New Labour - the continuing saga

In his new found role as St. Francis of Assisi, Tony Blair jetted off to Africa in February to lecture African workers about the new threat of global terrorism, about ‘self interest and mutual interest’ and how these two concepts were ‘dependent on each other’. At the same time he was in Africa the British press were reporting how Britain’s arms sales to Africa had quadrupled since 1999. Self interest? Mutual Interest? Well maybe for the arms manufacturers and the leaders of those African states that purchase the British weaponry that helps them quell internal dissent and wage war on their neighbours.

The Continuing Saga of New Labour It seems these interests are at the forefront of much of Blair’s thinking. A week after he returned from India in January – remember he travelled there to help them solve the Kashmir problem in a verbal manner – the British press were reporting of a new arms deal with India, which was worth £1 billion and inclusive of 60 Hawk jets.

Those with long memories and familiar with Labour’s love affair with the arms trade, will remember the Biafran war of the 1960s, when Britain’s share of arms sales to Nigeria during that conflict increased from 15-75%. St Francis of Assisi? Try Vlad the Impaler!

Poverty
While the Blair government is keen to point out how they are reducing poverty in Britain – something which tends to run counter to the statistics socialists are regularly fond of citing – we draw your attention to a newly published report by the Child Poverty Action Group (interestingly, an organisation set up by the Labour Party many years ago and which was supposed to exist for one year only). The last time such a report came out in 1996, Labour Party MPs used it to ridicule the Tories. This time round it asserts: “…around a quarter of our society was living in poverty in Britain in 1999-2000. The poverty encountered by Children is even greater than for society as a whole. Around a third of children were living in poverty in 1999-2000. Over 7.8 million people were living on the ‘safety net’ benefit of IncomeSupport/ Jobseeker’s Allowance in February 2001. By the mid-1990s the UK had child poverty rates higher than any other industrialised nation with the exception of the USA and Russia.”

When recession hits, as it did at the beginning of the 90’s one of its marked features is the number of home repossessions. In 1991, courts issued 134,000 home repossession orders. Eight years later, Blair safely in power and reassuring us the austerity of the Tory years was behind us, 137,000 families found their homes being taken from them because of mortgage arrears.

The report further adds strength to our argument that under Blair the wealth gap is widening in Britain. It reveals how the wealthiest 1 percent of the population in Britain own 25 percent of all wealth, with the bottom 50 per cent, some 28 million people, owning just 6 percent of Britain’s wealth.

Blair and Mittal Steal
When it comes to sucking up to the big money men, Labour takes some beating. Who could forget the fiasco surrounding the Bernie Ecclestone affair just prior to Labour’s 1997 election victory? In return for a £1 million gift to the Labour Party in January 1997, Blair saw to it that Ecclestone’s Formula One were exempt from the ban on tobacco advertising.

A year later, Blair was kowtowing to right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch (whose help he sought during the election), phoning the Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, on behalf of Murdoch, and trying to have any hurdles removed that might hinder Murdoch’s acquisition of Mediaset, the Italian media company.

Months ago, the shit hit the proverbial fan again, when it was revealed that George Bush was not the only high level politician to be hit with the Enron splatter, but that the Labour Party also found themselves pebble-dashed. It was revealed Enron (an energy multinational, now bankrupt) had sponsored several Labour Party Conferences after their 1997 victory, that the Labour Party tailored its energy policies to enable Enron build a gas-fired power plant on Teeside and that Labour smoothed the way for Enron to buy Wessex water four years ago without having referred the buyout to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

Now come revelations of Blair’s links to steal magnate Lakshmi Mittal. It transpires that Blair wrote a the letter to the Romanian prime minister: “I am delighted by the news that you are to sign the contract for the privatisation of your biggest steel plant with the LNM group…I am particularly pleased that it is a British company [Mittal’s] which is your partner.”

The link, which Blair claimed oblivion of? Mittal had made a £125,000 donation to the Labour Party, his wife Usha giving a £50,000 donation to the local party of former European minister Keith Vaz. The story continues! Just one month before Blair signed the letter, he had attended a big thank-you bash laid on for Labour Party donors (the big guys, that is). And who should be there? Mittal!

It later emerged that LNM’s parent company is registered in a tax haven; that Mittal gets round paying tax in Britain by means of a nifty little loophole the Labour Party conveniently neglected to plug; that his LNM plant in Southern Ireland closed with the loss of 400 jobs and almost £40 million in debts, and that Mittal is one of the brains behind a US campaign to slap a 40 per cent tariff on steal imports, which could well impinge on jobs in the British steal industry. All of which you can be forgiven for, if you sponsor the Labour Party. Thinking of pulling off something big and want to get away with it? A Jewel’s heist, Big Business tax evasion? Simply send a donation to the Labour Party care of 10 Downing Street.

Book Review - The People of the Abyss

Centenary Edition
Jack London
Pluto Press
£10.99 paperback
192 pages

Those vaguely familiar with Jack London (pictured above) know him as a skilled writer, basing many of his stories on experiences from his rich, colourful and often dangerous life. Few remember him as the skilled political commentator and social critic who exposed many of the injustices of his day. The People of the Abyss is Jack London the investigative reporter relating an impassioned account of the degradation and squalor endured by the people of the East End of London in 1902, and this year marks the centenary of his visit to this part of London.


Living in the East End doss houses, London posed as a stranded American sailor, down on his luck. He mingled with the poorest of the poor, worked alongside them, ate with them, drank with them and slept amongst them in the workhouses. His observations are documented in full in People of the Abyss, and this is no work of fiction. This is the London in the days when the SPGB was about to be formed, and reading London’s account of the privation endured by millions of his fellow workers, one can’t help but ask why the clamour for an end to capitalism was not being screamed from every rooftop. He attempts an answer himself:


“Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be fed and housed as a pig is fed and housed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.” (p.162).


And who could blame them? For many in the East End of London in 1902, the daily struggle to live absorbed all their energies. Their life expectancy was 30 years; 55% of children died before the age of 5. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished men and women yearned only the public houses and alcohol in a pathetic attempt to “express their gregariousness” and because intoxication finally “brings the oblivion that nothing else can bring” (160). This is the England “where a constant army of 8 million lives on the border of starvation.” (155); where hundreds of thousands of families inhabit one room, and where “children take turn about in sitting up and drive the rats away from the sleepers (148); where the lucky go insane and the courageous commit suicide. And all of this when Britain had the largest empire ever know and milked the world.


The SPGB were not alone in the formative years of the 20th Century in pointing out the world of potential abundance we live in. Lamenting the widespread starvation of the day, the ‘hunger wail’ that echoed across the British Isles, London comments:
“And this in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300 and boots and shoes for 1000….and who dares to say that it is not mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?” (160)


The people of the Abyss is a masterly recording of the lives of the masses in 1902, and a poignant indictment on the capitalist system, and London is to be commended. However he affords us no panacea to the ills of the system he lambastes, but rather finishes with a lengthy note about how the system is being mismanaged, before ending:


“There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man’s producing powers an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of Civilisation live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear and protect them from the elements than the savage Inuit in a frigid climate who lives today as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago.” (p.170)


The people of the Abyss deserves to be read, for a Century after this book was written it is still possible to record the same, in spite of all the scientific and technological breakthroughs that have occurred since 1902 and which should be benefiting humanity.

Another American Cenury?

George Bush’s State of the Union address at the end of January was little short of a declaration of war on the world; an assertion that US interests are now paramount and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

Bush boldly announced that the ‘ war on terror’ was ‘only beginning’ and announced an enormous hike in military spending. This year’s military budget is up $36 bn to $379 bn and next year the US war machine will receive an extra $48 bn, with a further $120 bn promised over the next five years, bringing the total spent on the military by 2007 to $ 2 trillion. To get some estimate of this level of spending it is worth noting that this year’s increase alone is higher than the joint military spending of Europe, and larger than China’s existing military budget. Though just how such an awe inspiring arsenal of state of the arts weaponry is to stop September 11th type attacks on the USA is yet to be explained.

America has at last declared that the ’war on terror’ has replaced the threat of the ‘international communist conspiracy’ and found in this the pretext to set the agenda for the coming century. The Bush administration has embedded its flag in what it believes is the moral high ground. From now on it is a war of good against evil - evil being anyone standing directly in the way of the US and its aspirations of global domination, with the ‘war on terrorism’ allowing it to intervene anywhere and whenever and to deem who it likes a terrorist. Clearly this new ‘war’ will involve countless military interventions with no regard whatsoever for international sensibilities.

There are now bogeymen under every rock and the world needs protecting from them. Bush identified an ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union Address, pointing to the threat the world faced from North Korea, Iraq and Iran. Vice president Dick Cheney would later remark that the US is considering military action against 50 countries and that this ongoing conflict could last 50 years.

Bush’s advisor Richard Perle commented: “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there…if we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

All of this has naturally left political analysts wondering just who will be next. Somalia, with untapped oil deposits off its coast and with whom the US has a score to settle following the botched ‘Restore Hope’ operation of a decade ago, which left thousands of innocents dead, or Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria or Libya? All harbour bogeymen whose existence sullies the notion of western cultural supremacy. Any could be the next target for a war machine drunk with its recent victory in Afghanistan. And what a victory! – Usama bin Laden still not caught (the entire campaign was about catching him), 5 thousand civilians dead and 7 million facing starvation in refugee camps.

A key element in the US game plan for global hegemony is clearly control of the Caspian’s rich oil reserves – estimated to be able to produce 3.3 million gallons of crude oil per day and 4850 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year. Hence US military manoeuvring in the states surrounding Afghanistan and thus the attaching of the ’bogeyman’ label to any state perceived as standing in the way of these profits.

Already Kyrgistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are under US military domination and there are US military tent cities in 13 states surrounding Afghanistan, with the map of US bases mirroring the route of a projected oil pipeline favoured by the US and which takes oil through Iran to the Indian ocean. To save the cost and inconvenience of laying a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is far easier to simply topple the Tehran regime, install a US proxy government and run Caspian oil directly through Iran. And who is to stop the US? The UN may object, but who is the UN? The best place from which to launch an attack upon Iran is Iraq, so both states now feature high on the US hit list.

Iran and Iraq are both perceived as the regional powers who challenge US strategic ambitions between Europe and East Asia. And invasions of these two countries would well fit the ongoing US strategy of asserting itself into strategic areas of the world, setting up is bases and installing US geopolitical influence in these regions. US interventions in recent years in Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan have allowed the US to leave behind its bases in these regions and to better oversee the activities of its corporate elite. With US economic power now being challenged by Europe and the East Asian bloc, military bases become a useful counterweight to the threat posed its corporate elite by its competitors and US control over Iran and Iraq gives the US control over extant oil supplies between Europe and East Asia.

Iraq has long been high up on the list of US targets, a fact perhaps best portrayed recently by the pathetic and futile US attempts to link the anthrax scare in the US to Saddam Hussein. The Guardian’s February 14th front page headline “ US targets Saddam” was not reporting anything new. The story had been doing the rounds in the Russian press for some time with Russian military intelligence suggesting a full scale attack on Iraq would begin in September. But now sources close to Bush say the CIA is already in Saudi Arabia and Northern Iraq preparing for a joint operation with Kurdish forces and that the third Iraqi war may commence in May with the mobilisation of 200,000 US troops from bases in Kuwait.

Undoubtedly the pretext for the US invasion of Iraq will be Iraq’s refusal to agree to terms laid down by a US lead weapons inspectorate into the country, hence Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union Address that Iraq “continues to flaunt its hostility towards the US” and that “this is a regime that has something to hide from the civilised world.”

The above may sound like so much scare-mongering, but when it is considered the US now accounts for 40 per cent of global military spending, that it spends more on its war machine than the next 19 states, that in the past year it has discarded numerous international treaties, including those pertaining to weapons control, that the space taken up by its military hardware covers an area the size of Sweden, that it has served notice on all countries opposing the notion of US hegemony that their days are numbered, we can’t but conclude that warfare will be as much a part of life in this century as the one we have just emerged from. And what do we make of Bush’s words in that most eloquent of addresses: “Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘let’s roll’”? And what better way to distract domestic attention from the corruption of US politics – wonderfully exhibited in the Enron scandal – than to commence a war on the enemies of US freedoms?

We have every reason to be fearful for the future of humanity. War is competition for profits (either via trade routes, mineral wealth, resources or areas of influence) writ large, and to safeguard its future profits, its control of world resources the world’s greatest and largest military power is accumulating an unimaginable array of weaponry, rolling up its sleeves and marching forward to stamp underfoot all it perceives as being a threat to its interests.

So when will you join with us? When a million Iranians lie smouldering? When North Korea resembles a Stone Age society? Or when cruise missiles are heading towards Beijing? We owe it to the millions about to die in the name of profit to act now. They cannot, their fate is sealed.

Economic Meltdown in Argentina (just capitalism functioning normally)

Argentina, the one time darling of the IMF, held up as an example of how a country should stringently adhere to structural adjustment programmes, is presently standing as a shining example of how the capitalist system can not be made to work in the interest of the majority. Economists are mostly in agreement that the cause of economic meltdown in Argentina and the consequent protests and rioting were the result of three distinctive and converging economic crises.


When Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo pegged the Argentinean peso to the dollar ten years ago – on a one to one basis – he envisaged that this would end hyperinflation. Three years ago, when Brazil devalued its real, foreign investors and speculators discovered their dollars brought them bigger returns in Brazil than in Argentina. This seriously began to upset Argentina’s foreign investments and exports, as buyers of Argentina products found they could get the same next door and far cheaper.


Argentina is now in debt to the tune of $132 billion – attributable largely to far-reaching borrowing carried out during the second term of the Carlos Menem government, prior to the election of President Fernando de la Rue. The effect of the domestic and foreign borrowing was to send domestic interest rates spiralling upwards. As the debt increased, so did the interest rates, which had a knock on effect for many businesses reliant upon credit.


In the 1990s, Menem further introduced mass privatisation. This resulted in many workers being made redundant, they being surplus to requirements now that profit was higher up the agenda for the utilities and, moreover, the cost of basic services (electricity, gas, telephones) began to rise.


So, back in 1999, the Argentinean recession began, increasing in ferocity as domestic demand declined and companies began to close and unemployment increased and, because the government’s tax revenues began shrinking, Argentina’s burden of debt became all the more heavier.


In November all of Argentina’s economic woes came to a head when people, fearful their pesos would be devalued, began hurrying to the banks to exchange them for dollars whilst the one-to-one rate was still in existence. Cavallo, fearful the banks would be drained of money, issued a decree which limited withdrawals to $1000 per person per month. The effect of this was to create mistrust in the government and widespread uncertainty with people rioting and protesting on the streets, with looting reported in many cities.


One week before Christmas the riots had spread to Buenos Aries. The president declared a state of emergency and brought troops onto the streets. But his government offered no remedy for the economic crisis and this only brought larger numbers of protestors back on to the streets within 24 hours, the unemployed being joined by ‘middle class’ professionals – all taking part in the looting. When thousands of protestors congregated in Congress Square, banging pots and pans, the resignation of the president, his economic minister and the entire cabinet was almost immediate. De la Rua was determined to make one impassioned speech before he left, but with an angry crowd having none of it, he was instantly whisked to safety by a helicopter.


Tensions rose. People poured in from outlying districts, blockading motorways and erecting barricades, destroying banks and multinationals, looting supermarkets and fighting with almost 40,000 police who had been drafted into the city. When the violence had subdued, 26 had been killed.


Argentineans blame de la Rua for the crisis, citing the fact that he was the president when the crisis was deteriorating more alarmingly – as if he could control the economy! As the economy was controlling him, he had no option but to cut public spending to service debt repayments, though not as much as the IMF insisted. De la Rua, however, did enter office foolishly promising to kick-start the economy and end high level corruption. By early 2000 he had introduced £650 million worth of spending cuts and forced through eight unpopular austerity plans, which included a 13% cut in state workers’ wages. Just prior to the unrest, the government planned to further cut public spending from £34 billion to £27 billion in a further attempt to service the crushing loan repayments.


The current president is one Eduardo Duhalde, a former ‘left-wing’ senator and once upon a time investigated for the corruption his predecessor promised to stamp out. At present he plans to freeze the prices charged by foreign-owned utilities companies and put a tax on foreign owned oil companies. To protect the ‘middle class’ from currency devaluation he has offered to convert dollar loans under $100,000 into pesos, at the one-to-one rate – placing a hefty burden on banks, not borrowers - and he has further promised that cash will be set aside for the unemployed. All of which amounts to a timely game plan to placate the more volatile sections of Argentinean society.


Meanwhile, IMF top brass are in Argentina demanding, on behalf of the US and Europe, that the country does not default on its loan obligations. Outside markets are watching events carefully aware of the fact that economic crisis have tended in the past to lead to military coups and all their implications and are now mindful of granting further loans to the region.


There has been much analysis of recent events in Argentina. The general mood is that the IMF is to blame, that its structural austerity programmes are socially and politically unsustainable and that its rule book needs tearing up. What has not been said is that, like the Argentinean government, the IMF is simply a body trying to make capitalism work. And in this regard they cannot really be faulted, because as events in Argentina have revealed, capitalism is working perfectly well, for this is the only way it can work in an anarchic and chaotic manner, negligent and oblivious to the misery and suffering it creates. If a few get rich while millions lose out big style, then this is capitalism working as it only can work and as the workers – from their years of experience of living within the system - voted for it to work. If there is recession and boom and recession, then capitalism is working healthily. In Argentina, therefore, capitalism is functioning normally.

me

A Happy New Year (2002)

A Happy New Year? It seems most of us uttered this hackneyed sentiment at the beginning of 2001 and, whilst meaning well, fully understood that for many 2001 would bring nothing but misery.

2001 will be famously remembered for one date – September 11th – when Islamic fundamentalist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade centre and the Pentagon and killed almost 4,000 workers. The consequences of that attack the world will perhaps feel, in one form or another, for years to come.

September 11th apart, 2001 was not really something to celebrate, so why celebrate 2002. For one thing, the year ended with the US and Britain still fighting an imperialist war in Afghanistan; with Israel provoking further unrest with the Palestinians; with Indian and Pakistani troops massing on their respective borders prepared to bomb one another into oblivion over a stretch of land known as Kashmir. The year ended with 4 million Afghan refugees facing an uncertain future; with the Argentinean economy in tatters and the country in a state of civil unrest; with 7,000 Africans dying each day from Aids; with the US talking up forthcoming bombing raids on Somalia and Iraq and with 40,000 infants dying every day from malnutrition. A taste of things to come perhaps

On a somewhat brighter side – from which many on the left gained comfort – there was massive anti-capitalist demonstrations, first in Quebec in April , then later in Gothenburg in June and Genoa in July – the latter involving 300,000. In November, an anti-war rally attracted 100,000 in London and there was a further anti-capitalist demo in Brussels as the year closed. Though undoubtedly well intentioned, it was abundantly evident that all of these demonstrations attracted chiefly those simply interested in reforming the system, treating the symptoms and not the cause. Whilst many workers are genuinely sickened at the atrocities perpetrated in the name of profit, the evidence suggests that the working class is some way from being not just a class in itself but a class for itself.

2002 looks to be no different from 2001 for one major reason - Capitalism is still very much on the agenda. This means that every aspect of our lives in 2002 will be subordinated to the worst exigencies of the profit system. Businesses will only run so long as they have the competitive edge on their rivals, wars will take place because the executives of the capitalist class realise this is simply an extension of the global search for raw materials, foreign markets and areas of influence. The state and their pals in the media will think of new laws to keep us in line and new ways of distorting facts and hoodwinking us, for the simple reason that our isolation and ignorance is an important component in maintaining the status quo. Our unwillingness to unite, our indifference to their excesses will be the victories they celebrate in 2002.

We will reach December 31st of 2002 and look back on a year in which millions died of starvation; in which millions were killed in a dozen conflicts; in which millions died from curable disease. On December 31st 2002 there will still be homelessness and crime and every other social ill you can imagine. Despite all the reforms of the previous 100 years, despite all of our scientific, technological and medical know-how, we will still find it easier to launch a $100 million space probe on a journey to the furthest galaxies than to feed and inoculate a starving, disease-ridden African village.

Israel Again

Recent US approval for Israeli attacks upon Gaza, Nablus and Ramallah at the beginning of December – in response to the Hamas suicide bombings – has all but ended speculation that US influence in the Middle East in the wake of September 11th would bring about peace.

Israel’s media spin-doctor Benjamin Netanyahu, no doubt inspired by the gung-ho rhetoric that bolsters President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ could confidently compare Yasser Arafat to Osama bin Laden. A Bush spokesperson was heard to impart to the world’s media: “ Israel has every right to defend itself and the president understands that.” And these statements appeared to be the go ahead for all and sundry to launch verbal attacks upon the people of Palestine, lumping them, no questions asked, in with the Taliban.

The usually moderate EU demanded Ariel Sharon use the iron fist treatment and the ever cautious Tony Blair, who weeks earlier castigated his foreign secretary Jack Straw for linking Islamic terrorism with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, duly expressed his sympathy for Israel.

The prevailing view from the West was that Israel’s retaliation be applauded. The domestic voice of caution was all but muted, with Sharon insisting Israelis learn lessons from the US in the wake of September 11th and refrain from criticisng his policies, and only the boldest of journalists were prepared to set the crisis in a historical context and to point out that if Israel’s attacks upon Yasser Arafat’s compound were a response to the Hamas suicide bombings, themselves a retaliation to Sharon’s state assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Haroud, then militant Palestinians would soon respond in kind.

This said, from within the Israeli government there has arisen the ‘voice of reason’. Sharon’s foreign minister Shimon Perez and his colleagues in the Labour Party boycotted a vote calling upon Arafat’s administration to be labelled ‘an entity supporting terrorism’ and have cautioned Sharon that the fall of Arafat would pave the way for the ascendancy of Palestinian extremists.

For Sharon’s part, we can only despair at his belligerent game plan. He is obsessed with the demonisation of Yasser Asrafat, keen to lay all of Israel’s problems at his feet. In a televised address to Israelis, he declared: “Arafat is responsible for everything that happens here.” And he remains keen to weaken and marginalize the Palestine Authority. However, experts agree that taking the Palestine Authority out of the equation makes it harder for Arafat to subdue the very militants he is charged with rooting out. Moreover, the PLO recognises Israel’s 1967 borders and its ‘right to exist’. Hamas does not, demanding the total destruction of the Jewish state. Neither can Hamas and the PLO be said to be on speaking terms. The former is an organisation of Islamic militants that came to prominence in 1987 as a rival to the PLO, even finding a sponsor in an Israeli state which hoped it would undermine the influence of the PLO, the latter a secular organisation and one that sprung directly from the frustration borne of a failed peace process.

Israel, the US and its allies appear reluctant to acknowledge the causes of the current intifada. The fact is that the Palestinian people are a second class People denied many of the rights of Israelis. Palestine seemingly exists as a number of impoverished ‘third world’ Bantustans inside of an advanced industrial nation whose inhabitants have a high standard of living. The hardship of the Palestinian people is perhaps unparalleled in the Middle East. Palestine’s GNP has fallen by 35% in the past year, unemployment is above 40% and the average income per head of the populations of Gaza and the West Bank is almost one-twelfth of that enjoyed by Israeli people. Palestinians have endured restriction on their movement – guaranteed under previous peace agreements – and arbitrary arrests. The violence witnessed by Palestinian youths on an almost daily basis has induced in many symptoms similar to those suffering Post traumatic stress disorder.

Perhaps Palestinians can be forgiven for having nurtured a hatred of Israel, for this is a hatred that has arisen out of their daily experiences and it stands as an indictment on the Israeli state that so many see no alternative but to resort to horrendous acts of suicide.

Israel of course does not act alone. Its policies are carried out with the full support of the world’s only superpower. It exists as a subsidiary to the US government, surviving as a military outpost of the US, armed to the teeth with weaponry its much larger neighbours can only dream of. Its mission to counter the emergence of any Middle Eastern radicalism that would threaten US control of the region’s oil, which is itself an important source of the control of the world economy.

The future certainly looks bleak for Palestinians. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’, his determination to suspect any Islamic state with September 11th - note his determination to link Somalia, Sudan and Iraq with those attacks on the US – has given new life to the cause of Israeli hawks, led by a president still waiting to find out if he is to be charged with war crimes for orchestrating the 1982 of the massacre of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Nonchalantly lobbing missiles at Arafat’s compounds, police stations and security posts, blind to caution, Sharon risks bringing about the demise of Arafat and the Palestine Authority and paving the way for the ascendancy of a more desperate foe in the shape of militant Islam, with whom no peace deal will be struck. With most Arabs finding a common empathy with the Palestinian people, should Sharon take one step to far, invading the West bank and Gaza and, imposing direct rule in response to a militant Islamic blowback, the resultant conflagration would blaze across the Middle East and burn for years.

As socialists, we are prepared for any scenario for we are aware of the lengths the defenders of capitalism will go to secure their interests. If the future of US oil interests in the region meant that Islamic fundamentalism had to be prodded in order to provoke a reaction to justify a massive US response, then Palestinian’s Islamic militants will be prodded. History is littered with the pretexts for war in the name of profit.

George W Bush - Redefining War

As I write, it is having just learned that the Northern Alliance has ‘taken’ Kabul and that the Taliban are now in retreat. The ‘war’, if it could ever have been described as one, is said to be almost over. Already there has been much speculation as to the post-Taliban set-up in Afghanistan.

Speculation is not something socialists like to engage in. For one thing it is a forgone conclusion that any new government will have to be ready to bow with suppliant’s knee before the interests of US corporate elites and in particular the oil hounds, paying back the support their military wing the US air force and US my afforded them. And by all accounts, with the Northern Alliance suggesting they would decline the offer of an international peace-keeping force, Afghanistan is years away from any semblance of peace and order.

What is as important is that the rules of global interaction are changing. This is not least because the US is forging stronger links with repressive regimes in the Middle East and with governments in the Caspian region, but more importantly because of the ongoing delegitimising of international law, the US insistent it will act unilaterally where it wishes, regardless of any views of the UN and the threat of the war on terrorism finally replacing the threat of international communist conspiracy and how this will serve as the new pretext for US military adventurism. We can further anticipate the race for the militarisaton of space – albeit a one horse race and further sophistication of US war-fighting capabilities.

Whilst President George W has strutted and fretted about the US stage, his advisers burying their heads in their hands every time he speaks, Tony Blair globetrotting, drumming up support for the US cause like some keen-to-Republican foreign secretary, there has been every sign that Dubya is attempting to fulfil his father’s prophecy, mouthed during his presidential inaugural address all those years ago, that the 21st Century would be ‘another American century’.

For anyone interested in US domestic politics, aware that George W could never sway an electorate by the power of his words, it perhaps came as no surprise to learn that he could so blatantly repay his corporate backers and grassroots supporters so early into his administration. Within months of coming to office the gun lobbyists, oil companies, and defence contractors had their servitude recognised for the world to see. The 1997 Kyoto protocol on emission reductions is now history. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – the cornerstone of all arms-control negotiations during and since the cold war is now only fit to wipe the presidential arse with, and down the proverbial toilet went the comprehensive test-ban treaty and the UN treaty on the control of small arms. Bush even denounced the recent UN convention on slavery.

Let’s just leave aside Bush’s recent meeting with President Putin of Russia and his suggestion that the US is willing to negotiate cutting it’s nuclear arsenal by one third , to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads, for the simple reason that the US no longer perceives Russia as its prime military and economic threat. Moreover, Putin, in line with his Chinese counterpart, has given his blessing to the US bombing raids on Afghanistan in the hope the US will now support their own wars against ‘terrorists (in Chechnya and China’s Muslim Xingjiang province). So at the moment there is a lot of back slapping camaraderie amongst leaders whose countries are notorious for their state terrorism. This is not, however, a sign of the US seeking a more stable world, but an acknowledgement by the Republican right that National Missile Defence is still very much on the agenda and that the US does not need such a large nuclear stockpile now that it can depend upon other methods of defence. Neither does Bush’s promise to reduce the nuclear arsenal heed recent Russian and Chinese claims that any NMD system would only spur other countries to increase their own arsenals in the hope of overwhelming a nuclear umbrella.

On 25th July, the US scuppered a decade of international negotiations by announcing in Geneva its intention not to back a draft protocol to reinforce the biological weapons and toxin convention, which was initially signed in 1972. It’s reason? Such a move threatened US commercial interests. The protocol would have included verification measures that would have given international inspectors access to laboratories in the signatory countries. Perhaps the US has some stronger reason for denying inspections at thousands of its defence plants and biotechnology sites. What on earth are its commercial interests that it can nonchalantly destroy a treaty signed in the interest of humanity? What the hell is the US developing? And wasn’t it the US that was so damned insistent that an international scientific inspectorate search behind every Iraqi door capable of being locked?

In effect, President Bush has told the world: ‘Fuck off, it’s US first’. Somewhat echoing his father’s sentiments’ that he would ensure the 21st century was another ‘American century, son George W has announced his intention that the world will be ruled by force and on behalf of US corporate interests.

The evidence has been ever present since September 11th. Colin Powell, when asked to publicly provide evidence of bin Laden’s links to the attack on New York and Washington, avoided the issue by claiming its disclosure would be a breach of national security. When the Taliban wished to negotiate, offering to hand bin laden to a third party, Bush replied: “I said no negotiations and I mean no negotiations.” And while the US is keen to point out it has a ‘coalition’ of support against the Taliban it has bombed Afghanistan single-handedly, except for a few token cruise missiles fired from a British submarine (a doggie- snack for the ever-loyal poodle) on the first day of the attack upon Afghanistan.

It is now not only full steam ahead with the prized National Missile Defence system with a target date for the deployment of the system set for 2005 (See also the Socialist Standard of March this year), but plans are now afoot in the US to develop a space bomber that could destroy targets on the other side of the globe within 30 minutes; the bomber travelling 15 times faster than conventional bombers, able to hit a target from 60 miles up and paving the way for a new era of stratospheric warfare.

NMD, however is clearly a sign that the US is moving towards becoming a more aggressive and threatening military power. Experts now maintain that the issue is not so much whether an anti-missile system is feasible or desirable, but what kind of diplomatic and military policies the world’s only superpower would pursue from beneath the relative safety of a nuclear umbrella. It seems less the case that NMD is about protecting the USA from ‘rogue states’, and more the likelihood that such a sophisticated system of defence will ensure the profits flow in the right direction and that the global schoolyard bully can streamline its protection racket, safe in the knowledge it will meet little resistance.

Back in 1992, Paul Walfowitz (now Deputy Secretary of Defence) and Lew Libby (Bush’s National Security Adviser) formulated ideas which were presented as a confidential Pentagon document by none other than vice-president Dick Cheney:

“The US must hold global power and a monopoly of force. It will then protect the new order while allowing others to pursue their legitimate interests as Washington defines them. The US must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership, or seeking to overturn the established political order, or aspiring to a larger regional or global role…we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing those wrongs which threaten not only our interests but also those of our allies and friends. The US alone will determine what are those wrongs and where they are to be selectively righted.” (quoted in. Year 501 by, Noam Chomsky)

This is an extremely revealing document - a document that is also very worrying. And it’s not a one off. There are others, take for instance the US Space Command’s document “Vision 2020” which, now five years old, well telegraphs US designs for the 21st Century, suggesting that globalisation will lead to greater misery, to a lot more ‘have-nots’ with an axe to grind and who will have to kept in line:

“Although unlikely to be challenged by a global peer competitor, the United States will continue to be challenged regionally. The globalisation of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between the haves and have-nots. Accelerating rates of technological development will be increasingly driven by commercial interests not the military. Increased weapons lethality and precision will lead to new operational doctrines…..only military dominance will protect US interests and investments.”

In 1998, the US government report “The Long-Term Plan” reiterated this notion of there being trouble ahead from the dispossessed:

“The US will remain global power and exert global leadership. Widespread communications will highlight disparities in resources and quality of life, contributing to unrest in developing countries…The gap between the ‘haves and the ‘have–nots’ will widen, creating regional unrest. The US will remain the only nation able to project power globally.”

It is a fair bet that such sentiments have been prominent components of the US weltanschauung for some years – at least since 1945 and definitely since 1989 and the collapse of Soviet-style state capitalism. Moreover, it’s no bold assertion to suggest that China is chief the enemy in waiting – not the allegedly ‘rogue states’ such as Iraq and North Korea, nor the threat of international terrorism which has been a US favourite since the days of Reagan – for the simple reason that the republican right perceive China to be an economic and military power on a collision course with the US over domination of the Pacific. And if the US learns anything from its military history it is to strike first – hence the dire necessity of a fully functioning NMD.

At the beginning of July this year, only days before the New York Times announced Bush’s plans to ditch the comprehensive test ban treaty, his administration enquired of nuclear laboratories just how soon they could begin testing again – clearly intent on breaching agreements made 16 months earlier by 187 countries who had negotiated steps to strengthen the non-proliferation treaty.

On the 14th of July this year, the US launched a missile from the Marshall Islands. Twenty-nine minutes later a second missile, launched from Vanderburg, California, intercepted it at an altitude of 144 miles. The success not only strengthened Republican arguments for a competent star wars system, but was the order for similar multi million dollar tests to be carried out every month and helped justify the mobilisation of contractors into Fort Greeley, Alaska, to begin foundation work on a new missile silo.

Just over two years ago, President elect, George W Bush, gave a speech at Charleston, South Carolina. He spoke of the “contagious spread of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction” and hence the necessity of strengthening the unrivalled military power of the US. He then boldly announced that “the best way to keep peace is to redefine war on our terms.”

Which just about says it all – “to redefine war on our terms.” Economic war? Surely not the more bloodier version? And what is ‘redefining’ war? To provoke your competitors to the point that they begin arming themselves with better weaponry, then making a pre-emptive strike, bombing them back into the stone age on the pretext they threatened world peace, safe in the knowledge, there will be no retaliation and that you can then overtake their markets? We jest not!

Forget all the crap that George W’s father mouthed when he became president. The peace dividend’ that was supposed to replace cold war hostilities and benefit all after the collapse of ‘communism’ was as fictitious as fairies. The agenda now is as it was then and 40 years previous – US global domination in the military and economic fields and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

As socialists we certainly do not need to redefine our war. The war we must fight to end the insanity and horror Bush and Co would hurl us headlong into is the Class War. And this can not be fought with missiles, but something more powerful – our minds, our imagination, our solidarity and preparedness to unite as the majority exploited class and to wrest control of the planet from the madmen before it is to late.

Are you with us? Don’t take too long to think of a reply – the doomsday clock really is ticking.

Unholy War (book Review)

Unholy Wars – Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism
299 pages, John K. Cooley, Pluto Press

This new edition of a book first published in 1999 provides a first rate insight into the US relationship with militant Islam during and since the Cold War and provides much ammunition for those holding to the line that in supporting the likes of Osama bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US was indeed sowing the seeds of a bitter harvest reaped on September 11th 2001.


The USA did not only support those opposing the Soviet forces in the Afghan War, forming a deadly and unholy alliance with militant Islam in the process, it very much instigated the war. When President Carter signed a directive for covert support for the enemies of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in July, 1979, he was informed that do so would lead to Soviet intervention. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, would comment: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we consciously increased the probability that they would do so…This secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.” He later wrote to Carter: “Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam War.” (p. 19)


The US support for the mujahedin and other groups would turn out to be phenomenal. Billions of dollars were pumped into the Afghan cause and thousands of Islamic zealots were given specialist training in the US and Britain. As Cooley observes: “In the United States they experienced tough courses in endurance, weapons use, sabotage, and killing techniques, communications and other skills. They were required to impart these skills to the scores of thousands of fighters who formed the centre and the base of the pyramid of holy war.” (p. 81)


The training of the warriors of jihad not enough, the CIA also promoted drug trafficking in Afghanistan, one result being that the trade found easy access into the Soviet Union and helped destabilise civil society there. Moreover, “Nowhere did the growing addiction to locally-produced drugs, encouraged by those in the CIA…wreak greater havoc than in the Red Army…on an even larger scale than the addiction of American GIs during the Southeast Asian wars.” (p.5)


And of course there was the oil. One reason why the US nurtured the Taliban was that American oil companies wanted to build an oil pipe-line from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, to the Indian Ocean. It was hoped, states Cooley, “…that the Taliban, once in control, would be a security blanket. It would be able they conjectured, to secure the truck highways and eventually routes for oil and natural gas pipe-lines.” (p. 147)


In this updated edition of the 1999 publication, Cooley brings his topic up to date with an insight into the Bin-Laden-linked international terrorist network, as well as providing information on the post 1999 Pakistani coup.


For the socialist there is much in Unholy Wars we can use in the battle of ideas, revealing the lengths the US will go to, and the stinking depths it will plummet to secure its own ends, regardless of the cost of life. Where there is profit to be made, where US interests are challenged, nothing is sacred. People, no, whole nations are there to be manipulated.

Leaders? Not Here

Many workers think we cannot function without leaders. This is a fallacy and one perpetuated by the master class to help them maintain their rule over our lives. Indeed, so prevalent is this philosophy, that from the cradle to the grave we are taught to mistrust out own intelligence and to look up to our ‘betters and superiors’ (schools, church, politicians, parents etc) and to accept without question the plans they draw up for our future.

It is assumed leaders run the world. Well, we think it is we, the workers who run the world. Politicians might make government policy, which becomes law, but it is we who build and man the hospitals and schools. It is we who build the bridges, roads and railways, ports and airports, all the products that humans need to survive. It is we who produce everything from a pin to an oil-rig and provide humanity with all the services it needs – we the working class. We don’t depend on leaders for these skills or for their guidance. They have no monopoly on our knowledge and intelligence and the inventions we dream up, but benefit from them the most. If all the worlds leaders died tomorrow, few would really miss them and society would function as before. If all the bosses decided not to turn up at their factories, their business would still function because it is we who see to it that they function. Do you need a boss standing over you all day in the office or workplace, showing you how to work? Are you constantly in search of the guidance of a more superior individual to tell you how to run your life?

The concept of leadership has emerged as a result of class society and will end when we abolish class society, when abolish the capitalist mode of production and all that goes with it. The master class have been allowed to lead because of their control over the means of living, because of their control of the education system and their monopoly of the media and other and information processes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The greatest weapons we posses are our class unity, our intelligence, and our ability to question the status quo and to imagine a world fashioned in our own interests. The master class perceives all of this to be a threat and so will do anything to keep us in a state of oblivion, dejection and dependency. Our apathy is the victory they celebrate each day. Our unwillingness to unite as a globally exploited majority and to confront them on the battlefield of ideas is the subject of their champagne toasts.

Only sheep need leaders, and if workers want to be sheep then they can expect to get fleeced. The truth is, we have been led for so long by idiots that we have forgotten our own collective strength and lost sight of just what we, as a species, working together, are capable of.

The WSM has no leaders and has existed for 97 years without one. If someone can lead you into socialism, there will always be someone who can lead you out again. Socialism must be the free and conscious decision of the majority, otherwise it will never work. Our position is now as it was in 1904 at our inception – there is nothing that we can do for the working class that it is not already capable of doing for itself. For Socialism to be a success, it must be established without leaders and followers. It must be established by ordinary people al over the world uniting and working together to establish a new system peacefully and democratically – a world in which the exploited at last regain control of their own destiny.

Terrorists and Terrorists

Writing in The Guardian recently, George Monbiot observed that if Osama bin Laden did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. This is no brazen assertion, for the same has been said about many a US enemy over the years, the most memorable being Saddam Hussein. The reasoning behind such an outlook is simple. The US needs the threat of a bogeyman to scare us into falling into line as well as to justify large scale military actions on behalf of its own corporate elite and, of course, to provide the US with the pretext to play globocop on behalf of all god-fearing, peace-loving citizens everywhere.

Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organisation have been blamed for the September 11th attacks on the USA. Bin Laden’s photograph has been splashed across every newspaper front page in the world. Already there is a $10 million price on his head. The highly articulate George

W Bush is urgently reminded of the old Wild West wanted posters and has spoken of how bin Laden’s name is now on one. But who is bin Laden and how did he come to prominence? Osama bin Laden is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This is no big secret. The US, in fact, were arming groups like the notorious mujahedin a full six months before the Soviet invasion of December 1979 and it is estimated that at the Soviet withdrawal, US aid to the Afghan cause totalled $5 billion (this monetary support for some seven fundamentalist and extremist groups beginning after 1980 when Reagan quadrupled the CIA budget to £36 billion). Even after the Soviet withdrawal, the US still supported the Mujahedin, though more covertly now and through Pakistan’s version of the CIA, the ISI, their game plan now to play on the differences between the varying groups and their leaders in an attempt to undermine the power of the factions for Washington’s ends. The game plan analogy is perhaps best revealed in the words of Jimmy Carter’s adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski, who described Afghanistan at the time as ‘the greatest chessboard’. (see also Unholy Wars book review).

Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be linked to bin-Ladens’s al-Qaeda organisation and amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them. Moreover, US surveillance was well aware of bin Laden’s absence prior to the attack and it seems they purposely chose not to target him because a dead bin Laden would have dangerously enhanced his legendary charisma amongst the Islamic fundamentalists he inspires, his death inciting his followers to more crazed acts of vengeance.

It now seems that the US is reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam and is now paying the price. The globalisation process, which the US has pursued obsessively, has only served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

The Islamic zealots the US are prepared to annihilate, and indeed form an alliance with, in Afghanistan were, however, afforded most favoured status during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the Carter administration and beginning in 1980, they were trained in their thousands (sources quote 20,000) at the CIA’s Camp Peary and at the ex-army base at Harvey Point in Carolina; by the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and indeed by the SAS in Scotland. They would go on to be trained at Fort A.P. Hill, just off the Washington-Richmond interstate highway, and at Camp Picket in Virginia by Green Berets and US Navy SEALS. This was not simply ‘basic’ training. They were trained in over 60 deadly skills, including the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives, remote control devices for land mines, incendiary devices and the use of automatic weapons with armour piercing shells. Thus the US went about supporting a ten-year long jihad in the hope Soviet state capitalism would not encroach upon its central Asian markets and that the military cost of the operation would cripple the Soviet economy.

Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting and supporting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years. For instance, the US and the UK supported Suharto’s military coup in Indonesia in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 members of the PKI, and more recently they have supported an Indonesian regime that massacred thousands who voted for independence in East Timor. And it was the US who helped topple the democratically elected Allende government in Chile which resulted in thousands of deaths and countless disappearances. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and massacred 17,500, this was a terrorist act fully supported by the US. It continues to support one of the most notorious state terrorist organisations around in Colombia, Colombia now being the worst violator of human rights in the hemisphere and at the same time the leading recipient of US Military aid – the previous being Turkey. And how can we forget Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Korea?

Since 1945 the US has toppled some 40 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Noriega, Pinochet, Mobuto, Amin, Trujillo, Marcos, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.

In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan the Iraqi airspace its own air force is excluded from. During the 40 day Gulf War, US planes dropped 177 million pounds of explosives on Iraq – the greatest aerial bombardment in history. It has imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps 2 million people and bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey has used to bomb 3000 Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Gulf War, the US mercilessly attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and quite literally fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped, ill-trained soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. Only days previous to the September 11th attack on the US, the US and Great Britain again joined hands in a bombing raid on Iraq. No western newspaper reported it.

There was of course a time when the US couldn’t help Iraq enough. During the Iran-Iraq war, the US gave its full blessing to Iraqi atrocities, turning a blind eye to the chemical weapon attack on the small town of Halabjah in 1988 with the loss of 5,000 innocent lives. Indeed, in 1987 when Iraq attacked the USS Stark, killing 37 servicemen, there was no US response as the White House was keen at the time that Iraq got the upper hand in its war with Iraq and that the US got its oil at the price it demanded.

The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada, propped up right wing tendencies in Panama, Chile, Brazil, Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia. In Africa it supported the right-wing Savimbi as he tried to make Angola more hellish for its impoverished millions, adopted a policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa’s apartheid machine and was all to willing to shoulder up with South Africa in its war with the frontline states. In the Middle East it has allied itself with anti-democratic currents in Iran and Iraq and more recently with Jordan, Egypt and Saudi- Arabia, whilst at the same time ensuring there is no Middle Eastern solution, that the Palestinian people are kept in a state of subjection and that numerous UN Resolutions pertaining to the occupied territories are ignored. This year alone Israel is receiving $6 billion in free US aid, in direct contravention of Congress rulings. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 70 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed tens of thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked the proposed UN inquiry). The US catalogue of shame is indeed a deep one and we can only begin to scratch at its surface.

Whilst the September 11th attack resulted in an appalling loss of innocent life which no sane person could condone, it remains a wonder that the US has escaped the attention of terrorists for so long. For the poignant truth is that there are millions who have been murdered defeated, demoralised, impoverished and crushed by the US and its allies and who could well have turned to the pathos of terrorism as a means of evening up the score. Who knows the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world, prepared to destroy the life of their master? This is not to suggest the US ‘deserves’ to be bombed, but hints at the number of enemies the US has created in pursuit of global domination, forever trying to carve out larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.

If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, then the loss of life in New York and Washington, whilst horrendous, is not incomparable. For instance we can’t realistically comprehend the horror of the dying days of World War 2 when, in one night alone, up to 100,000 died in a 1000 bomber raid on Dresden or when Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost 150,000 in unnecessary nuclear attacks. But it is to the present we make comparison. Is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Is it not a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of an Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25 page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars? Where is the 3 minutes silence for the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died of hunger and disease as a result of US sanctions in the past 10 years – a figure which presidential spokeswoman Madeleine Albright described recently as “a price worth paying”? Can we not also label the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation terrorist organisations, judging them on the premeditated carnage their policies have unleashed on the underdeveloped world?

All of this may sound churlish, but is in no way intended to diminish the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble in New York are our fellow workers - make no mistake about it - members of the working class, murdered whilst they were being exploited. Whilst we are revolted, as socialists we certainly do not crave the comfort of revenge. We take a more considered view.

Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. But what is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where 3 individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the world’s 48 poorest nations? How can we condemn attacks on our ‘civilisation’ when we destroy food to keep prices high and employ scientists on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease? What questions we can ask of those who destroy the lives of millions, then run for the moral high ground when disaster hits their own backyard!

Since the attacks on New York and Washington, The US and British media has become a history exclusion zone, feeding only the spreading contagion of patriotism, whilst flag waving and the repetitious singing of anthems trigger, in pavlovian fashion, national epidemics of jingoism, the only cure of which is reprisals. The dominant view is that extremists the world over are intent on destroying democracy and western civilisation – a myopic perspective which washes well with a news-hungry audience whose knowledge of US foreign policy and basic international affairs makes it impossible for them to separate reality from distortion.

Bush may well speak of the terrorism the US faces from Islamic fundamentalism, but a truer picture is one in which the real global terror is US fundamentalism. Since coming to power, Bush has helped scupper the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on emissions and all but wiped his presidential backside on the 1972 ABM Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the UN treaty on the control of small arms. His attitude to treaties and conventions suggests he has already declared war on the planet and that US foreign policy will continue as before and with one aim – to ensure the 21st Century is another ‘American Century’, as George senior poignantly prophesised all those years ago.

And so, the proverbial line has been drawn in the sand. President George W Bush has told the world “either you’re with us or you’re against us.” It’s a catch all sentiment that is taking hold. Indeed, one writer asked me through the letters page of the Shields Gazette: “A simple message to John ********. Which side are you on, ours or the terrorists?” “It’s that simple”, I’ve been told on the streets! This is presumptuous arrogance and not an option for the class conscious to dwell on. It’s a form of blackmail coming from both sides of the pond which has had some effect. Some campaigners feel that for the time being we should hold back with our anti-war campaign. Oxfam, for instance, cancelled a petition against US policy on pharmaceutical corps on the grounds it was ‘inappropriate to pursue criticism of the US’

The mainstream view is that the forces of barbarism have declared war on the bastion of democracy. George Bush boldly declared: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another.” Yet wonders not why, if this were so, the Statue of Liberty, the White House or the Lincoln memorial was not attacked on September 11th. Why the Pentagon and the WTC - one a symbol of America’s global military reach, the other a symbol of US economic prowess?

Of course there is much missing from Bush’s assertion that Islamic terrorists are just simply jealous as hell of the democratic freedoms ‘enjoyed’ in the US. The simple truth is that throughout the Middle East, indeed the world, the US has, despite its alleged support for movements towards democracy and greater freedoms for all, generally hampered provisional steps in the direction of democratisation. The general line is that if a foreign election is not going the way Washington would like it to go, if the outcome could prove detrimental to US corporate profits, then it must be tampered with. Since 1945, the US has subverted elections in the following countries: Italy (1948-1970s), Philippines (1950s) Lebanon (1950) Indonesia (1955), Vietnam (1955), British Guyana (1953-64), Japan (1958-1970s), Nepal (1959), Laos (1960), Dominican Republic (1962), Guatemala (1963), Bolivia (1966), Portugal (1974-5), Australia 1974-5, Jamaica (1976), Panama (1984, 1989), Nicaragua (1984, 1990), Haiti (1987-1988), Russia 1996), Mongolia (1996), Bosnia (1998).


In the Middle East, whilst it has increased its support for despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco, it has invariably lowered its economic, military and diplomatic support for any Arab country embarking on major political liberalisation.

Israel, for instance, gets 40 per cent of all US overseas aid. Meanwhile Israel is in breach of 6 UN resolutions and continues oppressing Palestinians, the great majority living as second class citizens with almost no rights. During Jordan’s despotic and repressive rule in the 1970s and 80s, US aid for the Amman regime was enormous. Then when Jordan decided to oil the cogs of its political machine in the 1990s, that aid was vastly reduced and for a while suspended. Similarly, aid to Yemen was cut off within months of that unified country’s first ‘democratic’ election. In recent weeks, when it was discovered that Qatar’s satellite channel Al-Jazeera was beginning to sound a little ‘pro-democracy’, upsetting regional dictators, broadcasting images of the US bombings and airing bin Laden’s now famous video, it was Colin Powell who demanded the channel be closed down, insisting it fostered ‘anti-Americanism’.

When it comes to Middle Eastern peace, the US has ensured the region is as unstable as ever, cocking a snook at UN Resolution 687 which calls for region-wide disarmament - which would also mean an end to Israel’s nuclear capability – whilst at the same time selling $60 billion worth of arms to Middle Eastern countries in 10 years (80% of all world arms exports to the Middle East). Israel, by the way, receives $3 billion in US military aid on the pretext it is defending itself from its Arab neighbours – those same neighbours the US has armed to the teeth!

This side of the Atlantic, In his finest Orwellian double-speak, Tony Blair could announce: “The values we believe in should shine through in Afghanistan”. Could this be the same Blair whose government armed the Indonesian military machine during its recent rampage through East Timor, whose government signed 91 military export licences for Israel in the first eight months of the current Intifada? Such instances fly in the face of the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) claim that ‘we will not issue export licences where there is clearly identifiable risk that the equipment might be used for internal repression or adversely effect regional stability.’ Are these the same ‘values’ which, on the same day as the attacks on the US, allowed the DSEi arms fair to go ahead in London and to continue for another 3 days? And are these same ‘values’ informing a Labour government who, without any mandate from the UN, has helped notch up 15,000 RAF/USAF bombing raids on Iraq since the second Gulf War?


These same ‘values’ are now behind the decision that Britain and the US should support a proxy army, the Northern Alliance, an outfit with an impressive record of widespread rape, pillage and murder in Kabul, in its confrontation with the Taliban. One of the key figures in the Northern Alliance is Abdul Rashid Dostom, and ally of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov, who has made huge profits exporting drugs via Uzbekistan, and who allegedly was all to keen to secure Russian weapons and military supplies in exchange for keeping the gas flowing north.

Just as Blair’s values can enable him to curry favour with Israel’s Ariel Sharon, architect of the slaughter in Qibya in 1953 and the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, so can these same ideals prompt him into friendly dialogue with President Karimov, whose airfields are suddenly strategically important now the destruction of Afghanistan has commenced. Karimov, incidentally, holds 7,000 political prisoners, allows no free press and no political opposition. And Karimov, of course, has other reasons for supporting the anti-Taliban alliance. His corrupt police state is facing bankruptcy and to prop it up he is intent on running an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port

But back to the US. It’s fair to say that the Bush administration is in the throes of foreign policy denial – there has been almost blanket rejection of any notion hinting that previous US policy has any bearing on the present. Yet few worthwhile commentators have not mentioned the Middle East linkage, the US support for Israel in its continual oppression of Palestinians and of Washington’s continuing victimisation of Iraq. In a video-recorded message to the world, bin Laden asked: ‘You American people, can you ask yourselves why all this hate against America and Israel? The answer is clear and simple, that America has committed so many crimes against the nations of Muslims.’ Bin Laden then proceeded to list the aforementioned grievances. The latter said, it could perhaps be that bin Laden is an opportunist - indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians – but who is a wise judge of issues that incense people across the Middle East.

Here in Britain, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was castigated by his Labour bosses for making such a link between Palestine and the recent terrorist attacks in the US when he said that Middle eastern terrorism was bred “by the anger many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.” Tony Blair was to spend 15 minutes on the phone to Ariel Sharon, trying to calm him down and get him to agree to meet Straw

Neither will Washington acknowledge its complicity in other areas which have a direct bearing on the present. Whilst Bush is mouthing off about the importance of curbing the funding of terrorist groups and keen to see the Taliban’s overseas assets frozen, it was his own administration, May gone, that scuttled international efforts to clamp down on tax havens, withdrawing support for an OECD initiative that called for more transparency in tax and banking procedures.

Moreover, it was again in May of this year, that the Bush administration was giving the Taliban $43 million as an incentive to reduce the cultivation of poppies, knowing full well the Taliban were notorious abusers of human rights and that they harboured terrorists from all over the Islamic world, including number one bogey-man Mr bin Laden . And there was no criticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who for years gave the Taliban military and financial aid.

For quite some time now, US, German and Russian intelligence services have been alerting Washington to the fact that Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire weapon’s grade nuclear material, indeed as early as 1993 from Russian outlets with poor controls. What was the response of the Bush administration to this? They proposed cutting funds for a programme aimed at preserving nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.

At every turn we find evidence that the US is not only the creator of the monster that now seeks to destroy it, but of also unlocking the door wherein the creator lives.

Of course all the cant and clever rhetoric and soldier speak of the last few weeks have helped mask what are now becoming the true intentions of the US. The attacks on the US on September 11th are now being used to serve US foreign and domestic policy.

The oil reserves of Central Asia are large enough to attract any oil baron (200 billion barrels by some estimates) and as Afghanistan is geographically located between the Caspian basin and the markets of Japan, China and the Indian sub-continent, we can well see the country’s strategic importance to foreign policy planners wishing to dictate the way in which the region’s oil and gas reserves are utilised to the benefit of the US dollar.

The ‘war on terrorism’ is clearly being used to induce fear and mistrust in the US, and through this fear a justification will be found to curb all manner of civil liberties, increase police powers and military spending.

Furthermore, the current crisis serves to extend US power around the globe and perhaps sets a definite agenda for the coming century, the ‘war on terrorism’ serving as a replacement for the Cold War, now that the US has had its anti-communist passport stamped null and void and is desperate to maintain a pretext to assert its hegemonic credentials. (With regards US intentions in the 21st century, please see the article ‘Redefining War’ in issue 5 of Socialist View).

To be sure, this is not the first war of the 21st Century as Bush has claimed, but just one battle in a larger war that began in 1945 with the US determined to control the world’s resources, and there is more than ample evidence to prove this. More importantly, though, The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed too late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit.

As socialists, as observers of international affairs and commentators on the way they impinge upon the lives of our fellow workers, we are well attuned to the machinations of the elites of powerful countries as they seek to promote the interests of their corporate backers. Though it is no easy task for the uninitiated, we urge our fellow workers to be as vigilant as ever. To believe the arguments of the likes of Bush and Blair is to disarm yourself intellectually - for it is at times like the present, when the media is dancing to the tunes of governments, when the trumpets of jingoism, patriotism and reaction are sounding, that we need to be fighting the war of ideas with a little more gusto.

The solution to the ongoing insanity, we insist, remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity – socialism

The Great Denial - Terror Attacks on USA

I sent this to the Shields Gazette. Needles to say it was never published, even in part. I later lengthened it into another post on thsi blog "Terrorists and Terrorists (I am unsure of the actual date I wrote this - just workiong here from a date in the article's properties)

The proverbial line has been drawn in the sand and President George W Bush has told the world “either you’re with us or you’re against us.” It’s a catch all sentiment that is taking hold. Indeed, one local letter writer asked me through the letters page of the Shields Gazette: “A simple message to John B******. Which side are you on, ours or the terrorists?” “It’s that simple”, I’ve been told on the streets!


The mainstream view is that the forces of barbarism have declared war on the bastion of democracy - or so the explanation to a bewildered nation reads. George Bush boldly declared: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another.” Yet wonders not why, if this were so, the Statue of Liberty, the White House or the Lincoln memorial was not attacked. Why the Pentagon and the WTC - one a symbol of America’s global military reach, the other a symbol of US economic prowess?


Of course there is much missing from Bush’s assertion that Islamic terrorists are just simply jealous as hell of the democratic freedoms ‘enjoyed’ in the US. The simple truth is that throughout the Middle East, indeed the world, the US has, despite its alleged support for movements towards democracy and greater freedoms for all, generally hampered provisional steps in the direction of democratisation. Whilst it has increased its support for despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco, it has invariably lowered its economic, military and diplomatic support for any Arab country embarking on major political liberalisation.


Israel, for instance, gets 40 per cent of all US overseas aid. Meanwhile Israel is in breach of 6 UN resolutions and its continuing repression of Palestinians. During Jordan’s despotic and repressive rule in the 1970s and 80s, US aid for the Amman regime was enormous. Then when Jordan decided to oil the cogs of its political machine in the 1990s, that aid was vastly reduced and for a while suspended. Similarly, aid to Yemen was cut off within months of that unified country’s first ‘democratic’ election. In recent weeks, when it was discovered that Qatar’s satellite channel Al-Jazeera was beginning to sound pro-democracy, upsetting regional dictators, broadcasting images of the US bombings and airing bin Laden’s now famous video, it was Colin Powell who demanded the channel be closed down, insisting it fostered ‘anti-Americanism’


When it comes to Middle Eastern peace, the US has ensured the region is as unstable as ever, cocking a snook at UN Resolution 687 which calls for region-wide disarmament - which would also mean an end to Israel’s nuclear capability – and at the same time selling $60 billion worth of arms to Middle Eastern country in 10 years (80% of all world arms exports to the Middle East). Israel, by the way, receives $3 billion in US military aid on the pretext it is defending itself from its Arab neighbours!


Writing in the Guardian (29/9/01), Artundhati Roy goes a little further. “Could it be’ she asks, ‘ that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support of exactly the opposite things, to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorships, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocides?’ (for more on this see the October issue of Socialist Standard).


This side of the Atlantic, In his finest Orwellian double-speak, Tony Blair could announce: “The values we believe in should shine through in Afghanistan”. Could this be the same Blair whose government armed the Indonesian military machine during its recent rampage through East Timor, whose government has signed 91 military export licences for Israel since the current Intifada? Such instances fly in the face of the FCO claim that ‘we will not issue export licences where there is clearly identifiable risk that the equipment might be used for internal repression or adversely effect regional stability.’ Are these the same ‘values’ which, on the same day as the attacks on the US, allowed the DSEi arms fair to go ahead in London and to continue for another 2 days? And are these same ‘values’ informing a Labour government who, without any mandate from the UN, has helped notch up 15,000 RAF/USAF bombing raids on Iraq since the second Gulf War?


These same values are now behind the decision that Britain and the US should support a proxy army, the Northern Alliance, an outfit with an impressive record of widespread rape, pillage and murder in Kabul, in its confrontation with the Taliban. One of the key figures in the Northern Alliance is Abdul Rashid Dostom, and ally of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov, who has made huge profits from exporting drugs via Uzbekistan, and who allegedly was all to keen to secure Russian weapons and military supplies in exchange for keeping the gas flowing north.


Just as Blair’s values can enable him to curry favour with Israel’s Ariel Sharon, architect of the slaughter in Qibya in 1953 and the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, so can these same ideals prompt him into friendly dialogue with President Islam Karimov, whose airfields are suddenly strategically important now the destruction of Afghanistan has commenced. Karimov, incidentally, holds 7,000 political prisoners, allows no free press and no political opposition. Karimov of course has other reasons for supporting the anti-Taliban alliance. His corrupt police state is facing bankruptcy and he is intent on running an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port


But back to the US. It’s fair to say that the Bush administration is in the throes of foreign policy denial – there is almost blanket rejection of any notion hinting that previous US policy has any bearing on the present. Yet few worthwhile commentators have not mentioned the Middle East linkage, the US support for Israel in its continual oppression of Palestinians and of Washington’s continuing war with Iraq. In a video-recorded message to the world, bin Laden asked: ‘You American people, can you ask yourselves why all this hate against America and Israel? The answer is clear and simple, that America has committed so many crimes against the nations of Muslims.’ Bin Laden proceeded to list the aforementioned grievances.


Here in Britain, Foreigh Secretary Jack Straw was castigated by his Labour bosses for making such a link between Palestine and the recent terrorist attacks in the US when he said that Middle eastern terrorism was bred “by the anger many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.” Tony Blair was to spend 15 minutes on the phone to Ariel Sharon, trying to calm him down and get him to agree to meet Straw


Neither will Washington acknowledge its complicity in other areas which have a direct bearing on the present. Whilst Bush is mouthing off about the importance of curbing the funding of terrorist groups and keen to see the Taliban’s overseas assets frozen, it was his own administration that scuppered international efforts to clamp down on tax havens, withdrawing support for an OECD initiative that called for more transparency in tax and banking procedures.


Moreover, it was only in May of this year that the Bush administration was giving the Taliban $43 million as an incentive to reduce the cultivation of poppies, knowing full well the Taliban were notorious abusers of human rights and that they harboured terrorists from all over the Islamic world. And there was no criticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who for years gave the Taliban military and financial aid.


For quites some time now, US, German and Russian intelligence services have been alerteing Washington to the fact that Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire weapon’s grade nuclear material, indeed as early as 1993 from Russian outlets with poor controls. What was the response of the Bush administration to this? They proposed cutting funds for a programme aimed at preserving nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.


Such hypocrisy is further reflected in the personnel at the forefront of Bush’s anti-terrorism ‘crusade’ - Colin Powell, US Sec of State and John Negroponte, the current US ambassador to the UN. The former came to prominence when given the job of covering up the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, next seen trying to whitewash to the Iran-Contra scandal, whilst the latter, as US ambassador for Honduras, was up to his neck covering the tracks of US backed right-wing death squads and their state terrorist activities. Yet these same mendicants are charged with routing out the threat to freedom and democracy!