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 recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation 0786 799 6074 P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW 17 9NL [Post Office Registered.)   www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk                                                       
No 1126 March 5th 2002                                                                                                                          25p Weekly          

The smallscale lies and disasters damaging American imperialist prestige are merely a lesser version of the complete historical nonsense and reactionary direction that failed propaganda and catastrophic militarism are trying to inflict on people in the joke 'free world'. The serious splits in the Western camp tell the real story that economic crisis is bringing down the whole rotten exploitation and domination game. It is the little people who are fighting back and who are going to win because Western colonial control is now well past its historical sell-by date. Supposed 'mass destruction superiority' is a notion made equally redundant by the globalisation, technological and political transformation of the world's billions. WWI11 will end the farce in disgrace.

In line with its collapsing economic system, imperialist propaganda is also now falling apart.

Total conflicting nonsense is being put out about a supposed 'economic recovery', and at the top of the agenda, real hostility is growing to US imperialism's fascist military aggression to spread general blitzkrieg warmongering worldwide in its fury at its Sept 11 humiliation and in its vengeful confusion to make everywhere pay for America's faltering world leadership.
	
Universal derision keeps growing at the USA's ludicrous failures and incompetence in every aspect of its insane 'war on terrorism'; and as well as NATO's 'allies' denouncing the 'axis of evil' targets of Iraq, Iran and North Korea because they have business there or want a different approach of negotiated agreements rather than military zapping, opposition is also mounting inside the United States itself to what is now seen as dangerously crazed Washington policies.

Something as trivial as the cocked-up attempt by huge NATO forces to arrest Radovan Karadzic has led to such radically diverging spin offensives by the rival western powers that massive speculation is inevitable that deep and serious rifts over all issues are now panicking the imperialist camp.

More than just capitalist press admissions, doubts about the ignorance and corrupt spivery of the US imperialist establishment under the guidance of the Bush Texas mafia are now being popularly expressed by even reactionary right-wing circles:

ROBERT BAER's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled: As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil is published is Britain tomorrow, is appalled at the idea of a US strike against Iraq today.

'If the US is to bomb Saddam and his army until there is no army, what comes after that? No-one is discussing the ethnic composition of Iraq or what Iran is likely to do.'

The US is in no position to rejigger this because we don't understand anything about the country.'

Baer worked for the CIA's Directorate of operations far 26 years, with postings in Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Tajikistan, India and Europe. His devastating portrait of the agency's decline adds much to the understanding of why America was caught off guard on 11 September, but as important is what he has to say about American sluggishness when it comes to institutional reform.

Towards the end of his time, he searched CIA computer for files on subjects that interested him, for example, the Pasdaran (the Iranian Intelligence service), the Saudi royal family and Syria.

'You know, what? There was nothing there. Nothing. They didn't have anything. That's America now, you know. It can't reform.'

After a quarter of century abroad, Baer hardly recognises the States and is appalled at the level of public ignorance.

'There is no debate.' he says. 'People will not address the question of Palestine in the context of the world Trade Centre attacks. It's not in the terms of the discussion. They simply believe that Israel bas the right to defend its democracy like the US does. They don't understand that Israel gives no democratic rights to the Palestinians whatsoever. They don't see that it's not a democracy.'

An affable but watchful man in his late forties, Baer is aware that the CIA is mightily displeased with his first literary effort. It can't help that the book has been an the New York Times' bestseller list for four weeks in a row; that Warner Brothers bought an option and hope to develop the project with the team that made Traffic, and that Baer is never off US television, often doing three national shows in an evening.

He seems to have few regrets about leaving the CIA. 'I would rather drive a taxi than serve in the CIA,' he says convincingly over lunch at the Alistair Little restaurant in West London.

'Don't ask me how it happened, but the people who work in it just don't match up to the people who got to Silicon Valley or the people who make cruise missiles or design derivatives.'

It's in the innocuous detail that Baer's book is telling. At one point be remembers taking over from a female officer in the Paris station and being handed her list of contacts and agents. When he followed them up, he found that instead of using them to gather intelligence she had been trying to recruit them to a religious sect. The serving US ambassador to France was also involved in the sect. When the two of them were observed handing out leaflets in the street, the French security service thought some kind of operation was in progress.

With good reason he is a pessimist about the CIA and US foreign policymaking. Examples of incompetence abound in See No Evil. In 1986, he was contacted in Germany by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who wanted a meeting. He went to Dortmund and listened to Syrian contacts propose an intelligence alliance against President Assad. He wrote up a report (on a typewriter, whose ribbon he destroyed afterwards) and sent it to the US embassy in Bonn. A message came back that they weren't interested.

But that was not the last he heard of it. In the wake of 11 September, 18 years later, the FBI contacted Baer to say that associates of the Syrian contacts had been involved in al-Qaeda. That channel, closed down so peremptorily, might have led them to Mohamed Atta.

Over lunch we circled the problem of Iraq, he mentioned that it is easily within Saddam's power to forestall the long-announced air attacks from US bases in Diego Garcia. He could, says Baer, 'simply move his tanks into Syria and proclaim that he was going to liberate the Palestinians', thus pitching Israel into a war with an Arab state.  While he acknowledges Saddam's willingness to use force against civilians, he does not believe that the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction is anything but defensive.

Baer says we should look at it through Saddam's regional mentality and that his chief concern is as it always has been, Iran.

In other words, Iraq's unpredictable behaviour is, in this rightwinger's eyes, much more nervously defensive than anything else, - and, moreover, has very good cause to be, this CIA spook admits.

And why? Because the whole imperialist system, from the top down, has become decrepit and unreliable, - a dangerous threat to everyone in all directions.

And the most frightening and uncertain behaviour of all is coming from, not the ruling circles of Iraq, Iran, or North Korea (or Afghanistan), but the ruling circles of the USA, this expert in CIA fascist aggression admits.

No surprise, therefore, that the formal diplomatic muttering against Washington's stupidity and bullying is growing more and more audible in the ranks of the European imperialists:

The foreign policy rift between Europe and the United States widened sharply yesterday as France urged Washington to consult properly with its partners and use its power "more responsibly".

The outspoken French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, who last month denounced US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11 attacks as "simplistic", said the transatlantic split was not just a "passing polemic", but the result of "real and fundamental" differences.

There was "real perplexity" in Europe in the face of a US administration that had rejected the Kyoto treaty on global warming, objected to an international criminal court opposed multiple disarmament agreements and "abused its UN security council veto" on the Middle East, he said.

"This is not sterile criticism, but an appeal to the United States to adopt a different attitude," he told the newspaper Liberation. "The current debate is legitimate and healthy, and I hope it will contribute to convince the US to use its power more responsibly, and to pay genuine attention to its allies and partners."

Several European leaders have voiced concern at parts of US policy, particularly President George Bush's recent branding of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" sponsoring global terrorism. EU foreign ministers have also criticised Washington over the stalled Middle East peace process.

But these mild official complaints, while of dramatic importance in revealing how fearful and bitter the rival imperialist gangsters are in reality at a supposed time of universal monopoly capitalist 'kick arse' triumphalism (since the 14 richest countries on Earth banded together in 1990 to destroy Iraq's economy and leave its uppity nationalist regime indefinitely humiliated and crippled by sanctions and provocative inspections and routine aerial bombardment ever since), -  are as nothing compared to the hate-filled viciousness and infighting that is the reality of the 'free-world alliance for democracy' behind the scenes. 

A European correspondent recently had this to say after a trip to Birmingham, Alabama had revealed total public ignorance and unconcern in the USA about what American 'allies' felt or thought about anything. He did find that Washington's political insiders were slightly more knowledgeable about Europe's concerns, - but had contempt for them even more dismissively than the Southern Red-Necks:

At times over the past few weeks, Washington has seemed almost like an enemy capital, certainly less comfortable for a European than Birmingham, where people do not follow the nuances of international diplomacy. Last month, the president coined the phrase "axis of evil" for his unholy trinity of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Birmingham papers may not have fully reported the reaction of Europe's foreign ministers. Hubert Vedrinc of France said it was "simplism"; Joschka Fischer of Germany said alliance partners would not be 'reduced to obedient satellites'; Britain's own Jack Straw said the speech had more to do with the mid-term elections than international politics; Chris Patten, the European external affairs commissioner, called it "absolutist" as well as simplistic.

The response was brisk. The New York Times reported that the president was fuming about "weak-kneed European elites". Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, accused Europeans of "hyperventilating". Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said Vedrine had had "a fit of the vapours". The president baffled Chinese interpreters last week by using the word "apoplectic" in a private meeting in Beijing, though it was not entirely clear who had the apoplexy.

The kennel of rightwingers who snarl daily in the Washington Times has frothed more rabidly: "It is usual for adolescents to rebel against their parents. But in the instance of global geo-politics, the situation has been totally reversed. Our aged if somewhat cowardly child is rebelling against papa America again," wrote Martin Gross, tortuously. Austin Bay accused the French, in particular, of "arrogance and anger" born of an inferiority complex. Patten's attack, said Wesley Pruden,"might have been taken as a declaration of war except that the Europeans, concerned with selling cheese and sausages, have neither the will nor the stamina to make war on anyone more fearsome than the United Republic of Upper Bunga Banga". Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, summed up the differences more elegantly: "Well, the Europeans do believe that there is an axis of evil in the world. It's just that they believe the axis of evil is Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz."

European embassies have been playing all this down, which is their job. With a world-weary air, they say that transatlantic relations have often been touchy.

And it is true that as late as 1998, which nostalgists now regard as a sunlit era of Euro-American amity, an article in Foreign Affairs moaned: "Eurobashing is back in fashion in the United States."

"Iraq policy is in process at the moment;" said one continental diplomat. "And during the process there are always arguments. What matters is that we agree on the end product. And there is every sign that we will." One experienced administration source described this view as"horse shit'; adding, "Relations now are worse than anyone can ever remember. It has become very fashionable in the middle reaches of government to beat up on the Europeans as being useless whiners. That's especially true in the Pentagon, but it's true in most of the state department too." 

"We're on the edge of the abyss," said Dr Ron Asmus of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Whether we step into it remains to be seen. I think a lot of Europeans have underestimated the paradigm shift that has taken place in this country since September 11. I think even most Democrats now see the internal debate as solely one about method and tactics."

There is a fundamental dichotomy between the two sides that in some ways dates back to the very founding of the republic, when Europe in general, with the sullied exception of revolutionary France, was effete and dictatorial. Washington politicians are especially conscious that their armies had to come across the Atlantic twice in the 20th century to settle Europe's quarrels. Europeans are inclined to think that the Americans, having been late for the last two world wars, are determined to be early for the next one.

In Alabama, Europe might seem like a distant fairyland. Europeans in Washington, even the Brits, are inclined to see the notion of European unity more positively than they might at home; exile, however benign, breeds a sense of solidarity. And perhaps no single group of people outside Brussels has been as enthusiastic about the idea of European unity as the traditional liberal-minded Washington elite clustered round the state department and restaurants a great deal fancier than the Olive Garden.

Yet in reality the EU seems to harden American attitudes. When Powell initially responded to the massed ranks of foreign ministers, he was genuinely sorrowful that his friends Joschka and Hubert should have misunderstood things so. His tone of voice when referring to Patten implied that the European commission was not a significant enough player to be worth considering.

Now that Europe has attained a sort of political and economic reality, the Americans are having even more trouble taking it seriously than the British. ABC News recently described Strasbourg as "a picturesque college town near the German border". So much for the European parliament.

The cadet version of the state department is at Georgetown University, Washington's most famous, where the school for foreign service offers degrees that are a traditional route into the US diplomatic corps. The undergraduates there are clever, worldly, well travelled, and not uncritical of the thrust of American policy. I talked to some the other day and asked them to play word association. 

They responded very readily to Britain and the British: "Tea...proper...trousers...Monty Python...Jane Eyre...Austin Powers...soccer hooligans...Prince William...dry and witty...educated...not huggy..."  They were just as quick shouting out about France and the French: "Wine...good food...smokers...nationalism...cultural snobs...closed society...proud...hairy". 

But they seemed almost Alabama-vague when asked about Europe and Europeans as a whole: "Culture...old...small...snobby...castles". Someone added, "They enjoy life more," then the answers petered out.

In Alabama, people might imagine that Britain and Denmark are much the same thing. But in Washington, the continent's pretensions to unity seem to be treated with some contempt. Long before the Bushies came to town, it was commonplace here to say that Europe does not matter to the Americans any more.

It is, in part, a problem of success. Americans have turned away from Europe because the end of the cold war has enabled them to do so. "We're drifting apart because the relationship has achieved its fundamental purpose," says Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution. "For the past 50 years, Europe has been the focus of American attention. We now have a peaceful and undivided Europe. From that perspective, Europe is 'done'." But there is a second part to this. "September 11 confirmed the world-view of this administration," says Daalder. "They believed it was a dangerous world and that proved it. Europe thinks the threats are more diffuse and complicated. Furthermore, Europe emphasises norms, treaties and institutions, partly because they don't have an alternative. The US emphasises power."

It is, however, easier to claim that Europe does not matter than to claim that Britain or France or Germany don't matter. America may not care about Europe. But the parts of Europe are still greater than the whole. When it comes to it, would they really launch a full-blooded assault without Powell holding hands with Hubert, Joschka and Jack?

Militarily, the US can now take on whomever it chooses. But the psychology is different. One influential senator (not from Alabama) was musing the other day: "Sure, we can invade Iraq without at least British support. But people still think of Winston Churchill. I think it would be politically difficult and perhaps impossible." It might, in short, go down badly.

Despite these revealing hints about the actual crisis-based economic contradictions between the major imperialist powers which must inevitably sooner or later break out into an almost endless series of open and bitter conflicts over trade questions and the geo-strategic military-political questions which go inseparably with such matters, - - nevertheless the Western public still gets treated to the sick formal nonsense about the 'free-world' leaders all still walking hand-in-hand towards ever better and fairer solutions for all the world's problems.

What an insanely farcical and dangerous period of history the world is now mired in.

The economic crisis of 'over-production' is potentially lethal far all the major imperialist economic powers, and they must unavoidably eventually start fighting each other in one way or another over who is to bear the biggest burdens of the international markets collapse which is inevitably coming.

The first serious open trade war between the USA and Europe (and the rest of the world, effectively) could break out this very week, just as the start of things to come, over a steel glut.

Yet still the ludicrous public pretence its that the 'free' Western world is still marching all together, in step, to zap all the 'rogue state' enemies of 'democracy' and the 'axis of evil' powers responsible for 'terror', allegedly.

Even taken at face value, this project in the first place is one of complete barminess.

But much more importantly, it has nothing whatever to do with what is actually happening in the world, - which is a towering inter-imperialist economic crisis which can only end in all-out trade war and then all-out shooting war BETWEEN THE MAJOR IMPERIALIST POWERS THEMSELVES.

The unmistakable signs are everywhere, - as can be easily gleaned or deduced from the capitalist press itself reporting the mounting ructions between the major imperialist 'partners' and the laughable failures of all their sick 'anti-terror' stunts and propaganda hysteria in the field against all supposed 'enemies of democracy'.

It starts with the lies about the world economic crisis itself. The latest CIA brain-washing directive to all 'free-world' governments and media monopolies is to stress 'recovery', 'recovery' 'recovery', etc, from the 'fears of an American recession' which it is admitted could put further severe gloom on an already nastily-difficult international economic situation where Japan has now been dangerously paralysed for 11 years by 'surplus capital' difficulties, and major global markets have seen their industries threatened with bankruptcy by 'over-production' such as telecommunications, aircraft production and related electronic equipment, farm produce, the whole dot.com-services gimmickery, and now steel. Giant motor manufacturers and other consumer goods empires were already being killed off wholesale by cut-throat competition. 

To avoid the gloom and further stock exchange and money-market panic such as is currently leaving Argentina in a condition of almost anarchic lawlessness, it in thought that 'confidence-building' brainwashing propaganda about 'recovery' throughout the 'free-world' will do the trick of preventing any further collapse or slump, and of even getting the world boom going again. 

But even in the most unscrupulous right-wing commentaries, some pangs of conscience can still be observed in the small print beneath the 'recovery' headlines which admit that much serious thinking within capitalism is still full of total gloom about the future, and that there is not much to back the 'recovery' argument except crossed fingers and propaganda spin; revealing that even Alan Greenspan has his doubts:

But he worries that "the lack of pent-up demand in the consumer sector, significant levels of excess capacity in a number of industries, weakness and financial fragility in some key trading partners, and persistent caution in financial markets" weight the risks in the direction of economic weakness.

But Greenspan is a wild-eyed optimist compared with some. White House economists privately say the current uptick in growth is unsustainable. It is, they reckon, due to stocking after a rapid inventory draw-down, but lacks "legs". The huge consumer debt burden makes it likely that spending will decline, housing construction is already at full bore, car sales certainly cannot increase, and excess capacity and the dreary profits picture is likely to constrain investment.

So they expect a double dip, and are hoping that the short-term recovery will last until the November congressional elections. After that, they expect another drop in activity, with a durable recovery coming only after excess capacity is worked off and rising profits make new investment attractive to businessmen who, even in light of economic evidence that a recovery is under way,  remain pessimistic.

There is, of course, worse - a scenario in which the merely ugly becomes apocalypse now, or at least soon.

It goes like this. The serious imbalances in the American economy have not been corrected during the recent slowdown. Consumers are in debt up to their eyeballs, and on the verge of losing their confidence, especially as unemployment continues in rise from its current level of 5.6% to, Greenspan reckons, 6% to 6.25%.

The loss of confidence is already noticeable and is recorded in the latest survey by the Conference Board. The rising nervousness is explained by the fact that February was the fourth straight month in which more people said jobs were hard to get than said jobs were plentiful.

If consumers zip their wallets, the force that has been preventing a steep downturn will have been spent. The Fed, having already cut interest rates 11 times, won't be able to do much to stimulate consumer demand. And banks, nervous about the integrity of borrowers' financial reports, will slam the door on their corporate clients.

Foreigners, seeing that the American economy is beaded for a long period of zero or negative growth, will begin to wonder whether they want to hold on to the dollar assets they have accumulated as a result of the American trade deficit. With the outlook for profits and capital gains slight in America, they may start bringing money home.

This means selling dollars: That wave of sales will cause the value of the dollar to fall, making imported goods more expensive in America and giving domestic manufacturers some pricing power.

Result inflation. And there will be no way to head it off, since the government is committed to a huge spending increase to fund the war on terror, and the Fed would find it difficult to raise interest rates in the face of slowing consumer demand.

It is not a pretty picture. 

And the most intriguing trade-war revelation of all comes from Blair's respected former Third Way economic adviser Will Hutton, ex-editor of the Observer, writing there about the barely-stated urgency in Europe to quickly match the USA in the most vital e1ectronic global warfare gadgetry before the conflict between the EU and US imperialism (on trade-war matters and everything else) gets any worse:

LAST WEEK WAS an enormous week for Europe.--

Europe's Ariane 5 rocket successfully launched Envisat, the largest European satellite ever built.

Germany said it would back the European Union's Galileo satellite navigation programme which will take the EU to the frontier of space-based navigation technology for civil use.

And, amazingly, the British awarded the European space consortium the $2 billion Skynet contract to modernise our defence communication system, only the third time since the war that the Cabinet has overturned an MOD recommendation on a defence contract. It's little short of extraordinary - European integration in action.

Six months ago, such a rash of unanimity of effort over space would have seemed impossible. The Ministry of Defence and the Treasury had firmly overruled the Department of Trade and Industry and the Foreign Office over the Skynet contract which was set to go to the US-led consortium, and the Europeans were wrangling interminably over the $2.2bn cost of the Galileo project. Then came the Afghan War and the show of US unilateralism and the stunning demonstration via the interrelated network of predator planes, smart missiles and ground-based special forces, all using satellite technology, that space had come of age.

The Europeans have learned a salutary lesson; this technology is so important that they must have their own access and control of it - and the only way forward is to act together because no single European state can fund space technology itself. The Galileo programme is not yet certain - the key meeting of EU Transport Ministers is at the end of March and Britain is dragging its feet - but its prospects look immeasurably better. The law of unintended consequences has operated with devastating consequences. Osama bin Laden has revived Europe's interest in space.

THE US HAS always seen the military and commercial importance of space. It has sustained its hitherto overwhelming dominance because the Pentagon has paid whatever necessary to ensure that the US had the defence capability in space it needed. The emerging core technology has turned out to be the use of networks of satellites in fixed orbits beaming radio signals to Earth; by getting co-ordinates from the beams we earthlings can locate our position to within a few metres.

The US's variant - the Global Positioning System (GPS) - was at the heart of American military superiority in Afghanistan, but military use is only a fraction of satellite positioning's potential application. It will soon be central in air traffic control, guiding planes to land and take-off. As it advances and becomes interactive, it could be the basis of road congestion management, as we reported last week. It can be used by railway companies to locate trains and rolling-stock accurately; by shipping firms to monitor and guide their ships. And the technology can be extended so it can even monitor the physical condition of roads.

In short, it is revolutionary and the US has wanted to make sure GPS has no rivals. In 1996 President Clinton ruled that its radio signals, originally dedicated for US military use, could be used by anybody, so making it apparently worthless for anyone else, notably the EU, to establish a rival network. In a letter to Nato in December last year, the ultra-nationalist US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz highlighted why the US was so generous. He warned that if the EU went ahead with its own satellite positioning system, Galileo its radio signals might interfere with US military operations based on GPS.

The US has another vital unilateralist interest; if GPS is the only global positioning network, all positioning on the planet can only be done by America, so that if the US wants to block, say, a military or civilian aircraft sale by the Europeans it can simply ban the use of GPS avionics in the aircraft's positioning system. French President Chirac is uncompromising about the consequences; this would be economic, security and technological 'vassalage'.

The US would like to kill Galileo, but with Europe having its own rocket launching facilities in French Guyana, its own Ariane rocket and positioning technology more advanced than America's (European atomic clocks in the Galileo system can position to within 45 centimetres compared to GPS's 100 metres), the EU has sovereignty over its choices. This infrastructure has been painstakingly built over 30 years, rather as Airbus has been. Now the French and German governments want to use it so there will never be a risk the system could be unavailable or abused because of US military and security needs. They await the British to assert their sovereignty as well.

Blair's decision to back the European space consortium on the Skynet contract was a landmark moment, bitterly fought to the last in an unreported Cabinet sub-committee battle by the Eurosceptic Treasury. In the next fortnight, a similar decision has to be taken over Galileo, with the Treasury again in ferocious opposition.

WE HAVE to think big. Britain led the design and building of the path-breaking Envisat which will provide the most extensive environmental monitoring of our planet ever mounted. The US thinks environmental concerns are a socialist conspiracy against middle America, as George Bush has declared. The results from Envisat will supply the environmental evidence that the US refuses to gather. It is the EU, now going it alone with the Kyoto Treaty, that is paying to acquire this information and showing a readiness to act on the results.

The US has breached too many international treaties and shown such a disregard for anyone's interests but its own that we cannot trust it over satellite positioning technology, a public good that will rank beside water and energy distribution in importance in the decades ahead. While Europe was making these epic advances last week in space, the EU story which the Eurosceptic British media chose to report concerned regulations over the size of leeks. That Europe is the only force in the world that can supply disinterestedly what the US can no longer be relied to do thus went ignored. This argument has to be heard. Blair must assert himself again. Forget leeks. Praise Envisat and back Galileo.

This pro-capitalist muddlehead of course hasn't the wit to see that Sept 11 is precisely the RESULT of the imperialist carved-up world, not its cause & now taking this form of the EU and the USA rivalling each other in military space technology.

But the slowly-dawning trade-war reality of the total international anarchy that is the 'free market' will steadily catch on anyway, and the idiot light-heartedness of this Hutton approach will soon disappear.

These war preparation moves are for real.

But people will still argue: Would not the hierarchies of the Western world have to be completely crazy to even think about going to war with each other?

Again, the notion needs turning round. It is the very ruling-class rivalry nature of the imperialist economic system itself which makes it unavoidably a cut-throat competitive period of world history, or else the capitalist system would never have taken civilisation to the brink of the complete triumph of scientific reason in the first place.

It is only the monopoly bourgeoisie ensuring its own survival through aggrandisement that has produced the modern world in the first place.

It cannot stop now, and the whole of capitalism instinctively realises it. The whole of the bourgeoisie the whole world over is incurably deeply committed to the flourishing of the cut-throat competitive 'freemarket' come what may. It is the very basis of their existence, - and of their power and enjoyment at ruling the world.

So the tyranny which culminates at the top in the biggest monopoly-imperialist dog lording it over all the others must continue. Every bourgeois life depends upon it.

And so their tradewar and political-influence squabbling for pecking-order position will go on relentlessly too. 

But in the periodic nightmare world of 'over-production' crisis which threatens total collapse, bankruptcy, and class-war slumps (with the danger of revolution facing the worst losers in the trade war), this means that the most determined and competent bourgeoisies will set the pace in getting very nasty with each other, - as all the evidence is beginning to show is already happening. But that also means the ultimate barbaric degeneracy (in sane people's eyes) of going to war with each other if necessary.

And it is that process of inevitable willing degeneracy, which every bourgeois class on Earth will follow without exception, - which is the process of the ruling classes 'going crazy' as they go to war. The inbuilt need of the cut-throat competitive system to keep going all the way to war is what degenerates the bourgeoisie to 'madness'. It is not their 'madness' which makes them go to war.

And how 'crazy' are they getting? Right on cue, pretty barmy already. Even on permanent autocue, always telling him exactly what to say, Bush cannot hide his relative brainlessness. Nerdy Blair is kept happy with pornographic images on his shirtcuffs, while his wife spends all her spare time consulting the occult. 

But Bush's Cabinet proudly parade their lunacy for all to see and admire. What can be concluded about the US Government's senior law officer who seriously thinks The Devil lurks inside every tabby cat, and who insists on being anointed with cooking oil every time he attains high office???:

Since John Ashcroft became US attorney general last year, workers at the department of justice have become accustomed to his daily prayer meetings, but some are now drawing the line at having to sing patriotic songs penned by their idiosyncratic boss.

Mr Ashcroft, a devout Christian and a grittily determined singer, went public with one of his works last month, when he surprised an audience at a North Carolina seminary with a rendition of Let the Eagle Soar, a tribute to America's virtues, which continues: "Like she's never soared before, from rocky coast to golden shore, let the mighty eagle soar," and so on for four minutes.

Ashcroft's staff are complaining that printed versions of the song are being distributed at meetings so that they will be able to join in.

When asked why she opposed the workplace singalong, one of the department's lawyers said: "Have you heard the song? It really sucks.'

A group of Hispanic justice department employees were recently summoned to see the attorney general, and went along hoping that their boss might be making a special effort to promote diversity in the department's higher ranks.

Instead, they were asked to provide a hasty Spanish lesson to give the secretary a few phrases to use on a foreign delegation the next day. The Hispanic staff were then handed printed copies of Let the Eagle Soar and asked for volunteers to translate it.

This is not the first time Mr Ashcroft's subordinates have realised that this attorney general is unlike ordinary politicians. Each time he has been sworn in to political office, he is anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs Lessons from a Father to His Son).

When Mr Ashcroft was in the Senate, the duty was performed by his father, a senior minister in a church specialising in speaking in tongues, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. When he became attorney general, Clarence Thomas, a supreme court justice, did the honours.

In January, a pair of 12ft statues in the atrium of a justice department building were covered by a blue curtain, on orders from Mr Ashcroft's office because the female figure Spirit of Justice was barebreasted, and the body of her male partner, Majesty of Law, was not sufficiently covered by his toga.

The cover-up has provoked an anti-Ashcroft campaign by the singer and film star Cher, who has toured the media circuit denouncing his Puritanism. She asked the Washington Post: "What are we going to do next? Put shorts on the statue of David?"

Perhaps the most bizarre wrinkle in the Ashcroft enigma emerged in November when Andrew Tobias, the Democratic party treasurer and a financial writer, published an article on his website accusing the attorney general of harbouring superstitions about tabby cats.

According to the Tobias article, advance teams for an Ashcroft visit to the US embassy in the Hague asked anxiously if there were tabby cats (or calico cats as they are known in the US) on the premises.

"Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are signs of the devil" Mr Tobias reported.

When asked about the veracity of the report, the justice department said that it had made Mr Ashcroft laugh. There has been no further comment on the matter.

Perhaps Ashcroft is just a one-off? Not according to reliable capitalist press reports which say that the whole of America is going barmy:

A RELIGIOUS campaign to block the teaching of evolutionary biology is taking an inexorable grip on the US.

A survey published in Scientific American reveals that the doctrine of creationism - which holds that the origins of humanity and the Earth are recent and divine - is spreading in the world's greatest technological nation at a disturbing rate. More and more states are restricting the teaching of evolution in schools.

The journal says that a startling 45 per cent of Americans now believe God created life some time in the past 10,000 years, despite research that has established the universe as 13 billion years old and that men and women are descended from apelike ancestors.

Even among US Catholics, 40 per cent still insist God created human life a few thousand years ago - even though Pope John Paul II reaffirmed his Church's commitment to the theory of evolution in 1996.

'At the time, newspapers in Mississippi wrote that this proved the Pope was senile and should be ignored,' said Amanda Chesworth, head of the anti-creationist Darwin Day group. 

'It is very, very scary. Creationism is spreading further and further. It now has missionaries across the world and even has bases in Russia and Turkey.'

In the past, most attempts to block the teaching of evolution ended in failure, the most famous example being the Scopes trial in 1925. It involved the prosecution of John Scopes for teaching Darwin's theory in his class. He was fined $100, but this was overturned by Tennessee's Supreme Court on a technicality. Yet the state kept its anti-evolution laws on the statute book until 1967.

In 1999 Kansas Board of Education voted to block mention of Darwin in its schools but members were voted out and their anti-evolution policy was reversed.

But creationists have been quietly notching up a series of victories elsewhere. The Scientific American survey by Lawrence Lerner, of California State University, shows that in northern states such as Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin, creationism has taken a powerful grip on education at local level, despite each state's strong liberal tradition. Ohio is considering banning evolution teaching, and even New York and Massachusetts are turning against evolution.

'Creationists use some very effective tactics,' said Chesworth. 'They target small towns and get supporters on important local organisations, in particular boards of education. Then they launch campaigns to demand equal time for their views beside those of evolution. Voters get confused. They don't understand that creationism is a doctrine and is very different from scientific theory. Equating one with the other is simply false. One is science, the other is religious belief.'

Another recent technique has been to promote the argument of 'intelligent design'. Yes, the universe may be very old, say proponents, but everywhere you look you can see clear evidence of the handiwork of a creator. Even bananas are given as evidence of this: convenient for handling, with a tab for wrapper removal, a pleasing taste, and an obvious skin-blackening sell-by-date mechanism. By contrast, most scientists believe the cosmos is random and unpredictable.

Scientific American believes that the content of textbooks and lesson plans in schools is already being affected by creationism.

Cheswell agrees. 'Our nation went from the Earth to the Moon a few years ago, and discovered these worlds date back billions of years. Now it is sticking its head in the sand, claiming the whole lot was made in a flash a few millennia ago by one entity. They even argue that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, like they do in The Flintstones. That's not healthy.'

And while the 'Onward Christian Soldiers' tradition of imperialist bloodletting to 'spread democracy' and profitable monopoly-capitalist domination would certainly not be a hindrance to the fascist-warmongering initiatives by the Bush regime to avoid world slump paralysis (mimicking the blitzkrieg initiatives of German and Japanese imperialism in similar markets-collapse conditions in the 1930s), the problem with colonial control via the Bible and the Browning is that it was classically applicable only to a very limited period of history (relatively speaking), like all these things.

This point meets another war-doubt question frequently asked: Does not the colossal mass-destruction power of today's advanced weapons systems, plus the huge disparity in armaments between the USA and all other countries, but particularly the Third World countries, mean that the chances of any serious international military conflict on Earth again are limited just by the sheer mismatch in global firepower??

To which the answer is: It is a question of historical relativity.

The greatest and least challengeable period of Western world domination was at the height of colonial empire when the industrial imperialist economies were so vastly more powerful than the Third World that the entire planet could be kept under permanent total armed control by the West.

That period of complete imperialist ascendancy has long since passed. Neo-colonialism still rules the world, but the vast mass of the world's countries are no longer colonies.

Technological and political development (arising inevitably out of capitalist exploitation itself) has long ago made it impossible any longer for the Western powers to directly rule almost any part of the earth any longer. There is always savage and effective local resistance. There is always dangerous international uproar against any colonial-military re-domination.

But it has happened in the Gulf war, in Kosovo, and in Afghanistan???

Has it really? Surely all the West's problems are precisely because colonial blitzkrieg is NOT working: and has not removed any of the SOURCES of difficulty for safe and secure imperialist control of the world at the start of the 21st century.

Exactly in line with the graph of history which places the peak of colonial-empire Western total domination further and further in the past, so does the effectiveness of modern neo-colonial zapping appear to be producing only increasingly meagre results on the overall picture of anti-imperialist revolt.

Iraq's mild insubordination was supposedly blitzkrieged to nothingness in 1990, to make all of Arab and Third World nationalism cower in its hovels for all of time thereafter. 

But by 2001 the total humiliation of Sept 11 was what the greatest imperialist power in history was having to endure.

The Palestinian nation has been increasingly brutally and ruthlessly butchered, imprisoned, expropriated, bulldozed, thoroughly spy-penetrated, and all-round crushed and shamed, - more abjectly outgunned and helpless today than ever before in its rotten miserable history, without a single regime on Earth willing to stand up for it or go to its assistance - and yet the Zionist fascist colonisation-genocide is in deeper trouble today than it has ever been before.

Why does Iraq need zapping again only 11 years after its last seeing-to despite being relentlessly bombed and blockaded and internally dictated to every day since then?

Why is trouble for the West in Afghanistan actually GROWING only months since the place was first blitzkrieged into smithereens at the opening of the ludicrous 'war' on 'terror'.??

Simple. Because the tide of historical HATRED of the imperialist system of Western domination is relentlessly GROWING all around the world and will inevitably continue to do so, getting ever stronger and stronger as the final stages of 250 years of capitalist globalisation finally produce a quantity and quality of international proletarianisation and technological-political transformation that is simply too smart, too capable, and too evolutionarily advanced to be willing to go on living as the wage-slaves of Western imperialist domination any longer.

It is to this general background of a dying monopoly-capitalist neo-colonial order, currently losing its grip on history at an ever faster pace, that steadily NOTHING now seems to go right with imperialist attempted manipulation of the planet, from world economic and trade strategy, to international environmental and conservation questions, to the military domination 'New World Order'.

Although a slightly trivial and boring issue on the surface, it might nevertheless be worth putting on record the bizarre case of the failed NATO operation to capture Karadžic which would appear to have produced totally humiliated propaganda panic in the ranks of the 'military masters of the world'. 

If they are so good, and so sure of themselves at kicking arse to keep the whole of mankind in line, then why this obvious back-stabbing buck-passing over what should have been shrugged-off as a minor local hold-up?? Does it not again indicate that the imperialists' real conflict is with each other, and that "winning self-determination democratic rights for the Kosovo Albanians" was nothing but an infamously hypocritical Goebbelsian stunt (on a par with World War II for the 'rights' of the Sudetenland Germans, etc, etc) to give the rival Western imperialist powers the chance to 'show off' their muscles against each other in the course of making sure the Yugoslav Socialist Federation died a complete death, and that Serbia should not emerge as a minor regional leadership rival the Western NATO gangsters???

Otherwise, why did three different point-scoring versions of this embarrassing NATO cock-up appear on three successive days in the capitalist press, the first under the headline "Botched", with the strap "Recriminations follow French-led assault"?:

French failures

• 1997: then chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal in The Hague lashes out at France's "totally unacceptable" lack of cooperation, and at the French troops' "complete inertia" in Bosnia.

• 1998: Washington Post reports that an operation to arrest Karadžić was abandoned because a French officer, Major Hervé Gourmelon, had jeopardised it by passing on secret details to the Bosnian Serb leader.

• December2001: Paris court jails Major Pierre-Henri Bunel for two years for passing a Serb agent details of planned NATO bombing raids before the Kosovo war.

NATO troops blasted through two walls and stormed into a mountain farm complex in one of the remotest parts of the Balkans yesterday but failed to get their man - Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader charged with the worst crimes in Europe since the second world war.

Under French command, teams of French and German soldiers backed by helicopters and armoured personnel carriers took part.
 
Although NATO announced that a large cache of weapons had been found and the operation showed the alliance's "determination" officials were forced to concede that not a single arrest was made.

"I don't think that anything went wrong", said NATO spokesman Yves Brodeur. "We were acting on the basis of information that we were able to collect, we had a sense that he was there but be didn't sit and wait for us. For security reasons we don't want to reveal our sources"

The headquarters of Sfor, the 18,000-strong NATO-led stabilisation force, refused to give troop figures or say which countries they come from, but British defence sources told the Guardian that the troops were French and German, and led by a French officer. The troops were likely to have been special forces.

No British forces were involved. German troops have a base in Foca but the area is in a sector under French command.

Diplomats say that only the Americans have the necessary intelligence resources to conduct surveillance on Karadzic.

Bosnian Serb TV reported detonations and gunfire near the village of Celebici, some 45 miles southeast of Sarajevo, adding two NATO helicopters had landed nearby. Roads toward Celebici ware blocked in a radius of some 25 miles and reporters trying to reach the village from Foca, a nearest large town, were held back. Phone lines were cut. NATO officials said its forces met no resistance and the shooting and explosions all came from its side as the men stormed into compound containing up to 30 buildings. 

Angry with what they see as a biased and illegal "political" court, Bosnian Serb crowds recently mobbed Sfor troops who were trying to put up posters offering $5M in reward for Karadzic's capture. Earlier poster campaigns came to nothing when they were routinely torn down hours after they went up.

For years NATO maintained a fiction that its rules only allowed it to capture indicted war criminals in Bosnia if it came across them in the course of its normal patrols. Since Karadzic went into hiding six years ago, this virtually meant he was safe. Bosnians complained Sfor was too worried about losses to bother looking for the men responsible for thousands of murders. 

Although British troops have mounted several successful snatches of indicted war criminals in north-west Bosnia, the sector under its command, French troops have been reluctant do the same in their area.

US troops are based in Tuzla, a Bosnian Muslim area, and only patrol a small corner of Bosnian Serb territory. Bosnian Serb leaders were furious at yesterday's raid and accused NATO of acting without their knowledge.

"One cannot expect cooperation with the tribunal while there is no cooperation of the international community with Republika Srpska", said Bosnian Serb prime minister Mladen Ivanic.

The next day, the story changed dramatically:

AMERICAN military commanders were criticised by their Nato allies yesterday for botching a raid to capture Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, by insisting on "going it alone".

Officials in The Hague are demanding to know why it took so long for US commanders to launch their operation - it started on Thursday morning - when intelligence sources had spotted Dr Karadzic in the hilltop village of Celebeci on Tuesday night with his armed entourage.

By the time that the United States staged its airborne raid, the 57-year-old Serb wartime leader had escaped.

Senior Nato figures in Sarajevo blame the Americans for the slow reaction and insisting that only their troops take part in the operation. SAS reinforcements who were sent to Bosnia last month were ignored, as were contingents from the Sfor peacekeeping force that which know the area better and move more swiftly.

One military official in Sarajevo said: "The Americans wanted all the glory."

The United States insisted that French and German units should be employed only to seal off roads into the area.

Nato faced further embarrassment yesterday after a second abortive mission in the same village failed to find the former child psychiatrist, who is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. For the second time in 48 hours, scores of troops were dropped by helicopters into the woods around Celebeci, in southern Serb-run Bosnia, after a tip-off that be was in a forest hideout.

Farmers and pensioners mocked the troops as they burst into loggers' cottages and storage sheds in their futile search.

Air Force Brigadier John Rosa, deputy director of current operations of the joint Staff, admitted in Washington yesterday: "The first operation was purely American, the second operation was coalition. We got an intelligence tip.

"We reacted to that. But we didn't find Karadzic."

After the first debacle, Nato commanders had hinted that a spy in their own camp could have tipped off Dr Karadzic, suggesting that it was a local working for one of the Sfor contingents.

A defiant message from Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the Nato Secretary-General, yesterday did little to dispel the view in Bosnia that the multinational force has shown itself to be incompetent in its attempts to capture Dr Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, his former military leader, who were indicted on charges of genocide in 1995.

Yesterday's four-hour raid began before dawn, with troops again sealing off roads with rolls of barbed wire and armoured vehicles. This time the search parties spread out to include homes in the neighbouring villages of Bode and Hocevo.

One loyalist, Milan Petrovic, shouted at troops searching his hilltop hamlet for the second time in as many days: "They can't count on finding anyone among us who would betray this president."

Villages such as Celebeci remain among the staunchest strongholds of the Serb nationalist and poet.

On the third day, it rose again, - in yet another new guise:

NATO officers in Bosnia described yesterday how special forces fought a long gun battle with bodyguards of Radovan Karadzic, the war crimes suspect, to cut off escape routes into neighbouring Montenegro and force him to stay within a target zone.

German military sources said 80 Nato-led special forces troops were sent to patrol the border area on Thursday, aided by Montenegrin hunters with years of experience of roaming the area's steeply pitched woods and canyons.

At first single shots were exchanged with an "outer perimeter" of Karadzic's guards, then heavier firing broke out towards the evening.

Yesterday the German military command said Nato believed Karadzic was still within a 100 square mile patch of territory near the border. The operation, which also involved French and American troops, was still concentrating on the villages of Celibici and Jecmista, where Thursday's fighting was fiercest. A Ministry of Defence source said no British forces were taking part.

A member of Karadzic's bodyguard confirmed there had been a gun battle with Nato special forces and admitted the operation was the West's most serious attempt yet to capture the fugitive, who is regarded as a folk hero in the area.

Calling himself Beli Vuk, or White Wolf, the guard said there were no casualties among the 80-strong bodyguard, nor among a larger network of loyalists and partisans who are prepared to take up their guns when required.  

The prolonged operation is having just the effect Nato had hoped to avoid, however, a widespread outpouring of support for Karadzic from Serb hardliners throughout Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia. A senior western diplomat in the region discounted sniping among Nato nations in which blame for the operation's failure is being openly discussed. But an American diplomat with years of Balkan experience admitted that Karadzic's extensive network of sympathisers was causing more problems than anticipated. "He's got every Sfor Nato stabilisation force base in Bosnia watched and he's always an hour ahead of the game," he said.

Just the sort of irresponsible, incompetent military hooligans it is ridiculously supposed to be 'comforting' to know are in charge of the 'free world', shooting places up needlessly for showing off purposes, and not even managing that successfully, or even managing to tell coordinated NATO lies afterwards. Karadzic and Milosevic deserve to be nobody's heroes, but their gaining street-cred with Serb nationalism despite the howling failure of their 'anti-imperialist' struggles shows how powerfully the mass proletarian spirit of international anti-imperialism is still growing. So much so that the most challenging dissident bourgeois-intellectual spirit is telling the West, for example, that its intervention into Afghanistan e.g. has actually made matters worse there, not better:

So far progress is scant, though everyone pays lip service to the idea of getting trained Afghans back. In Britain, a Home Office working group will soon hold its first meeting with Afghan refugee organisations. The EU is also on the case. A key issue will be whether Afghans are offered short-term contracts to "try things out"; with a salary upgrade subsidised by foreign aid. Lack of security is the main deterrent. Few will give up their residency rights in Europe or European-level incomes until they are sure Afghanistan is safe.

But there is another obstacle, which makes the Afghan diaspora different. Most professionals, particularly those in the vigorous "middle generation" now in their 30s and 40s, were members of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the Soviet backed communists, or they lived in Kabul and other cities in the PDPA time.

Many complain they are being penalised by the Karzai government, which is dominated by royalists from the pre-communist period and rightwing mojahedin factions who took up arms to resist communist rule. The Kabul government's prejudice is shared by many western columnists and officials, either consciously or through ignorance.

In spite of the recent attention given to Afghanistan, basic facts about its history remain unknown. Writing from Kabul, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times's main commentator on international affairs, compared the city to the World Trade Centre site in New York. Half the Afghan capital was in ruins, he wrote, "thanks to 22 years of civil war".  

With a little homework, he could have discovered that until 1992, when the communist regime imploded, Kabul was virtually untouched. Kabul's destruction took place between 1992 and 1995 after the mojahedin entered the city and fought among themselves.

Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator of the United Nations development programme, will be a key figure in Afghanistan's reconstruction. Yet, at the donors' conference in Tokyo, he revealed similar gaps in knowledge. Afghanistan, he said, had not had a police force "for 20 years": During the PDPA period, most Afghan cities from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz to Jalalabad were not prey to local commanders, warlords or bandits, and people lived securely with normal urban police.

Far from being paralysed, Afghan cities enjoyed a huge surge in education and healthcare. Kabul had a one-party system but, with numerous functioning mosques and a thriving market economy, it was more liberal than anywhere in Soviet central Asia. Had they not been allied to Moscow, the PDPA would be praised today as the most competent modernisers in Afghan history. 

Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan leader; seems to be an intelligent moderniser himself, a devout Muslim but not an Islamist. He deserves support. The weakness is that he is also an admirer of Zahir Shah, the ex-king whose reign is trumpeted as a golden age when women could dress freely. So they did, but what the king started, the PDPA multiplied.

"People think the 1980s didn't exist," says Keshtmand. Yet one thousand male and female doctors were graduating annually, equal to the number in the entire 50 years of Zahir Shah and his cousin, Mohammed Daoud, who followed. In their time there were five kindergartens in Kabul and none elsewhere. We built 400." 

He maybe too old to return, but others who fled fundamentalist rule say Karzai and his western supporters are not making them feel wanted. The PDPA no longer exists. Most of the old members, if they seek a political role at all, believe Afghanistan must make a fresh start. The bitterness of the civil war has to be set aside. But the country needs a modern, secular left-wing party which can compete with the monarchists and the former mojahedin.

The Bonn conference which chose Afghanistan's interim government failed to represent this broad current of thinking adequately. The government has only one minister who is ex-PDPA. The commission which will prepare the loya jirga is similarly narrow. Karzai, western donors and UN mandarins must correct the bias.

They need to promote a climate of national reconciliation, welcome back the "PDPA generation", and prove there is no blacklist. Otherwise Afghanistan will repeat the sad pattern of Bosnia, Kosovo and other international protectorates. Billions of dollars of "aid" will go to western consultants for interminable feasibility studies or to mafia businessmen looking for a quick buck. The doctors, engineers, and teachers who know the country because it is their own will stay away.

And this, unsurprisingly, - from the capitalist press, at a time when the bourgeoisie is also again admitting that even the so-called 'military triumph' against the totally amateurish religious fanatics of the Taleban is not even what it seems, or was being relentlessly presented as, in standard 'free world' euphoria:

THE Pentagon admitted last night that al-Qaeda fighters had inflicted heavy losses on American forces in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, killing at least eight US soldiers and wounding about 40 more as two transport helicopters came under fire.

The casualties, the heaviest since America's ill-fated mission in Somalia nearly a decade ago, were suffered during the most intense ground, combat of the five?month conflict.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, warned the American public that the battle around Shahi-Kot, known as Operation Anaconda, was unlikely to be al-Qaeda's "last stand" and tough combat lay ahead.

In spite of the Pentagon's clear determination to press ahead with the offensive, the casualties could not have come at a worse time for the Bush Administration as Democratic congressmen have begun to question the open-ended nature of the White House's War on Terror.

US attack had been beaten back under a fierce barrage of mortars, artillery fire and heavy machine-guns: Some Afghan units were feared cut off or surrounded. 'Right now the whole campaign has retreated. We failed,' one fleeing front-line fighter said.

"We failed", the man says. And things continue to go from bad to worse in this sick and out-of-date colonialist 'nation-building'.

So when will Western imperialism get off the Third World's backs?

Only by being beaten off. And it is coming. The defeat of colonial tyranny is on the cards inevitably everywhere.

The Balata refugee camp sums it up. Although cowed and humiliated for 50 years in this stifling virtual-prison hell-hole, the spirit of these Palestinian people (part of 3.5 million such Palestinian refugees still waiting to go back to their homes in what is now 'Israel' and absolutely determined to get there, - and they will get there) has not only not been extinguished by this unspeakable 50-year tyranny but is precisely now showing more signs of vigorous new life and fighting determination than ever:

The afternoon shift of Palestinian gunmen slipped into their bulletproof vests, slung their M-16s and hand grenades around their hips, and piled into the taxis waiting to take them to the next round of battle against the Israeli army.

This is urban warfare, Balata style, as the Israeli army tries for the first time to take control of refugee camps in the West Bank. Yesterday Israeli troops, pressing deeper into the camps in the second day of operations, swapped fire with gunmen and set off explosives in house-to-house searches for weapons and militants.

The Israeli army said yesterday its invasion of Balata, on the edges of Nablus, and the Jenin refugee camp, was a message to the Palestinians that even these strongholds of militancy were not beyond its reach. "There won't be a safe place for terrorists," said Brigadier General Gershon Yitzhak, Israel's West Bank commander.

Somebody should have told Mahmoud Titti - number eight on Israel's list of wanted Palestinian militants - who simply repaired to another part of town, stretching out in a living room done up in shades of pink for a rest break between sporadic bouts of shooting.

"Who told you the Israelis have control over the camp? We know all the entrances and exits. We can come and go as we please, and we are going to lay siege to them so long as they remain there," he said.

Mr Titti, and his dozen or so lunch companions, are all members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a military offshoot of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, and Israel's main target in the camps.

The assaults on Balata and Jenin have provoked some of the fiercest gun battles of the intifada.

Meanwhile, the risks for Israel of the assaults grew more apparent after another Israeli soldier was killed, and one was critically wounded, in Jenin yesterday

Back at Balata, a tank swivelled its barrel in a slow arc of the main road. Women scurried home from the market, ducking into narrow alleys barely three feet wide, to escape the Israeli army sniper scopes, and lumbering over a deep trench gouged out of the pavement by army bulldozers yesterday morning.

Teenagers huddled behind skips filled with earth, whistling and jeering at the Israeli soldiers at each crack of a bullet from the army post in a block of flats, and the gunmen got out of their taxis and began filtering back into the camp.

The growing casualties yesterday from Israel's twin assaults have deepened doubts about the wisdom of invading the camps, as the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has been hankering to do for some months.

"This is a psychedelic journey and you have to be either stoned or a gambler to put the army into it at this point of time;' said a front page commentary in the Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest paper. "His [Sharon's] decision to capture the refugee camp is a high stakes gamble."

Another commentator in the same paper wrote: "As soon as the tanks pull out of Balata, - and that will happen in a day or two, the Palestinians will be left feeling victorious. Balata will revert to its wayward ways, wanted and armed individuals will roam the streets, workshops will manufacture rockets, and the arsenals will be filled:"

Yesterday, the gunmen could not be bothered to wait for the pullout, but sat back in their safe house for a meandering debate on vengeance. Suicide attack, or gun rampages?

The assault on the camps has given the al-Aqsa brigades the right to strike inside Israel's cities once more after a lull of several  weeks, Mr Titti argued.

For him, it had become personal. Earlier yesterday, the Israelis demolished his home - one of at least 10 houses destroyed in the camp.

The nearly 20,000 people here have been refugees for more than five decades, driven out of their homes in Jaffa and  other coastal cities in what is now Israel, when the Jewish state was created in 1948.

"This makes us more determined to confront Israel and to fight them," Mr Titti said. "Now they have demolished my home, I have every reason to attack inside Israel:'

The gunman's threat is literal. In recent days, the al-Aqsa brigades have broken Fatah's taboo on suicide attacks, and founded their own cell of suicide bombers, following the lead of Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

But others were pushing for different forms of revenge yesterday - such as shooting sprees inside Israeli towns. "It gives you the pleasure of quenching your thirst and anger against those people when you are shooting at them," said Majid al-Masri, another wanted militant, whose leg was shattered by an Israeli missile in a failed assassination last year.

"When you blow yourself up, you don't get that same satisfaction."

Zionist imperialism cannot win. The 1:1 head-count of both sides' casualties following this grotesque provocation by Western imperialism against the Balata refugee camp is not something which the more exploitation-minded Zionist 'immigrants' (colonists) from Los Angeles, New York, and Golders Green will put up with for long. Life was far too comfortable back home.

As the howling fascist mobs shouted around the scenes of Zionist colonialism's latest casualties, 'the only solution is to wipe out the whole Arab Palestinian nation'.

And Western imperialism, under the TUC-backed Labour Party and the Bush Texas mafia, might even be sick enough to try it. 

But they will fail. And the failure of Zionist imperialism to genocidally wipe out the Palestinian nation and its homeland is likely to be a symbol of Western imperialism's failure overall to carry on for much longer trying to brutally dominate the whole world. It can no longer be done, and the West will fall apart, murderously squabbling over their failure.

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