Anti-war movement deserves labour support

War has never benefited working people. It is workers, as a class, who make up the soldiers who do the fighting and dying. And it is working people and their families who make up the increasingly grotesque numbers of civilian casualties in modern warfare that are coyly termed ‘collateral damage.’

It is workers whose rights are usually trampled during times of war. Here in Canada, in both the First and Second World Wars, the War Measures Act was used to ban strikes and freeze wages while doing nothing to control prices or profits. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are typically victims of war.

Sometimes working people cannot avoid war. There is good reason, in a democracy, for citizens to resist foreign military aggression. In fact, the struggle against fascism in the Second World War was necessary. However, that is a far cry from supporting an aggressor nation’s announced intent to invade a country that has not taken any hostile military actions.

The United States is under no danger from Iraq. The entire world, including Iraq, learned that lesson during the last American war on Iraq. American high-tech weaponry devastated the Iraqi military with ease – and the Americans then proceeded to destroy Iraq’s infrastructure in a way that has resulted in more Iraqi dead than all American losses in their decade-long war in Vietnam.

Everyone knows this war is about controlling Iraq’s huge oil reserves and about putting a permanent American military presence into both Iraq and, ultimately, Iran to secure American control over Middle East oil.

And, as much a tyrant and swine as Saddam Hussein is, there are a few points to remember. First, it is the United States that armed him and put him in power in the first place – as they did the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was America that equipped him with nerve gas and biological weapons to use in his war against Iran.

Is it justifiable for any nation to attack another simply because they do like or trust the leadership of that country? In that case, the U.S. should have invaded Canada in the late 1960’s – after all, President Nixon hated Pierre Trudeau.

Is it justifiable because the man is a brutal dictator? If that is so, why didn’t the United States invade Chile under Pinochet instead of propping him up? Why didn’t they invade Indonesia, or Spain under Franco?

The labour movement in Canada and around the world has many reasons to oppose American plans for war on Iraq – and not a single reason to support them.