Democratic and Republican parties, are engaged in a campaign of global demonization to discredit, marginalize and isolate the Iranian government. And I think everyone here does recognize that this demonization is nothing other than preparing political ground for aggression of a military or economic character against the people of Iran.
Because I have limited time, I do not want to spend my few minutes documenting all the incidents that demonstrate the growing threat against Iran. Instead, I want to have a very brief historical assessment of the evolving U.S. strategy towards Iran, so that we can talk about what the real solution is.
On January 2002, President Bush, speaking at the State of the Union, identified the so-called axis of evil in the world, naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea. That was a sign that they intended to destroy the governments in each of these countries to establish a new pro-U.S. proxy government. The plan itself is based on imperial arrogance and is a fantasy. They could destroy the government in Iraq, they could not eliminate the deep-seated sentiment that exists and will never cease existing among the Iraqi people. Shortly after Bush’s speech, North Korea resumed its nuclear weapons program and the Iranian government took many measures to strengthen itself in the face of imperialist threats.
Even in Iraq, the goals of U.S. imperialism shifted in the spring of 2007. The new counter-insurgency goal of the “surge” was not premised on overwhelming the insurgency by an expansion of U.S. military power. Rather, the United States began paying over 100,000 fighters so that they would not shoot at the U.S. occupiers. In short, the new goal in Iraq became simply this: to avoid catastrophic defeat, or the perception of catastrophic defeat, which would embolden the colonial resistance throughout this oil-rich region and throughout the world.
I want to briefly now talk about the U.S. strategy towards Iran. The ANSWER Coalition believes the following: It was the colonial policy of the major capitalist powers, which led to a global struggle for the division and redivision of markets and spheres of influence. This led to both the First and Second World Wars. It is our contention that what is driving U.S. policy in the Middle East today is an attempted imperialist redivision of control of the oil-rich Gulf region. The current attempt at redivision follows a classic pattern of inter-imperialist rivalry, but this time with a twist. The United States and Britain felt that the market domination of the Middle East that they had lost or had been curtailed because of the anti-colonial upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s could be reversed. The new political equation, following the collapse of the USSR and the other socialist bloc governments whetted their appetite to return the “good ole days.” Any nationalist regime sitting atop massive natural resources—or pursuing a policy independent of imperialism—was targeted for destruction.
There have been three distinct phases in U.S. policy in the Middle East and towards Iran. Two phases took place prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and they were designed to defend U.S. imperialism’s interests in the Middle East in the face of revolution, national liberation movements and the nationalization of oil previously controlled by Western oil monopolies. The third phase, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has sought to overthrow still existing independent regimes in the Middle East with the goal of recolonizing the region.
U.S. policy and the Nixon Doctrine
The first phase, the Nixon Doctrine, provided the operational framework for U.S. strategy between the late 1960s until the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Although it was bloody and aggressive, the Nixon Doctrine was essentially a defensive response by imperialism to the Arab revolutionary wave that swept through the Middle East and North Africa starting with the Egyptian revolution that brought Nasser and other bourgeois nationalist and revolutionary forces to power.
The entire Middle East had been transformed into a revolutionary cauldron in the 1950s and 1960s. The Iraqi revolution of 1958 prompted Eisenhower to send 14,000 marines to Lebanon the next day. This was a greater troop number than the Lebanese army. One day later the British sent 6,000 troops to shore up the Jordanian regime. They also mobilized troops into Kuwait. Without U.S. and British military intervention the Jordanian and Kuwaiti regimes would have been swept away in the revolutionary tidal wave emanating from the uprising in Iraq.
The Algerian revolution, known as the revolution of a million martyrs, secured independence from France in the early 1960s. The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964 and quickly became an instrument of armed struggle for Palestinian statehood. The overturns in Libya and Yemen created new anti-imperialist governments. In the Sudan the Communist Party grew to be a truly massive party, the largest communist movement in Africa. The main feature of the Nixon Doctrine was reliance on proxy forces, principally Israel and Iran, to function as the gendarme for United States interests in the Gulf.
1979 Iranian Revolution changes imperialist strategy
The 1979 revolution in Iran—which shattered the Nixon Doctrine and ended the first phase—shook the established world at its foundations. The fact that it was later hijacked by conservative clerical forces should not lead us to forget how stunned and threatened U.S. imperialism was by this genuine people’s revolution.
President Jimmy Carter, who had just saluted the loyal puppet on the Peacock Throne as an “island of stability in a sea of turmoil,” had to quickly re-shape U.S. policy since one of the two pillars of the Nixon Doctrine had not only vanished but actually seemed to transform into its opposite. Iran in 1979 was seen as a threat to the other U.S. puppets in the region.
The Carter Doctrine, also known as the doctrine of Rapid Deployment Forces, supplanted the Nixon Doctrine. A Rapid Deployment strategy combined two features: (1) New technologies in aircraft and troop transport vehicles and a new generation of powerful and more compact conventional weapons and (2) the use of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the other Gulf States as a location for the Pentagon’s Pre-Positioned Bases.
The Carter Doctrine was based on the assumption that the Pentagon might eventually have to do the work of policing the Gulf itself. The Pre-Positioned Bases did eventually become the staging area for Operation Desert Storm in 1990. Without the construction of the Pre-Positioned Bases during the decade between 1979-1990, it would have been impossible for the first Bush administration to so rapidly deploy hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers to the Gulf between August and November 1990.
The Iran-Iraq War provides a new opening
It was the war between Iraq and Iran that unquestionably altered the relationship of the forces in the region and was seized upon by the United States as a way to break the ice and intervene directly into the Gulf with military forces.
The third phase of imperialist foreign strategy towards the Middle East, which we have seen in the Clinton administration and the Bush White House, has identified “regime change” as the foundation of policy. Clinton used a combination of draconian sanctions and regular bombing of Iraq to bring about regime change. Brimming with imperialist arrogance, the neoconservatives—emboldened after September 11 to carry out regime change through military means—had a plan to take out regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and destroy resistance forces in Lebanon and Palestine.
But this tactic of outright military aggression and invasion has backfired. The U.S. is bogged down. It is losing the war in Afghanistan. And it is Iran that has gotten stronger and not weaker. This does not mean that the new threats from the U.S. beast are not real. In fact, the next White House will continue to use a host of tactics to carry out regime change and enhance U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East.
U.S. expansionism driving foreign policy
The limits of U.S. power are also obvious. The dynamic paradox rests on this premise: when the United States lost the war in Vietnam, they could disengage from Southeast Asia. U.S. imperialism, however, cannot disengage from the oil-rich Middle East. On the contrary, the struggle to control resources will inevitably drive the United States in the direction of military aggression. This is what is driving the United States to take control of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, the Ukraine, and all of central and southern Asia, as well as Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Our anti-war movement identifies a solution as the elimination of the system of imperialism itself. We want to achieve real peace. First and foremost, we most say loudly and clearly that Iran has the right to develop its nuclear industry. When the Shah sat on the throne, the U.S. encouraged him to develop nuclear installations for the purpose of civilian energy production. But moreover, Iran has the right to defend itself militarily in the face of threats. The U.S. has 10,000 nuclear weapons and an operational doctrine of first-use. Israel has 200 nuclear weapons and routinely threatens Iran. It is the United States government that is in non-compliance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which requires nuclear military powers to begin the systematic elimination of their own nuclear arsenals. Instead, the U.S. is building a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons and it intends to deploy and use them.
We must affirm in the short term that the Iranian people are not our enemies; they are our sisters and brothers. They have a right to control their own natural resources, they have an absolute right to live and they have a right to determine—free from outside interference—the political nature of their own government. If our goal, if our solution, is to eliminate imperialism, working people in the United States must be the force that carries out this radical transformation. That big solution requires a smaller solution in our movement. That is to tell the truth so that people learn that their real enemies are not in Tehran, but in the boardrooms on Wall Street, the war rooms in the Pentagon.
There can be no pandering to racism, national chauvinism, or demonization. Unfortunately, many in the anti-war movement prior to the Iraq invasion joined in the chorus of demonization. They called for economic sanctions against Iraq as an alternative to war and they insisted on the disarmament of Iraq by the United Nations at the very moment the Pentagon was closing the circle in preparation for invasion.
The solution can never be adjusting our message so that it is “legitimate” to the imperialists and their media. Rather, we must be unabashed in our own policy that promotes a profound internationalism and solidarity between all the peoples of the world. U.S. Out of the Middle East, bring all U.S. military forces out of the region, self-determination for Iran and all the peoples of the region.
