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No 1208 11th November 2003

Imperialism's insoluble problem with "terrorism" is in fact the slowly emerging "problem" of the world socialist revolution; and bogus "Marxists" of all kinds are going to be firmly and properly labelled "counter-revolutionary anti-communists" when the whole Third World starts to build a mass proletarian "terrorist" revolt, as the West will call it. The clumsy American Empire tyranny over Iraq is only breeding more and more "terrorist" responses, yet the list of "rogue states" needing to be invaded to preserve US world-domination in the teeth of the system's insoluble economic collapse into trade war and slump, just grows and grows. The game is up for the imperialist era.

The fake-'left', from Scargill to the Sparts, will be the most useful casualty in the long run as the growing crisis of the imperialist system looks increasingly chaos-doomed from the unstoppable rise of "terrorism".

As the EPSR alone has been able to explain from the start, this "terrorism" is nothing but the world socialist revolution in its early, clumsy, own-goal-scoring, teething stages, — expressing, via inevitable, initial, spontaneous, anarcho-individualism, the serious class-war HATRED around the Third World without which there would never be the world socialist revolution.

But by condemning the obviously inadequate petty-bourgeois nationalism which inspires most of the present wave of "terrorism", the fake-'left' have only shown their own true class-collaborating colours.

When the ENTIRE 'left' swamp, from Lalkar to the Alliance, endorsed the cowardly idiocy which condemned Sept 11 as "an indefensible act of criminal terror" (Sparts), what it was cringing from was the stark reality that any serious international anti-imperialist revolution was undoubtedly going to entail HUGE destruction and bloodshed, utterly trashing most things sacred to the "Western, democratic, way of life".

The gutlessness of these posturing "revolutionaries" and "Marxists" does not just have a long tradition but is virtually the ESSENCE of the fake-'left'.

It has been marked over the decades by, on one side, ALWAYS faltering whenever any revolution or workers state has been obliged to actually impose the brutal FORCE of the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to survive or proceed further.

This became so routine during the Cold War period that the entire fake-'left' would scurry to disown "responsibility" for the violent conflicts even when they were caused by deliberate CIA provocations, or even when the "totalitarian brutality" complained of had been largely pure rumour to start with.

And this squeamish class-collaboration with bourgeois "no-to-violence" hypocrisy reached hysteria point whenever there were clumsy, dubious, or mistaken judgements by the workers state/revolution, or whenever the necessary firm actions against counter-revolutionary manifestations were nervously delayed by the proletarian dictatorship (e.g. the airliner downed over Korea; & by the anti-communist counter-revolutions begun in Hungary (1956) Czechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1980) (before they were all allowed to succeed by Soviet workers state self-liquidation in 1998) & Tiananmen Square (1989); etc, etc.)

But despite the now incontrovertible evidence of modern history that the Cold War illusion about "the world could be such a nice, friendly, helpful, democratic, non-violent non-antagonistic place if it were not for those totalitarian communist tyrannies", etc, proved to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of the truth —(there has never been so much international warmongering bloodshed and dangerous bitter upheavals in such a short space of time as there has since the Socialist Camp was liquidated), — — — this ridiculous, hypocritical, anti-communist nervousness by the fake-'left' STILL goes on, — e.g. the recent hysteria against Cuba for locking up 70 counter-revolutionary agitators, and executing three of them who had staged violent provocations.

This snivelling betrayal of the Cuban workers state, — laying it open to more imminent counter-revolutionary invasion violence by the current fascist streak in US imperialist policy, — also leans a lot on the other side of this anti-communist intellectual cowardice bespattering the ENTIRE fake-'left' from the SLP to the still-vast international wing of museum-Stalinist Revisionism, — namely, the imbecilic faith that "parliamentary democracy" means anything other than the foulest concealment of capitalist-bourgeois dictatorship imaginable.

If the self-deluding mirage of "real democracy" is being used as the "answer" to the total fraud of bourgeois (i.e. parliamentary) democracy, then no wonder that this snug, petty-bourgeois-trade-unionist complacency will turn cartwheels of mock "horror" at the unsubtle brutality of anti-imperialist suicide bombers.

But all this anti-communist 'left' rubbish is now heading towards ever-deepening trouble eventually as the unavoidable choices about class-war reality become increasingly starkly posed before mankind.

Not only is the "terrorism" issue not going to go away. It is inevitably going to become ever-more-widely identified with ALL revolt against imperialism, both as a consequence of the crude and vicious Western propaganda vilifying all its opponents; and because these bold initial excitation and symbolic martyrdom tactics by nationalist/religious extremism are going to merge imperceptibly in with growing guerrilla warfare strategies by more solidly class-based proletarian revolutionary elements.

But although the dimwitted opportunism and the hypocrisy, (which are the hallmarks of the fake-'left'), will snivel their way towards grudging sympathy with any serious anti-imperialist revolution which looks like getting anywhere, regardless of its tactics, — the swamp's basic compromise, easy-life, mentality (born of the petty bourgeois class — essential to reformist trade-union "militancy" – V.I.Lenin) will endlessly keep reasserting itself for all to see, nevertheless.

 This camouflage tactic for the fake-'left' (to keep faith with any workers drawn into their sectarian posturing) will extend the stunt currently being tried by the Sparts and other joke "revolutionaries" pretending that they were "always supporters of the Soviet Union, and now that it has gone, all can see what a disaster for global anti-imperialist struggle its demise has been", etc, etc, — when in reality, Trotsky's "Revolution Betrayed" farrago of self-contradictory nonsense and individualist impressionist spleen provided Western imperialist anti-communism with all the 'left' cover it could wish for.

But just as these Trot bogus pro-Soviet claims fall foul of the historical record showing that every time it really MATTERED, i.e. when world public opinion was being stacked up by CIA total international propaganda control towards warmongering interventionist sentiments, (yet again) threatening the USSR with blitzkrieg annihilation if enough hysteria could be generated, — these Trots would ALWAYS be found heaping up the anti-communist, anti-Soviet hysterics (under the guise of anti-Stalinism) more biliously than anyone; — — so will all future pretend sympathy with genuine proletariat-dictatorship revolutionary causes quickly falter whenever imperialist counter-revolution creates any major "violence" provocations which will require the fake-'left' to defend what is being denounced as "murderous terrorist totalitarian tyranny", etc, etc, etc, on behalf of the said revolution.

Paradoxically, the anti-revolutionary 'left' will shortly be basking in mass public glory when the anti-Bush demonstrations go off at the middle and end of next week, hunting down the "security reasons" concealed state procession route to hurl abuse, and then demonstrating en masse through London, — to the delight of virtually the whole country.

But few banners will get it right and make "Defeat for Western Imperialism's Coalition Forces" and "Revolution the only answer to capitalist crisis" the all-important slogans.

Once again, being accusable of "wanting 'our' troops to be killed" will frighten most of the fake-'left silly, in spite of this provocation being the most ignorantly shallow and illogical imbecility that any gung-ho warmongering could utter.

It is the world capitalist system which ALONE uniquely puts killing and "might is right" onto the agenda as a regular routine for resolving class and international contradictions, — a blitzkrieging murderousness arising out of the very economic MARKET of monopoly imperialist domination where the giant successful powers will always AUTOMATICALLY colonially subjugate the weaker exploited countries whenever an economic or political crisis develops which threatens the West's artificially exalted living standards and its domineering world role, — — as hundreds of years of Western EMPIRES directly demonstrated until the Socialist Camp's arrival on the historical scene forced the West to go into its bogus "decolonisation" posture.

But that superficial political retreat to appease Stalin's ridiculous "permanent peaceful coexistence with Imperialism" and "peaceful roads to socialism" Revisionist routines was NEVER really meaningful, (despite the alleged Cold War "stand-off"), when more than 400 acts of coup or invasion aggression were inflicted by the West to keep the "free world" under strict fascist or military dictatorship tyranny to obviously thwart any chance of communism "democratically" coming to power.

This brute-force colonial tyranny is now ten times more blatant and ten times WORSE, now that the "threat of communism" has supposedly been lifted from mankind.

People dying in wars is part of the mode of existence of cut-throat competitive capitalism. It cannot live any other way.

And everyone's "troops" will be dying more and more frequently, the longer that this imperialist-system crisis of "overproduction trade war" and domineering "Western democracy" racist culture lasts.

 The ONLY way to end it is for the West to be DEFEATED, followed by the revolutionary overthrow of the Western imperialist bourgeoisie everywhere.

Until that happens, the next bit of the rest of history is going to be war without end. But far from helping this growing world movement of anti-Western-imperialist hostility, the fake-'left' will be dowsing the anti-Bush demonstrations with such whipped-dog cringing as Nellist's SP-Militant call for "anti-imperialist slogans" but "no anti-American sentiment", hypocritical "moral" posture around the petty-bourgeois inherently-racist West which is not only sneeringly inimical to the naturally joyous anti-American enthusiasm beginning to unite the entire Third World revolt against imperialism, & completely out of touch with the real world, but is DELIBERATELY so, — the 'left' cover for parliamentary anti-communism that Nellist once so contentedly served as a Labour MP.

But it is hatred of the West that is growing, and will continue to grow, unavoidably. And the spread of "terrorism" will not be far behind, — as the more objective analyses by even the admittedly bourgeois press (as opposed to the fake-'left' middle class) are having to agree:

'It is their routine,' said her grandfather, Turk Jassim. 'After the Americans are attacked, they shoot everywhere. This is inhuman — a stupid act by a country always talking about human rights.'

Last September, US forces shot dead Sarab's two-year-old sister, Dunya, and wounded two other girls in her family, 13-year-old Menal and 16-year-old Bassad. The family belongs to the Albueisi tribe who farm the rich land along the Euphrates river south of Falluja. The Albueisi fought against the British and even Saddam Hussein found them difficult to control. Since April, at least 10 members of the tribe have been killed by US forces, including five policemen.

While the US authorities maintain that resistance attacks are carried out by former Baathists and supporters of Saddam, they continue to ignore the tribal nature of the insurgency which has grown steadily over recent months. Deeply conservative clans such as the 50,000-strong Albueisi have codes of honour which, they complain, the US army ignores at checkpoints and during raids on houses.

They also believe that the Koran demands jihad against foreign invaders. Asked how many American lives should be taken if one of their own is killed, the answer is: 'As many as possible.'

Last week an American Chinook helicopter was shot down by a heat-seeking missile a few miles from Sarab's house, killing 16 soldiers. It could have been worse, the neighbours say. Resistance fighters were ready to fire another missile at a second Chinook when they were stopped by worried locals.

After the crash, others in the area came out with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs, but they, too, were dissuaded for fear of retaliation. And with good reason. After Friday's downing of a Black Hawk helicopter near Tikrit, US troops dropped two 500lb bombs and fired tank rounds at the area of the crash in a show of force.

According to Albueisi resistance supporters, the attack on the Chinook was carried out by members of the tribe, as was a second attack later in the week on a military train. One of the train's freight containers lies behind Sarab's house, its lettering partially effaced by handfuls of mud.

'If the Americans came as normal citizens, we'd welcome them,' said Khalid, an Albueisi with ties to the resistance. 'When they came for liberation, I sent them food. Now I just want to kill them. If I didn't have children, I'd join tomorrow.'

As a teenager, Khalid won local fame for avenging his brother's death. A notoriously good shot, he says he is now thinking of dusting off his Kalashnikov.

'What are we supposed to say? "Oh, the poor American soldiers died" when they kill people here every day? I expected more than just a Chinook to be shot down.'

'I saw the missile come from the west and hit the helicopter. After the crash, people got their weapons to shoot the US soldiers, but they were stopped. Everybody here hates the US.'

Since April, at least 40 civilians and police have been killed in and around Falluja, as well as 22 US soldiers, two of them yesterday in a bomb attack west of the city. It is a cycle that does not look like it will end soon.

'They do not understand psychology,' said Dr Adnan Chechan, a surgeon at Falluja's main hospital. 'When you are violent, you get a violent reaction.'

Last week, he pointed out, six people were killed 500 yards from the hospital as they drove past a US convoy shortly after a roadside bomb exploded. Television footage from inside one of the minivans carrying employees of the Oil Ministry was too gruesome to be broadcast.

People in Falluja have been particularly critical of the 82nd Airborne — which has been ordered to crack down on insurgents.

'Previously, I had a good view of American people' said Adnan. 'But we have changed our mind after seeing the aggression — the soldiers in Falluja and Khaldiyo are very aggressive.'

In the area around Falluja the US army appears to be winning hearts and minds for their enemy.

'The American army is our best friend,' a resistance fighter told us. 'We should be giving them medals.'

And the more that this grotesque colonial-invasion clumsiness alienates the supposedly "liberated" population of Iraq, driving them towards currently ever increasing acts of sabotage and resistance to the new dictatorial regime, — the more the bewildered hired armed thugs for imperialism put the boot in, acting out their character, and alienating even more Iraqis in the process:

AMERICAN fighter-bombers have started to drop heavy bombs on suspected guerrilla targets in Iraq for the first time since the end of major combat. The aircraft hit troublespots in a show of force near the Sunni towns of Fallujah and Tikrit, to the west and north of Baghdad.

The airstrikes came as an American soldier shot dead the head of the US-appointed council in Sadr City, a Shia slum where two million of Baghdad's residents live, in a new blow to coalition attempts to win the support of the Iraqi people.

The new tactic of airstrikes, not used since the invasion of Iraq, follows the bloodiest week in the country in months, with 37 US soldiers killed so far this month. Another soldier died yesterday in a rocket attack on a convoy 40 miles (641m) south of Baghdad.

On Saturday night, F16s dropped three bombs near Fallujah after a series of ambushes that killed two soldiers and injured three others in the area. The bombs fell on wasteland on the edge of town, but near a small settlement of houses, forcing the residents to flee. Shaka Mahmoud, a local mechanic, said that his brother's pregnant wife had suffered a miscarriage as the shockwaves ripped through their house and shrapnel hit the building.

"I've never heard anything like it," he said "What have we got to do with the rebels? Would we be so crazy to attack them here in front of our houses?" He said that he and his neighbours were going to leave the area last night to stay with relatives in the town.

F16s also dropped three 5001b bombs near Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit on Friday night after a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down there, killing six soldiers.

The strikes in the restive Sunni Triangle came as General John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, met the region's mayors and tribal leaders on Saturday and told them that if they refused to cooperate with occupation forces they could face a new, tougher response from the US military.

General Abizaid said that if Fallujah did not start to work with the coalition, there "might be another policy", Taha Bedawi, the town's Mayor, said.

The United States appears to be switching its focus from encouraging participation to cowing resistance. "Part of warfare is coercion and ... a show of force is a tool that can be used by a commander," one military official said.

However, in the south of Iraq, British army officers were incredulous at the new approach, pointing out that the Americans' already aggressive approach had left them little room to up the ante.

In Sadr City, an American soldier shot the head of the council in the leg during an quarrel that arose when Muhamad al-Kaadi, the councillor, was refused entry to the municipality by the US sentry supposed to be protecting him.

Mr al-Kaadi, a marine engineer who worked as translator for The Times during the war, died of his wounds.

AMERICAN troops yesterday unleashed their most furious attacks in Iraq since the official end of the war. The attacks were carried out in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit in response to the killing of six US soldiers whose Black Hawk helicopter was shot down near the town on Friday.

As F16 jets dropped 5001b bombs on the area where the Black Hawk was hit, US troops launched a massive sweep operation, as a show of force against resistance fighters based in the Sunni Triangle. This saw the arrest of several dozen alleged fighters and the death of five more.

But any hope that the sweep — named Operation Ivy Cyclone — would steady nerves in Iraq was almost immediately demolished by the news that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was closing its offices in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra because of the rapidly worsening security situation.

The organisation had already announced that it was reducing the number of its international staff after the bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad on 27 October in which 12 people died.

Despite the US military operation, however, lethal attacks on US forces continued yesterday with two US paratroopers killed in the Sunni Triangle town of Falluja when a roadside bomb exploded under their vehicle.

Amid suspicions that the bombing raids were designed as much for domestic consumption as out of operational necessity, a coalition spokesman said it had also captured 12 people suspected of involvement in an attack on a Baghdad hotel where US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.

Military officers said the operation involved raids on several locations. They said they believed they had broken up a cell of former regime figures.

The arrests and the launch of Operation Ivy Cyclone came, however, amid more bad news for the Bush administration over its handling of post-war Iraq.

An official American army review leaked to the US non-governmental organisation globalsecurity.org revealed that the army had no plan for the occupation of Baghdad.

Officially titled the Third Infantry Division (Mechanised) After Action Report, operation Iraqi Freedom, the study provides the first formal internal view of the Iraq war from the point of view of the soldiers who brought down Saddam Hussein.

The report provides official confirmation of a complete absence of high-level military and political planning to manage the aftermath of victory and indicates some key problems that continue to hamper US Army effectiveness to this day.

The report continues that the 3rd Infantry Division itself, which had been engaged in some of the heaviest fighting on the outskirts of Baghdad, 'lacked guidance' on how to deal with the different competing Iraqis they encountered.

'Ongoing struggles for power, establishing security without the benefit of a functioning police system, and re-establishing a pay system for government workers continue to plague the restoration of "normalcy" to Baghdad.' it said.

The fence, completed on Sunday, was the brainchild of Colonel James Hickey, the American leading the hunt for Saddam around the deposed dictator's former stronghold of Tikrit He believes in aggressive soldiering and does not let local sensibilities stand in his way.

The residents are furious. "It's like Palestine," protested Salam al-Nasseri.

"Is this the freedom the Americans bring to the Iraqi people?"

IT WAS the middle of the night when the American military engineers moved into al-Ouja, Saddam Hussein's birthplace. By morning they had thrown a rudimentary fence around the town. Within 72 hours it was sealed off from the outside world by razorwire coiled shoulder-high.

The 4,000 residents must now enter and leave by a single checkpoint. Their vehicles are searched. They must show a pass issued by the US military that bears their photographs and thumbprints. Anyone attempting to scale the fence can be shot.

From Camp Raider, an opulent guest house built by Saddam on a bluff overlooking the Tigris, Colonel Hickey's 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division controls an area of 10,000 square miles (27,000 square kilometres) and 230,000 people.

He believes that Saddam moves in and out of the area because "this is like Chicago to Mayor Daley — this is where he grew up, where his key supporters are, where his security people are. He's got to come back here."

The colonel's men have detained more than 200 Iraqis, and mounted more than 400 raids.

Between 20 and 30 members of the key families believed to protect Saddam have now been detained, several in the past fortnight. The sealing off of the town may bring more. "We are moving up the family tree," said the colonel.

His men monitor banks, suspecting that Saddam has huge quantities of old Iraqi dinars that he must somehow convert into the new currency. Discreetly they watch the forlorn cemetery outside al-Ouja where Uday and Qusay lie beneath unmarked mounds of baked mud. They have studied pictures of what Saddam might look like in disguise. They know he must orchestrate attacks and issue messages to remain "relevant", and therein lies their main chance.

"At some point he's going to make a mistake," said Colonel Hickey. When that point comes his team will be ready. "We've been through the drills many times. We're prepared to act at a moment's notice. Whether he's killed or captured I really don't care. It depends what he does. If there's armed resistance we'll use as much firepower as necessary."

In the meantime the colonel pursues what he insists is his priority — the pacification of his area. That means "aggressive" patrolling, raiding and ambushing "morning, noon and night". Men with guns are killed, and houses concealing munitions are destroyed.

He is not worried about alienating the locals, believing most simply want order restored so they can get on with their lives. And he is confident nothing would destroy the resistance as fast as Saddam's capture. Asked what he would say to his quarry if they ever come face to face, he replied: "Good to see you."

The natural hatred for all things American that this sort of concentration-camp collective punishment will engender can hardly be doubted, especially among those Iraqis who were opposed to Saddam at a time when he was one of Washington's favourite Middle East stooges.

And subjecting the Iraqi nation to this sort of half-witted derangement ("Good to see you") with its one-trick fantasy that catching Saddam will solve all of the colonial invasion's problems, must be akin to imperialist insanity.

This killer-colonel's bovine one-track mind exactly highlights a main problem that the ailing, wounded, and largely unjoined "Western coalition" is suffering, — namely its admissions of "intelligence" inadequacy whereby either there is no agreed definition of what forces make up the resistance in Iraq, or else the truth is just too embarrassing to own up to:

'It's knowing who they are, where they are and when they act. If we know anything from Vietnam and the various things that have gone on in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is that our humint [human intelligence] is terrible. We know that we were woefully under-prepared in general.'

It is a view shared in part by British officials, who concede that attempts to infiltrate the resistance have been without success. Others are sharply critical of how the intelligence war against the rebels has been handled. They point to a woeful shortage of Arab linguists and analysts familiar with Arab culture in the US-run sector, despite being six months into the insurgency.

To counter this, Pentagon officials briefed last week that some of these specialists working among the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group on the unsuccessful search for stockpiles of unconventional weapons would be transferred to this effort.

'What we are looking at,' one UK official told The Observer, 'is not some monolithic organisation with a clear command. That would be far easier for us to deal with and get into. Instead, we are looking at lots of different groups with different agendas. They are locally organised with each having its loyalty focused on middle ranking former commanders.'

What he describes is a network of partisan type groups without a central command and links between them based on personal relationships — an organic rather than monolithic structure.

The groups' communications based, say Iraqis, on couriers, often teenage boys, to carry messages have been equally difficult for the coalition to penetrate.

And they have very little difficulty in getting materiél for attacks or the money to finance the operations. Iraqi military doctrine under Saddam, especially after the first Gulf war, long envisaged the risk of a second US-led invasion that would attempt to depose the regime. The consequence was the placement across the country of hidden caches of weapons, explosives, fuel and cash, all in vast amounts — everything required to run a guerrilla war.

'We are looking at three categories of group involved in the resistance,' said one official. 'There are ex-Baathists, especially in the Sunni triangle [where the majority of Special Republican guard and members of Saddam's security organisations were traditionally recruited from]. Then there are groups like Ansar al-Islam and groups that may be affiliated to al-Qaeda or sympathetic to them. Finally, there are foreign jihadists who have been drawn to Iraq to fight Americans.'

IT IS A VIEW endorsed by a former colonel in the Iraqi security services interviewed by The Observer. 'It is a mixture of different groups — former Mukhabarat [security services], religious groups and Baath party members. If Saddam is involved in the resistance, as some at the Pentagon are claiming, then he believes he is just one leader among many.

'These groups are separate, but work together more and more as the various leaders are contacting each other. Most people are not doing it because of Saddam, but for religious or nationalist reasons. Some are criminals, who under other circumstances few people would have anything to do with. Some are paid, but not many.'

He suggested that last Sunday's rocket attack on the Al Rashid Hotel showed a level of sophistication that was new for the resistance. An underground cell working with staff at the hotel, which was once virtually run by the Iraqi secret service, watched the arrival of guests while street cleaners worked with an underground cell to position the rocket launcher.

After the arrival of Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, the launcher, disguised as a generator, was remotely activated.

Most worrying of all is the emergence of abroad, post-Saddam ideology across the groups. And if recent polling in Baghdad is to be believed, it is rapidly gaining currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely simple, insisting that the US-led occupation is an assault against both Islam and the wider Arab nation, that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists the occupiers is an enemy as much as US troops.

BUT IT IS NOT ONLY the homegrown resistance that is concerning the coalition. It has also been struggling to prevent a wave of devastating suicide bombings against a variety of targets which Western intelligence officials increasingly believe may be being carried out by foreigners coming to fight the Americans in Iraq.

Two officials have told The Observer that they do not believe the suicide bombings are 'Iraqi style'. 'It does not feel to us like their way of doing things,' said one.

The comments follow warnings from intelligence officials across Europe, reported in yesterday's New York Times, that since the summer hundreds of young militants have left Europe to join the resistance in Iraq, a trend which is also in evidence across the Arab world.

The paper quotes Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's leading investigative judge on terrorism, who said that dozens of young Muslim men had left France for Iraq since the summer, inspired by the exhortations of al Qaeda leaders, even if they were not trained by the movement.

According to the Iraqi colonel interviewed by The Observer: 'There is no specific information on these car bombs.' He believes that the attacks are 'probably organised by religious Iraqi groups but carried out by foreigners who want to become martyrs during Ramadan.'

But a question that is also worrying coalition and other officials is precisely who is organising these would-be foreign fighters and putting them in touch with resistance groups.

One disturbing theory being investigated is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a former Afghan jihadist of Jordanian-Palestinian extraction who knows the al-Qaeda leadership, may have recently entered Iraq and be organising foreign fighters the way he once organised them in Afghanistan.

According to the former Iraqi security services colonel, 'These Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Syrians and Jordanians were trained for these kinds of operations and want to die. They are now working with various resistance groups whether they are religious or not.'

If even half of all these bourgeois press speculations are true, then the imperialist misery in Iraq is likely to continue, posing incalculably complex questions over Western imperialism's whole reason for existence in due course. If the Iraq invasion goes completely sour, the entire "free world" mythology could come crashing down with it.

And aside from the military-security debacle, public criticism is spreading to even the very aims and philosophy of the West's routinely accepted superficial "justification" for destroying the Saddam regime, and even in the most rightwing of capitalist newspapers:

Baghdad is bigger and more handsome than I expected. It has the spacious boulevards of dictatorship, but pleasantly tree-lined and planted with flowers.

Saddam created astonishing structures. The daring geometry of his parade ground would win a RIBA award. The stupendous al-Mansour mosque still stands three-quarters complete, bigger than St Paul's Cathedral. Even bigger was to be the adjacent Saddam mosque, intended as the largest place of worship on Earth. It is a giant folly, its arches and unfinished piers rising hundreds of feet into the desert sky, attended by four giant cranes. American helicopters huddle like pygmies round its base.

I have known many cities that have seen regime change, such as Saigon, Beirut, Berlin and Pretoria. In none of them did the incoming regime permit, indeed perpetrate, the destruction of the entire security and administrative apparatus of the capital city, with nothing to put in its place. After the invasion the Pentagon rejected all advice (including from its own State Department) and decided to run it through its favoured satrap, Ahmed Chalabi. It has been a catastrophic bungle.

What is astonishing is what no longer works. There are no phones. After the Americans bombed Baghdad's Karada Kharj exchange in 1991, it took Saddam's regime two months to repair it The Americans bombed it again in April and have left it in ruins. With no civil service there are no pensions paid. Traffic lights do not work. When I asked a driver why he had just risked my and his life disregarding another red light, he blandly replied, "No police".

Then there are the much publicised explosions. Such outrages are the grim furniture of many cities. In my view they do not mean that the Coalition Provisional Authority must be failing, merely that its foes are getting bolder.

Yet the explosions are a sign to every Iraqi of what has apparently failed to materialise, at least in Baghdad and its surrounding region, which is order. Sitting in the bombgutted office of the American appointed Mayor of Fallujah yesterday I could sense his despair. He had survived five assassination attempts and had just read of $87 billion being devoted to the rebuilding of Iraq. None was coming his way. There was no American soldier near his building. Requests for flak jackets and better guns had been ignored. His pathetic bodyguards were huddled behind sandbags, awaiting the next rocket. It reminded me of the Alamo.

Just up the road stands Saddam's appalling Abu Ghraib prison camp. It passes belief that what should have been bulldozed as a publicity gesture was blithely reopened as the local Guantanamo Bay. A crowd outside was desperately seeking news of inmates. One had a son arrested two months ago after an Apache helicopter had seen him on the roof of the family home looking out after an explosion. He had vanished. Most of the crowd had news of relatives only from smuggled pieces of paper.

What enraged the prison crowd, as I found so often in Iraq, were the small insensitivities. They pointed out that Saddam had allowed family visits to Abu Ghraib. The prison had built shelters for mothers waiting in the sun. The American made them wait in the burning heat. In an entrance bunker I encountered a heavily armoured reservist, a salesman from San Francisco, surveying the chaos. "Don't ask me, I just want to go home," he said, his face a mix of exhaustion and shame.

What beggars belief is the antagonism they seem wilfully to engender in the process.

Much of the trouble is that the CPA operates under military rules which reduce to total absurdity the doctrine of "total force protection". It is as if Genghis Khan had been expected to invade Mesopotamia with the Health and Safety Executive round his neck. American servicemen abroad used to fraternise with those they liberated. In Iraq they do not dare. They are confined to massively fortified barracks.

The most prominent symbol of this syndrome is the extraordinary decision to house the CPA and its boss, Paul Bremer, in Saddam's own hated Republican Palace, covering a huge chunk of central Baghdad. It is as if Tony Blair had decided to curry favour with London by commandeering a site stretching from Tower Bridge to Lambeth Bridge along the South Bank. The massive Forbidden Palace encampment now extends to embrace adjacent office blocks and the alRashid hotel and has been made all but invisible behind a gigantic bombproof wall covered in razor wire. Officials cannot leave the palace without armour and bodyguards, and many never do. It makes the Kremlin seem like the shop around the corner.

Baghdad's citizens are not wholly stupid and deeply resent being treated as conquered subjects. Of course they welcomed the downfall of Saddam, though they constantly point out that the United States once backed him. But everyone I have met finds present American policy incomprehensible. As I listened to yet another tale of scared soldiers killing in cold blood, of homes invaded and wives humiliated by searches, of tanks crashing into uninsurable cars, I wondered if the unimaginable were happening. I wondered if some fiendish Pentagon theorists had decided after all that Saddam should be made to seem the lesser evil.

This last quite fantastic speculation is indeed growing in reality. Critical talk around Washington is now guessing excitably about "an exit strategy", something hitherto unthinkable, and handing things back to the Baathists is indeed one of the more incredible proposals being looked at, — such is the terrified fear of defeat and failure now in US imperialist circles as a result of the debacle which has turned daydreams of "garlanded liberators" into the harsh truth of increasingly hated occupiers:

The Iraqi governing council, set up by the US as a step towards self-rule, has proved be so ineffective and shambolic that Washington is beginning to consider alternatives, it was reported yesterday.

The Washington Post yesterday quoted US and French officials as saying that the administration was even considering the idea put forward by Paris and other UN council members for an interim Iraqi leadership chosen by national conference — along the lines of the loya jirga held in Afghanistan.

This suggestion had been rejected by Washington, but it is beginning to look more inviting as the US death toll rises amid the clashes in Iraq, and there is now a greater urgency to withdraw US forces in time for next November's presidential elections.

"If our exit is going to take longer, if it looks like it could go more titan two years to get it all done, then there's an incentive to look into a transitional phase and some other governing mechanism," a state department official said.

Robert Blackwill, an official from the national security council, who was given the job of coordinating the political transition, is reported to have begun an unannounced visit to Iraq at the weekend, reportedly to try to put pressure on the council members and discuss alternatives with the head of the occupation authority, Paul Bremer.

The already parlous security situation in Iraq will get worse before it gets better, the Coalition Provisional Authority chief told The Times. Contracts for rebuilding Iraq are now being awarded. The terrorists will step up their offensive as they see reconstruction efforts gathering momentum, and the coalition's intelligence is not yet good enough to defeat them.

"We're going to have increased attacks and increased terrorism because the terrorist can see the reconstruction dynamic is moving in our direction," he admitted "It will be more of a problem in the months ahead unless the intelligence gets better."

That is why Mr Bremer is considering a controversial proposal from the Iraqi Interior Minister to create a "special force", with members drawn from Kurdish and Shia militia groups whose local knowledge and ability to spot outsiders far exceeds the coalition's. It was highly unlikely, but "not impossible", that former members of Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence service could be included, he said.

Any such force would raise the spectre of a new repressive state-security apparatus of the sort that plague the Middle East, but Mr Bremer insisted that all members would have to be carefully vetted, highly trained and subject to proper command and control. There was no question of empowering the militias themselves, or of leaving them intact after the coalition withdraws. That would be a "recipe for warlordism and civil war".

Mr Bremer, who is 61 and once served as President Reagan's counter-terrorism chief, was speaking in his spartan office in Saddam's Republican Palace, satellite maps of Iraq pinned to the empty bookshelves.

A sign on his desk proclaims "Success has a Thousand Fathers", leaving unsaid the corollary that failure is an orphan. But he does not admit the possibility of failure as he talks with evident zeal of his "historic mission" to "bring about a new Iraq."

Speaking after a week that 5 has seen 34 American combat deaths and two military helicopters brought down, he insisted the terrorists would never drive coalition troops out of Iraq before a new government had been established. "The consequences of us not succeeding here would be very grave. They are for the Iraqis fatal, perhaps for the Middle East almost as fatal, and for the Middle East extremely serious."

And even this "rebuilding" supposed trump card is in fact as likely to only increase hostility to the American domination, all round, cheekily continuing the sell-off and demolition of the previously large public sector of the Iraq economy, and, most piratically of all, placing all the best contracts ONLY with US corporations so that only Americans will immediately profit from Iraq's "reconstruction" joke.

THE US is to reaffirm that non-American companies cannot win government contracts in the multibillion dollar effort to rebuild Iraq.

Only companies with US joint ventures can expect to take prime contractor roles in a fresh wave of reconstruction programmes to be funded by the $18.6 billion budget cleared by the US Congress last month.

Few UK companies have such agreements.

The US-first rules have been a source of grievance to UK companies seeking to win work in Iraq. Some companies, and industry bodies such as the British Consultants and Contractors Bureau hoped the regulations would be relaxed.

But a briefing to British contractors from UK Trade and Investment, the government agency that promotes British commercial interests overseas, makes clear this will not happen.

And all this in the face of a growing chorus of international awareness and complaint that EVERYTHING to do with this American imperialist invasion of Iraq is completely "illegal" anyway:

Bremer's reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international convention governing the behaviour of occupying forces, the Hague regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the US army's own code of war.

The Hague regulations state that an occupying power must respect "unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country".

The coalition provisional authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful defiance. Iraq's constitution outlaws the privatisation of key state assets, and it bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made that the CPA was "absolutely prevented" from respecting those laws, and yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them unilaterally.

On September 19, Bremer enacted the now infamous Order 39. It announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised; decreed that foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100% of their profits out of Iraq. The Economist declared the new rules a "capitalist dream".

Order 39 violated the Hague regulations in other ways as well. The convention states that occupying powers "shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile state, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct." Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "usufruct" (possibly the ugliest word in the English language) as an arrangement that grants one party the right to use and derive benefit from another's property "without altering the substance of the thing". Put more simply, if you are a housesitter, you can eat the food in the fridge, but you can't sell the house and turn if into condos. And yet that is just what Bremer is doing: what could more substantially alter "the substance" of a public asset than to turn it into a private one?

In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the US army's Law of Land Warfare states that "the occupant does not have the right of sale or unqualified use of [non-military] property". This is pretty straightforward: bombing something does not give you the right to sell it. There is every indication that the CPA is well aware of the lawlessness of its privatisation scheme. In a leaked memo written on March 26, the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned Tony Blair that "the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorised by international law".

So far, most of the controversy surrounding Iraq's reconstruction has focused on the waste and corruption in the awarding of contracts. This badly misses the scope of the violation: even if the sell-off of Iraq were conducted with full transparency and open bidding, it would still be illegal for the simple reason that Iraq is not America's to sell.

The security council's recognition of the United States' and Britain's occupation authority provides no legal cover. The UN resolution passed in May specifically required the occupying powers to "comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva conventions of 1949 and the Hague regulations of 1907".

And yet on top of all this comes Bush's latest insulting propaganda challenge to the entire Middle East to either switch to "modernised democracy" or lose their last claim to "legitimacy" as sovereign states, meaning more invasions are threatened:

A CALL by President Bush for Middle East and Gulf states to transform themselves into democracies drew a sceptical response yesterday.

Mr Bush challenged US allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and foes including Iran and Syria, to embrace democratic reforms as part of a global revolution against tyranny.

He conceded that the US had shared responsibility for propping up Middle East despots for decades, but said that the threat of terrorist violence emanating from the region made it reckless to continue to accept the status quo.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe.

He was careful to state that "modernisation is not the same as Westernising", adding: "Representative government in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures. They will not, and should not, look like us."

But he said Tehran "must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people or lose its last claim to legitimacy", and added that Syrian leaders had left a legacy of "torture, oppression, misery and ruin".

Abdel-Monem Said, director of Egypt's al Ahram Centre for Policy Strategic Studies, said that the Iraq war had tarnished Mr Bush's call for principled reform.

"Democracy is all about legalities, rule of law and legitimacy. There is an issue of double standards," he said

The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, accused Mr Bush of meddling in Iran's affairs, and told him to mind his own business. "Keeping in mind the dark record of the United States in suppressing democratic movements around the globe, he is in no position to talk about such issues," Mr Asefi said.

Not surprising that Bush's thick-skinned Nazi aggressiveness should have only instantly added to the growing anti-American hostility all round the Middle East, and far, far beyond.

For not only is US pre-emptive warmongering causing the world to think the unthinkable and anticipate a global REVOLUTION for a complete end to Western imperialist domination; but even more fundamentally importantly in the very long historical view, — the monopoly-imperialist dominated international capitalist economy continues relentlessly heading for "overproduction" tradewar disaster which will throw the whole planet into total slump upheaval everywhere as the masses start seeking socialist justice everywhere.

Total trade war is now inevitably on the agenda splitting the Western imperialist camp wide open.

Already divided and sickened by the pre-emptive American bullying which has threatened EVERY COUNTRY with blitzkrieg if anyone should even dare to try to catch up with the USA in military might, the lesser imperialist powers now look obliged to extend their anger at Washington's arrogant unilateral Middle East warmongering, and their annoyed contempt for the way that America has then kept all the plunder from "rebuilding" Iraq for itself, — to deliberate direct conflict with the USA over its dirty trade-war games:

Transatlantic trade relations sank to a new low after Brussels gave Washington until March 1 to scrap an illegal multi-billion dollar tax break scheme or face sanctions worth $Ibn (£600m) in the next two years.

Signalling that its patience with the US on the issue was exhausted, the European commission approved a formal proposal to automatically trigger the sanctions unless the scheme — known as the foreign sales corporation act — is abolished by that deadline.

The offending legislation, which has already been ruled illegal by the World Trade Organisation, offers tax concessions to the tune of about $4bn a year to big American exporters such as Boeing, Microsoft and Caterpillar.

Brussels has already won the right from the WTO to impose $4bn in sanctions on the US but said yesterday it had opted for a phased approach in order to avoid poisoning the EU-US trading relationship, which is worth about $lbn a day.

The sanctions are serious, nonetheless. US exports including precious metals, leather, nuclear reactor parts, shoes, soap, live animals, toys, jewellery and sporting goods will face a punitive EU import tariff of 5% from March 1, rising by one percentage point a month to 17% in March 2005.

The commission said the sanctions would net it $340m in 2004 and $680m in 2005.

It stressed, however, that it was not too late for America to abolish the tax breaks scheme and avoid a trade war.

Reaction from the US was chilly. Calling the move "unhelpful"; Rockwell Schnabel, the US ambassador to the EU, argued that Brussels should give the US three more years to comply.

"Something is going to happen [in Congress], so at this stage to retaliate, we think, is counter-productive."

The EC has given the US several deadlines to scrap the tax scheme — the latest was the end of this year — but stressed yesterday that this was the final one, "cast in stone."

The commission's reluctance to levy $4bn in sanctions straightaway — an option that Americans have called "the nuclear bomb" — is in part recognition that a trade war on that scale would damage the EU economy.

It is also recognition that the two parties are trying to restart stalled world trade talks. However, the EU is expected next month to opt for sanctions worth $2.2bn a year in retaliation for America's failure to scrap illegal tariffs on steel imports.

THE United States and Europe edged closer to a tit-for-tat trade war yesterday when Washington rejected a ruling by the World Trade Organisation against its emergency steel tariffs and the European Union threatened £1.3 billion in retaliatory sanctions against American goods.

The WTO ruled that the extraordinary duties on imported steel of up to 30 per cent imposed by President Bush in March last year were illegal.

But Washington was unrepentant in its support of the tariff wall, which was erected to protect America's bankrupt steel industry from foreign competition.

Richard Mills, a spokesman for the United States Trade Representative, said the safeguard measures were consistent with WTO rules. "We disagree with the overall appellate body's findings."

The burgeoning dispute over steel tariffs threatens to mar next week's tour of Europe by President Bush by bringing to the fore a series of unresolved trade disputes. These include an EU ban on the import of US beef treated with hormones and a US tax law that provides exporters with tax breaks worth billions of dollars, a legislation ruled illegal by the WTO.

The European Commission has demanded an end to the steel tariffs. In a joint statement with Japan, Korea, China, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand and Brazil, the EU called. on Washington to terminate the safeguard action "without delay".

The Commission is threatening to impose retaliatory duties of 100 per cent on a range of US goods from December 15 if Washington failed to comply with the WTO ruling.

The goods under threat of penal EU tariffs include politically sensitive items, such as orange juice, as well as steel products and clothing. Florida citrus growers are a big political force in the United States.

Any decision to amend or revoke the safeguard measures must be made by President Bush. The sensitivity of the matter leads Washington insiders to believe that the President alone will make the political decision whether or not to continue to support the troubled steel industry.

America's steel sector is plagued with bankruptcies. A legacy of pension and health insurance liabilities has hindered companies in their efforts to rationalise and merge their operations.

The safeguard measures initiated by the US International Trade Commission and approved by Mr Bush were justified as a protective measure to allow companies breathing space to restructure.

But they were vigorously opposed by US steel consumers and attacked as protectionist by European exporters.

The Confederation of British Industry said that the tariffs were damaging to America's reputation and industry. "They are holding back US manufacturers as they struggle to lead the global economy out of choppy waters," Digby Jones, the CBI's Director General, said.

There is no "recovery" from the economic crisis. It only gets steadily worse, deep dowm, as the lethal pollution of irresponsibly maniacal credit-creation by Washington plunges the US state's finances further and further into unrepayable government debt which the world market blindly invests in but which will bankrupt it when the dollar finally collapses.

This pollution of the global currency is the price to be paid for the Cold War "victory", won by keeping "free world" economies booming at all costs to convince the Moscow Revisionist liquidators that capitalism was simply more successful at achieving "the good life" than a planned socialist economy.

It is in a vain tyrannical attempt to avoid this global economic collapse that the American Empire has resolved to impose immediate military domination threats over the entire planet if any state seriously challenges Washington's New World Order.

It is a hopeless ludicrous fantasy. Defeats for Western imperialism by all and any means is the only way forward for civilisation. EPSR

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