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 
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No 1226 March 30th 2004                                                                                                                                    25p

Middle-class academic and celebrity philistinism is being stirred to comment more and more on the disturbing warmongering chaos that the imperialist system's unresolvable economic crisis is steadily brewing up; but their self-regarding opportunist efforts are adding to the difficulties of consciousness and understanding, even if getting good publicity for revelations against Washington's dirtier secrets. It is not the "death of ideas" which is hurting humanity, but the refusal to own up to and correct the fake-'left' and anti-communist nonsense of the past by generations of bogus "Marxists". The sly "anti-Semitism" confusion over attacks on the western imperialist "Israel" project only gets slimier in TV demagogy hands. And no amount of "intellectual" muddle is going to hide the really huge historical question of Western imperialism's coming DEFEAT.

The idiot-"Marxist" Oxbridge professor Eagleton has tried to excuse the feeble defeatism of past Revisionist "Communism" by now whinging (part ironically) that "ideas no longer matter" which thus gives dominant pragmatic imperialism its seemingly unstoppable opportunity to impose apparently never ending warmongering and political tyranny on the world, - allegedly.

He should be more specific and say that the crap ideas of communism's long Revisionist blight (since Lenin's REVOLUTIONARY anti-imperialist science was torpedoed in Moscow, then Beijing) are what "no longer matter".

Even that statement is complete garbage, of course, because it is precisely the ideological REFORMIST and STALINIST stupidity of the entire shattered "left" (e.g. Eagleton) which continues to help keep the international proletariat confused or paralysed from grasping its clear and imminent REVOLUTIONARY future of enormous promise.

With a self-pitying defeated bleat, Eagleton moans that even "academics" now detest the few "intellectuals" whose ideas about the world "have got it roughly right", such as...."Edward Said and Susan Sontag".

No wonder Eagleton feels like shooting himself!

Said was an excellent anti-imperialist publicist for the Palestinian cause, and always stuck his neck out bravely even when his secure and lofty bourgeois-academic positions could have allowed him to get away with more indistinct mumbling (like Eagleton, for example!)

But at the same time, Said was philosophically a REFORMIST jerk, an anti-revolutionary, — and class-based consciously so (back to Eagleton, again).

And just like all our "intellectuals" in the public eye, in fact, from the very, very "left" to the most "extreme left".

Said may honourably have been the most reluctant of all of them to "condemn terror" in the way that they all ultimately end up doing, but he never publicly made any PHILOSOPHICAL case for explaining that the world only had a REVOLUTIONARY future, — and could have no other.

Eagleton likewise.

And this leading Oxbridge "Marxist" does not even grasp that this is the essence of "philosophy", — the broadest characterisation of the human social condition and the future of its civilisation.

Ongoing class war remains the absolute determining feature of society, — and REVOLUTION is its only possibly longterm way of a new leap forward in the social and human conditions for mankind in general; and that "leap" is already well overdue, with the existing circumstances of the monopoly-capitalist dominated "free world" making that REVOLUTION inevitable, and unavoidable.

In utterly suppressing and burying that core of Marx's real philosophy, which the whole world is going to have to learn, it is precisely the Eagleton brands of philosophical capitulation to the "all-powerful Western way of life" which ensure the "death of ideas" that he complains about.

If endless "reformist" preaching to society's or mankind's "better nature" is all there is, — going on non-stop since well before Jesus Christ's hayday 2,000 years ago, and still getting nowhere, — then no wonder that vast masses of humanity are currently temporarily able to be dumbed-down to a life of celebrity mindlessness, inebriation, pornographic sex, and football tribalism, with little apparent need, interest, appetite, or time for bothering with "ideas" or "different perspectives".

Apart from the utterly ineffectual Said and Sontag, the only "attraction" to a more philosophical way of life that Eagleton holds out is to trailer the dreams of Bertolt Brecht who longed for "a society in which thinking could become a real sensuous pleasure, with no neurotic expectation of an immediate payoff".

Which was nice, as the man said, but which is about as useful for the current political philosophical anguish torturing mankind as an extra punt in the River Cam.

And what monstrously hypocritical posturing by Eagleton to spice up his dreary cowardly article by throwing in Brecht's revolutionarily-challenging image when the German writer's greatest notoriety came precisely from his heroic refusal to disown, dishonour, or break from the dictatorship of the proletariat in East Germany despite awareness of Stalinism's many crimes, weaknesses and faults at a time when the Eagletons of this world were running away as fast as they could from any association with the workers states and their necessary tight disciplines and frontier controls in the face of endless total subversion and sabotage from the West.

It exactly suits Eagleton's anti-communist counter-revolutionary book to slyly pitch Brecht as an "abstract dreaming communist" rather than as a practical supporter of the GDR (which Brecht honourably remained, despite being a flawed Revisionist himself with a patchy political record).

And although "theory should not be the slave of practice" as Eagleton correctly remarks (but needing more elaboration to bring out the dialectical relationship between theory and practice), quoting Brecht's dream of society where "thinking could become real sensuous pleasure" is the worst possible proof, being just as one-sided itself.

Marx's perspective of a world where scientific reasoning would finally triumph as the only philosophy that society could even conceive of — (by all means embracing "thinking as real sensuous pleasure" if that is the odd aspect of things that appeals best) — was much more clearly based on Marxism's deepest philosophical grasp of constructive labour being mankind's greatest need, the distinctive feature which most distinguished out the human species from all others, — turning the potentially grim or disastrous "working to live" necessity under capitalism into the endlessly creative "living to work" necessity in a world socialist society of rational cooperative endeavour where the maximum good for every single individual on Earth (with as much sensuous pleasure as you like) is freely accepted as the condition for the greatest happiness for everyone on Earth collectively.

And Eagleton's examples, — of how both sides (in his caricature of current enfeebled class conflict) fail to see the powerful role of good and bad ideas, — are themselves more idealistic confusion on his own part rather than proof of absent "Marxism". He says:

There is no point in forever piously proclaiming the unity of theory and practice, as though you derived your opinions about Austro-Hungarian feudalism from selling socialist newspapers outside Marks & Spencer.

On the other hand, nobody is more abstractly utopian than hard-nosed, streetwise pragmatists. Some of them cultivate a little philosophising on the side, or perpetrated a spot of it in their youth, but these academic speculations are not to be confused with the Real World: Their current bosses can forgive such adolescent indiscretions, secure in the knowledge that ideas don't matter anyway. As with bad breath, ideology is always what the other person has. Socialism and anti-racism are ideas; greed and inequality are just plain, honest-to-goodness facts of life.

The unity of theory and practice is not demeaned by some daft activist, thinking that his "revolutionary ideology" is only validated if he hands out guru-worship "left" propaganda on a rainy High Street, — but by his sect's "understanding" of the revolutionary perspective being laughably WRONG, — (Revisionist, Trot, Stalinist, Maoist, RESPECT, Alliance, SSP, Anarchist, Eagletonist, — or whatever), — an obvious point which Eagleton will never see because this "philosopher" has let slip all grasp of having a worked-out perspective for mankind (or at any rate of ever publishing it) in favour of agnostic, piecemeal, impressionistic sniping, typical of all "academics" and all "intellectuals" in the EPSR's experience.

The streetwise pragmatists who are basically "abstractly utopian" are better observed, but still not clear examples of fatal splits between theory and practice.

They stick to earning a living without ever really threatening the position of the Ruling Class NOT because of merely refusing to let a duty of correct social and political thinking get in the way of their careers, but because, once again, of the utterly bankrupt reformism of Eagleton and others which precisely reduces "socialism" and "anti-racism" to just being "good ideas" but nothing else.

If there is no serious, rational, scientific perspective for ever seeing the class-divisive, race-divisive, and nation-divisive capitalist system and capitalist RULING CLASS (i.e. US imperialism, principally) toppled from power, — then the idea that socialism and anti-racism will ever become second nature in all human relationships can only remain perpetual pie-in-the-sky.

So back to the careerist trail for now, thank you (a bit like Eagleton, perhaps?).

The attack on this "philosophical" bilge could go on endlessly, but the EPSR's weekly duty to try to update and restate, from the latest "real world" situation, what the only rational, scientific, and worthwhile perspectives for mankind can possibly look like, meanwhile must proceed.

Said should live now. He could have claimed abundant public space for brilliantly debunking the tidal wave of gobshite, from re-emerging glitterati, following the Zionist butchery in cold blood, with a rocket, of the effectively in-custody sheikh Yassin, spiritual inspiration of Hamas.

Clive James led the way with vast columns of cleverly-written and witty abuse of all sides which terminated with the supposed irresistible blockbuster conclusion that, like it or not, Zionist "Israel" is now a fact of history and here to stay.

But it is exactly that statement which is precisely the thing which is at issue, and is precisely the WRONG conclusion.

This genocidal landgrab, rendering the entire 8-million nation of Palestine homeless, is NOT "legitimate" (the United Nations is just a stooge of Western imperialism; gets everything wrong; and will soon be despised and discarded by EVERYBODY).

And this murderous colonising ousting is NOT accepted by the better sentiments of the overwhelming majority of mankind, whenever the facts can be presented accurately.

Above all, this tyrannical imperialist seizure is NOT accepted by the Palestinian nation itself; and the ruthless slaughter of Yassin (and as many more leaders besides) will NOT stop the steadily growing REVOLT of the Palestinians which is today more lethal, better supported, and more resourceful than it has ever been, and rapidly growing clearer about what it must do to defeat Zionist imperialism, — which is the most important factor of all.

"HAMAS is finished and cannot retaliate" crowed the Jewish NAZI tyranny after blowing-up the wheelchair-bound and unconcealed Yassin from a helicopter gunship (US-supplied).

Well, maybe. But to stop the revolt, these fascist colonists are going to have to kill all 8 million Palestinians, or most of them. The HAMAS sect as such is neither here nor there, as the more-perceptive imperialist press reports are themselves admitting. Far from giving in, Palestinian militancy is trying to oust the arch appeaser Arafat so as to regroup the revolt more successfully than ever:

HAMAS militants fought a gun battle with Yassir Arafat's security forces in Gaza yesterday, in a sign of escalating tensions between Palestinian factions.

The disaffection has led to a blurring of the lines between Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups, with shadowy hybrid factions growing between the cracks.

In the back room of a tiny sewing factory in Gaza City yesterday the leader of one such group — the Salahuddin Brigades — told The Times that although many of his followers still drew Palestinian Authority salaries, they disowned the leadership. 

"We started as a group of Fatah who wanted to fight the enemy without the influence of the corrupt people and corrupt leadership that surrounds Abu Ammar [Mr Arafat]," Abu Shahnab, the splinter group's leader, said.

"They are selling us out by making too many concessions to the Israelis. These people are very rich and have their own interests to protect. Their loyalty is not to the people; they should step down."

Asked if he still considered himself loyal to Mr Arafat, he said that he was ruled by the street, not the leadership. "If he gives us a decision and we see it has the support of the Palestinian people, we will obey it. If it does not, we will not obey it." Similar sentiments are voiced by members of al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades — nominally a Fatah militia.

Hamas has thus far avoided violence attributed to an internal power struggle between rival Fatah groups. All factions are eager to cover up any hints of internal division. But there is widespread disaffection among younger Fatah hardliners at corruption, inefficiency and a crackdown on militants, which is seen as collaboration with Israel.

In Nablus, Amin Maqbul, a senior Fatah official, conceded that internal policy divisions — such as whether to attack civilians in cities across Israel or to restrict attacks to soldiers and settlers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had led branches of al-Aqsa to break away.

"Now we are trying to direct these groups in Nablus and Gaza to stop military operations inside Israel, but some of them have external links," he said.

"The brigades have become very strong, to the extent that they do not reflect or recognise Fatah leadership decisions."

While Mr Arafat accused Israel of trying to "destroy Gaza before they leave it", internecine strife between his own men and rival groups erupted outside the security force headquarters in Gaza City. One person was killed and 17 injured in shooting during the morning rush hour.

Witnesses said that the clash had started when police with orders to stop all cars with blacked-out windows pulled over a Hamas vehicle. The routine checkpoint was intended to monitor licences and vehicle registration, as part of the Palestinian Authority's attempt to restore control over widespread lawlessness.

One member of Mr Arafat's Fatah dominated military intelligence force, which stopped the car, said that it was filled with masked Hamas gunmen and weapons. He said that the driver took umbrage, shouting: "Do you know who you are talking to?" before throwing a grenade and summoning reinforcements, who opened fire from all sides.

Other witnesses said that police were heavy-handed, beating the driver who retaliated by hurling the grenade. Many of the injured were members of security forces under the leadership of Mr Arafat's cousin, Moussa Arafat.

The violence flared even as Israeli helicopter gunships launched missiles into the Gaza Strip, killing six people.

Israel continues to hold Mr Arafat responsible for failing to crack down on Palestinian groups carrying out attacks on Israeli civilians, such as the double suicide bombing in Ashdod on Sunday in which ten Israelis were killed.

Police are investigating whether one of the bombers entered the port in a container where weapons, including five grenades, were yesterday found beneath a false bottom. 

The security Cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, gave the go-ahead this week for a "relentless" offensive in Gaza after the Ashdod attack, the first time that Palestinian suicide bombers have penetrated the fenced-in Gaza Strip.

In one airstrike yesterday a helicopter gunship killed two Palestinian men in Rafah. Palestinian witnesses said that a second missile later killed two boys, aged 12 and 14, in the same town.

Two points emerge. Class consciousness, within the Palestinian national revolt, is getting ever-stronger and must inevitably one day result in unbeatable communist revolution.

Secondly, the Zionists can never stop, and never will stop, the genocidal torture and humiliation of the Palestinian nation because of the utterly contradictory and unstable situation that the entire nonsense of "Israel" has been from the start and can never cease to be.

The 8 million Palestinians have only had Palestine to live in for the past 1,500 years.

The 4 million Zionist colonisers for the past 1,500 years (and longer) have been inhabitants, native speaking, of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, England, Poland, the USA (last 200 years), etc, etc.

In the ferocious Armageddon turmoil to come after world imperialist economic collapse, — when no one can be certain about who will be fighting who, or being blamed for being "the cause of all the trouble", etc, etc, etc, — which "immovable object" is likely to give way? — the 8 million Palestinians whose only homeland this is, — or the 4 million Zionist colonisers who all have far more reliable and longstanding homes and family connections in Los Angeles, New York, London, Warsaw, Kiev, Odessa, Paris, etc, etc, than they do in occupied Palestine (i.e. "Israel")?????

Irresponsible establishment stooges like James can pretend all they like that Jerusalem has had a "majority Jewish" character since ages ago, but the post-1945 armed colonisation with millions of Jews coming in from Europe and America is what the world clearly knows and can never forget, — with this brutal takeover STILL the only essence of what is going on to this day, — as these latest imperialist-press observations clearly reflect:

The first Ruad Ajlouni knew that the Israelis were moving in was as he awoke in the early hours to find a group of armed men standing over his sleeping children.

The 30 or so Jewish activists had quietly clambered on to the terrace roof of the three-storey apartment block in rundown Arab east Jerusalem, drilled their way through the locks of the outside doors and surrounded the Ajlounis before they had a chance to stir.

"They said they had bought the flat and were moving in," said Mr Ajlouni. "At three o'clock in the morning. I said: 'Good for you. Show us the documents and I will help you move the furniture'."

But there were no deeds, only weapons. Within a few minutes, the Ajlounis and their five children, the youngest just 18 months old, were out of the door. The furniture followed.
		
When the Israeli police finally arrived, after the Ajlounis had spent hours pleading for help, the officers said there was nothing they could do: it was a matter for the courts — and they nearly always back Jewish over Palestinian property claims.

"This area is a prime target area for the settlers because they claim this is King David's city. They want to evacuate as many Palestinians as possible and replace them with Jews so they can say there are no Arabs in it," said Mr Ajlouni.

The Ajlounis' home is pinned between the southern ramparts of the old city's Jewish quarter and the site of the biblical City of David.

It was here, 3,000 years ago, that King David established the First Temple and Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people. And it is here today that Jews are seeking to reclaim the ancient city as their own by repopulating the Arab neighbourhood between the City of David and Judaism's holiest site, the Wailing Wall.

Leading the charge is Elad, the City of David Foundation, which is excavating King David's palace and some of the homes of the thousands of Israelites vita once lived around it.

"The goal of our organisation is to increase the presence of Jews in the neighbourhood as much as possible," said Elad's director, Doron Spielman. "We've been dreaming of coming back to biblical Jerusalem for 3,000 years. This is the fulfilment of our dreams. We cannot trust that if this is an Arab neighbourhood, Jews will be safe to walk around here."

The Palestinians say that Elad is responsible for ethnic cleansing by stealth through the seizure and occupation of property or duping the vulnerable into signing papers they do not understand.

Strategy

Israeli critics, such as the Jerusalem city councillor Meir Margalit, of the leftwing Meretz party, say Elad's operation is one part of a wider government strategy to "Judaise" swaths of east Jerusalem by refusing planning permission to Arabs, demolishing Palestinian homes and constructing the towering new "security" wall through the east of the city.

"All these features together paint a very dramatic picture where the Israeli government, together with the settlers, are part of a national programme to make the life of Palestinians so hard they will leave Jerusalem. It is that simple," said Mr Margalit.

"The country is full of places where Jewish history is found. For that matter, you can even find such places in Iraq. But this cannot be a reason to take houses of people who have lived there all their lives. This is not about buying houses. This is political."

Outside the seized apartment, one of the new occupants, a man who gave his name only as Udi, stood with a pistol on his hip. He says they had not intended to arrive in the middle of the night.

"We actually planned to do it in the day. To come, to say hello, we're your new neighbours."

But the Jews are not so welcome that they do not feel the need to build sentry posts manned by armed men outside each home. They are funded by the government, a reflection of its support for the expansion of Jews in the Arab east of the city.

Among those who have moved into the area is a Jewish-American avionics engineer, Gary Speiser.

"My grandfather was born in the old city so we always had a family connection," he said. "I don't consider myself a settler. I've heard friends and relatives call us that but we don't think that way because I don't mind being in a mixed neighbourhood. But I do desire a more Jewish or a Jewish-only neighbourhood."

Three families live in his complex under the protection of an armed guard perched in a watchtower at the gate. 

"It's a very special feeling living here, really living part of history. It's also a very weird feeling in a good way, as if we're living in a different world down here."

All Palestinians may stand for this humiliation some of the time; some Palestinians may stand for this humiliation all of the time; but all Palestinians will not stand for this humiliation all of the time, — yet "Israel" can never represent anything else in the eyes of all Palestinians, and all rational thinking people worldwide.

It is their lunatic racist anti-Semitism which will finally destroy the Palestinians, James goes on, — inferring that this is a throwback to Nazi Germany, and a historical impossibility.

But anti-Semitism of that depraved German imperialist stupidity has got nothing whatever to do with it.

There is a totally different situation in the world now, with a powerful Jewish lobby playing a huge and influential part in the worldwide "master-race" tyranny that American imperialism is determined to impose on the world to make sure that the coming global economic crash is paid for by everyone else except the USA.

And the "chosen people" gibberish which has turned these 4 million Jewish colonisers into tyrannical homicidal fanatics plays a crucial part in this world warmongering gendarme role that American imperialism (more than 400 coups, invasions, wars, subversions, etc, inflicted since 1945 in its now unique "superpower" role) plans in detail to impose on a long list of "rogue states" and "evil influences" all round the planet, including "pre-emptive" blitzkriegs on "ANY" state, no matter which, — that "dares" to try to emulate the USA in its unchallengeable weapons technology and its unprecedented amassed total firepower. 

Whenever needed around the Middle East and beyond, these Zionist thug-hitmen for Washington, (themselves the fourth strongest military power on Earth), have powered into punitive action, humiliating local Arab nationalist regimes to take them down a peg or two or get them overthrown, and blitzing to destruction any regional technological/weapons-technology advances which might take Arab and Muslim states out of the paralysed backwaters into more dynamic perspectives.

Within Western monopoly-imperialism overall, the Jewish lobby mafia now plays an undoubtedly powerful propaganda and financial role. It is not "anti-Semitism" to expose and denounce this.

It is politically-correct anti-reason to refuse to notice this and record it.

James, the Archbishops, and the Western imperialist media monopolies have created their own ideological game, with their own ludicrously biased rules, by deciding in advance that any idea of challenging the armed-colonising right-to-exist of "Israel" amounts to "anti-Semitism" with no further discussion allowed.

But what is the chief repository of racism in the world???

It is the totally divisive and domineering capitalist-colonialist imperialist SYSTEM; and the Jewish part in this reactionary tyranny is now very specific and, via "Israel", absolutely huge.

The incurably RACIST essence of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine is, and will remain, a permanent running sore for all world politics, — as even some imperialist press admissions reveal.

The armed Palestinian revolt is deemed "sub-human"; and the "transfer" genocidal elimination of the Palestinian nationality is the real Jewish dream, an exact replica of NAZI "master-race" ("chosen people") fanatical self-righteousness, and irredeemably malevolent:

Israel's deputy defence minister, Ze'ev Boim, recently wondered whether there was a genetic defect that made Arabs terrorists. "What is it with Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular?" he asked on Israel army radio. "Is it some sort of cultural deficiency? Is it a genetic defect?"

The dismay this arouses will be discounted by some of Israel's friends simply as evidence of the extreme nature of its present government, with its barrier wall and its "transfer" enthusiasts.

But to believe this is to misunderstand the nature of Israel's dominant ideology — of which Ariel Sharon and his minister are nothing more than devoted servants. It is not he that is the problem, but the Zionism he espouses. 

For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism meant in practice, the Israeli historian Benny Morris's latest revelations and comments published in the Israeli daily Haaretz and in the Guardian — make salutary reading.

Using Israeli state archives for his recently revised study, he reminds us that Israel was set up by expulsion, rape and massacre. The Jewish state could not have come into being without ethnic cleansing and, he asserts, more may be necessary in future to ensure its survival. 

This bald assertion should shock no one, for it is entirely consistent with the basic Zionist proposition of an ethnically pure state. Palestine's indigenous-population was a clear impediment to this aim, which is why the concept of transfer was so central to Zionist thinking long before 1948 — advocated by Zionism's leaders and expressed through a series of specific expulsion plans from the mid-1930s onwards. These led inexorably to the 1948 Palestinian exodus and the refugee tragedy that persists today.

Between January and the end of May 1948, a mere two weeks into the war, a third of the Palestinian population (my own family included) had left, most of them expelled. The "war" itself was more of a civil conflict and could not alone have accounted for the mass exodus. The Arab armies were notoriously ill-equipped and poorly trained and no match for the superior Zionist forces. Though ultimately ineffective, they came to defend the hapless Palestinians and to prevent their territories from being totally overrun.

The truth is that the problem for Zionism was always how to keep Palestine without the Palestinians. And hence today's Israeli anxieties about the so-called Palestinian "demographic threat". As the intifada continues, despite draconian suppression, there is near panic over a "demographic spillover" that might dilute Israel's "Jewish character". 

One recent opinion poll shows that 57% of Israelis support transferring the Arabs, and government ministers such as Avigdor Lieberman advocate this idea quite openly.

It is against this background that the monstrous barrier wall in the West Bank can be understood. "The Palestinians will always pose a threat and they must therefore be controlled and caged in," Morris explains. 

Hence, also, Ariel Sharon's offer last December of a "unilateral" withdrawal from 40% of the West Bank, and his hardline deputy Ehud Olmert's support for partition "because of demography". 

But the problem also exists inside Israel, whose Arab population is 20%, and growing. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be an Arab majority in the whole of Israel-Palestine. How will the Zionists stem the tide and keep the state Jewish?

If Zionism is to prevail, there are few choices. As Morris says, it can only be by superior force to overcome "the barbarians who want to take our lives". The Arabs have "no moral inhibitions", he claims, insisting that in Islam "human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the west". 

Is this observation much different from Boim's Arab genetic defect? And can the rights of such inferior people equate to those of Jews? "The right of [Palestinian] refugees to return... seems natural and just," Morris says. "But this 'right of return' needs to be weighed against the right to life and well-being of the 5 million Jews who currently live in Israel."

Apparently, Jewish self-determination is an imperative that supersedes the rights of the people at whose expense it was promulgated.

And in this he encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Though creating Israel entailed Palestinian suffering, Morris argues, it was for a noble aim. That is why Zionism is still a dangerous idea: at its root is a conviction of moral rightness that justifies almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means massive military — including nuclear — force, unsavoury alliances, theft of others' resources, aggression and occupation, the brutal crushing of all resistance — then so be it. No one should be under any illusion that Zionism is a spent force, regardless of current discourse about "post-Zionism". That a benign Zionism, sympathetic to Palestinians, also exists means little while these basic tenets remain.

We must thank Morris for disabusing us of such notions. But a project that is morally one-sided and can only survive through force and xenophobia has no longterm future. As he himself says: "Destruction could be the end of this process."

Most interestingly, this insoluble Western imperialist degeneracy and ideological corruption is beginning to alarm ever-widening sections of the middle classes, including journalists and politicians.

Here follow views from a Fleet Street features editor and a New Labour Cabinet member (ex), published by the imperialist press itself in the last week:

The most dangerous delusion of our time must surely be the notion — trotted out by all manner of public figures, from George Bush to Clive James — that Islamist terror is motivated by hostility to freedom and the western way of life. As anyone who is familiar with the Arab and Muslim world, or even bothered to read successive statements by al-Qaida leaders, it is in fact overwhelmingly driven by hostility to foreign, and especially western, domination and occupation of Arab and Muslim countries. Of course, there are other factors in play. But from the start of his campaign in the 1990s, Bin Laden's call to arms focused above all on US foreign policy in the Middle East: its troops in Saudi Arabia, backing for pro-western dictatorships like Egypt, sanctions against Iraq and support for Israel against the Palestinians — along with the subjection of Muslim Populations in Kashmir and Chechnya. Since September 11 US interference in the region has gone much further, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result is an arc of foreign occupation across the Middle East, unmatched anywhere else the world.

That has in turn spawned an arc of resistance, while anti-US feeling among Muslims has reached unprecedented levels, as demonstrated in this week's Pew opinion survey. Muslims now find themselves in perilously unequal conflict with the world's military powers: the US, Britain, Russia, India, China and Israel. There are also dangers that the boundaries between nationally based mass resistance movements against occupation and socially disconnected (though widely supported) terror networks of the al-Qaida type become blurred. But to address the swelling and legitimate grievances that underlie both is now a global imperative. Unless and until the occupying powers — notably the US, Britain and Israel — do that, they will be fuelling, not fighting, terror.

Ariel Sharon's decision to incinerate a 67 year-old blind quadriplegic cleric outside his local mosque will certainly go down as one of the most spectacularly counter-productive acts of violence in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Quite apart from the morality of assassinating Sheikh Yassin, it is the Israeli people themselves who will suffer from certain retaliation. Israel has the right to defend itself, President Bush declares, while apparently denying the Palestinians the same luxury. But the killing can have no military value at all. Whatever his authority as the founder and figurehead of Hamas, the idea that Yassin was involved in planning armed attacks is preposterous. When Israel rocketed the apartment block he was visiting last September, the ailing sheikh was reported not to have even realised that an attack had taken place. And regardless of the domestic political calculations of the Israeli government, such attempts to destroy a popular movement by decapitation are doomed to failure.

From Algeria to Vietnam, the past century is littered with evidence that such strategies invariably come to nought. Where resistance has deep roots — as Hamas's undoubtedly has in the occupied territories — it will always re-emerge, however savage the repression. Yassin has been succeeded by Abd al-Aziz Rantissi, and if the Israelis incinerate him, another will take his place.

The sharp-tongued Rantissi is widely regarded as more hardline than Yassin. But, as he told me in Gaza a couple of months back, Hamas is ready to call a ceasefire. On another occasion, referring to the Hamas dream of Islamist rule throughout Palestine, he has said: "We can accept a truce...live side by side and refer all the issues to the coming generations."

But instead of seizing the opportunity for peace offered by such political signals, the Sharon government is deliberately undermining the basis for a two-state solution by carving up the occupied territories with its electrified fences, closed zones and ever-expanding settlements. At the same time, it is planning a partial withdrawal from the most heavily populated areas, while effectively annexing other areas of the West Bank and confining Palestinians to walled bantustans that can never form the basis of a viable state.

Such a rearrangement of the occupation will clearly not resolve the conflict. And considering that the US arms and funds Israel to a greater degree than any other state on the planet, its leverage might be seen as an ideal opportunity for the much vaunted project of western humanitarian intervention. But instead of applying pressure to achieve a just settlement, the US and its friends refuse to talk.

After September 11 2001, Tony Blair promised hope to the slums of Gaza and convinced his supporters that he would deliver US commitment to a Middle East peace deal in exchange for backing the invasion of Iraq. Now his main contribution appears to be extra funding for Palestinian police and prisons to provide security to the occupier — while Gordon Brown's response yesterday to the killing of Sheikh Yassin was to announce the freezing not of Sharon's, but of Rantissi's, (probably non-existent) assets in Britain.

The killing of Yassin, along with the wider bloodletting in the occupied territories, will further heighten the Arab and Muslim anger that is fuelling Islamist terror attacks. Justice for the Palestinians should self-evidently be pursued on its own merits. But given the extent to which Palestine has become a focus of global Muslim grievance, it has also become a necessity for international security. And the failure of western leaders to confront the crisis in a remotely even-handed way is now a threat to their own people.

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None of the history of mutual hostility over the past two decades prevented a deal along these simple lines: we accept your acknowledgement of guilt over flight 103, you open up your WMD programmes to inspection, and then both of us can start benefiting from trading your oil again. The weakness of this deal as presented, however, is that it appears that Libya didn't have any WMD, other than chemical weapons no longer likely to be usable. The International Atomic Energy Agency stated last December that "Libya was not close to building a nuclear weapon". Indeed, Libya had itself nine months earlier proposed inspections, so the west's triumphalism says more about the US-UK desire to placate domestic critics than about forcing any fundamental policy change on a recalcitrant Gadafy.

Nor is this rapid shift from terrorist to statesman confined to Libya. The US backing of Islamic terrorism in the Balkans provides another example. As the official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre has now revealed, a secret alliance was formed between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups to assist the Bosnian Muslims in violation of the UN arms embargo. A vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling through Croatia was organised by US, Turkish and Iranian clandestine agencies, together with Afghan mojahedin and pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Aircraft from Iran Air were used, joined by a US-sponsored fleet of C130 Hercules.

The 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, directed by the US general Wesley Clark, was said to be stopping an alleged "genocide" by the Serbs in Kosovo (some 2,000 bodies were later exhumed, a horrifying number but far short of the 100,000 the US predicted). The US goal was to assist the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Yet the year before, the US state department had branded the KLA a terrorist organisation, financing its operations from the heroin trade and funds from Islamic countries and individuals, including Osama bin Laden.

As James Bissett, the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, has subsequently reported: "This did not stop the US from arming and training KLA members in Albania and sending them back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and intimidate hesitant Kosovo Albanians... Despite a UN arms embargo, and with the support of the US, arms, ammunition and thousands of fighters were smuggled into Bosnia to help the Muslims... Bin Laden and his network were also active in Kosovo, and KLA members trained in his camps in Afghanistan and Albania." According to reports in April 1999, assistance was also provided by Britain's SAS.

Through much of the 1990s, US support for Islamic militants in former Yugoslavia was backed up by covert US airdrops of arms, especially at Tuzla in northern Bosnia. These took place in the face of Operation Deny Flight, the UN-imposed and Nato-policed no-fly zone over Bosnia. The US House of Representatives also failed to authorise the war under the War Powers Act, making it illegal (shades of Iraq). But the airdrops were only the tip of the iceberg. Retired US officers heading Military Professional Resources Inc, a private paramilitary firm based in Virginia, planned the bloody Croatian "liberation" of the Serb-held Krajina enclave, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs.

US goals in the use of the KLA as a proxy force, similar to the funding of the Contras against the leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, were partly to remove Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia as one of the remaining Communist regimes. But related motives were to break Russia's monopoly over oil and gas transport routes and secure pro-western governments in the strategic Black Sea-Caspian Sea oil-rich basin. A crucial oil corridor, called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, designed to become the main route to the west for oil and gas extracted in central Asia, was to run from the Black Sea to the Adriatic via Bulgaria, Macedonia near the border with Kosovo, and Albania. Another was to run across Serbia to Adriatic ports in Croatia and Italy, fed by a pipeline running from a Black Sea port in Romania.

The implications of this are stark. The US played a major role in creating and sustaining the mojahedin to fight the invading Soviet army in the Afghan war of 1979-92. Then from 1992-95 the Pentagon assisted the movement of thousands of Islamic fighters from central Asia to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims and remove the Milosevic barrier, and so extend US influence in a key area of oil geopolitics — a "pact with the devil", as Richard Holbrooke, America's former chief Balkans peace negotiator put it. It has proved quite another thing to rein them back in again. Before President Bush trumpets his dedication to his war on terror, he should reflect on his country's links with terrorism over the past decade where it has suited US interests. 

Negotiations for a rehabilitated public image for Colonel Gadafy, linked to improved western access to Libyan oil, began to surface in August 2002 with the visit by the Foreign Office minister, Mike O'Brien, to Sirte, near Tripoli. As the BBC said at the time, Libya was keen to re-enter the world economy, and the UK did not want to lose out on potentially lucrative oil contracts.

For both the UK and US, an energy crisis is looming. The latest BP statistical review of world energy predicted that UK proven oil and gas reserves will last, respectively, only 5.4 and 6.8 years at present rates of use. It has been estimated that by 2020 the UK could be dependent on imported energy for 80% of its needs. The US energy department has calculated that net imports of oil, already at 54%, will rise to 70% by 2025 because of growing demand and declining domestic supply.

Libya produces high-quality, low-sulphur crude oil at very low cost (as low as $1 per barrel in some fields), and holds 3% of world oil reserves. It also has vast proven natural gas reserves of 46 trillion cubic feet, but actual gas reserves are largely unexplored and estimated to total up to 70 trillion cubic feet.

The problem of access to Libyan hydrocarbons was Gadafy's record of running a state terrorist machine — Britain had even, according to the former MI5 agent David Shayler, paid £100,000 to an al-Qaida cell in Libya to assassinate Gadafy in 1996, and then granted asylum to a member of the cell named Anas al-Liby, who lived in Manchester until 2000.

Moreover, just two months before Gadafy's pact with the west was announced on December 19 last year, Libya was caught trying to import nuclear technology from Malaysia. If it had been Saddam Hussein, no doubt the deal would have been scotched on the grounds of his unreliability and bad faith. But it is remarkable how sometimes terrorists suddenly turn into "statesmanlike and courageous" friends (to use Jack Straw's phrase).

So "brave" Muammar Gadafy has agreed on the importance of combating terrorism.

A handshake with Tony Blair has sealed his re-entry into the international community, with contracts worth several hundred million pounds for Shell and BAE to follow. His compliance in opening up Libya to nuclear weapons inspectors has been spun as a major triumph in the "war on terror". The motives, however, are rather more cynical.

These views partially reflect some of exactly the same scientific conclusions that the EPSR has weekly consistently fought to establish over 25 years. 

The inescapably revolutionary conclusions all of this unravelling ultimately leads to, could never be a bourgeois call, but the vital mass-educational work, conscious or unconscious, can only come via a mass awakening of various bourgeois, academic, and intellectual circles, including petty bourgeois trade unionism. 

The "oil conspiracy" theory is overdone, but it is not so much "incorrect" as naïvely and foolishly unbalanced, born of anti-revolutionary straight-line thinking. 

The automatic assumption that "more and more oil will always be needed", etc, dangerously walls brains off from grasping that imperialism will carry on warmongering still more ferociously than ever EVEN WHEN WORLD OIL SUPPLIES ARE IN TOTAL GLUT AND PLAYING A HUGE PART IN THE GLOBAL "OVERPRODUCTION" CATASTROPHE that will eventually bring the imperialist system to totally mutually devastating war and revolutionary ruin.

The economics and politics of world slump, trade war, dumping, currency wars, and mutually-destructive unemployment exporting, followed by all-out inter-imperialist war, - are not ideally prepared-for by just seeing Western imperialism's monopoly-capitalist industrial and banking giants as only ever engaged in DEVELOPMENT intrigues for oil (or anything else).

This misses the point entirely of Marx's whole revolutionary understanding.

Securing oil resources is the name of PART of the game just now.

But the whole game involves much, much more, and requires a vast leap in understanding, — imperialism as ultimately a TOTALLY WARMONGERING system, in which the most powerful monopoly-capitalist state must eventually be forced to CRUSH all rivals and all opposition by the very NATURE of monopoly-power relationships in this very specific world domineering era of unprecedented wealth, privileges and glory to the mightiest empire.

Currently, - and predictably, according to Marxist science, - that empire has never looked sicker or more dangerous, - which is by far the most important question of all (and one which most of the 'left' and most of the now-beginning-to-be-alarmed middle class hopelessly fail to grasp, so far).

The greatest military, financial, and political power the world has ever known is being thwarted by history itself, - by the epoch when the very global triumph of capitalist-imperialist exploitation and domination itself TRANSFORMS the international proletariat into an ultimately organised ideological force which will no longer put up with that domination (see EPSR box).

The current still developing signs are in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Earlier rampant flourishes were in Vietnam, Korea, Algeria, Egypt, Aden, Iraq, etc, etc, etc, throughout the whole international movement for colonial freedom which brought down the Western imperialist physical empires.

The cycle of economic crisis, now ending the most colossal world trade boom in history which began in 1945, once again requires the imperialist world rulers to physically go back into all the Third World trouble spots or rapidly start losing total global control and their aura of invincibility.

Via "rogue states", or "evil-axis influences", or just former US imperialist stooges now going straight or forced into revolt by slump-necessity, - America's world domination is coming under serious, and shortly TOTAL, siege.

The defiance from even Saddam's rubbish regime (a former US stooge) was too dangerous a loose cannon; and even the nutty Taliban's bizarre "anti-imperialism" and the equally peculiar "anti-Great-Satan" and "anti-Crusader" stances of the Ayatollahocracy and Bin Laden-Wahabiism have proved to be more than Washington's total-control needs could tolerate.

This astonishing historical fragility of the Western imperialist system, now that it is at the very peak of its supreme global might and arrogance, can be envisaged as even more staggering once serious organised COMMUNIST revolution starts to spread massive ideological strength and unbeatable insurrectionary capability to the growing anti-imperialist revolt once again.

Iraq is still nowhere near approaching such DEFEAT conditions for the imperialist warmongering programme, - but even only faced with such apparently haphazard resistance, the USA's obvious lack of any credible control, intimidation, or respect in this re-colonisation occupation of Iraq (and Afghanistan) is possibly having nothing but an ever more catastrophic effect on America's standing in the region, and throughout the world at large.

So far, it is not much more than the steady drip of small-scale setbacks, brutal crassness, and painful humiliations, - as the imperialist press itself reports:

VIOLENT clashes left 22 people dead across Iraq this weekend as fighting erupted between US forces and guerrillas armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

In Baghdad yesterday, five Iraqis were injured when a bomb exploded on a street. US troops sealed off the area.

In Tikrit a three-year-old boy died yesterday after being shot by US troops when the car in which he was travelling failed to stop at a checkpoint.

Rebels in Mosul fired a rocket at a government building yesterday, killing two civilians and wounding 14.

But it was Falluja where the fiercest fighting raged as marines and guerrillas fought for hours through the city's alleys, killing one marine, at least six Iraqi civilians, including an 11-year-old boy, and a television cameraman.

In the fighting, which began on Friday, 25 Iraqis and five marines were injured.

By Saturday morning, all the main roads into Falluja were blocked by US soldiers.

After promising a new approach to the resentful population of Falluja, US marines seem to be making the same mistakes as their predecessors, the US 82nd Airborne, who moved out of Falluja on Wednesday. Last April the 82nd killed 18 protesters over two days of fighting. In the first six months of the occupation, it killed at least 40 civilians and police in and around the city.

The Americans have never recovered the trust of the people following those deaths, and within a few months a fullscale insurgency had erupted across the province of Al Anbar. By early autumn, the US army had virtually lost control of the area around Falluja. American soldiers are now rarely seen outside their vehicles without helicopter and tank support.

But Friday's sweep through the city was seen by many residents as a display of power by their latest occupiers, the Marine Expeditionary Force.

'On Thursday there was an attack that killed an American soldier — this [Friday's sweep] was revenge,' said Mohammed Albalwa, the president of the Falluja City Council. 'They want to show they are in control. But they can't control Falluja.'

• Iraq is heading for economic meltdown from its $310 billion international debt and reparations bill from the Iran war and Kuwait invasion.

Attempts by the International Monetary Fund to reduce it are insufficient and will block Iraq's longterm reconstruction, says Jubilee Iraq, an offshoot of the Jubilee Debt Campaign.

'It is economically crazy to expect the repayment of so much because it will send the country into a tailspin,' said Justin Alexander of Jubilee Iraq.

The IMF is due to publish a debt plan for Iraq next month.

PASHTUN paramilitaries are reported to be deserting Pakistan's forces in droves as a major offensive against al-Qaeda by President Musharraf descends into chaos on the border with Afghanistan.

The local tribesmen were encouraged by an audiotape, purportedly recorded by the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, calling General Musharraf a traitor and urging Pakistani troops to disobey orders.

Aired on the pan-Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera, the tape said: "Musharraf seeks to stab the Islamic resistance in Afghanistan in the back. Every Muslim in Pakistan should work hard to get rid of this agent Government, which will continue to submit to America until it destroys Pakistan."

The ten-day operation to rout the al-Qaeda and Taleban sympathisers from the border region has provoked intense anger among local tribesmen. It is the first time in 56 years that the Pakistani Army has entered the lawless region, threatening the Pashtuns' fiercely guarded autonomy.

As dissatisfaction spread it emerged that scores of paramilitaries were deserting. "Several soldiers belonging to the local tribes have left their units after many innocent people were killed in the military action," said Merajuddin Qureshi, an MP from Waziristan.

A Pakistani military spokesman denied the report, but other sources confirmed the desertions. Local men comprise a large part of the paramilitary and scout units deployed along with the regular army troops in the region.

About a dozen paramilitaries, most of them from local tribes, were killed last week when militants fired on their unit. "Many of the survivors have returned home, refusing to fight their own people," Mr Qureshi said.

In Islamabad yesterday opposition leaders gave warning of civil war as the Government continued to deal out collective punishment to tribes for any members found to be providing sanctuary to the militants or for any attack on government forces in their area.

"We have plunged into a war which has no end," said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the hardline religious coalition.

The unrest has spread to other districts, with increasing attacks on army posts and government installations. The rebels blew up a bridge in northern Waziristan to prevent army reinforcements reaching the troubled area.

"The tribes are armed with heavy weapons including anti-aircraft guns and can easily match the government forces," Mr Qureshi said.

Despite the warnings, government forces began demolishing hundreds of houses yesterday after defiant tribesmen refused to hand over foreign fighters and their local supporters. "There is not going to be any let-up in the operation," said Brigadier Shah, chief security officer for the region.

Local tribal leaders meeting in Wana were equally defiant. "It is an infringement on our culture and tradition," one said. "No honourable tribe will allow the troops in their area. The Government should pull out the troops if they want peace."

The tape, which appeared to be authentic, was an embarrassment for the President, who claimed last week that "a high-value al-Qaeda target" was holed up in the lawless region and was surrounded by government troops. Officials had speculated that al-Zawahri was among 600 al-Qaeda and Taleban sympathisers living under the protection of local tribesmen. As charred military vehicles littered the mountain roads, officials claimed that the death toll among government troops had reached 49 and that more than 55 militants had been killed.

However, the guns fell silent under a ceasefire in Waziristan yesterday as tribal elders tried to negotiate the release of more than a dozen soldiers taken hostage by militants near the city of Wana.

After President Musharraf began the military sweep, officials claimed that the Army had killed several militants, many of them foreigners, and arrested more than 150 others in the week-long operation.

Local tribal leaders maintain that most of the foreigners killed are Chechen and Uzbek men who married local women and have been settled in the area for many years.

Pakistani authorities now admit that many al-Qaeda suspects might have escaped to Afghanistan last week during the siege of Kaloosha and Sarwakai villages, where they were holed up.

But very little ever seems to go right, and the oft-predicted assassinations of Musharraf or Karzai in Afghanistan (who has just been forced to put off "democratic elections" yet again because of ongoing total insecurity) would put total disaster on the agenda. 

Even before such potential catastrophes, signs of sickness proliferate in both the political and the military legs of the US imperialist colossus, - as bourgeois press scepticism itself reveals:

The survey confirmed figures released earlier by the Pentagon that the suicide rate among soldiers in Iraq was higher than the military average, with 15.6 for every 100,000 troops.

It also suggests that the extended American occupation of Iraq is claiming a toll on service personnel and their families far beyond that measured in the casualty rate.

Such considerations are weighing heavily on the Pentagon during the advance planning for the next round of troops rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan.

A survey published in the Washington Post yesterday suggests the US military could confront a serious troop shortage.

In the survey of military spouses, 50% said they expected the army was heading for a problem with retaining personnel, as families grow weary of prolonged and repeated deployments.

That disillusionment has already surfaced within the ranks now serving in Iraq. In the Pentagon survey, 52% of troops reported low or very low morale, and 72% said their units suffered low morale. More disturbing for the Pentagon, the soldiers had little faith in their commanding officers.

"Nearly 75% of the groups reported that their battalion-level command leadership was poor," the report says. The troops also believed their officers showed little concern for their well-being.

Mental health experts believe the nature of the war in Iraq intensifies the psychological dangers to US forces. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist for the US Department of Veterans Affairs, has attributed the high level of post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans to the guerrilla tactics of their Viet Cong opponents, who used mines and booby traps to create an atmosphere of constant danger. More than a third of Vietnam vets exposed to significant combat suffered PTSD through the 80s, surveys have shown. In Iraq, the biggest threat to troops so far has been improvised explosive devices.

"The phrase that has currency in the field of trauma studies is 'no safe place'" Dr Shay says. "If your body can never let down, if there is truly no safe place, if the enemy is constantly creating a condition of threat, this contributes a great deal, I think, to the development of psychological injury."

The scale of those injuries is becoming more apparent. As many as 10% of the casualties arriving from Iraq were evacuated with mental health problems, the commander of America's main medical centre at Landstuhl, Germany, said last month.

Other soldiers have sought help on their own following their return from theatre. Wayne Smith, an adviser to Vietnam Veterans of America, says as many as 4,500 troops returning from Iraq or Afghanistan have tried to seek counselling from veterans' centres rather than seek help through the regular military channels.

But as the war in Iraq enters its second year, the Pentagon has been forced to make its fullest acknowledgement to date of the psychological toll exacted by the conflict. In a painful report, the Pentagon last week made available for the first time its findings on the extent of suicide in Iraq, low morale in the ranks, and soldiers' access to mental health care.

The survey was commissioned by the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, after five soldiers committed suicide during the month of July.

The findings were so disturbing to the Pentagon that officials withheld its release for three months.

There have been 24 soldier suicides in Iraq since the start of the war according to the Pentagon's count. That figure does not include Seeley, or William Howell, 36. Howell, a special forces veteran, shot himself in the head on March 13 after chasing his wife around the garden of his Colorado home with a handgun. He was at least the seventh soldier believed to have committed suicide after returning from Iraq.

The Pentagon's figure also does not account for several other deaths in Iraq that were attributed to non-combat related bullet injuries.

One of the first official acts of the current Bush administration was to downgrade the office of national coordinator for counter-terrorism on the National Security Council, a position held by Richard Clarke. Clarke had served in the Pentagon and State Department under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder, and was the first person to hold the counter-terrorism job created by President Clinton. Under Clinton, he was elevated to cabinet rank, which gave him a seat at the principals' meeting, the highest decision-making group for national security.

By removing Clarke from the table, Bush put him in a box where he could speak only when spoken to. No longer would his memos go to the president; instead, they had to pass though a chain of command of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who bounced each of them back.

Terrorism was a Clinton issue: "soft" and obscure, having something to do with "globalisation" and other trends ridiculed from the Republican party platform. "In January 2001 the new administration really thought Clinton's recommendation that eliminating al-Qaida be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd, like so many of the Clinton administration's actions, from their perspective," Clarke writes in his new book, Against All Enemies. When Clarke first met Rice and immediately raised the question of dealing with al-Qaida, she "gave me the impression she had never heard the term before".

Clarke was not the only national security professional who spanned both the Clinton and Bush administrations. General Donald Kerrick served as deputy national security adviser under Clinton and remained on the NSC into the Bush administration. He wrote his replacement Stephen Hadley, a two-page memo. "It was classified," Derrick told me. "I said they needed to pay attention to al-Qaida and counter-terrorism. I said we were going to be struck again. They never once asked me a question, nor did I see them having a serious discussion about it... I agree with Dick that they saw those problems through an Iraqi prism. But the evidence, the intelligence, wasn't there."

Rice now claims about terrorism that "we were at battle stations". But Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward in Bush At War as saying that before September 11 "I was not on point... I didn't feel that sense of urgency".

Cheney alleges that Clarke was "out of the loop". But if he was, then the administration was either running a rogue operation or doing nothing, as Clarke testifies.

Bush protests now: "And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September 11, we would have acted." 

But he had plenty of information. The former deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, the only member of the 9/11 commission to read the president's daily brief, revealed in the hearings that the documents "would set your hair on fire" and that the intelligence warnings of al-Qaida attacks "plateaued at a spike level for months" before September 11. Bush is fighting public release of these PDBs, which would show whether he had marked them up and demanded action.

The administration's furious response to Clarke only underscores his book. Rice is vague, forgetful and dissembling. Cheney is belligerent, certain and bluffing. In Clarke's account, as in the memoir of former secretary of the treasury Paul O'Neill, Bush is disengaged, incurious, manipulated by those in the circle around him; he adopts ill-conceived strategies that he has played little or no part in preparing. 

Bush is the Oz behind the curtain, but unlike the wizard, the special effects are performed by others. Especially on terrorism and September 11, his White House is at "battle stations" to prevent the curtain from being pulled open.

Clarke's revelations of White House deceit, stupidity, and chaotic hysteria are getting useful wider book publicity internationally, but his line on "greater vigilance to ward off Sept 11" is, of course, complete bilge.

The whole "war on terrorism" is utterly pointless, and self-defeating. More terrorism will result.

The Bush programme to blitzkrieg Iraq, come what may, is the real story in all this, the crucial thread to the world imperialist warmongering crisis which will bring the system down in revolutionary ruin. Build Leninism.  EPSR

E P S R

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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