Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognitlon of Marxism is to be tested.- V. I.Lenin

I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party

No 581 Wednesday January 23 1991 (P&P Bulletin Publications.  PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL) (GPO Regd.) 10p

Gunboat diplomacy with massive 'smart' weapons is a fatal contradiction

In its hayday, Western colonialism ruled the world because the backwardness of the subjugated nations meant that tiny forces could cow millions of natives.

Iraq is not a very big country as Third World nations go, and yet the US imperialist conspiracy is obliged to amass unprecedented weaponry and manpower to try to subdue the Baghdad regime's revolt against Western domination of the Middle East.

Even if this all goes to the Blitzkrieg plans copied by Washington out of Hitler's German imperialist manuals, the obvious problem already looming is how can the Gulf region be kept subjugated on a longterm basis.

It was possible in colonialism's prime at the end of the 19th century to leave literally just a handful of gunboats (or their land equivalent) on station in order to keep down whole continents.

But the whole heart of all 20th century developments is that the vast proletarian masses internationally can no longer be dominated for long by even the most barbaric imperialist mass-destruction warmongering.

Neither in inter-imperialist world wars nor in more than 300 equally brutal colonial wars or engagements has the growing revolutionary consciousness of the anti-imperialist struggle been crushed for long.

The weakest links in the imperialist chain have been overthrown totally by the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the former huge colonial empires have been forced to concede nominal independence to virtually every former imperialist possession.

Western monopoly-capitalist domination has continued through the setting up of stooge regimes of feudal autocracy, fascist dictatorship, or corrupt parliamentary democracy.

But the crisis of imperialist control in the Gulf has blown up because that disgusting stooge system has fallen apart there.

The opportunist bourgeois nationalist regime in Baghdad itself is no longer able or prepared to be bribed with Western arms aid to do what Washington wants.

And as a spin-off from that colossal upheaval, the degenerate feudal set-ups throughout the Arabian peninsula are all now threatened with terminal disturbances.

A direct assault on these tribal and medieval colonial-stooge anachronisms (such as Saddam inflicted on the Jabah-Sabah gangsters in Kuwait) will not now be necessary. By reimposing the worst kind of Blitzkrieg bullying in the history of Western imperialism, the Anglo-Saxon colonists will be bound to have turned into eventual pariahs (of the Arab world) every remaining feudal regime in Arabia, especially the Emirates, the Saudi monarchy, and the Kuwait gang, - who collectively control (on behalf of Western imperialism) the major share of the crucially important (internationally) Gulf oil revenues.

They were already all under intense internal pressure anyway for their disgraceful injustices and arrogant greed.

Now they will be hated by the masses even more intensely for having been the willing tools of Western imperialist massacres rained down on Arabs all over Iraq.

These masses, including the masses in Iraq itself, will be impossible to police from the point of view of Western colonialism continuing being able to impose imperialist economic domination on the oilrich Gulf region (as up to now via its feudal stooges and via temporary alliances with bourgeois nationalist stooges from time to time, - a role Saddam himself played for the West against Khomeini fundamentalism, and as Sadat notoriously played in Egypt until assassinated, and as Mubarak is notoriously continuing, living on borrowed time).

Any Western project to establish a Mubarak-type regime in Iraq if and when imperialist military blitzkrieg is successful, will prove to be a very short-lived delusion.

These are not the 'natives' of the end-19th century hiding under the nearest bush or palm tree at the first awesome sound of shots being fired in the gunboat diplomacy tradition.

The emerging independent Arab states are now capable, as Saddam's Iraq itself has shown, of mastering advanced rocket technology with its own stretched Hussein version of the Soviet Scud missile, doubling its range but still hitting Tel Aviv on target.

As is now being graphically demonstrated, it is going to take an awful lot of the most deadly and sophisticated weapons of mass destruction imagineable just to win the battlefield conflict merely with Iraq (one of the most indebted and certainly far from being the wealthiest or the best manpowered Arab state by a long way).

What it will then require to police 18 million Iraqis on a daily basis is beyond imagination, in the realms of pure fantasy.

It takes the direct brutal Zionist colonising regime in Occupied Palestine all its time and 4-million strong militarily-trained personnel just, barely, to keep the lid on less than two million subjugated Palestinians directly under this Western imperialist conquest in Gaza and the West Bank. How will half a million unhappy American military colonists (and the US budget will collapse if even that many are kept in the Gulf for too long) hope to keep the lid on 18 million humiliated Iraqis, never mind the 4 or 5 million more Arabs who will be on the revolutionary rampage against their sell-out feudal stooge regimes all over the Arabian peninsula by that time.

The Jabah Sabah feudal gangsters are almost certainly done for in the long run whatever success the American imperialist blitzkrieg finally achieves by its terror-bombing massacres of Iraqi cities and infrastructure (water supplies, electric power, transport, communications, etc), as the capitalist press itself admits:

The Iraqis, in refusing orders from the United Nations to leave, argue that Kuwait has no right to be sovereign at all, and they make at least a plausible case that it is an artificial creation of British imperialism. Britain first took note of Kuwait in 1841,  when the British resident in the Gulf notified London that its harbour "is certainly an exceedingly fine one, capable of holding the navy of Great Britain, [though] the country around is a salt and sandy desert, of the most barren and inhospitable description, with not a tree or a shrub visible, as far as the eye can reach". 
Though Britain's navy had been dominant in the Gulf since early in the century, to safeguard communications with India, London was disturbed at a growing threat from Russia, which was pressing its influence southwards through Iraq, with the complicity of the Ottomans, This concern made British control of Kuwait, crucially located at the head of the Gulf, a strategic imperative.

In the middle of the last century the British began an assiduous cultivation of the Sabahs, the local ruling family. In 1899 their efforts were rewarded by a treaty that made Kuwait a protectorate, and over the ensuing decades, exercising their influence with a deft hand, they attained their objective of keeping the Gulf to themselves. It was Britain's interest in maintaining its control of Gulf waters that brought about the nationhood of Kuwait. In all probability, after the First World War Kuwait  would have been merged into Iraq, itself  a British mandate after 1920 but also a nascent regional power.

Instead, the British kept Kuwait separate, and for the first  third of the century defended it frequently  - not against intruders from the north but against the Saudis, who sought to attach it to their holdings. The menace from Baghdad took shape only after Britain granted independence to Iraq in 1932.

In 1988 Iraq, still governed by a conservative, pro-British monarch, formally laid claim to Kuwait, on the grounds that under the Ottomans it had been a district of Basra province. Since then, Iraqi schoolchildren have routinely been taught the irredentist lesson that Kuwait belonged to them. An Iraqi military regime, having overthrown the monarchy in 1958, published an edict of annexation when Britain declared Kuwait independent in 1961. Though it sent no troops, the Sabahs called for help, and Britain replied by dispatching a military contingent.   A decade later it reopened the issue by occupying a Kuwaiti frontier post and demanding a border revision that would include the Kuwaiti islands of Bubiyan and   Warbah. 

After the Arab League rallied behind Kuwait the Ba'athists backed off, but the frontier remained tense until Saddam's government turned its eyes eastward in 1981 with the start of the Iran-Iraq war.	

	In 1934 Sheikh Ahmad al-Sabah signed a contract which gave a nationwide oil concession to the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), a consortium made up of Gulf Oil and British Petroleum. 

The contract 	treated Kuwait as if it were the Emir's private property, providing that all the income from the concession would go directly to him. In endorsing the agreement, the  merchants apparently failed to understand that, for all practical purposes, it reduced them from partners to dependants in the Kuwaiti political system. The KOC dug its first exploratory well in 1936, and two years later discovered one of the largest oilfields in the world. Because production was suspended during the War, Kuwait received its first royalty only in 1946, but by 1950 the independent income of the Sabahs had reached $16 million, more than enough to carry out the functions of the state. 

By the mid-Sixties this income had risen a thousandfold, destroying what remained of the old system of checks and balances, and hundreds of Sabah relatives were on the payroll, performing critical state functions.

The Sabahs were wise enough not to ignore their constituents, however. To ensure the enrichment of the merchant elite, they agreed to stay out of the private sector and invest their personal funds abroad. They enacted a law requiring all foreign contractors to take Kuwaiti partners, which created dozens of millionaires overnight. They bought land and property at inflated prices, turned a blind rye to corruption, and paid the highest rates for loans, ignoring funds obtainable abroad at a fraction of the price. To their credit, the Sabahs also created a modern state, building roads, water and sewer networks, electricity systems, housing, hospitals, mosques and, notably, schools. 

Nearly all these benefits they bestowed on some 700,000 Kuwaitis free of charge, transforming the Kuwaiti standard of living from medieval austerity to one of the highest in the world in just a few years. The Sabahs were extravagant with themselves, certainly, but by making every Kuwaiti a beneficiary of the boom, they silenced internal opposition. The dissidence they faced never went beyond a handful of Arab nationalists, a tame contingent of Islamic fundamentalists and a distinct minority of Shiites, even after the rise of Khomeini. As for the Sabahs' old rivals, the merchant elite, their longstanding dedication to constitutionalism and democracy all but vanished in the deluge of riches.

"Few cities in history have burgeoned with the same momentum and rapidity that Kuwait has," wrote Saba George Sue. 

In the enactment of this drama, however, Kuwaitis were in large measure bystanders: the work was performed by foreigners. As the prosperous hub of an impoverished region, Kuwait had long attracted migrants. Bedouin came in from the desert from the turn of the century and, as Arabs and Sunni Muslims, they integrated smoothly, though few ever achieved the social status of the early inhabitants. 

The Shi'ites who migrated from Iran during these years, however, fared less well. By around 1950, one-third of all Kuwaitis were Shiites, and though a few grew rich, most served as labourers in the oilfields. In the Thirties and Forties, Palestinians and Egyptians arrived to organise the civil service and the school Totem. A decade later, Kuwait invited hundreds of thousands of immigrant vorkers to lay the bricks of the new civilsation, and by the mid-Sixties foreigners made up a majority of the population. 

"Most Sunnis believe the Shi'ites represent a fifth column," a prominent Kuwaiti once said to me, but he might as well have been speaking of all foreigners, for Kuwaitis, since the boom, have tended to forget their value and see them only as jealous, covetous and a threat to social stability.

Kuwait was stern with these migrants, denying them, with few exceptions, the right to own a home or a business, to bring in their wives or to remain in the country after the expiration of their work contracts. Most were forced to live in slums, subject to the whims of their employers. Security surveillance, salary kickbacks and other forms of fraud, and sexual abuse were part of daily life. The first mass of migrants were Palestinian,  part of the labour pool made available by the Arab-Israeli wars, but in later years Kuwait turned away from Arabs and increasingly to Asians, who were regarded as less threatening politically. 

Obviously, the workers kept coming because conditions in Kuwait were better than those they faced at home. Non-Muslims in Kuwait were at least allowed to worship, unlike in Saudi Arabia. But local lore is filled with tales of grief, none more poignant than those of workers - Palestinians, for the most part who served Kuwait faithfully for 30 or 40 years and who, on retirement, were sent away with a small pension, some furniture and their children, to find refuge with whoever would take them in.

Kuwait's citizens, meanwhile, passed their lives in a world apart from these foreigners, enjoying a "complete welfare system" which, as one Kuwaiti put it, probably substituted psychological problems for the economic problems common to most cultures. Since the boom, Kuwaitis came to take for granted their economic benefits: a guaranteed salary, free education and health care, subsidised food and utilities, no taxes. On marriage, they received the right to ownership of a ready-built house - two living rooms, five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a maid's quarters, a kitchen and a diwaniya, a men's dressing room. Or, for those desiring to live in grander style, a free plot of land and no-interest loans were available. 

The psychological problems, such as they were, came in the quality of this life. Kuwait has bookshops, but only a shallow literary tradition. It had a few concert halls, theatres and cinemas, but they were for the patronage of foreigners; Kuwaitis themselves showed almost no interest in the arts. The bland programming on the local television stations, and a range of Western and Arabic videos, took up much of the average Kuwaiti's times - if only because they could be watched in the sanctuary of the home, where foreigners could not intrude. Kuwaitis, especially those who studied in the Went, were known to enjoy partying. The finest foods were available for their tables and, though the country was dry, there was usually plenty of liquor, bootlegged in from Bahrain. As Kuwaitis themselves acknowledged, the national pastime was shopping, in air-conditioned supermarkets and indoor malls filled with luxury imports from around the world. Kuwait's sumptuous malls were crowded day and night, the year around. 

In theory, Kuwait had a master plan which called for a reduction in the proportion of foreigners, with Kuwaitis rising to 50 per cent of the population by the year 2000. But since, at the last count, citizens held only 19 per cent of the jobs, most of them sinecures, the real challenge the planners saw was how to put Kuwaitis to productive work so that foreigners could go home. Of employed Kuwaitis, nine out of ten were on the state payroll, which not even Kuwaitis claimed was work. Under the master plan, the government, having accepted the Kuwaiti aversion to blue-collar labour,  decided against a policy of heavy industrialisation, which would simply have increased the number of foreigners needed.

"Kuwaitis have neglected to work for more than 30 years," Fuad Mulla Hussein, the Secretary-General of the state's Higher Planning Council, said to me during one of my visits. "In the Fifties and Sixties, we acquired the luxury of employing others to execute our massive development programmes, which in any rest we could not do by ourselves. But the price we paid is that Kuwaitis have become spoiled children. They want a job only if they can be directors or managers. We planners would like to make hard work socially acceptable again. We have got to have Kuwaitis repairing cars, running retail shops, operating computers.  The government's long-range plan at best will take time to transform our consumer culture,  our rentier society." 

"And even if our most optimistic projections work out, Kuwaitis in the year 2000 will still be not more  than half the population and hold only 12.5 per cent of the jobs. But the truth is that we're not sure how to get Kuwaitis back to work. How do you motivate someone who has everything?" 

Saber George Shiber long ago sensed that Kuwaiti wealth created the risk of a significant social problem "When everyone in Kuwait owns a villa or two, four cars or five, and has more than enough of all that the USA, Europe and Japan manufacutre, and what then?" he said in 1961. 

The Sabahs acted neither wisely nor unwisely, instead, they found it comfortable not to act at all. Shiber advocated opening Kuwaiti citizenship to a wide range of non-Kuwaiti Arabs, convinced that a larger population would strengthen Kuwait's economic base and create a healthy diversity.  Influenced by patterns of growth he had seen in the United States, he argued for a cosmopolitan city of three million, a "great oasis" of the Arab world. But the royal family would not hear of it, and he never offered a concrete plan. In fact, if there was any tenet on which Kuwaitis agreed, it was that enlarging the population base would dilute the econornic benefits they all enjoyed, and that diversity would bring only political problems. The Kuwaiti consensus was to reject Shiber's vision, but there was no consensus on a vision to adopt  in its place.

Certainly, it did not occur to the Sabahs, or their subjects to follow a course of sharing their immense wealth with their poorer Arab neighbours. It is not that they gave nothing .

But in terms of Kuwait's disposable income, and the lavishness of its lifestyle, the contribution was small. It is estimated that Kuwait now has 100 billion salted away in overseas investments. The return already brings in more money than oil, while most of the capital has beat set aside for the generations who come along after the oil is exhausted. Such concern may be prudent, but it has done little to soothe Arab resentment. 

For along time criticism. was restrained, if only because Kuwait, though less manipulative than the Saudis, did not give its money to ingrates. But since the division of the Arabs produced by Iraq's invasion, Kuwait has heard a drumbeat of denunciations of past stinginess, and strident advocacy of a new concept which holds that the Golf states are merely the custodians of "Arab oil", which belongs to the entire Arab people. In place of the sympathy they believe they  deserve, Kuwaitis have been stunned to feel the pain of a deeply ingrained Arab anger descending on them.

When beleaguered Iran began lashing out desperately in the last years of the war, threatening to sink Kuwait's tankers in retaliation for its financial and logistical support of Iraq, the Sabahs dusted off their old practice of seeking a powerful patron to defend them. With the British gone from the Gulf, the Sabahs - after a flirtation with the Soviet Union - turned to the United States, which agreed to deploy its navy to safeguard their commercial fleet and,  presumably by implication, their independence. In this agreement, it seems, lies the root of their miscalculation.

The Kuwaitis had made no pretence of defending themselves during the war, notwithstanding recurring Iranian attacks, both internal and external.

The army had not taken even the elementary step of building fortifications on the northern frontier, a few miles from the  heaviest fighting. As the war proceeded to a conclusion, a State Department official told me that Americans and Kuwaitis were now regularly discussing security problems of the Gulf, in an atmosphere he described as "intimate and candid".

Less than two years after signing the armistice with Iran, Iraq reopened the old dispute by protesting at Kuwait's chronic over-production of oil, which had forced international prices to a level that seriously impaired Iraq's post-war reconstruction programme. The complaint had some substance to it, and when Kuwait dismissed it the Iraqis escalated, placing on the table the question of Bubiyan and Warbah islands, adding to it an oil field on the border, insisting upon formal cancellation of all war debts and, finally, making accusations that Kuwait stole oil from its holdings.

In the ensuing months, Kuwait apparently stonewalling, the Arab world began to worry, but the Sabahs routinely rejected their concerns. Ready as ever to believe in a conspiracy, the Arabs hypothesised that the Sabahs would not be defying the Iraqis without the endorsement of the United States. Even without a conspiracy, however, it seemed dear the Kuwaitis believed the Americans would protect them.

"They told us officially," a highly-placed Jordanian said to me "that the United States would intervene if there was trouble with Iraq. We don't know where they got the impression - from Washington itself or from another party, like the British or the Saudis. They insisted they knew what they were doing. They seemed to think they were safe."

	The Americans have persistently denied that they made any formal engagement to Kuwait, though a State Department spokesman stated enigmatically, as Iraqi forces assembled on the Kuwaiti border last August, that  'we remain strongly committed to supporting the individual and collective self-defence of our friends in the Gulf, with whom we have deep and long standing ties". That statement has never been explained, but the Bush administration's vigorous reaction to the invasion, and its repeated vow to restore the Sabahs to the throne, seem to throw at least a soft light on the meaning.	 

	In retrospect, however, it is apparent that, whatever the American promises, the Sabahs made an enormous blunder. Saddam had given public warning to the Kuwaitis as early as May that he regarded their oil policies as equivalent to war, and that he had no choice, in the absence of concessions, but to retaliate. In the succeeding months, the Sabahs uncharacteristically boasted that, if Kuwait was invaded,  their military forces could hold off the Iraqis for 24 hours. In fact, save for the unit that defended the palace, the Kuwaitis did not fight at all, and the occupation, which began around midnight, was completed by dawn.

The Sabahs must have known that the Americans did not have the means to save them within 24 hours, but they persisted to the very last day, in talks in Jedda, on their collision course. Had they simply lost their touch? Had the power of their money dizzied them into a sense of invulnerability? One day, perhaps, the documents may tell. Meanwhile, it is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which Kuwait, despite the multinational army stationed on its border, will be restored as a sovereign state with the Sabahs in charge. Whatever the outcome of the crisis, in fact, it seems unlikely that Kuwait  will ever again be what it once was.

The degenerate feudal monstrosity that was Jabah Sabah's Kuwait could only be put back together again in conditions of permanent massive direct US military colonisation of the entire Gulf region. 

This is simply a historical impossibility, a complete anachronism.

But that is the real trouble that US imperialism has let itself in for by its arrogant racist onslaught against the Iraqi regime, even more disastrous than the threat of military setback itself, and a danger which will unavoidably continue whatever the American ruling class now does.

For the hornets nest has now been stirred. If the US imperialists called it a day tomorrow to avoid any further risk of appearing to have failed to achieve (the overwhelmingly crushing military triumph which the world has been promised (to back up Washington's shaky pretensions to unchallengeable world domination), the nightmare of how then to 'pacify' and 'police' the Middle East (now entirely in turmoil) would still be alarmingly unresolved at the top of the agenda. Even if the blitzkrieg goes on towards a murderous 'triumph', the colossal difficulties of then politically controlling the Arab Middle East will still  remain terrifying formidable and virtually insoluble. And if the massacres go on but without any clearcut 'successful' crushing of the Iraqi regime at the end of it, and the American ruling class is forced to abandon its vicious subjugation for one reason or another, then the Middle East political fat really will be in the fire.

The paradox is that while the old game was up (of imperialist domination of the Middle East oil wealth via the feudal stooges and the corrupt bourgeois-nationalist regimes), and something had to be done to preserve the world-dominant position of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, - the very acts of trying to maintain the status quo (by military intervention, diplomatic blackmail, economic strangulation, etc) were always bound to result only in further humiliating and enraging the very same bruised and exploited regional, national, religious and cultural sentiments which were avalanching towards revolt against the old order in the first place.

Again, let the capitalist press itself reveal some of the breadth and depth of the profound frustration and indignation which the dying neocolonial system has sown like dragons teeth throughout the whole Middle East and the wider Arab world beyond, - talking first to 'Kuwaiti' exiles, and then reporting attitudes further afield.

What was the attitude of such people to the Iraqi border claim? Was it discussed?

This was a long-running issue; it had been going on for ages. It was not really a subject that Kuwaitis discussed. It came and went. We knew there was a problem but the dispute was more about other issues. The Iraqis wanted access to the Gulf from Umm Qasr.

But the Iraqi demands over the border, about oil, caught Kuwaitis by surprise. They did not know what was going on all this time, the fall in the value of oil that was hurting Iraq and
the fact of our over-producing. This came as a surprise because ours is a secretive government and nothing has been published. A few of us knew what was going on, but not the general public.

HOW did the Kuwaiti opposition see the situation within the country before the invasion on August 2? Parliament had been dissolved it 1986, but widespread mobilisation for a return to democracy occurred early last year. How did the al-Sabah family respond?

They did not respond. They organised elections for national assembly, a body with less power than the parliament, indeed with no power at all. The members of this assembly did not even have the right to ask questions of ministers. There would be no power to legislate and no power to review the budget. It was all unconstitutional. Everyone knew that they did not want to restore the 1962 constitution.

In 1976 when they dissolved parliament for the first time they formed a committee to revise the constitution. They appointed the members of that committee, but even so it rejected the amendments they put forward.

The same attitude was evident in the so-called dialogue which began this January, after the weekly demonstrations. It was a fake - they asked the people what they thought and the could not stand what we said, so they arrested us. They did not give us the right even to stay in our diwaniyas [men's political salons] and talk. They were very arrogant and stubborn, and they tried to go on ruling us like a ruling family. After all that, the prime minister Sheikh Saad, said that the people did not want to go back to the constitution, even though 90 per cent of them told him they wanted a return to it. He was a liar.

Did you want changes in the 1982 constitution or just a  return to it?

All we wanted was to return to it.  We wanted no more than that; But the trouble with this constitution was that it was never implemented: the alSabahs had, until 1985, their majority in the parliament and they passed laws that stripped the constitution of its essence.

The constitution makes clear what the prerogatives of the al-Sabah family are, in clause four. This says that the ruler has to be from the al-Sabahs, and from its Mubarak branch, and there are three things he can do. He can appoint someone to take his place when he is out of the country - this is an unqualified power. He can nominate an heir, a crown prince, but this has to be ratified by parliament and parliament can refuse: and he can appoint or dismiss a prime minister.

Was an understanding reached at the October meeting in Jeddah?  The al-Sabahs still exhibit the same mentality. They must stick to the constitution. Kuwaitis are having second thoughts about what Kuwait should be after liberation. Some say the Emir has a place, but not the rest of the family; the government should be formed after an election and contain no members of the ruling family. Some Kuwaitis accept that Saad should remain premier and Sabah foreign minister. Others say no. It is only natural that the whole government has to be questioned after this, affair. It was not a small mistake, it was catastrophe. The al-Sabahs have to be accountable.

Will women will now get the vote in Kuwait? So far the franchise has been restricted to some 62,000 males. We tried to-raise this issue in 1971 but the laws were not passed. 

SALADIN, like Saddam Hussein, came from the obscure provincial town of Takrit on the River Euphrates. Even if there were no connection between the two,  Arabs would be making one.

To the Christian West, the Saracen was the epitome of the chivalrous enemy. Such a comparison can seem deeply offensive politically to Arabs.

"It is true he treated prisoners well and did not massacre them in the spirit of the times," a PLO official said. "But you should know that he was less unlike Saddam than you might think. For with his own people he was a tyrant too.

"We know very well what Saddam is, that he has gassed his own people, or executed half his leadership just to dispose of them. But it is not Saddam we approve of; it is what he is now doing. We have no moral scruples about putting our weight behind a leader whom the West  supported for so long." 

Not all Palestinians think like that. Some, adding delusion to expediency, accept the "light of Arabism" according to Saddam's estimation. But in general there is little doubt that, though Saddam appeals more to the Palestinians than to anyone else, what they feel is more  or less shared by the Arab man in the street everywhere.

There is everywhere the sense - to adapt a recent phrase of Secretary of State, James Baker - that this is truly one of the great defining moments of Arab history.

For the Arabs cannot but see things in a historical perspective that goes back, if not to the Crusades, at least to the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Then, the European powers reneging on their promises, brought the newly liberated Arab provinces under their own rule, divided them into artificial entities and, in the greatest humiliation of all, foisted the militant state of Israel on the Palestinian segment of this fractured homeland.

To that great original injustice the Arabs attribute the repeated humiliations, the failure and frustration, the deepening sense of impotence and self-disgust that have afflicted them ever since.

For the Palestinians and all Arabs who think like them, whether their rulers are anti-Iraqi or pro-Iraqi, Sadism's stand is no less than a new crusade. It is not long before any conversation in Jordan comes back to that emotional analogy. For people there, the truly decisive moment in the shaping of this crisis was not Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, it was when the Americans, those incorrigible supporters of the latter day usurper of Palestine, entered the fray.

What the present vast array of armed force so imminently portends is the Arabs' renewed subjugation to the foreigner.

For a few - their voices get no public hearing in Jordan today - Saddam is simply a despot and reckless adventurer, "the mad dog", as one Transjordanian put it; the Iraqi leader is about to bring down the latest, greatest disaster on Arab heads.

But most, it seems, rejoice in his unblanching defiance of the invaders. More surprising, they seem persuaded that he will triumph. It is largely Saddam's extraordinary calm and his self-assurance that sways them.

They are not, of course, expecting an outright military victory; rather, they feel, his mere survival against daunting odds, his avoidance of defeat, would be enough to bring about political and diplomatic upheavals in the whole region that would not merely foil the West's neo-imperialist designs but, at long last, force a settlement of the Palestine problem.

It is with their own cause in mind that Palestinians welcome the prospect of an Iraqi-manufactured Israeli involvement in the looming conflagration, even if that goes beyond the mere exchange of Iraqi missiles for Israeli air-raids on Iraq and makes Jordan the arena of collision between those two armies. That would establish beyond dispute the "linkage" that the US so categorically rejects.

"We should prefer an international conference to the apocalypse," a PLO official said. "But we are ready for either: This may be our last chanced Our peace initiative was getting nowhere and we were in a state of panic, what with American bias, the influx of Soviet Jews, and the preeminence of the Israeli right.

"We know it could mean yet more bloodshed and suffering, even the destruction of the Israelis and ourselves. But our people say: 'Let it be'. This is a kind of nihilism but you have to understand the despair into which our people have sunk."

Even among those who fear Saddam's destruction will be swift and brutal, there is the hope that out of it will come the Arab rebirth, so complete will be the blow to the existing Arab order. Few Arab rulers are expected to survive such a calamity for long, least of all those who joined the alliance against the Iraqi leader.

Palestinians single out Syria's President Assad for particular obloquy. "People hate him more than they do King Fahd or the Kuwaitis," one said, "because they never had hopes for them unlike him, and he belongs to the same type of revolutionary nationalists as Saddam himself."

Assad's betrayal is seen as truly monstrous. No one doubts he senses it, hence his continuing diplomatic contortions and his impassioned eve-of-war appeal to Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait and thereby spare him, Assad, the appearance of siding with the US and perhaps the Israelis, in a war against a sister Arab state.

King Hussein, by contrast, has managed to stay on the side of the angels. Never in his long reign has he been as popular with both the Palestinian and Transjordanian halves of his people. "All his past sins are forgiven him," a Palestinian said, "as long as he remains that way."

That he might not is taken for granted. For war, and perhaps a terrible one, would usher in yet greater perils and more fateful responses than the mere build-up to it. Who knows, with their own destruction staring them in the face, Assad's nerve might crack in one direction and Hussein's in another.

Saladin or an Arab Samson? The next few days may determine which of them Saddam more closely resembles. But, by midnight New York time, his part as a momentous and bloody shaper of Middle Eastern history had been all but assured.

Nor will the repercussions of this renewed Western colonial savagery against the Middle East end with this inevitable driving of the Arab national revolution towards ever new levels of competent and implacable determination,  and eventually towards its ultimate complete fulfilment (almost certainly under proletarian socialist revolution rather than opportunist bourgeois nationalism, a matter for subsequent discussion).

This obscene eruption of Western imperialist butchery and hypocrisy is going to have an enormous effect in time on the level of coherent debate among Western workers, helping to transform it towards revolutionary consciousness.

It is only the committed petty-bourgeois fake-'left' around 57 varieties of Trotskyism and revisionism which automatically, in any discussion, pits its class instincts hostilely against any notion of workers in the West identifying with the broad anti-imperialist thrust of the Iraq regimes opportunist revolt against Washington tutelage, or of Western workers seeing a defeat for the Western imperialist forces as being in the best interests of the masses of ordinary people the whole world over.

The whole Trot-revisionist swamp (see countless past Bulletins and the entire series of ILWP Books for detailed exposure of the phoney 'revolutionary' posturing of every single one of these middle-class sects) is far too obsessed with its philistine anti-communist hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of any thought of unconditional defence of the existing workers states to correctly identify the anti-imperialist perspectives within the Gulf turmoil.

The pacifist-artist letter to the Guardian signed by leading ex-WRP Trot 'revolutionaries' demanding worldwide economic strangulation of Iraq to 'punish' the 'aggression' of the Saddam regime 'despicable beyond doubt' while Western imperialism, whose entire history is the really guilty party for the world's problems, is not to be starved at all but merely admonished for having a 'John Wayne factor' in its makeup, - - is typical of the counter-revolutionary garbage inseparable from all Trot and revisionist-trained anti-communists.

But serious-minded workers uninfected by Trotskyite subjective-idealist pretentiousness and opportunism or by revisionist defeatism and philistinism, - will respond with far less prejudice to the connections which need to be understood between every aspect of the developing anti-imperialist struggle in the Middle East, for example, and the ultimate necessity for the proletariat !in the West to actually overthrow its own ruling class by socialist revolution before a peaceful future for the world can even begin to be constructed successfully, anywhere.

The criminal and racist humbug of the Western bourgeois propaganda campaign against the Iraqi regime, which the fake-'left' swamp of the British middle class so ignorantly and slavishly echoes (see pacifist Trot artists letter), - will be increasingly put under scrutiny by serious-minded workers as the evidence continues to leak out in the capitalist press itself about the disgraceful lies and hysterical bias wilfully misrepresenting the whole modern history of the Middle East and the wretched responsibility of Western colonialism for every single evil currently suffered there.

The whole story of hostage-taking and terrorist violence, - now so readily associated by Western prejudice with 'Arab pigs' and 'Middle East savagery' in general, - happens in fact to be directly traceable to one of the most sordid political traditions inflicted on the region by Western (mainly British and French) colonialism earlier this century when for decades to 'pacify' the Arabian peninsula, the eldest sons or daughters of the local tribal chieftains were systematically held hostage for years at a stretch with instant punishment by death if 'dissident trouble' was allowed to break out against imperialist rule in the local area.

A huge emotive-racist issue is made of Saddam's alleged use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurdish areas, but the really criminal (and still uncorrected) legacy, affecting the region unjustly, arising from chemical warfare is the very subjugation of the (Arab nations oil wealth itself by Western imperialism which was only achieved in the first place, - allowing all the feudal-stooge regimes to be set up in the Arabian peninsula, - through prolonged and utterly barbaric massacres of the population from the air using principally illegal chemical warfare, - mainly by the British 'mother of parliamentary democracies', and under early Labour governments as well as Tories.

It is Britain's capitalist press itself which has printed the following admissions:

SADDAM HUSSEIN was not the first to use chemical weapons against the Iraqi population. General Sir Aylmer Haldane commanded the British forces which effectively ruled Iraq after its conquest by the Allies during the first world war. When the tribesmen of the Euphrates rose in rebellion against British military rule in the summer of 1920, the British army used gas shells - "with excellent moral effect" - in the fighting which followed. 

Unsurprisingly, the rebellion was crushed - with the loss of nearly 9,000 Arab lives. Freed to impose their political will in Iraq, the British then created a client kingdom, under Faisal ibn Hussain, the son of the Sharif of Mecca. The British did not want Faisal to appear a puppet, so held a referendum in 1921 and almost certainly fixed its result - to give some legitimacy to his appointment.

The British armed forces underpinned this indirect imperialism. Winston Churchill,  Colonial Secretary from 1921, believed that British bombers could control the dissident Iraqi tribesmen. Some army officers feared such methods might be too brutal, but despite this they were adopted because they promised to be very cheap. In 1922, the Air Ministry took over the defence of the new kingdom.

Like Saddam's bombers, the squadrons of the Royal Air Force flew most of their missions against the Kurds who resented rule from Baghdad. For 10 years the British waged an almost continuous bombing campaign in the oil-rich and mountainous north-east against the Kurdish rebels, to whom they had earlier promised autonomy.

The Iraqi air force - which the British had built up, trained and equipped - carried on the work after Iraq became nominally independent in 1932.

Churchill consistently urged that the RAF should use mustard gas during these raids, despite the warning by one of his advisers that "it may . .. kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes".  In the event the air force did not use gas bombs - for technical rather than humanitarian reasons.

Even without gas the campaign was brutal enough. Some Iraqi villages were destroyed merely because their inhabitants had not paid their taxes. The British authorities always maintained in public, however, that people were not bombed for 'refusing' to pay - merely for 'refusing' to appear when summoned to explain non-payment.

The primitive bombs sometimes did not explode, and tribal children developed a passion for playing with the duds. When the air force proposed using bombs with delayed action fuses, one senior officer protested that the result would be "blowing a lot of children to pieces". Nevertheless, the RAF went ahead - without the knowledge of the civilian High Commissioner for Iraq, Sir Henry Dobbs - because delayed-action bombs prevented tribesmen from tending their crops under cover of darkness.

Churchill was sometimes troubled by the realities of the methods he had supported. During one raid in Iraq, British pilots machine-gunned women and children as they fled from their homes. "To fire wilfully on women and children taking refuge in a lake is a disgraceful act," Churchill protested to the Chief of the Air Staff. "I am surprised you do not order the officers responsible for it to be tried by court martial." No action was taken, and this incident was quietly forgotten.

This "police bombing" was too much for some air force officers to stomach. In 1924, a distinguished Air Commodore, Lionel Charlton, resigned his post as a staff officer in Iraq after he visited a hospital and saw the victims of British bombing recovering from their injuries. The air force recalled him to England, promising not to otherwise damage his career provided he took his protests no further; but they went back on their word and placed him on the retired list in 1928.

Other officers seemed to enjoy the work. One who did was Arthur Harris, who would later achieve fame directing the bomber offensive against Germany in the second world war. Known to his friends as Bomber and to his enemies as Butcher, he first practised his trade against Kurdish villages in Iraq.

"Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing, and still argue," he reported after one raid in 1924, "they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective  means of escape."

The British employed "police bombing" elsewhere in the empire - in Transjordan; against the Pathan tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India; in the Aden Protectorate (now the southern part of Yemen); and against the Nuer people of the southern Sudan.

The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, had great amibitions for his bombers. In a paper written early in 1920, when some politicians feared a revolution in Britain, he suggested that the RAF could even suppress "industrial disturbances or risings" in England itself. Churchill was horrified, and demanded that Trenchard never refer to the proposal again - at least not in writing.  

And all these barbarities are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of the real full catalogue of crimes perpetrated by British colonialism in its murderous fascist history, - just the few facts which historical researchers have been able to winkle out from the blanket censorship, lies, and disinformation imposed by the British capitalist state over its whole long sordid history of imperialist aggression, kept hidden for from 30 years up to a hundred years under the label 'information withheld in the interests of national security',  meaning that ordinary people should never find out what the real blood-stained pillaging history of the British imperialist ruling class has been.

To this criminal record must now be added the latest blitzkrieg massacres in the Gulf, bombing Baghdad and other cities to pieces, to which will be added shortly the mass murder of the Arab troops on the ground trying to prise Kuwait province and its oil wealth free from the grip of the Western colonialists feudal stooges.

Nor will the Western workers reappraisal of the propaganda lies they are being fed be limited to just the hypocrisy from the imperialist bourgeoisie about the real history of the most crucial uses of terror violence in the region, and the truly colossal wrongs and injustices which have still to be righted there even to begin to meet the Arab peoples' legitimate aspirations against the endless imperialist economic exploitation and colonial domination of the area's wealth by the Western monopoly powers.

There may be an increasing imbalance to correct in the rotten distortions put out by the West in just this latest military operation alone.

The theme about 'completely wiping out the enemy' by use of the 'unstoppable might of superior Western military technology', etc, etc, has all been heard before, - in Vietnam. It turned out to be the biggest 'victory' hoax of all time. Western propaganda was placed in tatters, and remained there, - after the inferior-armed 'defeated' Vietnamese communist guerrilla fighters temporarily seized control of Hue city in the 1968 Tet (New Year) offensive to explode the US lies, - and further plunge the Western imperialist forces towards inevitable defeat.

Saddam's opportunist bourgeois-nationalist regime in Iraq has probably nothing like the political clarity, revolutionary determination, or staying power of the more scientifically educated communist proletarian forces in Vietnam.

But the strength and ability of the Arab revolution has stunned and shattered complacent Western imperialism many times before, driving the French out of Algeria, the British out of Egypt, Aden, Iraq, etc, and the Zionist and US colonisers out of the Lebanon; etc. Another great Arab triumph now in resisting this latest Western imperialist-colonialist blitzkrieg on the Gulf would be a colossally valuable defeat for the murderous exploiting forces of international monopoly-bourgeois reaction.

Militarily, things remain either very obscure, or else very difficult because of the grotesque imbalance of forces involved with virtually the whole of Western imperialism blitzkrieging tiny Iraq.

But politically and economically, imperialism's cause relentlessly goes from bad to worse.

Hundreds of millions will have been struck worldwide by the pea-brained shallowness as well as the utter cynicism of the initial feverishly fluctuating reactions on the stock exchanges and other international capitalist markets to the first news of successful blitzkriegs followed by the first doubts about whether Iraq might still be able to inflict colossal damage in return.

To this greedy liverishness has been added the appalling nightmare of the ever-escalating US budget deficit which threatens to mushroom out of all control (and proportions) if the warmongering devastation goes on for any length of time beyond the West's initial vicious euphoric expectations.

And this costly and wholly destructive savagery is taking place to a background of relentlessly accumulating international economic problems anyway, which are all being simply swept under the carpet in the madness of this insane US imperialist onslaught, via which it somehow deludes itself that all its mounting difficulties of retaining world economic and political domination can miraculously be dissolved.

It is a delusion of terminal stupidity. It is the USA's relentless imperialist economic rivals in Germany and Japan who will reap the biggest benefits, if there are any, from any temporary halt to the approaching worldwide slump resulting from war expenditure, just as these traditional rivals of Anglo-Saxon world domination have been competitively destroying the old US dominated order in every other new phase of development since 1945.

By saddling itself with crippling new debts as a result of its ferocious war efforts, the US imperialist bourgeoisie will only succeed in placing the noose of losing the trade war more tightly round its neck than ever before.

By being at the centre of the dollar-dominated world debt crisis, the USA is certainly in a position to inflict appalling slump destruction in all directions, and to renege on financial market operations all the way to provoking inter-imperialist world war III.

But this can only take things in the same disastrous direction that US imperialism's Gulf policy has already led, - piling up the problems ever higher for the Western 'free market' system's very survival.

In all directions, as the capitalist press itself admits, the iron law of insoluble capitalist exploitation contradictions is unavoidably driving the degenerate 'free market' system towards ever worsening conflict.

Saddams opportunist bourgeois nationalist regime is probably not the force to cause the lethal damage to Western imperialist-domination interests.

But the filthier the colonial treachery inflicted on the Gulf and the Arab cause generally, the more certainly will the eventual revolutionary proletarian forces, replacing the compromising ideologically erratic bourgeois nationalists, be developed irresistibly by events into a mighty socialist revolution which will end the West's racist tyranny over the Middle East once and for all, including ending the degenerate Zionist colonisation of Palestine.

Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Joe Harper

World Revolutionary Socialist Review

(edited from Prensa Latina,Tass, Granma, Soviet News, African Communist, Barricada, Czechoslovak Life, etc.)

Image of Arabs on U.S. screens is much like Nazi propaganda

WASHINGTON. - The film and TV industry in the United States is perpetuating stereotyped images of "evil Arabs,' thereby increasing hostility to that community, according to experts.

"Insidious portraits of Arabs have filled the psychology of the average American," says Jack Shaheen, an expert in social communication. "Film and TV scriptwriters have..presented that image in the United States for over two decades." He draws a parallel between the attitude in the United States toward Arabs and the image of Jews presented in Nazi propaganda films.

Shaheen's view is shared by many Americans of Arab descent, who say hostility toward Arabs is based on stereotypes of them as evil and sinister which appear on film and TV screens everytime there is a crisis in the Middle East.

'This has been true ever since the 1967 and 1973 wars between Arabs and Jews and during the takeover of the cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian guerrillas, in 1985. The current Gulf crisis touched off by the August 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is no-exception.' 

Arab-American organizations have spotlighted a series of incidents in which their members were victims.

In September Bush said that Americans shouldn't judge all Arabs by the actions of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who has violated - according to Bush - the Islamic traditions of Arab hospitality by attacking another Arab country and taking hostages.

But statements from above haven't curbed prejudices which have developed for decades, Shaheen told Reuters.  Films have only depicted sheikhs who are rich corrupt, stupid, fat, oily sex maniacs.

The figure of the sheikhs was joined in the 1970s and '80s by that of the terrorist, the Inhuman Palestinian killer whose uncontrolled violence is directed at innocent European, Israeli or American victims. The stereotypes are so all encompassing that when Shaheen studied 450 films he only found ten in which Arab characters were presented in a positive manner.

Television is much the same, according to him. A recent episode of a popular soap opera depicted two sheikhs at war in the middle of the desert.

Shaheen contends that what viewers learned from the program was that Arabs live in tents and wear clothes which cover their whole body and pants which are tight at the bottom, while the women are scantily clad in order to do belly dancing.

Of course, the sheikhs take Arnerican hostages, murder other Arabs and are longing to make love to blondes in the United States. "I think that in most of Europe we have grown up accepting and believing in these images because they are the only ones we have ever been shown. The screen is like a visual textbook."

This textbook doesn't reflect the great majority of Arabs who have never climbed on a camel or slept in a tent, who don't own oil wells and are not responsible for terrorist attacks.

As part of his research on the power of stereotypes, Shaheen questioned 293 high school teachers in different states of the United States asking them to name a single Arab whom they considered a real or a film hero. Only six teachers were able to list anybody.

	Shaheen said that the members of the film industry and TV scriptwriters have .no incentive to 	change the image of the evil Arab because it has proven to be a box office success and popular with TV viewers. 		`

The Arab-American commission against discrimination and other groups representing the 2.5 million Americans of Arab origin, one of the wealthiest and best-educated minorities in the country, have repeatedly complained about this but to no avail.

Films which distort the image of Jews or blacks are no longer common, said Chalil Kajshan of the National Association of Arab-Americans. "but nothing has changed regarding Arabs."

According to Arab-Americans, one of the reasons for this is that very few members of their community work in film or TV and far fewer are in positions in which they can change the image.

Another reason is silence. Politicians and leaders are almost never critical of the situation for they fear that such criticism could be interpreted as being pro-Arab or anti-Israeli.

A third reason for this, according to Shaheen, is a lack of knowledge about the Middle East among film producers and the public.

International Leninist Workers Party -a Central London Branch leaflet
p&p ILWP, Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL

Defeat for Western imperialism in the Gulf.
Saying 'no to war' is a pacifist fraud

US imperialism is asserting its colonial diktat over the Arabian peninsula in its bullying warmongering against Iraq - not any 'principled stand for peace and freedom'.

And given the buckets of naked racist filth against Arab nationalism from Washington, - its generals and the British fascist press, it is a mark of the stinking cowardice of the class collaborating Labour Party, CND, Church and fake-'left' that they still support sanctions - against Iraq, join in the 'new Hitler' baiting of Saddam and, in most cases, are ready to back 'our boys' in any colonial bloodbath.

These middle-class reactionaries betray their arrogant Western hostility to the winding-up of Anglo-Saxon control over the Middle East and its oil wealth, an episode of which is all that has happened with the rolling up of Kuwait into its proper national entity of Iraq. Making the 'motivation' of the action by Saddam Hussein the issue, or pretending this is the start of an Iraqi march 'to conquer the world', and 'he's a madman who mustn't be allowed to have nuclear weapons' is just the nauseating hypocrisy of petty-bourgeois Westerners.

These opportunists want to pretend colonial rule was 'benevolent' and are too pig-ignorant to see the continuation of the US and British imperial carve-up of the Middle East in the 1920s and post-war period (through the implantation of a fascist Zionist overlord and the creation of stooge feudal Arab 'kingdoms') in the treacherous puppet regimes of Mubarak's Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf statelets.

And if there's going to be 'outrage' about the use of horror-weapons and poison gas it can start with British colonialism's mustard gassing from biplanes of rebellious Iraqi villages in the 1920s and carry on through imperialism's colonial oppression with B52 carpet bombing, napalm, Agent Orange defoliation, nuclear blackmail and murderous helicopter gunships used against Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, etc, etc and the killing of millions of people who wouldn't obey US ultimatums (some of these blitzkreigs backed by the UN, as in the US slaughter of Korea, some declared 'illegal', with 'international law' utterly ignored by Washington in such cases - as in the criminal US fascist aggression against Panama and Nicaragua).

Racist middle-class fatheads just resent the fact that this time round the subject colonial people have got more than spears and muskets to fight with.

And the pacifists should not confuse the working class away from the real solution to imperialist war, which can only ever be socialist revolution. Saying 'no' to war is a hopeless bleat of a protest, and can never stop war because deep inter-imperialist political rivalries between the large capitalist nations mean war is inevitable; and these states will use all their social influence and then naked fascist force to whip workers into the conflagrations. 

The fake-'left' Tony Benn, SWP, CPGB use this line, or talk about 'building a revolutionary peace movement to call for withdrawal of Western forces' (for example, the CPGB's fake 'Leninists') because they are social-chauvinists, closer to making the call to 'defend the fatherland' than they will ever be to Leninist revolutionary theory, which is for DEFEAT for imperialist warmongering and the OVERTHROW of the imperialist ruling class by communist revolution.

Typically, for all the Trot and 'left' posturers they can summon up more hatred for signs of firmness from the Soviet state against bourgeois nationalist restoration in the Baltic states, than they ever could towards imperialism and demanding its defeat in war.

And those 'lefts' that have managed to timidly call for defeat for the West in the Gulf have records of such vicious anti-communist hatred towards the socialist camp (e.g. Workers Power), for example, backing the Solidarity counter-revolution to the hilt in Poland, now exposed as amounting to just a wretched Catholic reactionary capitalist government, that workers could be clear that no turn towards Leninist politics is remotely possible from such quarters.

But despite the social-chauvinist and pacifist circus falling so easily for all the West's key propaganda points, Anglo-Saxon imperialism's frantic confrontation with Iraqis getting into a worse and worse mess, with every prospect of ending in the greatest ever humiliating debacle for Washington and London. 

The postwar days of easy American domination over its capitalist state rivals are gone forever. The surging national liberation struggle and socialist revolution (North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, ANC/ SACP defeating apartheid, etc) has eaten away at its colonial grip, and the US bourgeoisie faces economic and financial ruin at the hands of capitalist Germany and Japan in the developing cut-throat trade war.

However, no exploiting ruling class can go down without a fight, and the fantastic wealth and privilege of the US billionaires drives them to a frenzy of warmongering ambition to prove who's 'top dog' in the capitalist world through military means.

But the scared nervousness of the chaotic Bush administration and the hints of rising panic over German and French 'duplicity' and 'lack of support' show how desperately undermined US imperialism feels.

Resurgent German and Japanese capitalist economic strength is breathing down its neck, and everywhere in Latin America, southern Asia and Africa the masses are turning against neo-colonial rule and Western exploitation.

And despite the appalling revisionist backwardness in Moscow and Peking, the CIA can see that communism is far from 'dead' but instead is about to come into its own in the African revolution against apartheid (with the ANC/ SACP), in Central America (with the FNLN and the political battles of the Sandinistas), and will always inspire the people of Cuba, Vietnam and the suffering Third World.

The whole pattern of 20th century history has been set by the capitalist system's catastrophic plunges into inter-imperialist economic and political conflict and full-scale war.

The only way out for the masses has been communist revolution, with Russia pulling out of the First World War trench slaughter by Leninist revolution in 1917, and China breaking from WW2 barbarism in 1949.

Only the vast wealth of imperialist America's massive super-profits from colonial exploitation prevented socialist revolution in Western Europe and Britain after these criminal episodes of blood-soaked degeneracy. 

Not only that, but the Vietnamese communist revolution has since humiliated the US on the battlefield, and the shock of that fearsome defeat at the hands of poorly armed but brilliantly inspired revolutionary fighters still haunts American public opinion.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq may be only bourgeois nationalist at present, but a savage blitzkreig attack from the US war machine is guaranteed to inflame Arab nationalism to new heights - and could even tip the Middle Eastern masses rapidly to Leninism.

The same Labour Party that is cheering on the colonial warmongering today was declaring the 'total reform of Britain to a Welfare State' and that there would 'never again' be world war in 1945.

But imperialism and its colonial warmongering cannot be 'reformed', it can only be overthrown by the working class in socialist revolution. Imperialist defeat in war has been the greatest trigger for workers overcoming their social democratic illusions and turning to Leninism.

Defeat for Western imperialism in the Gulf. Victory to the Arab revolution.

Break with the anti-communist Labour Party and fake-'left'. Build Leninism. Build the ILWP.