Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 07712639934 www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
No 1246 Aug 31, 2004                                         25p Weekly

Northwest seminar delayed again. Reconvene Oct 16????

Blatantly arrogant coup-plotting and ruthlessly treacherous inter-imperialist spying form the appropriate background to the ever-intensifying warmongering plans by the "free world" Western leadership, despite the growing catastrophes undermining the American Empire's domination. But for every new belligerent imperialist stunt, Third World anti-imperialist nationalist forces create ever-newer problems to add to Washington's headaches. And the West's domineering monopoly-imperialist spirit is beginning to lose its nerve.

The stalemate in Najaf only confirms the doubts about US imperialism's longterm warmongering goal as reflected immediately in the Iraq theatre of the Empire's Middle East operations.

The wish to assert total domination has hardly been enhanced by having to compromise with Ayatollah Sistani, leader of Iraq's majority Shia community, in order to suspend the rebellion by the demagogic "anti-imperialist" cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The deal letting the Sadr militia melt away with all its weapons while the Americans' stooge "Iraqi government" in Baghdad has to pay compensation for the death and destruction it was party to in Najaf alongside the Empire, could taint the Allawi regime as incurably-weak and despicably-laughable poodles who will be wiped out even in bent bourgeois elections (if they are ever held, as promised for January).

Even the most anti-communist Western media could not paint a very bright picture of the West's counter-revolutionary ambitions for the Middle East as implied by this Najaf pact:

The government has repeatedly said it will not tolerate the presence of militias in Iraq. And Mr Allawi has urged militiamen to take advantage of an amnesty. But by the time of the peace deal many fighters — most of whom were not from Najaf — had left the holy city and returned to their homes in Baghdad and the south, taking their weapons with them.

There is no guarantee that they will not at some point resume military action.

Salama al-Khafaji, a prominent Shia member of the new Iraqi national council who played a role in the mediation, said: "Ayatollah Sistani's initiative solved the immediate issue of the ceasefire. And we needed some spark to put out the fires, without burning either the government or Mr Sadr. But the real problems lie not only in what happens in Najaf but in many other troubled parts of Iraq.

"What will happen to the Mahdi militia in Kut, Amara or Sadr City? We urge them to disarm and take part in the political process."    

Others believe that once Mr Sadr is drawn into the political process his rabble-rousing skills will lose some of their potency and he will soon be marginalised.

But the Sadrist movement has organised at the community level, providing services such as refuse collection and directing traffic, filling in the gaps left by the official municipal authorities and trying to create an alternative local government structure in the poor urban Shia areas under its influence.

Moreover, there is little doubt that his Iraqi Arab nationalist populism has struck a chord with thousands of mainly young, poor and disaffected Shia.

Mr Sadr demands an immediate withdrawal of US troops from the country and refuses to cooperate with the interim government, which he regards as a puppet of Washington. He wants a strong central Iraqi government and opposes Kurdish demands for federalism. In contrast to the "quietist" Shia trend represented by Mr Sistani, Mr Sadr believes in theocratic rule and wants sharia as the law of the land.

He would also like to see a system similar to the Iranian model, where elections would be held but real power would rest with the clergy.

"If that is what the Iraqi people decide they want, then they will have it," said a senior government official. "But that decision should be made at the ballot box and not at the end of guns."

But there is in all this a tacit recognition of the emergence of Mr Sadr — who has until now withstood the might of the "US military — as a rival centre of power which cannot be ignored.

A disenchanted government minister said: "Our past mistakes have turned Mr Sadr into a player. He still has his army, but he is now a political problem and not just a military one. And he won't be going away soon. With every crisis he emerges on top and stronger than before."

Financial Times Editorial, August 28
"What is certain is that the confrontation [in Najaf] has established Mr Sadr's theocratic constituency... as an important element in the future equation of power in Iraq... Political problems cannot be resolved by military means, especially against a religious backdrop...
"The problem is that militias ... thrive in Iraq because the US-led forces have comprehensively failed to establish security. Now, only an inclusive political process can draw the Sadrists and the Sunni insurgents in central Iraq into a shared national endeavour in which they feel they have a part. That is an absolute precondition for the constituent assembly and general elections scheduled for next year."

Hassan Hanizadeh Tehran Times, August 29

"Although it is possible that the current situation in Najaf could change ... the presence of Ayatollah Sistani... will have a balancing effect, preventing the outbreak of more bloody clashes... "The recent clashes... proved that there is no military solution to the crisis in Najaf and other Iraqi cities, and that a political solution must be found. Arranging a speedy withdrawal of the occupying forces and a general election is the only way to prevent the continuation of the Iraq crisis, for which both the Iraqi people and the US... forces have paid dearly."

New York Times Editorial, August 28

"Significantly, it was with Ayatollah Sistani, not Ayad Allawi [the Iraqi prime minister] whom Mr Sadr worked out the withdrawal deal. The battered remnants of his Mahdi army were allowed to leave the mosque without having to surrender or give up their weapons. They are now supposed to stay out of Najaf and the city of Kufa... but similar agreements... have broken down in the past. And with Mr Sadr now seen as a hero in the Shia slums, he will have no trouble replacing his fallen fighters and building an even more powerful militia to advance his towering political ambitions and militant religious agenda...

"Washington... needs to make major adjustments in military and political strategy if it is to retain any hope of rebuilding Iraq and preparing for credible elections in five months."

Jim Hoagland Washington Post, August 29

The Bush White House and its chosen blunt instrument of governance in Iraq, Mr Allawi... have escaped immediate disaster... But by striking an agreement with Mr Sadr and then in effect imposing it on Mr Allawi's government, Ayatollah Sistani enhanced his already considerable political authority at Baghdad's expense. He acted in extremis and to preserve his role as custodian of the shrine. In doing so, he set himself far above Mr Allawi as the arbiter and moral voice of Iraq's destiny...

"Mr Allawi's publicised role in telling US commanders when to start and stop attacks has helped George Bush deflect political responsibility for the risks that US soldiers took. But it also has blurred who is responsible for what in nominally sovereign Iraq, which is supposed to be moving toward national elections in January. This leaves Iraqis — and Americans — confused about US intentions, responsibilities and strategy."

This is all a long way from the original US occupation blitzkrieg intention to arrest al-Sadr and put him on a murder charge over an alleged rival moderate Shia cleric who was assassinated in 2003.

It has also given a huge hostage to fortune in strengthening the Ayatollah Sistani, bearing in mind his strong links with the Shiite Ayatollahocracy in next-door Iran which it is emerging is being seen as potentially a vastly bigger future problem for US imperialist Middle East domination than was even the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, even when misrepresented most luridly as "an immediate global military terrorist threat to the 'free world'".

The Ayatollahs in Tehran have been even bigger "anti-imperialist" demagogues than al-Sadr could ever dream of being, and have achieved not much more than the partly-pathetic Saddam Hussein ever did with his mixture of sordid opportunism, treacherous dictatorial tyranny, and fatuous bluster.

But the potential anti-imperialist stance of Iran really frightens the American Empire and its stooge Zionist hitmen running the genocidal Jewish colonisation of Palestine and forever plotting or carrying out lightning blitzkrieg raids all round the Middle East to crush or destabilise any nationalist regime which starts to take its obligatory "anti-imperialism" too seriously.

A Sistani-controlled regime in Iraq would be an enormous boost for Iran's self-confidence and regional prestige, and a corresponding added problem for the American Empire's Middle East domination plans which hiccup particularly badly over the possibility that Tehran might be emerging as a new nuclear military power in the region.

But despite the doubts and setbacks, the increasingly warmongering essence of all Western imperialist politics explodes more and more glaringly.

The West is currently trying to play down the latest scandal of Zionist spying on its own "closest allies" and paymasters in Washington, hoping that the story does not blow up into a major issue for the American presidential election of opposition to the worst extremes of berserk Zionist warmongering.

But although "free world" journalism can be persuaded into playing things down (however scandalous and dangerous) when the even bigger scare of "hardline Islamic anti-imperialist nuclear weapons" can be brandished to frighten everybody, — the bourgeois press admission nevertheless cannot conceal the very advanced and highly hysterical warmongering mentality which is steadily gaining ground throughout Western ruling circles.

THE threat of a new spying row between Washington and Israel loomed yesterday after reports that a middle-ranking Pentagon official is being investigated for allegedly passing secret documents to Tel Aviv.

The official was identified by The Washington Post as Larry Franklin, a regional policy expert. He is the target of a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry for allegedly providing Israel with a sensitive draft of a presidential document outlining US policy on Iran.

It was the first US case of suspected espionage involving Israel since Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy intelligence analyst, was jailed for life in 1987 for passing large volumes of classified material to Israeli contacts. Franklin was an Iranian specialist who worked in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau. Israel has recently become acutely concerned by reports that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons at its Bushehr reactor.

US officials have hinted that Israel may be preparing a military strike on the reactor to end the threat. Iran has threatened to destroy Israel's Dimona reactor if such an attack were carried out, but, in a rare conciliatory gesture, President Mohammad Khatami said yesterday he was ready to give the world "guarantees that we won't seek nuclear weapons".

The American media reported the FBI's investigation of Franklin had been under way for several months. One official was quoted as saying that information handed over by Franklin was passed to Tel Aviv by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a prominent pro-Israeli lobbying group.

Two AIPAC employees are also under investigation but a spokesman yesterday denied any wrongdoing. "Any allegation of criminal conduct ... is baseless and false," said Josh Block. "We would not condone or tolerate for a second any violation of US law or interests".

Other Israeli sources spoke more frankly about "friendly" spying. "They spy here, we spy there, everyone spies on everyone," one intelligence source said. "The only rule of the game is not to get caught."

The source added that the US remained the "prime target for overseas intelligence operations for Israel, since most of the relevant Middle East intelligence is gathered in the States". Inside knowledge of Washington's strategy for dealing with Iran would prove invaluable to Israeli planners as they prepare to counter any Iranian threat. "Iran has threatened more than once to destroy the Jewish state," an Israeli official said.

The affair may prove a serious embarrassment to the Pentagon, which is already suffering the fall-out from a critical report on its handling of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. After calls last week for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, the spying allegations are likely to fuel demands for a shake-up of the Pentagon's civilian leadership.

Franklin's office reported to Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's, third-ranking official behind Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy. Both Feith and Wolfowitz are strong supporters of Israel and critics have frequently complained that Pentagon policy-making is controlled by a "Jewish cabal".

Feith is an influential aide. He oversaw the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, now defunct, which was criticised for providing policy-makers with alleged links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

A report in the Washington Times claimed yesterday that the FBI had "unconfirmed" information that Feith also supplied information to Israel in the 1980s. The Pentagon made no comment and no arrests have yet been made in the case.

Relations between Israel and Iran have become increasingly fraught in recent months.

But if not Iran (if Khatami means what he says), then certainly some new Third World nations at some point WILL press ahead in seeking to defend themselves with nuclear weapons because not to do so is going to invite GUARANTEED military onslaught from the American Empire alliance or its Zionist hitmen at some stage in the future as the global economic crisis of the monopoly-imperialist system creaks ever-more-dangerously towards total "overproduction" breakdown, currency collapses, and market depressions (see EPSR box).

And whatever Tehran's intentions, an utterly depraved and irresponsible war-provoking Zionist blitzkrieg raid on Iran can almost certainly be predicted for the near future.

Western reactions to Najaf have all shallowly missed this essential central point, — that however obscure, prosaic or uneventfully boring the final fizzling out of the armed stand-off may be for the purposes of detailed instant-headline reporting, — this whole total-Iraqi-chaos situation remains a completely explosive world-struggle issue.

Superficial neocon hysteria cannot avoid concluding that the world's fanciful "terrorist" problem must now be measured as worse than ever.

Nearly 18 months after the costly blitzkrieg invasion of Iraq (in terms of the crippling high price, the lost prestige, and the politically-damaging bloody military occupation difficulties), — the "mission accomplished" early rhetoric against Saddam has just had to conclude a "mission unaccomplished" compromise with rising nationalist forces in Iraq which hardly even existed when Saddam was first toppled.

Of itself, the al-Sadr problem may yet prove to be a totally damp squib; but there can be no mistaking that overall, the Western imperialist warmongering position is looking both politically, militarily, and economically more fragile by the day.

National rejection of Western imperialist domination is breaking out all over the Third World; the American Empire's warmongering imposition on the planet looks increasingly stupid and futile and grows more and more unpopular; and any confidence and clarity with which the warmongering was started by the West's leaders in the blitzkrieg on Serbia, reinvigorated after 9/11, has been steadily ebbing away since.

The unprecedented difficulty Bush is having in getting re-elected despite standing as America's continuing wartime leader, normally resulting in a virtual walkover, — is one measure of this.

The remarkable impact of sacked BBC boss Greg Dyke's renewed autobiographical onslaught on the Blair regime's criminal lying propaganda to bulldoze Britain into the war and to whitewash all "inquiry" attempts to get the decision declared illegal, is another.

And New York has just staged reportedly the biggest mass protest demonstration since the time of Vietnam to demand the end of the Middle East warmongering and to demand the downfall of the Bush government.

Signs such as these, plus the resulting splits in the broader Western imperialist camp over nervousness about crass warmongering, hint that a new general worldwide revolt may be in the offing against the use of superior imperialist military might as a way of "settling" any international problems.

This impression has been added to by the astonishing African-state intervention to thwart the just-mounted Western imperialist "mercenary" plot to stage an armed coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea so as to, overthrow its allegedly "rogue" regime in favour of someone groomed to be closer to Western oil-monopoly interests.

Western capitalist press admissions have been open about the extent to which the Western imperialist intelligence agencies knew all about the coming coup and had not only turned a blind eye to it but had very widely connived in the plotting to the point of actively encouraging it.

THE Pentagon and MI6 were warned in advance about the prospect of the African coup attempt which led to the arrest of Sir Mark Thatcher.

The American defence department was tipped off by Greg Wales, a British businessman named in legal papers as one of the ringleaders behind the plot.

Two weeks before the plan swung into action, he met a senior Pentagon official in Washington and told her that the situation in Equatorial Guinea had become "dangerous" and to expect trouble.

This weekend the official confirmed that the conversation had taken place, and the subsequent coup attempt tallied with the warning. The alleged plot failed when a group of mercenary soldiers were arrested in Zimbabwe while trying to collect a cargo of machine-guns, mortars and other weapons at Harare airport in March.

Those at the centre of the affair say Washington wanted the overthrow of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has been blamed for human rights abuses.

During earlier trips to the American capital, Wales, who worked for Simon Mann, the alleged coup leader, met a CIA analyst and representatives from the Africa section of the US State Department. Wales participated with government officials in private think tanks that had discussed the possibility that Obiang could be arrested for money laundering or human rights violations.

"The State Department was under increasing pressure because of Obiang's reputation to impose penalties on Equatorial Guinea which would have damaged American oil interests," Wales said.

Earlier this year the State Department put Equatorial Guinea on notice of sanctions after it was named in an official report as one of the world's worst offenders for human trafficking.

MI6 also knew in advance of a conspiracy to overthrow Obiang "through diplomatic channels", according to a British official.

Since the botched coup, the Pentagon has announced plans for a show of naval strength in the Gulf of Guinea. A US navy battle group may be sent to waters near Equatorial Guinea as part of a wider military exercise.

Equatorial Guinea is of increasing strategic interest to the United States. The country is sub-Saharan Africa's third biggest oil producer, pumping 330,000 barrels a day, and with oil prices topping the political agenda in Washington, officials are anxious to increase sources of supply outside the Middle East.

Severo Moto, 60, the opposition leader in exile who has been linked to the coup plot, flew to Washington in 2002 where his backers had hired a lobbying firm to promote him as the future leader of the government in exile. Moto is said to have met Charles Snyder, a senior official in the African affairs bureau at the State Department, and other senior officials.

A State Department official said he had not been briefed and had no comment on whether a warning of the coup had been received. Wales denies involvement in the coup plot.

There are other indications that the plot — which has been widely portrayed as a ham-fisted attempt by a band of mercenaries to seize power in an oil-rich state — had wider backing. Moto had contacts with the government of Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, according to Spanish media reports. Sources say that Spain was planning to issue an international warrant for Obiang's arrest.

According to one account, Obiang was to have been detained at the request of Spanish, authorities while he was travelling.

Obiang flew frequently to Rabat in Morocco where he is said to have been receiving treatment for cancer. One trip that he made to Morocco in April coincided with the timing of the intended coup, had the mercenaries not been intercepted.

Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's intelligence minister, is reported as having said that the alleged conspiracy to overthrow Obiang was infiltrated at an early stage by South African intelligence.

Thatcher was arrested last Wednesday by South African police. Prosecutors claim they have receipts from Thatcher to show that he invested $275,000 to fund the logistics of the coup attempt and that he had bought a helicopter gunship.

Thatcher's business partner, former crack mercenary pilot Crause Steyl, is believed to have handed over details of Thatcher's investment in an aviation firm that had contracts with Simon Mann, the old Etonian and former SAS officer in jail in Zimbabwe.

The Observer, which first revealed details of Thatcher's alleged involvement in the coup last month, has been told by South African sources that Steyl accompanied Moto to the Canary Islands on the eve of the day the alleged putsch was to happen. They were flown from Madrid to the islands in a South African-registered King Air 200 by a stunt pilot and landed in the morning of 7 March. The plane is then reported to have flown on to the Malian capital of Bamako where Moto awaited news from the mercenary leaders. The next day, the Boeing 727 carrying Mann and his crew of more than 60 mercenaries, was impounded in Harare and those on board arrested.

Steyl's evidence could be highly damaging to Thatcher, who faces 15 years in jail after being charged last week with helping to finance the mercenary plot to topple the President.. The government of Equatorial Guinea is requesting an interview with Thatcher in South Africa and is hoping to having him extradited to face trial there.

It was Steyl and another former mercenary who arranged the leasing from US Dodson Aviation of the Boeing 727-100 which was seized in Zimbabwe with 70 former South African soldiers on board last 7 March. Steyl's brother Neil was piloting it, and has been held in Harare since March.

One of Steyl's associates suggested that it was concern for his brother's fate that prompted Crause Steyl to start co-operating with the Zimbabwean and South African investigations. 

As further details emerge of the extraordinary coup plot, speculation is mounting over the role played by western intelligence agencies in the plot.

South African sources claim the rumours of the coup were circulating among diplomatic circles in Pretoria earlier this year — although the Foreign Office denies any 'prior knowledge'.

The allegation that British officials knew about the potential illegal coup comes amid claims from British and Spanish intelligence agencies that French spies helped to scupper the plot.

It is also claimed that the US and Spanish security services were involved in the plot to replace the dictator of the tiny West African state, which has vast oil reserves.

Although it is not suggested that British intelligence was complicit in any coup plot, the claim that some officials might have   had advance knowledge of the attempted putsch has prompted opposition politicians to demand a statement from the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, last night called on the government to come clean about its knowledge of the operations. 

The Observer has learnt that in February this year there was a meeting at the London headquarters of the Royal Institute of International Affairs on the future of Equatorial Guinea. It is known that there was at least one government official present as well as representatives of the oil industry. According to sources present, there were active discussions about rumours of coup plots there.

Mann is accused of being the mercenary leader hired by mysterious business and political figures involved in an old-fashioned battle to control the oil reserves. Up for grabs was a huge multi-million pound bounty of cash plus a share of lucrative oil concessions.

Many in the intelligence community are asking whether a hidden hand was played by Western powers. Some suggest American, Spanish and British interests offered their backing to exiled Moto. On the other side were the French, who believed a successful coup would have cemented US domination in the country, where US oil giant Exxon Mobil already enjoys the most important drilling concessions. British intelligence sources have suggested that the French learned of the plot and helped to sabotage it.

Spanish intelligence sources have made similar claims. Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was a close ally of the exiled Moto, who lived in Madrid.

Mann, who was found guilty on Friday in a Zimbabwean court of attempting to buy arms for the botched coup, confessed to Spanish involvement in plot.

The Spanish government has denied this claim. But it has emerged that earlier this year two Spanish warships left the Nato naval base based near Cadiz. One of the frigates had on board 500 elite troops and the soldiers are reported to have been told they were heading for Equatorial Guinea.

Nick du Toit, one of Mann's alleged accomplices arrested in Equatorial Guinea, told the country's court last week: 'The Spanish government would recognise the Moto government and it had the blessing of some American higher-up politicians.'

It was Du Toit who named Thatcher in a statement last week that led to his arrest.

The bourgeois papers are less eloquent about the apparent solidarity shown by the South African and Zimbabwean authorities with a fellow African state, — in defiance of the obvious Western imperialist interest in the success of the coup.

A clearer picture of the South African and Zimbabwean attitude to the plotting, and in particular to the Western imperialist involvement in it, would be very usefully informative; but on the surface, it looks like another indication of how Third World nationalist anti-imperialism is poised to play a major historical role in frustrating the American Empires plans for violent warmongering world domination.

Meanwhile, the general situation confronting Western imperialism's initial Middle East onslaught continues deteriorating, above and beyond the Najaf stalemate.

The "handover" stooge regime in Baghdad is just viciously out of its depth.

And the recolonising Western military occupation just runs into more and more resistance in both Iraq and Afghanistan, — in the admissions of the Western imperialist press itself:

JUST weeks ago, Basra was being held up as a role model for security operations in Iraq, proof that the softly-softly approach of British troops was the way forward in Iraq; now, those troops are largely confined to their bases, sheltering under a barrage of mortar and gunfire.

More than 500 attacks by hostile forces were reported last month, the Army has revealed. In the past month four soldiers have died in Basra and al-Amarah, a city 100 miles to the north, three of them in combat.

Although the Army refused yesterday to reveal the numbers of combat injuries, military sources said that some of the fiercest engagements had lasted for hours, with some conspicuous acts of bravery involved.

Both cities are predominantly Shia-controlled and, while attention has been focused on the battles between American troops and the Shia militia of the rebel cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf, the British have been engaged by the same al-Mahdi Army further south in cities that were once regarded with pride as havens of relative peace that had escaped the troubles of the American-controlled north.

In the past four weeks, British Army involvement in almost all kinds of reconstruction and training has been virtually suspended. "We are pretty much stuck behind the wire and being mortared and attacked on a daily basis. It is frustrating," one officer said.

Although the military places most of the blame for the fighting on a backlash against the American siege in Najaf, the conflict has also been a test of the local tactics employed by the British and their commander. Brigadier Andrew Kennett, who has ordered a policy of "de-escalation and then negotiation".

To avoid turning the cities into battlefields and to allow newly trained Iraqi forces to test their own responsibilities, Brigadier Kennett has adopted a defensive posture: refusing to launch counter-attacks on the Mahdi militia, except when asked to do so by the new Iraqi Government.

So far, however, the Iraqi police and National Guard have appeared unwilling, or unable, to prevent the Mahdi Army taking to the streets and entrenching its control.

"We are acutely aware that Mahdi militia have been openly dominating the ground and parading with all their weapons. The Iraqi police have not been able to take them on," a British source said.

Squadron Leader Helen Hindmarsh, a military spokesman, said that troops in the two cities were facing "regular attacks by mortar, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] and small-arms fire".

In cities where British forces were once happy to move around in civilian or soft-skinned vehicles, and where commanders were urging Western civilians and organisations to come and invest, most British personnel will not go anywhere except behind at least an inch of armour. In some cases, troops have been using helicopters just to travel from Basra city centre to Basra airport.

Tanks are now widely used around Basra, particularly at checkpoints. Even a convoy to bring medical supplies to the city's main hospital has had to be escorted in by Challenger tanks and Warrior armoured vehicles.

Al-Amarah has seen the worst fighting, with 361 attacks this month. There were seven in July. "We can't stick our neck out of our base without getting attacked," one British officer said. 

Speaking by telephone from the city, Abu Maytham, the Iraqi police chief, said that the Army's city-centre base was coming under regular pounding from mortar positions.

Mr Maytham also revealed that prisoners at the city jail had broken out last week after a revolt by inmates. Several dozen have escaped capture.

The Taleban militia claimed responsibility for the Kabul bombing, which a spokesman for President Karzai said had killed two Americans, two Afghans and three Nepalis in front of the offices of an international security company.

Abdul Latif Hakimi, a spokesman for the Taleban, said that the bomb was detonated by a Taleban fighter using a remote control device. "A few minutes ago he phoned our chief to say that he finished his mission and is alive," he said

The Taleban was ousted from power by a US-led alliance in late 2001 and is now waging a campaign of violence to disrupt Afghanistan's first presidential elections on October 9.

The blast in the Shar-i-Naw area of Kabul, where dozens of aid agencies are located, injured an unspecified number of other people and destroyed several vehicles.

Afghan police cordoned off the site of the explosion as ambulances arrived in the area to transfer injured people to hospital, witnesses said.

Taleban fighters have launched a series of attacks against aid workers and organisations in recent months in an attempt to bring development to a halt and undermine the Government's efforts to rebuild the country.

Almost a thousand people, including militants, Afghan and American soldiers, civilians, foreign and Afghan aid workers and election officials, have been killed in the past year.

The entire Sunni part of Iraq — towns such as Fallujah, Ramadi and Baquba — is now considered so dangerous that western reporters have simply stopped going there. The south is dangerous too; though Shia militant groups have so far refrained from executing westerners they have taken hostage.

Most American TV networks now rarely venture out of their Baghdad hotels. Last week not a single American TV reporter travelled to Najaf to cover the conflict there; instead the American networks prefer to "embed" with the US military, where the information on offer is, at best, one-sided.

By contrast, the British media emerged well from what was the biggest story in Iraq since the Abu Ghraib scandal, with all major British newspapers and the BBC represented in Najaf. For journalists working in Iraq, it sometimes feels like trying to operate between a rock and a hard place.

Last week around 60 of us covering the battle in Najaf were sitting in our hotel when the Iraqi police burst in.

A man stormed into the lobby and fired a shot into the wall. Other policemen, some of them wearing balaclavas, then ran upstairs and went from room to room, yelling 'Yalla, Yalla" - "Go, go".

It is hard to argue with someone who is pointing a Kalashnikov at you, and so we went — waiting outside the Sea of Najaf hotel while the police fired a live volley over our heads. They then herded us on to a truck.

The incident last Wednesday confirms an unwelcome truth: that despite the talk of democracy, Iraq's interim government shares many of the same authoritarian traits as its predecessor.

The new police force is very like the old one. The same Ba'athist instincts — to threaten and intimidate people who cause you embarrassment — appear to be alive and well.

Many of the rank-and-file police officers who served under Saddam Hussein are now back in uniform.

But it was the needs of the world imperialist crisis, requiring the American Empire's original Iraqi stooge Saddam Hussein and his Baathists to act more and more thuggishly in Western imperialism's interests, which eventually made Saddam too big for his boots so that Washington had to get rid of him.

Only the most violent tyranny will keep the scorned Allawi stooge regime in power, — but how quickly will the fraught crisis conditions, plus the Empire's non-stop confusion and mistakes, put Washington back on collision course with an aggressive thuggish Baghdad yet again???

More and more bourgeois commentators are beginning to pick up on the broader historical patterns of this imperialist crisis.

Here is the interesting and alarmed perception of what is "going wrong" from an ex United Nations official:

It was the first Gulf war in 1991 and the accompanying sanctions and stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia that had driven deep cleavages in relations between Islam and the west. More important, it had given rise to the age of global terror — beginning with the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993. In the decades of Palestinian and Arab anger at the US for its close support of Israeli occupation, it had never before been targeted, except in the Middle East.

To say this is not to underestimate the impact of the current war and occupation of Iraq, which have made the US a reviled power in the Arab and Muslim world, and are creating powerful new hatreds globally and seeing thousands of terrorist recruits joining the anti-US battle. Most of the world had opposed this war in fear of just such an outcome, but it now seems to feel powerless to influence the US in the face of Washington's determination to "stay the course".

In most countries, Bush is held responsible for the terror crisis, but this is unfair. The groundwork for the crisis was laid by President Bush Sr and his European and Arab partners who, in 1990, went along with his decision to mete out severe punishment to Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. Many had warned of unprecedented Muslim fury if Iraq were attacked, since the UN had never before approved the use of force to counter an invasion. More important, Israel had for years been allowed to occupy Palestine and parts of Syria and Lebanon with impunity.

But the US, flexing its muscles as the sole superpower, was not to be deterred — and the war was ruthlessly prosecuted. Martti Ahtisaari, the then UN under-secretary general (and later Finnish president) went to Iraq to assess the damage. He told the general assembly: "The conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results and most means of modern life have been destroyed."

Worse was to follow, with the most punitive sanctions in modern history destroying Iraqi society and claiming the lives of at least half a million children. But the predicted upheavals in Arab countries allied to the US failed to materialise after the war, and there was public glee in the nascent neoconservative movement, which saw in this the validation of its view that the US had been too constrained in using force in its Middle East dealings. No one was particularly interested in seeing the profound alienation that was developing among Muslims worldwide, and the related establishment of a global terrorist network.

The world again seems powerless to influence the US in the face of the even more rapid growth of anti-western sentiment resulting from the current war. There is no graver challenge than stemming the growth of terrorism practised by aggrieved Muslims. The rise of such militancy is driven by US policies and cannot be glossed over with self-serving assertions that "they" hate western freedoms and are inherently barbaric and uncivilised. Beheadings are indeed so, but so is the killing of over 600 innocent Fallujans in a week of aerial bombing, or the death of 500,000 children through UN sanctions.

The depth of this anti-US animus is recent. Muslims and Arabs gravitated towards the US for decades, and worked closely with Washington to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But even the most moderate now see the US as bent on crushing Islam. 

Salim Lone is the former director of communications for the UN mission in Iraq

This is almost matched by the reported thoughts of a disillusioned American Government official who served with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, more narrowly concentrating on the subjective American ruling-class disarray which is fuelling all these wrong decisions and disasters, one after the other:

There was no "imminent threat" to the United States from Iraq. Then there was no strategy for building a new Iraq."Hubris and ideology" ruled. Now, "Iraq is more dangerous to the US potentially than it was at the moment we went to war". 

These are the reluctant judgements of one of the key US officials who participated in the highest levels of decision-making of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

"There are so many bungled elements. We haven't had a strategy for the beginning for dealing with Moqtada al-Sadr. We were flying blind from the start. The result was we didn't neutralise him early on."

In Falluja. after the murder of four American contractors, the US military pounded the city and withdrew. "We now have a terrorist base in Falluja. The Bush administration looked at the political cost, at what would have been necessary to destroy this terrorist haven. A country not an imminent threat to the security of the US is now in some areas a haven of the most murderous, dedicated enemies of the US, including al-Qaida."

In Iraq, the US cannot escape from its own trap without even more ruinous consequences. "If we walk away the place falls apart disastrously. Americans are not only a bulwark against civil war. They are a stimulus for nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist mobilisation. We need to reduce that stimulus and provocation without robbing the new Iraqi state of the bulwark it needs. 

"We have been dealt a bad hand by mistaken decisions, going to war, in prewar planning and in the first few months after the war ended. A lot of negative things are difficult to alter because of mistakes that were not inevitable. There are really no good options."

Fallujah remains under terrorist control; insurgents run rampant even beyond the Sunni triangle; the number of US soldiers killed spirals towards 1,000; Larry Diamond offers from the heart of the Green Zone an unvarnished first-hand account of the unfolding strategic catastrophe.

Diamond, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, a conservative thinktank located on the Stanford University campus, was personally recruited to serve as a senior adviser to the CPA by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, once provost of Stanford.

When he arrived in Baghdad, Diamond observed "a highly centralised decision-making process. There were weighty Americans with decades of experience in the region who were not consulted or integrated into decision-making, foreign service officers up to the level of ambassadors." 

The neoconservatives in the Pentagon were in charge, and CPA head Paul Bremer "was the agent more of the Pentagon than the state department". The Pentagon cut out state because the neocons viewed it as "not on board" ideologically.

The British were regarded as warily as was the state department. British ambassador to the United Nations Jeremy Greenstock was systematically shut out. "In terms of the final decision-making on key issues I never saw much evidence that [the British] had the opportunity to weigh in." 

When British officials in Basra urged conducting local elections there "they were vetoed" Diamond told me. "It would have helped. If the British had been listened to it might have been better. They had a history with this country."

The UN was considered only useful as a rubber stamp to approve the flawed decisions. After the August 19 bombing that killed 22 UN personnel, "the organisation felt that they suffered this trauma and for what? They were so ignored, they felt used. The combination of the risk and the trauma with the lack of impact and consultation left the organisation feeling wounded."

The reality of all these setbacks makes it more necessary than ever to correct the very misleading impression which some media gave of the recent Washington announcements of huge troop withdrawals by the USA from Europe and Asia.

The implication was that the battered American Empire was pulling in its military horns a little. But nothing seems further from the truth. Casual comments from various sources much more indicate a sick ruthless determination for greater mobile aggressiveness in all military matters precisely to avenge past setbacks and to get on top of all the policy mistakes via a firmer-than-ever imperialist hand:

Speaking at a meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mr Bush said: "The world has changed a great deal and our posture must change with it for the sake of our military families, for the sake of our taxpayers and so we can be more effective at projecting our strength.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, hinted at the change earlier this month. "We've decided that it's time to shift our posture in Europe and Asia and around the world and move from static defence, which does not make much sense today, to a more deployable and usable set of capabilities."

Senator Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee, said: "This is a fundamental change and is a change probably in the tactics of our military, so that our people will be more mobile, more available at other places all over the Earth." 

Charles Heyman, senior defence analyst for Jane's Consultancy Group, said it was consistent with the threat faced by the US that the troops should be withdrawn. The decision, which will also affect about 100,000 military family members and civilian employees, is likely to be greeted warmly by military families, but will have no bearing on the 150,000 US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the whole of Marxist science is saying loudly that history is solidly against the Empire in this dramatic period in the international balance of class and national forces.

Globalisation has created a majority world population now which is consciously and coherently sick of the ever-widening gulf between the lot of the Third World poor and that of their Western monopoly-imperialist exploiters, and of the even greater tyrannical injustices and warmongering brutalisations which come the Third World's way in ever more intolerable and ever increasing volumes.

The spirit of this revolution is inadvertently captured in this fascinating little bourgeois press cameo:

Sadr City, the northern Baghdad slum once known as Saddam City, and which is home to about two million dirt-poor Shia, is the ultimate stronghold for the rebel Mahdi Army.

Unlike the middle-class shrine city of Najaf, the rebels here are born and bred on its mean streets. In time of crisis, they swarm on to the streets: when the fighting dies down, they melt away again.

"We are working towards two things, victory or martyrdom, and either way we are winners," says 34-year-old Sheikh Abbas, one of thousands of men to join the prayer session that spills out of the mosque and down the broad boulevard, the house walls scrawled with the words "Vietnam Street".

As a sea of men kneel on prayer mats along the street, they beat their chests and chant "We are with you, Say-yid Moqtada, until martyrdom," a roar carrying through the city like a Zulu warrior chant. For a moment, the poor and disenfranchised men of the slum lose themselves in the greater cause.

The al-Hikmeh mosque is at the heart of Sadr City, and the writing on the wall makes clear local sentiment towards the American intruders.

On almost every building is stencilled the portrait of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, his scowling, bearded face sandwiched between black turban and black robes, an admonishing finger wagging at any unbelievers. By contrast, all the graffiti about the Government of Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, is rudely disparaging, calling him a US spy and a traitor. "Country for sale: contact Iyad Allawi," reads one slogan.
 
The US military have fought a number of heavy skirmishes with the Mahdi Army Here, losing a tank and a helicopters and several men in the past fortnight. Scores of militiamen have been killed, as well as a number of civilians. 

Yesterday, a group of men were digging a hole in the road. At first sight it appeared they were repairing the threadbare surface. On closer inspection, one of them turned out to be lugging a huge artillery shell to plant in the road against future incursions. Sometimes these go off when Iraqis, rather than US troops, are passing.

The Americans have accused the Mahdi Army of disrupting vital reconstruction projects in Sadr City with their armed insurrection. But there is little sign that anyone has ever tried to improve conditions here in Baghdad's shadow city: the crowd outside the mosque perch on the edge of a lake of vividly green sewage as they pray.

Just as failed states breed terrorism, a failed city on the edge of Baghdad has produced an Islamic guerrilla force on the capital's doorstep. 

Behind kids with their heads wrapped in black scarves play with toy rocket-propelled grenades.

But the revolt is on worldwide. Exactly as scientific Marxist history has explained, the very triumph of the worldwide Western-dominated monopoly-capitalist system has ultimately created civilisation's most important product in the increasingly technically competent, emotionally rebellious, and politically conscious proletarian masses of the world who alone can make the international socialist revolution possible on Earth. Build Leninism.  EPSR

E P S R BOX

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.

***********

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

*********

"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.)

*******

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

An international delegation of human rights activists is to conduct an independent probe into allegations of British collusion in a series of gun and bomb attacks in Tyrone in the mid-1970s

Now, an international delegation of human rights activists is to conduct an independent probe into allegations of British collusion in a series of gun and bomb attacks in Tyrone in the mid-1970s. The group have travelled to Ireland at the invitation of the Pat Finucane Centre.

The group's main focus will be investigating a British death squad, known as the Glenanne group, which included British soldiers, members of the RUC and unionist paramilitaries. The Glenanne squad has been connected to a series of bomb and gun attacks, including the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974, but despite a wealth of detail already within the public domain, the information has never been considered collectively and systematically.

Alan Brecknell of the Pat Finucane Centre said that the centre had been researching the activities of the Glenanne group for sometime. "The full extent of the links, both forensic and through the personnel involved are shocking," said Brecknell. The international team of investigators will meet relatives of the victims and witnesses to the killings.

Professor Douglas Cassel, President of the Board of Directors of Justice Studies Centre for the Americas and Director for the Centre for Human Rights in Chicago, is heading the team. Others include Piers Pigou, who worked with South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Susie Kemp, a barrister and former legal Director of the Centre for Human Rights Action in Guatemala; and Steve Sawyer, a former prosecutor and legal counsel for the Centre for International Human Rights at North Western University of Chicago.   

As well as the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the group will also be investigating the Miami Showband killings, bomb attacks on three nationalist bars which resulted in a number of deaths, the killing of Catholic civilians Peter and Jane McKeaney, and the death of IRA Volunteer John Francis Green.

The pub bombings included attacks on the Catholic-owned Hillcrest Bar in Dungannon, the Eagle Bar, Charlemont and the Falls Bar in Coalisland. All three attacks have been connected to the same Tyrone-based British death squad.

On 17 March 1976, St Patrick's Day celebrations ended in tragedy with a UVF bombing of a bar in a Catholic area of Dungannon. Four people were killed, two of whom were children, caught in the carnage while playing nearby in the street. A number of people were seriously injured.

57-year-old Joseph Kelly, a Catholic from Donaghmore Road, died inside the Hillcrest bar. Andrew Small (62) died as he walked past the bar with his wife, who was seriously injured. The couple were returning from Mass.

13-year-old James McCaughey died as he was playing in the street, while his 13-year-old playmate Patrick Barnard died in hospital the following day from the injuries he received during the explosion.

James' father, Norrie McCaughey, has said that despite the fact that it is almost 30 years since the bombing, "a lot of questions still remain unanswered". To date, only one person, a 27-year-old Dungannon man, has been convicted in connection with the bombing.

He was also convicted of the murder of Peter (63) and Jane McKearney (58), a married Catholic couple with five children. The pair were shot dead by a unionist paramilitary gunman at their Moy home in October 1975. Jane McKearney had opened the door and was confronted by a masked gunman armed with a Sterling submachinegun gun. She was hit eleven times and her husband was shot 18 times. Both died at the scene.

On conviction, the presiding Judge showed remarkable leniency towards the multiple murderer. The judge had no choice but to impose mandatory life sentences but he ordered that they run concurrently and refused to pronounce a recommended minimum time in jail on the grounds that the killer was remorseful and that he posed no danger to the public.

During the trial, the court heard that the same UVF gang was responsible for the Miami Showband killings. Members of the Miami Showband were travelling towards the border when their coach was stopped at a UDR 'checkpoint'.

Band members were ordered out of the vehicle and two members of the 'patrol' appeared to search the coach. If fact the 'patrol' was a unionist paramilitary gang, which included a number of UDR soldiers.

Two UVF members posing as UDR soldiers, Harris Boyle and Wesley Somenville died at the scene when a bomb they had been planting on the coach exploded prematurely.

When the bomb exploded the rest of the gang opened fire,killing three band members and seriously injuring a fourth. A fifth man was blown into undergrowth by the explosion and was able to hide until the gang dispersed.

A weapon used by the gang in the showband attack was identified as a Star pistol, a relatively rare weapon to be found in the North of Ireland. A similar weapon had been used in the slaying of the Lurgan IRA Volunteer John Francis Green, shot dead while staying in a safe house across the border.

A Star pistol has been linked to the British officer Captain Robert Nairac and a former British Army intelligence officer Fred Holroyd has repeatedly claimed that the attack had been organised by Nairac, who was closely associated with the unionist paramilitary gang involved.

In his new and updated republished study, The SAS in Ireland, Fr Raymond Murray claims that Nairac was a close associate of Harris Boyle and both were connected to the assassination of John Francis Green,

In July 1993, a documentary screened by Yorkshire television, First Tuesday, detailed allegations of British collusion in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974. During the programme Harris Boyle was identified as one of a number of men involved in the bombings.  •

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

The US Empire's tyranny in Iraq continues a long rotten NAZI-imperialist tradition by Americans.

In The World Stopped Watching, Raymont analyzes the indifference of the international media to the misery into which Nicaragua has sunk as a result of the Contra war and the atrocities committed against its people by mercenaries trained, armed and financed by Washington to overturn the popular Sandinista government during the 1980s.

Produced by well-known Canadian director Peter Raymont, the film updates — 15 years later — the award-winning movie The Whole World Was Watching (Canada, 1988), in which Raymont documented the role of the international media during the upsurge and triumph of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

The most horrifying aspect is the macabre parallel between the massacres carried out by the invaders of Nicaragua during those days and those that have taken place 15 years later in Iraq.

On May 18 in Makaradeeb, an Iraqi village located near the border with Syria, U.S. forces bombed a wedding and followed that by razing the village. The genocidal attack killed 42 people, all of them part of the wedding party. Fourteen of the victims were children and 11 were women. A reporter told General James Mattis of the U.S. Marines First Division, that Arab television had showed the bodies of children, victims of the massacre, being lowered into their graves. Mattis replied that he had not seen the photos, "but bad things happen in every war. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."

In The World Stopped Watching, one segment graphically captures the precise moment at which a gang of contras had just murdered 18 campesinos and was preparing to exterminate the rest of the guests at a wedding in the mountains of northern Nicaragua. Gilles Paquin, a French-Canadian journalist, and his television crew interrupted the massacre and filmed the corpses of the victims lying exposed to the sun. Risking his own safety, Paquin asked the chief, of those killers, trained by the U.S. Army, to stop the massacre, saying that the bloody images captured by his cameras would be counterproductive for the Contras.

Reluctantly, the Contra leader ordered his men to retreat, but not without first informing Paquin that "errors occur during ambushes. The combatants are young kids and they can't distinguish (between Sandinistas and campesinos)." Just like General Mattis, his counterpart in Iraq, the Contra leader did not apologize for the macabre genocide of innocents. Today he is a deputy in the Nicaraguan National Assembly.

The events in Iraq are duplicating the brutality that characterized the military interventions of U.S. troops and mercenaries in Nicaragua. Diametrically contrary to President George W. Bush's hollow claims, there was never any respect for human rights on the part of the U.S. military. Basely and unjustly, they make those claims against Cuba, conveniently ignoring their own long and institutionalized history of violations. In Nicaragua alone, the history of U.S. crimes exceeds 150 years.

In 1855, gringo soldiers of fortune headed by William Walker took advantage of internal disputes between the traditional political parties to invade Nicaragua. Walker took over the nation and named himself president. His government became a reign of terror and blood. Walker attempted to establish the basis tor opening up a canal through the country for U.S. magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, but did not achieve it in the end.

After one year, Central American patriots attacked Walker. Feeling threatened, the gringo usurper razed Granada, one of the oldest colonial heirlooms of the Americas, to escape with his life. Outside of the city he left a sign saying, "Here stood Granada." A year later, Walker tried to return and was captured in Honduras. A firing squad executed him in 1857.

It would not be the last U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. In 1912, the gringo army once again occupied the country. A common tactic of the occupation forces was to decapitate opponents and rape Nicaraguan women. Some, like Lieutenant Remington of the U.S. Marines, posed for the U.S. cameramen holding the heads of the decapitated as trophies. (See the photograph of Remington with the head of Silvio Herrera of Matagalpa, published in the United States in 1930).

The bloody occupation lasted until 1933, when Augusto Cesar Sandino, the General of Free Men, defeated the Marines, throwing them out of Nicaragua. During their withdrawal, the gringo army named General Anastasio Somoza Garcia head of the National Guard. Somoza invited Sandino to the Presidential Palace to sign a peace treaty. Immediately after dining, a Guard squadron escorted Sandino to the outskirts of the city. They shot him down, along with his general staff. The murderers were carrying out the orders of Somoza and the U.S. minister in Managua.

The Somoza betrayal initiated the bloody dynasty that would brutally rule the nation until the triumph of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in July 1979. During those 46 years, more than half a million Nicaraguans were murdered by Somoza and his two sons, the younger — Anastasio Jr. —  graduated from West Point Military Academy in the United States.

On one occasion, in response to a U.S. congressman's appeal to President Franklin Roosevelt to stop backing the criminal dictator, Roosevelt stated that if "Somoza was a son of a bitch, he is OUR son of a bitch;" Period.

That was clear evidence that it never occurred to the United States to give greater importance to the violations of Nicaraguans' human rights. 

The president of the moment never worried about it. He would leave the details to his advisors and spokesmen, who would react to selected bloody deeds and would present the official version at Washington's convenience.

With few exceptions, each U.S. president has functioned as a puppet of his advisors. Marionette son, ventriloquist father. Just like a parrot, Bush does not utter a word unless the scribes on salary have prepared it beforehand. Moreover, the president does not act unless the puppeteer of the moment has given the habitual wink and shown him how to mechanically spit out the tired White House gobbledygook on respect for human rights while nonchalantly subjecting the "enemy" to inconceivable and diabolical torture. Afterwards, they deny it. Poor imitations of Pinocchio's extraordinary capacity for lying.

Thus, U.S. crimes are endlessly repeated. Bush, the most recent version of the lobotomized wooden doll, exemplifies the tradition of fools. According to Mr. Bush, the crimes committed in Iraq and Guantanamo by soldiers under his command are isolated incidents, unworthy of the noble U.S. military establishment.

At the height of cynicism, the White House Pinocchio makes himself out to be an innocent in the department of historic memory. He uselessly tries to turn the tables by accusing Cuba of precisely the rosary of atrocities committed by his "disciplined" army of little angels during the last 150 years in the Caribbean, the rest of Latin America and now in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Bush: neither your arrogance nor your cultivated ignorance can hide the reality of your nation's crimes against an innocent and defenseless humanity. Perhaps, to paraphrase Raymont's documentary, for one instant the world stopped watching, but history will never forgive you. Nicaragua does not pardon. Cuba does not pardon. Viet Nam does not pardon. Afghanistan does not pardon, and Iraq definitely does not pardon.