U.S. Nuclear Cowboys on the Loose
Defend Iraq Against U.S. Attack!
Down With UN Starvation Blockade!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 788, 4 October 2002.

OCTOBER 1—As the people of Iraq gird themselves for another round of mass slaughter at the hands of “democratic” America, the imperialists shamelessly trade in the commodities futures of blood, oil and votes. Despite the Senate Democrats’ being effectively labeled traitors by the president, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle corrals them to push through a war resolution for Bush, concerned that they’re being out-flanked by the Republicans for the upcoming Congressional elections. In the United Nations, the European powers and the Arab states look to the “world’s only superpower” to buy off their opposition to the impending war.

The U.S. and Tony Blair’s Britain have been engaged in a steady buildup of military deployments to the region and of deadly bombing sorties against Iraq. Notwithstanding all the diplomatic jockeying over UN weapons inspectors and the wording of Security Council resolutions, the question is not whether but when the U.S. will launch its invasion. After the UN and Iraq reached an agreement over the return of weapons inspectors today, the U.S. responded by declaring that it will not accept inspections unless they are preceded by a new, “tougher” UN resolution demanding, among other things, the installation of foreign soldiers in Iraq to “guard” the inspectors. One administration official described the U.S. government’s response as going into “thwart mode.”

With little respite, the five million residents of Baghdad have lived under war or the shadow of war for 12 years, their homes destroyed by bombs and missiles, their children’s lives snuffed out by malnutrition and disease. Some one and a half million people have died as a result of the UN embargo, half the schools are now unfit for use, female adult literacy has plummeted from 87 percent in the mid 1980s to 45 percent in 1995, and one in five children have had their growth permanently stunted.

Arab leaders throughout the Near East, fearing turmoil in their own countries, have warned Washington against a U.S. invasion of Iraq while the Zionists continue to sow terror against the Palestinians. Israeli troops occupy the Ramallah compound of Yasir Arafat, having destroyed almost all of the buildings, where he has been imprisoned since December. Israeli troops have repeatedly fired into crowds of Palestinians who have defied curfews to come out on the streets and demonstrate. Almost the entirety of the West Bank is now again under the iron fist of Israeli military occupation, the oppressed Palestinian population confined to their villages and towns by a network of military checkpoints, barbed wire and trenches and imprisoned in their homes for days and weeks at a time by 24-hour curfews.

Around the globe, there is mounting fear and anger over Washington’s war moves against Iraq, accentuated by the release of the “Bush doctrine” earlier this month threatening any perceived adversary with “pre-emptive” military strikes. On Saturday, over 400,000 people marched in London to oppose the Blair Labour government’s support for war against Iraq. In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic (SPD)/ Green coalition, which had been trailing in the polls, was re-elected on the basis of opposition to an American war. In Mexico City, one television poll elicited over 40,000 calls, with more than 80 percent opposed to any endorsement by the neocolonial Fox government of the coming U.S. onslaught.

Our opposition to this war is based on our struggle in the interests of the working people and oppressed internationally against an imperialist order in which a handful of rich and powerful states dominate and exploit the world. A war between the U.S. and Iraq would be reactionary and predatory on the part of the U.S., but just and defensive on the part of Iraq. We stand for the military defense of Iraq against imperialist attack without giving one iota of political support to the bloody Saddam Hussein regime, which is run by a Sunni Arab minority oppressing the Shi’ite and Kurdish populations.

The defense of neocolonial Iraq against the American imperialist behemoth is in the interests of working people and the oppressed around the world, not least in the United States. A decade of imperialist attacks against defenseless peoples abroad has been accompanied in the U.S. by the loss of millions of jobs, the increasing erosion of any health care benefits for tens of millions of people, the virtual destruction of welfare and an unparalleled widening of the gap between rich and poor. The domestic “war on terror,” directed overwhelmingly against Muslims and Arabs, is ultimately aimed at organized labor. This is most starkly demonstrated by government threats of military strikebreaking against the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

Every unchallenged act of aggrandizement, every new easy win further emboldens America’s capitalist rulers to lash out against their perceived enemies at home and abroad. Small, neocolonial Iraq is in no position to militarily prevail over the U.S. imperialist war machine. The Bush administration screams that Saddam Hussein has “weapons of mass destruction.” But the fact is that the one-sided slaughter carried out by the U.S.-led coalition in 1991 and 12 years of sanctions—as well as the loss of its overt Soviet and covert American military suppliers—have left the Iraqi military much weaker even than it was during the Gulf War, with the army barely one-third its former size and most of what equipment it has in need of spare parts.

Pursuit of the class struggle in the U.S. and other imperialist countries is the chief means of defending Iraq against imperialist attack. “Imperialist war is the continuation and sharpening of the predatory politics of the bourgeoisie. The struggle of the proletariat against war is the continuation and sharpening of the class struggle.” These words from the 1938 Transitional Program, written by revolutionary fighter Leon Trotsky in the lead-up to the second interimperialist world war, must guide class-conscious workers and antiwar youth on the eve of this predatory war against Iraq. Every strike, every labor mobilization against the government’s war plans and its attacks on workers and minorities, every mass protest in defiance of the assaults on civil liberties is a blow against Bush’s war drive.

For class struggle at home against the U.S. capitalist rulers! Down with the racist war on immigrants! Defend Iraq against imperialist attack! Down with the UN starvation blockade! Defend the Palestinians—Israel out of the Occupied Territories! U.S., UN and all imperialist forces out of the Near East, Central Asia and Afghanistan! Only workers revolution can end imperialist war!

The “Bush Doctrine”: U.S. Imperialism Declares War on the World

In his speech to the UN on September 12, Bush made a grudging bow to “multilateralism” while delivering a U.S. ultimatum for war against Iraq. Coming only days later, the release of the Bush government’s “National Security Strategy” document was something of a diplomatic bombshell. Affirming a general policy of “pre-emptive” war, the document states that the U.S. is militarily “strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” Summarizing the administration’s view, the New York Times (20 September) wrote that “the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.”

This doctrine is the encapsulation of the arrogance and triumphalism of the U.S. imperialist rulers—whose military budget is greater than that of the next 19 countries combined—since capitalist counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet Union a decade ago. Our international tendency, the International Communist League, fought until the bitter end for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and called on the Soviet proletariat to sweep away the Stalinist misrulers, whose bureaucratic mismanagement and futile attempts to conciliate imperialism paved the way for capitalist restoration. The destruction of the former Soviet Union ushered in a far more dangerous world. As the ICL’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998) stressed:

“History speaks its verdicts loudly. The ascendancy of counterrevolution in the former USSR is an unparalleled defeat for working people all over the world, decisively altering the political landscape on this planet. No longer challenged by Soviet military might, U.S. imperialism has proclaimed a ‘one-superpower world,’ running roughshod over semicolonial peoples from the Persian Gulf to Haiti. No longer the unrivaled economic powerhouse of world imperialism, the United States still maintains the murderous advantage of its military might, while often preferring to camouflage its terror under the ‘humanitarian’ fig leaf of the United Nations’ ‘den of thieves’.”

Virtually the entire “left” howled along with the imperialist wolves in backing the forces of counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe. Having done their bit to strengthen the rapacious might of U.S. imperialism, today these same groups, particularly in Europe, push the illusion that the European governments or the United Nations can and should be made to stop an American war against Iraq. The UN is simply a clearing-house for the rival imperialist powers, and the European bourgeoisies have neither the will nor the capacity to stop the U.S. Moreover, though constrained by Washington’s overwhelming military superiority, they are no less predatory in their own national interests.

At any rate, in its war moves against Iraq, the Bush administration has overtly challenged the need for a UN fig leaf, “multilateralism” or any of the other “democratic” trappings that have historically been used to mobilize the population for war. It was the criminal September 11 attack on the World Trade Center that allowed this government, which came to office with an electoral minority, to embark on its designs for global conquest. A New York Review of Books (26 September) article titled “George Bush & the World” cites a February speech by Vice President Richard Cheney to the Council on Foreign Relations. Referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cheney said: “When America’s great enemy suddenly disappeared, many wondered what new direction our foreign policy would take.... All of that changed five months ago. The threat is known and our role is clear now.” As the article added: “What Cheney was saying, in a slightly more articulate fashion, was that the main purpose of American foreign policy was to confront an enemy—and that a worthy successor to the Soviet Union had finally emerged, in the form of international terrorism.”

Indeed, in the name of the “war on terror,” this government declares that it can go after whoever it wants whenever it wants. It is this reckless “unilateralism” that has provoked concerns among sections of the U.S. ruling class, including within the Republican Party and the Pentagon. These critics recognize that international institutions like the UN have served American imperialism’s interests well. Moreover, despite a propaganda blitz by the administration, popular support for a war is shallow, with opinion poll majorities plunging if the U.S. has no allies or encounters significant American casualties. A number of labor organizations, including ILWU Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area, have adopted antiwar resolutions.

Unlike Afghanistan, an invasion and occupation of Iraq, with its built-up population centers, would not be carried out by a few thousand elite “Special Operations” units, but would have to draw on the proletarian and plebeian base of the military. An insightful article in the London Times (4 September) captured the seething racial and class contradictions in the U.S. military. Visiting the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in Japan, the Times correspondent reported:

“Boarding one is like entering a time warp back to the former Deep South. In the bowels of the carrier, where the crew are cooped up for six months at a time, manual workers sleep dozens to a room. Most are black or Puerto Rican, paid $7,000 to $10,000 a year to work in the broiling temperatures of the kitchens and engine rooms.

“As you move up the 11 segregated levels towards the pilots’ quarters beneath the deck, the living quarters become larger, the air cooler and the skin tones lighter. Officers exist in almost total ignorance of the teeming world beneath them, passing around second-hand tales of murders, gang-fights and drug abuse. Visitors are banned from venturing down to the lowest decks, which swelter next to the vast nuclearpowered engines.”

The military itself is a reflection of the class and racial contradictions of civil society. Any number of factors, including a military reversal or significant casualties for U.S. imperialism in its “war on terror,” could trigger an upsurge of struggle in the U.S. and ignite the social tinder that has accumulated over the years. The capitalist class enemy is well aware of this, too, as demonstrated by its heavy-handed threats against potential strike action by the ILWU, invoking “national security.” The recent increased rumblings within the Democratic Party over the Bush administration’s “go it alone” policy on Iraq also speak to fears of what a war could ignite on the home front.

A handful of prominent Democrats, from Al Gore to Ted Kennedy, argue that the government’s provocations are not the means to mobilize for war. Declaring that war “is hell” and also “dangerously unpredictable,” a full-page ad in the New York Times (1 October), signed by a number of prominent Democratic Party liberals, expressed concern that “a war against Iraq could destabilize more than just Saddam Hussein.” Worried that the nuclear cowboys in the White House are “reluctant to accept international dissent, even from our closest allies,” the ad opines that it is “incumbent upon domestic critics to make their voices heard.”

Such Democrats are positioning themselves to get out ahead of and contain any opposition and turmoil that the war against Iraq could generate among working people and minorities. In fact, because of its image as a “friend” of labor and minorities, the Democratic Party has historically been the preferred party of war for the American bourgeoisie. Antiwar youth, labor militants and fighters for black and immigrant rights must understand that any genuine opposition to imperialist war must be based on class struggle and political protest independent of all the parties and agencies of imperialist rule. Break with the Democratic Party of war and racism!

Fake Lefts Appeal to Imperialism

Such is decidedly not the perspective of various organizations building antiwar coalitions. Among the most prominent of these is the International ANSWER coalition, politically dominated by the Workers World Party (WWP), which is building for protests on October 26 in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco under the slogan: “Stop the war on Iraq before it starts.” WWP has a long history of building coalitions aimed at roping in Democratic Party “doves” and bourgeois liberals. The longstanding central spokesman for its International Action Center (IAC) is former Democratic Party attorney general Ramsey Clark, who has now launched an appeal to UN secretary general Kofi Annan to stay the hand of the U.S. While a tiny article buried in the 26 September issue of Workers World is headlined: “UN Binds Countries to U.S. Interests,” Clark’s September 20 letter, which was circulated by the IAC, expressed the real line: “George Bush will invade Iraq unless restrained by the United Nations.... If the United Nations, above all, fails to oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it will forfeit its honor, integrity and raison d’etre.”

The “raison d’etre” of the UN from its inception has been to serve as a tool of the imperialist powers, particularly and overwhelmingly at the dictate of the U.S. A partial list of UN-sponsored wars includes the 1950-53 “police action” against the North Korean deformed workers state, which took the lives of upwards of three million Koreans, the 1960 military intervention into the Congo under whose cover the CIA and Belgian imperialists assassinated nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba and the 1991 war against Iraq. The UN presided over the 1947 partition of Palestine and the ensuing Zionist expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. In the last 12 years, the UN starvation embargo and its weapons inspectors (who are in fact spies) have paved the way for the U.S.’s current war moves against Iraq.

For its part, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has run a series of articles protesting reliance on the UN. Socialist Worker (20 September) writes:

“During the lead-up to the Gulf War, many activists insisted that the antiwar movement should call for the UN to take action of some sort against Iraq—rather than the U.S.

“These activists were disarmed when the UN, despite all the rhetoric about peace, did sanction a war run by Washington.

“Likewise, the call to ‘let sanctions work’ against Iraq also undermined the fight against Bush Sr.’s war drive by conceding that the U.S. had the right to wage an economic war.

“A decade later, sanctions have ‘worked’ —by killing many more ordinary Iraqis, just as this newspaper and other opponents of the Gulf War always pointed out.”

This is truly shameless considering that in 1991 the ISO helped foster the very illusions it now decries, when it dropped its paper opposition to the UN embargo in order to endorse a January 1991 “Campaign for Peace” march that explicitly called for economic sanctions as a supposedly “peaceful” alternative to war.

For the ISO, such sellouts of their supposed principles always come dressed up in the garb of “unity.” As much as the WWP, the ISO’s purpose is to build “broad” coalitions that do not offend the political sensibilities of bourgeois liberals. They appeal to antiwar youth that “unity” is necessary in order to mobilize the largest number of people possible on the streets, peddling the illusion that the answer to imperialist war is mass protest on any political basis whatsoever.

To be sure, any dent in the bourgeoisie’s “national unity” is welcome. Thus it is not insignificant that in a climate where the “war on terror” is being used to target all manner of dissent and at a time when the Bush administration is using the anniversary of the criminal attack on the World Trade Center to beat the drums for war, more than 4,000 people signed the “Not In Our Name” protest ad that appeared in the New York Times (19 September). But unlike the ISO and Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which is the central force behind the “Not In Our Name” coalition, we do not cater to liberal appeals or moral-witness pacifism. Successful opposition to war must have a proletarian class axis and a revolutionary internationalist perspective, otherwise it will be used by the bourgeois liberals to confine protest within the bounds of the very capitalist system that breeds war. As Trotsky wrote:

“To condemn war is easy; to overcome it is difficult. The struggle against war is a struggle against the classes which rule society and which hold in their hands both its productive forces and its destructive weapons. It is not possible to prevent war by moral indignation, by meetings, by resolutions, by newspaper articles, and by congresses. As long as the bourgeoisie has at its command the banks, the factories, the land, the press, and the state apparatus, it will always be able to drive the people to war when its interests demand it.”

— “Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam” (July 1932)

For Class Struggle Against the Imperialist Rulers!

The depth of opposition to war with Iraq among the working masses of Europe, Latin America and the Arab countries provides significant opportunities for international class struggle. In Britain, Washington’s only coalition partner, the Blair government, faces a volatile combination of massive opposition to the war and a revival of class struggle unseen in nearly two decades. At recent trade-union rallies, those speakers who attacked the Labour government have elicited the loudest applause. The annual Trades Union Congress conference held last month passed a motion opposing a war called without UN approval, narrowly defeating a resolution against a war under any conditions. London underground (subway) unions are engaged in a campaign of one-day strikes, including one staged the day after Blair issued his bogus “dossier” on Iraq. And the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) is currently balloting to authorize its first national strike in 25 years, with London underground workers threatening to stop work over safety and workers in the English Channel tunnel also saying they will not work without fire safety cover.

It was a Labour government that called out the troops against the 1977 FBU strike. Now the military is training 12,000 troops for strikebreaking, while the bourgeois press tries to whip up an anti-union frenzy over claims that the country would be without fire protection in the event of terrorist attacks. What is posed is the possibility of a major class confrontation with the hated New Labour government as it prepares for war. Joint strike action by firefighters and rail workers would deal a massive blow against the British imperialist state’s ability to pursue war against Iraq.

But workers actions in any country will immediately come up against the strikebreaking apparatus of the capitalist state—whether the particular government is for or against the U.S.-led war. The working class must be mobilized on the basis of decisive class independence from and opposition to its “own” bourgeoisie. And it is this which the European social democrats and their centrist and left-reformist helpmates act to prevent in trying to hitch the working class and radical youth to “antiwar” sections of the imperialist bourgeoisies.

In Britain, virtually every fake-left group, from the Socialist Party of Peter Taaffe (aligned with Socialist Alternative in the U.S.) to the barely centrist Workers Power (WP) group, has thrown itself into the Stop the War Coalition organized by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), sponsors of the huge September 28 march in London. The effect of this coalition is to submerge working-class opposition to the war in a “broad”—i.e., class-collaborationist—unity with everything ranging from bishops and Muslim clerics to bourgeois parties like the Greens, “left” Labour parliamentarians and trade-union bureaucrats, including those who support the imperialist sanctions against Iraq. A major speaker at the protest was London mayor Ken Livingstone, who screamed for the U.S./British bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Warning against such class-collaborationist “antiwar” alliances, Trotsky wrote in his 1932 article: “Whoever attempts to put all the programs, all the parties, all the flags into one package in the name of pacifism, that is, of a superficial struggle against war in words, performs the greatest service for imperialism.” Today, the European fake lefts do not even deign to hide their service for imperialism. From the SWP and WP to Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and Alain Krivine’s Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) in France, a wide array of reformists and centrists joined in a call “To all citizens of Europe and to all their representatives” (reprinted in Weekly Worker, 12 September) which declaims:

“Those who show solidarity with the people of Iraq have no hearing in the White House. But we do have the chance to influence European governments—many of whom have opposed the war. We call on all the European heads of state to publicly stand against this war, whether it has UN backing or not, and to demand that George Bush abandon his war plans.”

This is a logical step for the LCR. After years of support to Lionel Jospin’s Socialist-led popular front of racist terror and anti-working-class austerity, the LCR moved on to pimping for rightist Jacques Chirac in the recent presidential election in the name of keeping out the fascist Le Pen. The centrist Workers Power, however, strikes a more left posture, proclaiming in a 23 September statement posted on its Web site: “When fighting breaks out we must call clearly and unequivocally for the total defeat of the imperialist invasion and victory for the Iraqi resistance to it.” Workers Power indulged in similar “red” rhetoric during the bombing of Afghanistan, but the real substance of its program was captured in its call to “LOBBY PARLIAMENT as it debates the war.” Today, WP openly appeals to the capitalist governments of Europe against the U.S.

In fact, the European imperialists had been the historic exploiters of the Near East. Iraq and other Near Eastern countries were creations of the British and French imperialists, who carved out their borders in the sand with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The current antiwar posture of the French and German governments is very much a reflection of the divergence of their interests from those of the U.S. These countries are reliant on Near East oil and have substantial investments in Iran and Iraq. Any tightening of U.S. control over the Near East oil spigot—and Iraq’s oil reserves are second only to those of Saudi Arabia—would mean not only higher fuel costs for European corporations but even greater reliance on Washington’s good graces.

At the same time that Germany expressed overt opposition to a major American military-strategic policy, a no less unprecedented, if less dramatic, move was made by Japanese prime minister Koizumi, who was elected on a platform of resurgent Japanese militarism. Without first getting American approval, Koizumi made the first visit ever by a Japanese head of state to North Korea, a bureaucratically deformed workers state included in Bush’s “axis of evil.” Meanwhile, Japan is forging ahead with the creation of a regional trade bloc to compete with the German-dominated European Union and the U.S.-controlled NAFTA. While the Japanese bourgeoisie is divided over whether to support a U.S. attack on Iraq, it is united on one thing. Like the Germans, they will not bankroll this war.

The conflicting interests of the rival imperialist powers, subordinated during the Cold War to a U.S.-led anti-Soviet alliance, have increasingly come to the fore since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. The Bush administration’s bellicose “unilateralism” drives home with a vengeance that the European (and Japanese) imperialists cannot pursue their own national ambitions when those come into conflict with U.S. interests anywhere in the world so long as they remain, relatively speaking, economically powerful but militarily weak.

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The Bush administration continues to ride high in the polls on support for the “war on terror,” shamelessly manipulating the 9/11 anniversary commemorations to hype its war aims. But this “national unity” bubble against a putative “axis of evil” can’t withstand the pinprick of any examination of the Bush gang’s relation to those they now declare the enemy. Bush, Cheney et al. have a long history of working in cahoots with the likes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

After U.S. intelligence agencies had for months denied any connection between the Baghdad regime and Al Qaeda, Rumsfeld and others now darkly allude to vague, indefinite and unsubstantiated “visits” by Al Qaeda to Baghdad (never mind that the secular Hussein regime and the fundamentalist Al Qaeda are historic enemies). What is definitely substantiated is Rumsfeld’s own visits to Baghdad (and a quiet meeting with Saddam Hussein) as an emissary of the Reagan administration in 1983, during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. “In the two years after Rumsfeld’s visits,” notes the Los Angeles Times (15 September), “the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence on Iran. That operation soon blossomed into a larger military exchange,” continuing right through the 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, now hypocritically decried by the imperialists as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s brutality. In fact, the CIA helped Hussein’s Ba’ath Party come to power in 1963—following the suppression of a revolutionary upheaval in 1958-59—providing lists of workers and leftists to be rounded up and slaughtered.

Now, Bush raises a hue and cry over Saddam Hussein’s desire for nuclear weapons. For weeks, there were murky reports of Iraq’s attempt to import aluminum tubes (which it did not get) supposedly designed (which they were not) for a centrifuge to make weapons-grade uranium (which by all accounts Iraq does not have). As an article in the London Guardian (20 September) aptly noted: “It is precisely because he is not now a real threat to the US, nor a real ally of al- Qaida, and nor, probably, in possession of usable weapons, that war is feasible.”

The government is trying to sell this war as one to “liberate” Iraq and install American-style “democracy,” while on the home front Attorney General John Ashcroft puts the Bill of Rights through a shredding machine. Non-citizens and citizens alike are being rounded up, incarcerated and denied any semblance of Constitutional protections; neighbors are encouraged to spy on neighbors; university presidents slander anyone who defends the right of a Palestinian man, woman or child to exist as “anti-Semitic.” More than 600 people were thrown behind bars for exercising their right to free speech and assembly at anti-globalization protests in Washington, D.C. last weekend. Cops were brought in to D.C. from distant states and deputized in order to enable them to gain experience working with federal authorities in suppressing protest.

But the picture is hardly one of seamless reaction and fear. Although the U.S. imperialists trumpet the “death of Communism” and sneer that Marxism has been proven to be a “failure,” the laws of the class struggle have not been annulled. Marx’s prediction of recurrent economic crises under capitalism is being borne out with a vengeance. The 1991 Gulf War led to a spike in oil prices and a recession, and that war was financed overwhelmingly by America’s coalition allies. The bill for this war will come due when a recession has already been underway for over a year. And then this avaricious ruling class—which has been squeezing every last ounce of profit out of the working class—will try to take the cost of Bush’s military adventure out of the hides of the workers in the U.S. (while threatening to force the Iraqi people to pay for their own “liberation”). The bourgeoisie’s incessant attacks on the working class will necessarily provoke proletarian class struggle.

The key to unlocking labor struggle in this country lies in breaking the class-collaborationist “national unity” pushed by the bourgeoisie and its labor lieutenants in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. And that means, first and foremost, breaking the chains forged by the labor tops and the black politicians and preachers that bind the proletariat and the ghetto masses to the “lesser evil” Democratic Party of American imperialism. If there is to be an end to imperialist war, to racist oppression and all-sided, grinding misery, the multiracial U.S. working class must be won, through Marxist education and its own experience in struggle, to the fight to build a revolutionary workers party to lead the struggle for socialist revolution in the bastion of world imperialism. That is our perspective, and on its outcome hinges the fate of the whole world.