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 

No 1153 September 24 2002

Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  

www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
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US imperialist paranoia and trade-war aggression is what is really scary, but the untamable economic crash, which makes warmongering inevitable, will also provide the solution in mass anti-capitalist revolt. Iraq and "terrorism" are just diversions in a long standing monopoly-bourgeois tradition of unleashing colonial adventures abroad to cover-up economic failure and to whip up national-chauvinist cohesion for conflict of all kinds with imperialist market rivals. But where a real Axis of powers set the pace to warmonger a way out of the 1930s slump, half-encouraged by the West so that the USSR could be hopefully wiped out - only propaganda nonsense about "terror" and "WMD" from the sole US superpower can today reintroduce blitzkrieg destruction as the 'solution' to capitalism's chronic international overproduction crisis. The new US war doctrine, embracing worldwide counter-revolutionary preparations, will spark inter-imperialist disintegration and signal ultimate humiliating failure for the whole capitalist system, anti-communist bogus 'Marxists' and other fake-'lefts' notwithstanding, whose "condemnation" of anti-Western-imperialist "terrorism" marks them as the all-time stooges of the capitalist system's "democracy" fraud.

The partial collapse already of a range of different economies from Japan to Turkey to Argentina is advance warning of an international slump more terrifyingly long and deep than the 1930s Depression or anything else in history, and it will be accompanied by trade-war hostilities and revolutionary upheavals way beyond all previous experience.

A basic ingredient of all over-production crises remains inter-imperialist rivalry and greed, - all the ruling elites wanting to ensure domestic class-war survival by ever-more grandiose development and expansion schemes for national showing-off.

But the busting of bubble-economy booms leaves capitalist big business groaning with supposed "world surplus capacity" in steel, coffee, motor cars, aeroplanes, agricultural produce, airlines, etc, etc, etc, and vicious trade-war becomes inevitable.

Inter-imperialist world war (part I in 1914,  part II in 1939) was the classic warmongering expression of this uncontrollable anarchic economic rivalry.

As the overwhelmingly dominant imperialist power since 1945, the American monopoly capitalist bourgeoisie has been able to raise its imperial grandeur and might to unprecedented levels, never dreamed of before in history.

With such vast wealth, 	bought-in technological mastery, and effectively a licence to print world money and buy up country after country and even whole continents through vital economic aid and even more 	crucial military supplies, the US ruling class is further removed from any notion of letting that power slip than all previous imperial ruling classes, none of whom ever dreamed of giving up voluntarily.

More aware of and alarmed by the deepening insoluble economic crisis of global imperialism than anybody, and with more to lose than anybody for the first time in history, it is now the American ruling class which is uniquely setting the pace back to warmongering, the traditional degenerate outcome of overproduction and trade-war crisis when the bourgeois world is more than usually fearful of revolt against the capitalist international order as well as aggressively-intentioned against each other, and actually prefers a state of turmoil.

In the 1930s, German imperialism was deliberately set up to lead the way back to war as the world economy continued to stutter because of uncompleted interimperialist business rivalry and market-domination conflict for raw materials, etc.

Using the 'excuse' of powers like Germany, Japan, and Italy, - still searching for their colonial place in the sun to rival what Britain and France had already carved out, plus some added venom against an "international Jewish-Bolshevik terrorist conspiracy", etc, the overproduction Great Depression could be militarily battered until sufficient destruction had made capitalism's unparalleled rapid-expansion capacities a prized phenomenon once again.

Those 'excuses' would not go down well today, and so US-led imperialist propaganda is obliged to make an unconvincing fuss about a global "war on terror" and about non-existent "axes of evil" who are supposedly "threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction", etc.

American imperialism's "pre-emptive strike doctrine" amounts to a declaration of war against the whole world, plus a declaration that the United Nations is finished.

Announcing that no state will ever be allowed to rival the USA in military might, and that any which approach that level of economic and technological power will be attacked, is WORSE than the Hitler doctrine.

And whereas the Nazis merely abandoned the League of Nations in the late 1930s in rejecting its strictures against aggression, these US imperialists around Bush are actually threatening to put the UN under house arrest to stop it inspecting Iraq's weaponry on terms which Washington consider not belligerent enough.

All round, the US position amounts to the most arrogant statement of bullying imperialist hypocrisy and fascist militarism in all history.

The clue to this panic-stricken philistine aggression (in the insoluble economic crisis which is shattering global capitalism) is also the explanation of how this warmongering tyranny will be ended.		
Inter-imperialist rivalry will not cease just because the USA is so much more powerful than anyone else. 

And in the devastating trade-war conflicts which will ensue, including many humiliating defeats for some of the powers forced to the wall by the competition or by military bullying, working-class revolution will increasingly become the best or the only way 	out of the destructive crisis of capitalist over-production.

Presumably, the new US warmongering doctrine has been cynically worded so that pre-emptive strikes can cover any and every imaginable perceived "enemy to American interests".

Even the capitalist press's own reports (see below) find it impossible to conceal the deliberately sinister menace in this new tone of belligerence, but the obvious implications are even more alarming still.

If there is some kind of socialist revolution brewing in, say, Argentina, Turkey, or Indonesia, - not to list all the obvious "trouble spots" for America such as Colombia or Mexico; then this vicious Nazi doctrine will apply:

The United States will not hesitate to strike pre-emptively. against its enemies; even if it faces international opposition; and will never again allow its military supremacy to be threatened," President George Bush declared yesterday in a document setting out an aggressive new vision for US foreign policy.

"As a matter of common sense and self-defence, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed," Mr Bush writes in the introduction to a text which bears the imprint of the hawks in his administration - Vice-President Dick Cheney; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary - and takes a sceptical view of multilateral action and international treaties.

"History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act," Mr Bush adds in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a document he is required to submit to Congress. "In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action."

Since the end of the Cold War deprived Moscow of its superpower status a decade ago, the US has had no rival in terms of military strength.

But instead of easing its spending on defence, like many Nato countries, the Pentagon is increasing it. The US defence budget for 2003 is $400 billion, an increase of 6 per cent. Washington spends as much on defence as the next eight largest military powers combined.

With Russia financially strapped; Mr Bush's message appeared aimed at China, a rising military power which is increasing both its conventional and nuclear capabilities.

The US will strike against its enemies even if its allies or the UN do not back its efforts, the text emphasised.

"American is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones." But it aims to "turn adversity into opportunity", pursuing "a distinctly American internationalism" that reflects US values and interests.

Wary of charges that the US is throwing its weight around, Mr Bush used his foreword to the document to insist that Washington was not acting only for itself.

Elaborating on the doctrine of which he first spoke at the West Point military academy in June, Mr Bush said that the US would seek allies as it confronted these threats. But the document added that "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defence by acting pre-emptively".

The key to America's efforts to combat weapons of mass destruction would be "counter-proliferation". Although it failed to spell out in detail what measures or pre-emptive moves that would encompass, they would allow the US, to "deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed".

This imperialist savagery could fail at any one of these hurdles, or even in Iraq, or especially in Palestine where in spite of the most overwhelming firepower superiority and total humiliating domination, the local national liberation revolt just continues to grow and grow even though it clearly "threatens America's interests" (in Washington's sickly-enlarged interpretation),  and even though everything short of actual physical genocide is being done to totally crush once and for all the independent Palestinian national  spirit.

But that warmongering will fail at some point is indisputable because not far down the line of this relentlessly deepening world slump, the places in revolt will be downtown Detroit and downtown Los Angeles, by which time world working-class revolution will have got irresistibly under way.

The 'new militants' of the fake-'left' let Blair get away with the most monstrous warmongering sophistry and hypocrisy at the TUC because of their philistine contempt for Marxist theory, - beguiled by "democratic economic recovery" delusions; sceptical of "crisis catastrophism";  incapable of disentangling the astonishing 20th centuryachievements of the workers states from  their disastrous Revisionist mistakes or from the crudest anti-communist biliousness and ignorance spread by the Trots and their dodgy friends like Orwell and Amis; and helping the CIA to peddle global brainwashing hypocrisy to term Sept 11 as "condemnable" (as opposed to the non-stop imperialist tyranny around the Middle East which gave rise to this heroic but feeble DIY attempt to strike back against the Third World's tormentors). 

Only the total conscious rebuilding of a world Leninist movement will meet the needs of the working class in this escalating global warmongering crisis to which there is NO SOLUTION,  -  not from Parliament, the United Nations, the 'free-market' economy, nor from any other of the inventions and fictions of bourgeois "democracy".

History will be FORCED back to widespread international socialist revolutions as the only way forward, - Bolshevism reborn.  And the sooner this is made a CONSCIOUS way forward for workers, the better. 

It is capitalist crisis which really threatens the US ruling class - and the world bourgeoisie by the throat, - not Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden.

The anarchic mess dragging down global profiteering deteriorates daily. Only TOTAL collapse is the real prospect.

In the capitalist press's own admissions, Japan nearly got there last week, only a dozen years since shining as the most sensational "miracle economy" in history. Global overproduction crisis (which not surprisingly struck Japan first, helped by sly tariff walls put up by rival powers, producing a decade's stagnation), has now started to inflict a downward spiralling vortex on the former most successful economic competitor in the world.

A panic started spreading that the major banks, stifling under the debt of unrepayable loans made at the peak to the now collapsed bubble economy, were about to realise that their vast shareholdings in no-longer-profitable Japanese industry, could end up losing ALL their stockmarket value (and not just the 50% losses already marked down).

To stem another catastrophic wave of sharemarket selling, the state bank stepped in to offer itself as a buyer of last resort.

The only problem with this is that the state exchequer itself is already technically bankrupt, owing vastly more in national government debt (from repeated attempts to restimulate economic growth via lavish tax handouts, etc) than can ever be recouped.

As a result, amid utter confusion and turmoil, the market turned nasty against government gilt sales as well as against the now-dubious corporate shares, denouncing the buy-up stunt as a hopeless non-solution:

THE unprecedented failure of an auction of Japanese government bonds yesterday fuelled fears over the financial system of the world's second largest economy.

The yen, - and Japanese shares and bonds, - all tumbled after the failure of the Tokyo Government to find enough buyers for an auction of its ten-year benchmark bonds stoked market anxieties. This is the first time such a bond auction has failed in Japan.

The debacle was triggered after the Government delayed vital policy statements in the wake of a controversial and unorthodox plan by the Bank of Japan to shore up the country's commercial banks by directly buying stocks from their investment portfolios.

The Japanese government's economic policy was in tatters yesterday as investors went on strike, alarmed at the Bank of Japan's controversial plan to prop up the banking sector.

The yen tumbled to a three-year low against the euro after Tokyo failed to find enough buyers for its long-term debt, the first time a Japanese bond auction has been undersubscribed.

Sir Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England, warned that the turmoil in world financial markets could knock a global recovery off course.

Questioned after a speech to West Midland manufacturers, Sir Eddie said that a fresh bout of tumbling equity markets could derail hopes that the world economy will pick up in coming months.

Ten years of attempts to kickstart the Japanese economy through public spending programmes saddled the Tokyo government with the largest debt in the developed world. Analysts said yesterday's investor strike raised the prospect that Tokyo will have difficulty servicing its outstanding loans.

"It's symptomatic of the disarray in the market and tremendous policy uncertainty," said John Richards, a capital markets analyst at Barclays Capital. "Ultimately, if the government doesn't cover their auctions this raises all kinds of problems - worst of all the possibility of not being able to re-fund existing debt."

The BoJ failed to reassure the equities market with its announcement this week of plans to buy shares from the financial sector. The Nikkei continued to lose ground yesterday, falling 1.95%.

Masaru Hayami, the BoJ's governor, insisted that the bond market was merely correcting after a period of strong demand. "I am not that worried," he told reporters. "I believe investors' appetite for JGBs [bonds] is unchanged.'

Analysts said that the auction bombed because Junichiro Koizumi's government has not shown its resolve to turn the economy around by tackling deflation and banks' huge bad loans.

Mr Koizumi dashed hopes of an early remedy to recession when he said he would detail plans to aid the financial sector next month instead of this week.	 
The central bank stunned observers the previous day by announcing plans to buy up stock held by 10-20 commercial and regional banks over the next two years. That drastic proposal left many analysts wondering whether the stronger than expected remedy signalled a worse than feared diagnosis of Japan's financial woes.

"For a developed country's central bank to jump out and buy equities is completely bizarre," said Garry Evans, strategist at HSBC Securities. "Reading between the lines, the Bank of Japan sees some sort of crisis looming."

Japan's banking system has been on the verge of collapse for almost 10 years. A ¥1,400 trillion drop in asset values since the collapse of the bubble economy in 1989 has meant non performing loans accumulated faster than the banks have been able to write them off. By the reckoning of the financial authorities, the total of those soured loans is now ¥52 trillion. Some private sector estimates say the figure is more than twice as high, which would make many banks insolvent.

So fragile is the system that the settlement of accounts in March and September has become a half-yearly trauma for banks worried that a late slide in stock prices could erode what is left of their capital bases.

The financial authorities have become old hands at patching up the system just in time to wobble through each potential crisis. The usual method has been for the government to talk up share prices with promises of new economic packages, tax breaks or restrictions on shortselling.

This month looked to be following the familiar pattern. Equity prices have dropped close to 19-year lows, the banks are nervous and the government has once again hinted that it will draw up a new anti-deflation package, which could be announced as early as today. A worrying situation, but certainly nothing unusual.

Then came the Bank of Japan's unexpected proposal to start buying corporate stock from banks - a radical move for a bank and a governor usually considered arch conservatives.

The bourgeois media still deliberately create the impression that there is still an inexhaustible supply of 'recovery' or 'reform' hopes for every economic situation (because admitting the opposite would be political dynamite). 

But the only healthy growth to be seen worldwide from now on will be in widespread disbelief that the "authorities" have any real idea of what to do any mare, plus great suspicion that nothing but lies and cover-up are now on the "freeworld" agenda. 

Warnings against "irrational panic" are likely to be the only other growth area as surges of inexplicable volatility become the overwhelmingly decisive characteristic of market behaviour. 

This only reaffirms the Marxist scientific understanding that underneath it all, the capitalist mode of global production remains a total anarchy of free-for-all profiteering whose methods of surplus-value extraction through exploitation can NEVER end anywhere but in a grotesque 'over-production' warmongering crisis at the end of every prolonged world-trade boom.

The quite insane destructiveness which capitalism will then unleash in its irrationally vicious determination to wipe out the "surpluses" which are destroying profitability, has to be read in the capitalist press itself to be fully believable.

Ditto the utterly mindless panics currently revealing that the "free world" has aspects still close to a savage jungle, a humiliating feature underlined even more by the West's turn to conscious kick-arse warmongering.

Both sides of capitalism's ultimate inadequacy (as a system for the modern rational world) cannot be hidden in the following bourgeois press admissions; but the gross destruction of lives and livelihoods (rather than of coffee beans) is an implication which needs dragging out of the story, as does the monstrously callous threat to people's pensions and savings well-being from the money-grubbing antics of the stock market:

Coffee exporting countries said yesterday that up to 5m bags of low quality beans must be destroyed by the industry to halt the sharp decline in prices that threatens to ruin millions of poor farmers.

The International Coffee Organisation said its efforts to destroy the glut of poor quality beans, which has pushed prices to 30-year lows, depended on cooperation from the multinational companies that control the market: Nestlé, Sara Lee, Kraft and Procter & Gamble.

As Nestlé became the first big company to break ranks and support efforts to put a floor under prices yesterday, the ICO's executive director, Nestor Osorio, said the multinationals were doing themselves no favours by profiting from the low prices.

The ICO believes that unless it succeeds in destroying large amounts of low-grade coffee, prices will continue to decline with disastrous long-term effects on the industry.

Higher quality, more expensive producers such as Colombia and Nicaragua will be forced out, and the ICO believes consumers will turn to alternative drinks if manufacturers continue to substitute low grade beans.

"One of the problems is that the buyers [for the big companies] are given instructions to screw the last cent they can out of every deal," said Pablo Dubois, head of operations at the ICO.

Nestlé announced over the weekend that it would support efforts to reduce oversupply in the market, the first time one of the big roasting companies has agreed to help manage prices since the International Coffee Agreement [ICA] broke down more than 10 years ago.

"It is in everybody's interest that there should be a better balance between supply and demand," said Francois Perroud, a Nestlé spokesman.

Coffee analysts said Nestlé wanted to avoid bad publicity from a report to be published tomorrow by the aid agency Oxfam, which is expected to accuse the four big coffee roasting companies of making fat profits at a time when millions of farmers face poverty.

Prices have fallen from $1.20 a pound during the 1980s when the ICA was in force to about 50 cents, the lowest level in real terms for 100 years.

An internal Nestlé paper seen by the Guardian admits that the breakup of the ICA after the US walked out led to the collapse in prices. 

The ICO estimates that 10 years ago coffee sales worldwide were worth $30bn and farmers earned $lObn-$12bn. With the spread of upmarket coffee shops in western cities, sales are worth more than $70bn but farmers receive just $5.5bn.

THE FTSE 100 dropped 308 points, or pearly 8 per cent, in the space of just seven minutes yesterday as the London stock market endured its busiest session so far.

About 1.2 billion shares changed hands in the 20 minutes between 10.10am and 10.30am as futures and options contracts pegged to the FTSE 100 benchmark index expired simultaneously. Not since the late Eighties, when the futures markets were a relatively new phenomenon, has the socalled "double witching" hour proved so volatile.

Some 5.1 billion shares were traded during the day, shattering the previous record of 4.2 billion, set on September 21 last year, when world stock markets touched their low in the wake of September 11.

Dealers attributed the frenetic activity to a surge in hedging by institutional investors, who have sought to protect the value of the equity portfolios after July's stock market falls to six-year lows. Liffe, the futures exchange where FTSE 100 contracts are traded, said that volume in September's FTSE 100 futures and options contracts was 40 per cent higher than last year.

Under the quarterly timetable on which those contracts trade, investors were forced to buy or sell underlying shares in the FTSE 100 yesterday to close out their positions or roll them forward.

Drew Mader, of Instinet, the institutional stockbroker, said: "A lot of people have got positions on, which meant there was a lot of business to be unwound."

The record volume of business that needed to be executed in the 20-minute expiry period produced sharp moves in the underlying shares. During the expiry, the London Stock Exchange gave warning that prices were suffering "material delays" of up to three minutes because of the size of the volumes going through.

The sharp price moves prompted rumours that a large investment bank was left with a £100 million loss after executing a massive buy order at the market's infra-day peak.

Credit Suisse First Boston, the investment bank at the centre of the speculation, denied that any of its traders had made an error that had added to the market volatility. There were also suggestions that an investment bank had sought to keep the FTSE 100 above the 4,000 level to suit its underlying derivatives position.

There are no automatic mechanical steps from capitalist economic crisis towards imperialist warmongering; but the trade-war differences with the rival great powers, - plus the inevitable flexing of counter-revolutionary preparations as market, state, and currency collapses reraise the spectre of communist revolution once again, - confirm the obvious connections between capitalism's failure and an aggressive thrashing around by the international exploiting powers with the most to lose.

Since it began (1979) analyses of the imperialist system on its way to the greatest revolutionary crisis in world history, the EPSR has always insisted on the scientific inevitability of violent inter-imperialist splits as wealth-creation and profits-for-all gives way to the wholesale destruction of 'surplus capital'.

Whose surplus capital?? And who is to blame??? They will never agree.

Right on cue, Germany thrust an astonishing large spoke into the wheels of the rampaging US warmongering 'coalition', suddenly declaring that Germany would play no part whatever in the invasion of Iraq, and overcoming a 7%o poll-deficit to win the German general election on this basis.

The Justice Minister Herta Daubler-Gmelin went even further than Schroeder's "this is a dangerous policy" line and declared that America's warmongering against Iraq was to divert attention from Bush's domestic problems.

"Such diversionary measures have been a popular method since Hitler", she added to huge cheers, pointing out that under new tighter US insider trading laws, Bush "would be sitting in prison today" if he were still a businessman in the oil industry.

Gmelin will inevitably now disappear from the German Cabinet (now the election is safely won) so as not to drive US-German differences any further any faster than necessary, for the moment.

But this astonishing tearing-up of the USA's Alliance for Western Warmongering Hypocrisy will not stop reverberating around the world for the foreseeable future.

And the French bourgeoisie have been even quicker and more eager to put the Anglo-US warmongering clumsiness in the dock:

THE French media demonstrated again this weekend that they like nothing better than bashing America. 

Israel's weekend offensive against Yassir Arafat was more fuel for the French assumption that the root of the Israeli Palestinian agony is Washington's unflinching support for the Government of Ariel Sharon. The Middle East flare-up helped to amplify the general chorus in the French media and among public opinion that the main danger to world peace is President Bush.

Nothing could better illustrate the cultural gulf between Britain and France than in their media view of Mr Bush's push for an Iraqi regime change. While the British media largely bang the patriotic drum behind the War on Terror, the French on Left and Right see Mr Bush as engaged in a ploy to grab Iraqi oil and distract domestic opinion from economic troubles.

In a front page analysis yesterday, Le Monde, the voice of the left-leaning Establishment, said that, in Texan gambler's style, Mr Bush had embarked on a "mad bet". This was "to loosen the grip of the Saudis by getting his hands on Iraqi oil". The United States wanted to end its dependence on its increasingly unreliable Saudi allies. At the same time, American drivers, "who are great lovers of fat limousines and four-by-fours" were punishing Mr Bush for rising petrol prices.

A near identical argument was in Saturday's Le Figaro, equivalent to The Daily Telegraph. Since the terrorist strikes by Osama bin Laden, and the 15 Saudis who hijacked the airliners, it had become urgent for Washington to divorce itself from Riyadh, said Antoine Basbous, Figaro's commentator.  "This explains why the rush to control Iraq is more urgent than bringing North Korea to heel."

Hammering the theme, Le Nouvel Observateur, the news magazine of the thinking classes, said Washington's quarrel with President Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the war against terrorism "They want to finish off Saddam, for reasons of oil, strategy and morality."  In accepting UN weapons inspectors, Saddam had played a brilliant hand, turning his Anglo-American enemies into possible aggressors, said the magazine.

Le Journal du Dimanche, the main Sunday paper, played-up the caricature of the ugly American with a sympathetic portrait of Nazir Sassi, a Frenchman who is detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay after being captured in Afghanistan.

And even solidly British bourgeois who have no opportunist political ties to the official state "special relationship" arslikhan policy pursued by Blair and Smith, are finding their voice to denounce this demented American warmongering:

A dangerous cabal around George Bush, ignorant of world affairs and contemptuous of Europe, is threatening to destroy the world order, Lady Williams, the Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords, warned yesterday. 

Known as she is for her close connections with the US, her remarks underline the gap growing between the Bush administration and mainstream European politicians. 

Lady Williams said the new Bush doctrines of preemotive action and regime change were "wildly dangerous'. 

The US president set out the doctrines in a strategy paper to Congress last week. Lady Williams commented: "In effect you are exchanging the opinion of the international community for the opinion of the most powerful state. Yet the same doctrines could equally be applied by India visible Pakistan, or in any dispute where a state feels threatened. It is throwing a match into a barrel of oil." 

She described the cabal, including the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as "very strongly unilateralist. They don' talk much to foreign governments, they are contemptuous of Europe,  particularly now Germany. They regard allies as just codpieces". 

Some of them she suggested wanted to take the US out of the UN. "To destroy the effectiveness of the UN and to make it a laughing stock would be terribly dangerous."

She also accused the US of deploying wrecking tactics to undermine the international criminal court.

She feared moderate Arab opinion would explode if the weapons inspectors were not given a proper chance. The difficulty, she said, lay in Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's closeness to the Bush team.

And as part of that moderate Arab opinion, even moderate Iraqis, although bitterly hostile to Saddam Hussein, are now denouncing the vicious scapegoating of Iraq to suit deranged US imperialism's warmongering purposes:

I am an Iraqi British woman (half-Kurdish, half-Arab). I have lived in Britain since 1976. I can't go back to Iraq because, like many Iraqis, I was imprisoned and tortured. When I was released I was haunted by human howls of pain and memories of the dead. 

Once in London, I could hardly believe I was safe in a democratic country. The day that I first exercised my right to vote was one of the happiest of my life. On election day 1979, I was up at 5am. I was the first to vote that day. I voted Labour. The Conservatives won. 

The massacre of Halabja in 1988 went unnoticed here. Iraq was then the darling of the west. Iraq fought the west's war with Iran, to protect their interests and ensure a free market for oil. But this was Mrs Thatcher's government, which supported friendly dictators and normalised relations with military regimes.  

In 1990, the Iraqi regime occupied Kuwait, and the US and UK decided Saddam had breached his contract of employment. In January 1991, hell was unleashed against the Iraqi people. The bombing lasted 43 days, destroyed many civilian targets and massacred tens of thousands of defenceless conscripts. Iraqis were shocked and confused: it seemed bizarre to punish them for the crimes of their persecutors.

Confusion turned to numbness when people discovered they were to be subject to one of the most comprehensive campaigns of economic sanctions in modern history. On December 6 1995, I sent an A4 padded envelope to my nieces and nephews in Mosul. It contained one pencil case, three erasers, three sharpeners, six fountain pens, two markers, one glue-stick and two Biros. It was marked "gift for children". The envelope was returned, stamped: "Due to international sanctions against Iraq, we are not able to forward your packet". But that was under John Major. 

In 1997,  the Labour party was at last elected, and Robin Cook declared the government's foreign policy to be "ethical". I applauded. But what has the restoration of hope brought? Continuing sanctions, for a start, which has meant starvation, death and intellectual stagnation. The bombing of Iraq has never stopped either. The USAF and RAF have been bombing civilians almost daily since December 1998; 144 civilians were killed in raids in 1999 alone. For the rest, life in Iraq goes on, as hard as ever. 

Here are some paragraphs from two personal letters. The first, from a relative: "We women spend most of our time doing what our grandmothers used to do: we are staying home, sieving flour, baking bread, preparing and storing tomato puree and raising chickens".

The next, from a friend: "Let me share a laugh with you. As Selma, my wife, was being wheeled out of the operating theatre, the doctor handed me two things: a long prescription and, what else, do you think? Selma's uterus! I had to go find the medicine as soon as possible, and also to take the uterus to a private lab for a biopsy. It was the start of a 20-hour madman's journey around Baghdad". 

So how do I now find myself standing by Iraq's dictatorial regime, while Tony Blair presents himself as the defender of both democracy and the Iraqi people? For decades, it was the other way around. Iraqis were not only resisting the oppressive regime, they were sacrificing their lives for change long before the occupation of Kuwait.  They appealed for help from western governments. Their request was: stop supplying the Ba'ath regime with weapons. Nobody listened.

It's 2001: election time again. I hesitated, but still voted Labour. What choice did I have? Now the US is pushing for a massive assault on Iraq, and Blair is one of the few leaders willing to offer troops. Can it be true that the man I voted for is now preparing to "liberate" Iraq, in the same way he liberated Afghanistan, by ensuring the death of thousands of civilians? Is it true that he is relying on the Iraqi National Congress; a group set up in the early 90s with CIA help, and now funded by the State Department? Does he know that they are loathed by most Iraqis.
 
You are "either with us or against us"; they say. As an Iraqi that means choosing between war and the dictator. To be on the side of the oppressed does not mean we are unaware of the complexity of the situation. To campaign for the lifting of sanctions, for an end to the paralysing bombardment and dally threat of war is to stand by the Iraqi people; it is that policy which will help them to change the oppressive regime. Any change should be initiated from within Iraq, not imposed by Bush or Blair.

When I hear Tony Blair speak on Iraq, I am reminded of my old landlady, who asked me, politely, in the late 1970s, about home. I explained a little about the government there and how it doesn't give a damn about people. She listened attentively then, in a nice, gentle way, said: "Next time, don't vote for him dear."

And if that is how moderate bourgeois pro-Western muddleheadedness can see through the rotten hypocrisy of US imperialist warmongering even in Iraq, then how sound are Washington's gambles that no elements inside Iraq at all will fight against a reactionary imperialist invasion of their country???

A socialist line in Iraq would certainly be in favour of the defeat of any Western colonial aggression, while of course (as carefully as possible) avoiding any implication that the viciously arbitrary and unstable Hussein dictatorship deserved a shred of confidence, trust, or credibility either.

And it seems inconceivable that such an out-of-the-ordinary aggressive nationalist regime as Saddam's would not inspire a fair amount of mob support from various social sectors however nasty the tyranny. Consider the widespread fanatical loyalty of Germans towards Hitler's rule right to the very bitter end of a catastrophic war he led them into.

The Guardian sent a reporter to Baghdad precisely to try to find mass disaffection and no willingness to defend Iraq against colonial conquest.

It did not turn out quite as anticipated:

A frenzied crowd of 40,000 at Iraq's biggest weekend football match launched into a chant at the start of the game vowing to resist a US invasion.

"Saddam,  Saddam,  we will spill our blood for you," they shouted as they danced and jumped, waving flags in their team's colours and placards proclaiming loyalty to the Iraqi leader.

A giant black and white portrait of Saddam Hussein stood high above the stadium. Many of the supporters wore their team's strip but some had T-shirts with pictures of President Saddam and one had the leader's head printed across a traditional Arab gown. Another chant went up: "We will become martyrs for you. America, can you hear us?"

If US military and political leaders planning for war could have heard them, it might have given them cause to pause. The crowd echoed sentiments that can be heard all over Baghdad: they will fight any US invasion street by street, using any weapons they have at their disposal.

This is the dilemma facing military planners and their political masters in Washington and London. Will the 10 million-strong population of Baghdad fight, exacting a heavy toll on American soldiers trying to enter their sprawling city, or will the residents, desperate for regime change after 20 years of totalitarian rule, stay indoors, silently grateful for the arrival of the Americans? 

Isaac Toma,  47, was in the rowdiest section of the Zawm stadium, which is in the centre of Baghdad. He supports Jawwiya, the Iraqi air force team. 

	He is a mechanical engineer with the ministry of technology, a father of three, a lover of Dickens and a Christian. He described President Saddam as the "pillar" that held Iraq together and that the chants vowing to fight represented real intentions.

"We have an army of 1 million; he said. "If they kill even 1,000 American soldiers, the Americans will go home. They are cowardly. They cannot, take those kind of casualties". The fans around him agreed. All of these men are used to war and claim not to be worried by bombing. To prove the point, they recall another football match four years ago; when the same two sides were playing, and the game was interrupted by a missile hitting Baghdad. The players stopped for a minute but the crowd bayed at them to continue, and a minute's extra time was played to compensate.

	Hours before the match started, in another part of Baghdad, Abu Hamid, 33, who is a car rental salesman and a former soldier who fought in both the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf war, also predicted that 	an assault on the city would end in carnage. He appeared to relish the prospect 	of taking on US troops: " We are prepared for the soldiers if they come to Baghdad. It will be Muslims against the Jews. If we do not have weapons, we will use petrol bombs, or make spears, like the old times anything we can attack them with." 

About 100 yards from Mr Hamid's office, lounging on a car bonnet; Jassim Thamar, 22, pledged the Iraqis would put up a tough fight for their homeland. He, like three of his six brothers, is a member of the elite 50,000-strong Republican Guard. 

"We are not afraid of them. Tell [Tony] Blair, we are ready for anything," Mr Thamar said.

Initially embarrassed to find himself the focus of western media attention, he quickly regained his composure. He was only nine at the time of the Gulf war. "To be frank, we were afraid then but we are used to it [the bombing] now" he said. "I am proud to be in the Republican Guard:  If the US comes, I will fight them." 

But there is another side to Baghdad, one where the residents look forward to the day when President Saddam has gone. 

In spite of the fervour of those in the Zawra stadium, Iraq's history, especially the revolt of the Shia Muslims after the Gulf war that saw Ba'athist party members being hung in the streets, combined with the sullen resentment of the regime among educated Iraqis, suggests that many will stay at home if the US arrives, or even rise up at the last minute if they were confident that President Saddam was definitely on his way out.

Iraqis, both those who vow to fight to the death and those who say they will stay at home, are united on one point: they profess not to want war.

Life has become marginally better over the past two years, even in the poorest districts, as sanctions have crumbled and there is a reluctance to see bombing reverse those gains. They also fear that much blood could be shed as people take revenge after President Saddam goes.

Towards the end of the football match, Mr Toma, happy that his team had fought back to 1-1, mentioned Brecht's Mother Courage. "Brecht said some people benefit from war. Brecht is wrong," Mr Toma said. "No one benefits from war".

And dramatically adding to the difficulties such as these facing a Western invasion conquest is the unalterable and immovable catastrophic weakness at the heart of the West's case which is that US colonial modern history is one long unbroken record of SUPPORTING ferociously armed tyrants in defiance of United Nation's hopes or decisions, including the dictator Saddam himself in his earlier "gas the Iranians, and gas their Kurdish allies" career as a direct stooge of ruthless American imperialist interests. 

And even worse than that, the USA supports (right now in the Middle East itself) a brutal tyranny, well-armed with the most fearful weapons of mass destruction, which assassinates or imprisons its own just like Saddam, and which has defied even more UN resolutions than Iraq has, namely Zionist occupied Palestine, or 'Israel' to give it the name which this genocidal fascist colonisation has adopted. 

For this whole Middle East plan of monstrous US imperialist-Zionist hypocrisy and tyrannical unfairness to prevail would be one of the most odious crimes of injustice and barbaric reaction in all history. Even the bourgeois media in the West are crying out in shame, disgust, and horror:

An unforeseen threat to freedom of speech in British broadcasting emerged last week. It was triggered by the showing of my documentary, Palestine is Still the Issue, on ITV. The film told a basic truth that is routinely relegated, even suppressed that a historic injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, and until Israel's illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included.

Most of the film allowed people to tell their eyewitness stories, both Palestinians and Israelis. What was unusual was that it disclosed in detail the daily humiliation and cultural denigration of the Palestinians, including a sequence showing excrement smeared by Israeli soldiers in a room of children's paintings. 

The film was accurate, restrained and fair; the longest interview was with an Israeli government spokesman. Every word and frame was subjected to a legal examination for accuracy and to ensure it complied with the fairness regulations in the Broadcasting Act. Our historical adviser, Professor Ilan Pappé, the distinguished Israeli historian. He wrote to Carlton Television that "the film is faultless in its historical description and poignant in its message". 

None of this deterred the chairman of Carlton, Michael Green, a supporter of Israel's policies, from abusing the programme makers in the Jewish Chronicle, calling the film "inaccurate" "historically incorrect" and "a tragedy for Israel": Not one of his accusations was, or can be, substantiated. Professor Pappé called the attack "an attempt to delegitimise any criticism of Israel". This was followed by an unprecedented rebuke of its chairman by Carlton's Factual Department, which stood by the film's accuracy. 

What is disquieting is that Green had actually seen the film before it went to air, and had not alerted the programme makers to his concerns, waiting until the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Israeli embassy expressed their "outrage" at a film transmitted after most people were in bed. 

A "pro-Israel" film is now being demanded by them and Green. What does this mean? My film was pro-Palestinian in as much as it was pro-justice. Most of those interviewed were patriotic Israelis, including the war veteran father of a teenage girl killed in a suicide bombing. He and others put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name.

So what does "balance" mean? A film approved by the Israel lobby? This lobby is currently orchestrating an email campaign against my film; curiously, many of the emails are coming from America, where it has not been shown.

At the heart of this is a failure to acknowledge the overwhelming imbalance in the British media in favour of the Israeli point of view. ITV deserves great credit for funding and broadcasting my film, which sought to redress a little of this. The BBC would have never dared to incur the wrath of one of the most influential lobbies in this country, as Tim Llewellyn, the BBC's Middle East correspondent for many years, says in a letter in today's Guardian. He accuses the BBC of "continuing to duck" its public service duty to explain "the true nature of the disaster [of the occupation] and Israel's overwhelming responsibility for it".

This general bias is verified by a remarkable study of the television coverage of the Middle East, conducted last May by the Glasgow University Media Group. The conclusions ought to shame broadcasters. The research shows that the public's lack of understanding of the conflicts and its origins is actually compounded by the "coverage". Viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation. The term "occupied territories" is rarely explained. Only 9% of young people interviewed know that the Israelis are both the occupiers and the illegal "settlers". The selective use of language is striking, says the study. Words such as "murder", "atrocity" and "terrorism" are used almost exclusively in relation to Israeli deaths. 

The extent to which broadcasters assume the Israeli perspective, says Professor Greg Philo, "can be seen if the statements are reversed ... We did not find any [news] reports stating that 'The Palestinian attacks were in retaliation for the murder of those resisting the illegal Israeli occupation.' " 

For years, journalists have complained about Zionist hate mail and the pressure of the "regular call from the Israeli embassy" to current affairs editors. This can take a subtle form: pressure is applied to correspondents in Jerusalem, who then shape their reports accordingly in the interests of what they tell themselves is "balance" but is, in effect, ... censorship by omission. The system gets the Israelis off their backs and "makes life 'bearable'.

If Michael Green and his vociferous friends succeed in intimidating ITV and the  Independent Television Commission, the freedom of broadcasters to be more than mere channellers of "official truth" and to offer viewers suppressed facts and a true diversity of perspective, will be destroyed. 

No matter how big and powerful the corporate media, journalists and broadcasters have a duty to resist on behalf of the public we are meant to serve.

The feature of John Pilger's film, Palestine is Still the Issue, that most angers the pro-Israel lobby and people like Michael Green (Carlton TV boss disowns Pilger, September 20) is that it is all too accurate a picture of life in the occupied territories, as anyone, like myself, who has covered the problem for the past 28 years can testify.

The problem in Britain is that mainstream television news, including the BBC, no longer covers Israel and the occupied territories in a manner that properly conveys the true nature of the disaster and Israel's overweening responsibility for it. Sadly for me, a former BBC journalist, Mr Pilger was right to point out that the BBC would never now make such a film- an honest film - which was short on polemic and allowed the participants, Arab and Israeli alike, to speak the truth for themselves. 

Carlton TV is to be congratulated for taking the kind of initiative our main public service broadcaster continues to duck.     Tim Llewellyn, London

Respect for international law and UN resolutions cannot be the issue either. Israel defies the UN without suffering any sanctions. In 1986, the US was found guilty by the Intemational-Court of Justice of illegally mining Nicaragua's harbours and fined $370 million. The US ignored the court and its decision. Now, by indicating that the US and Britain would go it alone, with or without the UN as a front, Bush continues to destroy the rule of law.

The idea of 'regime change' goes largely unchallenged by public commentators. That the world's most powerful state should decide the government of another country is abhorrent and plainly illegal. Not new, though. Nixon and Kissinger 'changed the regime' in Chile from a democracy to a murderous dictatorship.

Reagan and his administration funded and financed terrorists - Contras - to destroy the legitimate government in Nicaragua. Their targets were schools and hospitals as Reagan proclaimed: 'I am a Contra.'

The US's attempts to sustain a puppet government in Vietnam caused the death of two million Vietnamese and more than 60,000 Americans. The list goes on and on.

Of course, Saddam is as bad as they come. So was Suharto of Indonesia, whose rule caused the death of a million of his countrymen. Surprisingly, neither Britain nor the US demanded a regime change. Instead, he was supported with trade and arms deals until the bitter end.

The growing friction between the two sides came to a head in 1997,  when Iraq banned American nationals from participating in the UN inspection teams after it emerged that Americans had been sending classified information direct to US intelligence. Later that year all the inspectors were expelled. They were allowed back a week later after Russian intervention.

In 1998 the UN operation was halted altogether and the monitors were withdrawn.

THE United States will find it hard to control the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq as it once did because of changes made after a US spying scandal.

The last weapons inspectorate, known as Unscom, was closed down in 1909 after it emerged that Washington had. used American members of its inspection teams to spy on Iraq. The new inspection agency, known as Unmovic, was deliberately designed to reduce the Americans' overwhelming influence - thus making it more difficult for Washington to provoke a crisis if it so desires.

In the new body, Americans play a reduced role in planning inspection missions and, unlike its predecessor; it will not use U Government staff.

Perhaps the most telling change was the abolition of the powerful post of deputy chairman, which was always held by an American. The highest ranking American in the agency now has a relatively lowly job, in charge of the training division. The key post of "activity evaluation" is held by a Chinese official. That of liaising. with foreign governments and companies is held by a Russian.

Another key reform is that the inspectors  no  longer use US spy satellites,  but employ commercial satellite companies instead.

But there have been many more subtle  innovations, such as giving all new inspectors "cultural sensitivity" training.

The changes were all part of a grand diplomatic bargain struck after the withdrawal of Unscom inspectors in 1998, when it emerged that American members had planted bugs and even installed a safe in the UN office in Baghdad containing communications equipment to beam information up to satellites.

This is a sustained record of foul fascist imperialist reaction and domination far more effectively deadly than any colonial mark which German imperialism expansionism managed to leave on the Middle East and elsewhere.

And for this modern American aggressive neocolonial tyranny to be registering more belligerently and treacherously on the counter-revolutionary Richter scale than even Nazi Germany managed, in part, makes sense anyway because of the far greater burden of destructiveness that now waits to be imposed to rid the world of this most colossal 'overproduction' slump in history.

The world will hear increasing revolutionary warnings about this most degenerate decline yet of the capitalist system into imperialist warmongering barbarism.

The daily brutal slaughter and crushing humiliation of the Palestinian people by their Jewish colonial conquerors, with the "democratic" UN sitting back doing nothing, is all that the "freemarket" has in store for the indefinite future as the monopoly capitalist system bristles in fear and loathing at the ever sharper revolutionary pressures from the insoluble economic crisis.

Only the road of TOTAL anti-imperialist revolution will steer a path out of this ever widening warmongering tyranny being inflicted worldwide by bourgeois "democracy".   Build Leninism.   EPSR

World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

Fidel unmasks U.S. lies against China and Cuba 

• We're not going to give them any pretexts; they'll have to invent them, but they should know that they are not gods or the masters of the world

• Concept of War of All the People guarantees that an invader would have to pay too high a price

• There are millions of determined people convinced of their duty, and there are sufficient weapons

CUBA has not imported arms from China for 30 years, and since the special period began 10 years ago, Cuba has not invested a cent in arms purchases, President Fidel Castro stated during the televised roundtable discussion unmasking the United States' lies against China and Cuba.

Fidel gave detailed and documented analysis refuting all the information circulated in the United States on allegedly secret arms supplies by China to Cuba.

He explained that the three shipments of "terrifying weapons," arriving in Cuba on three ships from China, turned out to be beans, rice, fabric, buttons and thread.

WE HAVE ALL THE ARMS WE NEED

Fidel stated that in conversations held during the visit to Cuba by the head of the General Staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, there was no agreement signed for arms supplies. 

"What is our policy on arms?" he asked, and answered as follows: 

He explained that since before the disappearance of the USSR, in the first years of the 1980s, Cuba became completely convinced that it the United Slates undertook a military invasion of Cuba; we would have to fight alone.  

	"We elaborated ideas, and there was a radical change on the concept of our defense, an idea born out of our guerrilla experience, when we defeated an enemy force of 80,000 men in less than two years".

He referred to the fact that almost 20 years ago Cuba began to prepare itself for "the war of all the people," a revolutionary concept for which the country has more than enough arms, so that we could guarantee that an invader would have to pay too high a price for attempting to take over this land.

President Fidel Castro declared that in our country all the wars were studied, including that of Kosovo, where if the resistance had gone on for two more weeks NATO would have been dissolved, because the time had come for a land war and the aggressors did not know how to do that. 

Fidel said that the United States, claiming to be the "supreme judge," wants to say which countries in the world are behaving badly or well, which ones violate human rights and which ones support terrorism - when in reality it is the U.S. government that is the champion of terrorism in the world, that waged the dirty war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, that turned over weapons to Savimbi in Angola and that even shot down UN planes, as well as sponsoring horrible crimes committed in El Salvador.

He recalled that at the School of the Americas in Panama, the United States trained about 70,000 security officers in torture techniques and trained criminals from El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. In the case of Guatemala, 200,000 deaths and 150,000 disappearances were the result, as a time when no one was taken prisoner, but just killed.

He said that in Angola, Savimbi's s bands massacred entire villages; in Chile the United States prepared the coup d'état against Salvador Allende; and in Palestine tanks, helicopters, planes and sharpshooters kill children and raze homes with the support of the United States, which cynically refused to approve a resolution and later vetoed it, so as not to condemn Israel.

After listing all these actions, Fidel asked, "How do they have the nerve to talk about terrorism and human rights? How can they speak of money laundering when everyone knows that the U.S. banks are the main exponents of these actions?"

The roundtable began with an analysis by journalists Eduardo Dimas, Barbara Betancourt and Renato Repro, with moderating by Randy Alonso, of information that appeared last week in the U.S. press, specifically in The Washington Times, voice of the U. S. ultraright, on alleged Chinese arms sales to Cuba.

They read out paragraphs of what that daily has published, including allegations that "according to U.S. intelligence sources," some of the shipments would go to strengthening a Chinese electronic wiretapping system in Cuba.

The panelists recalled that The Washington Times belongs to the Unification Church, better known as the Moonie sect, which - more than a religious organization - is a powerful corporation linked to the most conservative sectors in the United States.

Since 1980, that sect has had ties with the Bush and Reagan families and contributed $10 million USD to Bush Sr 's electoral campaign.

Furthermore, the journalists emphasized that the United States is trying to stop other countries from selling arms, while it provides military aid and advising and sells weapons to 152 countries throughout the world.

Speaking about another U.S. lie on the subject of "asymmetical warfare" - only comparable with "all the trash they've said - the very few truths they have spoken in their lives",- Fidel asked, "Who had the peculiar and stupid idea that someone could make electronic war with the few resources we have? Where did the crazy and stupid theory of such warfare come from?"

He explained that the country is making a great effort to improve communications and mentioned the $400 million USD investment in the Cuban-Italian company ETECSA, installing new microwave systems, and the process of installing fiber optic cables for better and increased communications, initially benefiting all the provincial capitals and some 30 municipalities, but noting that more than 120 municipalities would be left without that service for now.

UNITED STATES: CHAMPIONS OF TERRORISM

Referring to the "new little campaign" regarding the supposed sales of Chinese weapons to Cuba, Fidel said that what had been published in The Washington Times in eight columns on the front page, and later picked up by various news agencies, was done with the goal of creating scandals and influencing U.S. public opinion, presenting Cuba as a threat. 

He read for those present some of the declarations of U.S. officials and representatives of the Cuban-American mafia in Miami, including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and other members of Congress who - alleging the truth of the arms sales - even threatened economic sanctions against China. •