Trotskyist Bulletin No. 8
AFGHANISTAN & THE LEFT
Document 1.4 Appendix No. 1
The Fire Last Time
ICL: Save Our
Boys Socialists
The following statement was published by the IBT as an appendix
to Where is the ICL Going? and reprinted in 1917 No. 24, 2002.
One of the reasons that the 1983 call to save the Marines presents
such a problem for the SL is that it flatly contradicted both the historical
tradition it claims to stand on, and the image it likes to cultivate as a
fearlessly revolutionary organization. In 1982, during the Falklands/Malvinas
conflict, WV ran an article sneeringly entitled Save Our
Boys Socialists which excoriated Sean Matgamnas Socialist
Organiser for running a sympathetic interview with Reg Race, a Labour Party
left:
Never has Lenins characterization of social
democrats as social imperialists been more fitting. Race calls for
withdrawing the fleet and sparing the precious blood of Britains elite
forces because he has another program to bring Argentina to its
knees.... WV No. 306, 28 May 1982, emphasis added
Even after WV revealed that sparing the precious
blood of the U.S. Marines had somehow suddenly become an important
Leninist tactic the same criterion was not applied in Britain. The December
1983/January 1984 issue of Spartacist Britain published an auto-critique
by A. Gilchrist, a senior cadre of the SLs British group, in which he
confessed:
The position of Withdraw the Fleet was
a position of defending the imperialist armed forces from destruction by
another anti-Soviet military. The Falklands war tested every tendency on
the British left in the clearest way, because war is the period of greatest
nationalist pressures. This Bennite [left Labourite] position was a clear
capitulation to the socialist chauvinism of the Labour
Party.... emphasis in original
In the 9 November issue of WV, the SL attempts to get out
from under its Marines Alive position by claiming that, to
this day it is still not clear who blew up the Marine barracks. The truth
is that it is pretty clear to everyone except the SL (and, presumably, the IG).
For example, in the Spring 1993 issue of Foreign Policy, the editor,
Charles W. Maynes, wrote the following:
The United States, in the hubris of the Reagan
administration, forgot the fundamental nature of peacekeeping. It deployed U.S.
Marines in Lebanon without understanding that it was essential for their safety
that the United States not take sides in the Lebanese civil war. The Reagan
administration decided to back the Christians and soon found its troops under
attack by the Muslims and finally driven from Lebanon after the disastrous
bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut.
Every serious observer of the Middle East agrees that the suicide
truck-bombing of the Marine barracks, carried out by a group calling itself
Islamic Jihad, was a response to U.S. military intervention on the
side of the Christian Phalange. The New York Times blames Hezbollah, the
Lebanese Party of God, for the attack:
In recent years the Islamic group has grafted a new
image as an above-ground political force onto its 1980s past. Back then,
Hezbollah, or groups to which it was closely linked, was notorious for brutal
terrorist operations, including destroying the American Embassy in Beirut in
1983 and killing 241 Americans at a Marine compound later the same year.
New York Times, 14 February 2001
If another truck bomb were to go off this week outside the Marine
encampment near Kandahar, would the SL try to hide behind the pretence that the
precise identity of the perpetrators was unknown? We rather doubt it.
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