Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.   V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074       www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk   [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]  
No 1172 February 18 2003                                                                                                                   25p

Warmongering idiocy is already leading to a huge leap  in public understanding of the "over-production"-crisis CAUSES of periodic imperial blitzkriegs, now in the open with all-out US trade-war preparations against Germany. But the anti-war movement will not reach peace until the necessity and inevitability of imperialist DEFEAT has entered world consciousness. Total class-war to the bitterest finish is the only solution to monopoly capitalism's relentless militaristic domination of the planet, and EVERY setback to the US imperialist ruling class from ANY anti-imperialist source or from splits with rival imperialists is a step towards DEFEAT for the whole monopoly-capitalist system of global exploitation tyranny in which the WHOLE of the West is filthily involved.

The imperialist system's degenerate preparations for destructive warmongering, both as a cover-up for and as a "solution" to the paralysing "overproduction" crisis in the world economy, have sparked massive "peace" protests for now but only the barest start to the greatest debate in civilisation's history about how to get the planet out of the mess capitalism has got it into.

That philosophical global CLASS struggle can only end in the greatest REVOLUTIONARY upheavals ever recorded.

The economy of grotesquely unequal and uneven development, and vicious nation-genocidal exploitation that has lorded it for 800 years of Western colonial expansion and domination over the whole globe, is not only collapsing politically because of Third World revolt and resistance, but is also collapsing financially as the relentless process of monopoly capital accumulation again stumbles disastrously over its own impossible-to-solve internal contradictions (see Marx, box p3).

Nobly trying to stop one particular blitzkrieg-scapegoating (on Iraq as "the essence of all evil, threatening to bring down our Western way of life", etc, etc) in the demented US imperialist campaign to wage war on the whole world rather than accept the redundancy and collapse of its lucrative world-monopoly position, - is only going to require an even bigger protest to rescue the next "evil-axis" scapegoat named, should this reformist zeal have the unlikely effect of undermining the belligerence against this first propaganda target, Iraq.

Good luck to this and to every subsequent heroic anti-war campaign, but the whole imperialist SYSTEM is geared-up for a new rampage of arse-kicking global domination against "rogue regimes" (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, etc) as a diversion from capitalist economic catastrophe and as a means of reasserting the West's monopoly-imperialist world leadership privileges in spite of the rotten failures and now-total-inadequacy of its fraudulent "free-market" racket of neo-colonial exploitation.

The useful splits in the NATO imperialist camp and at the wretched UN bourgeois talking shop have never stopped more than 400 acts of Western imperialist warmongering and coup-making before, (since 1945) and even in this divisive Iraq question are only proposing "alternatives" which would continue the system of imperialist domination via murderous sanctions, UN military occupation, ongoing US/UK warplane intimidation, etc, etc, etc, - and do absolutely nothing about the ECONOMIC CRISIS of monopoly-capitalist exploitation which is at the root of this inexorably-growing East-West conflict.

Far from being a move to stop all imperialist warmongering forever, the Franco-German row with the USA precisely demonstrates how the destructive and insoluble nature of the underlying economic-crisis CAUSES of Western militarised hysteria could reach World War proportions again, in which the imperialist powers sort each other out over whose interests are to bear the biggest burdens of the approaching financial collapse and long, devastating SLUMP. Note the language used, and the specific vengeance-targets considered, in this remarkable capitalist press admission (between the lines) as to what this sudden astonishing, Big-Power political falling-out is all about, which has buried "diplomatic language" and-the delusion of "mature Western unity and authority" instantaneously:

AMERICA is to punish Germany for leading international opposition to a war against Iraq. The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros.

The plan - discussed by Pentagon officials and military chiefs last week on the orders of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - is designed 'to harm' the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's 'treachery'.

The hawks believe that making an example of Germany will force other countries heavily dependent on US trade to think twice about standing up to America in future.

This follows weeks of increasingly angry exchanges between Rumsfeld and Germany, in which at one point he taunted Germany and France for being an irrelevant part of  'old Europe'.

Now Rumsfeld has decided to go further by unilaterally imposing the Pentagon's sanctions on a country already in the throes of economic problems.

'We are doing this for one reason only: to harm the German economy,' one source told The Observer last week.

'Our troops contribute many millions of dollars. Why should we continue to support a country which has treated Nato and the protection we provided for decades with such incredible contempt?'

Another Pentagon source said: 'The aim is to hit German trade and commerce. It is not just about taking out the troops and equipment; it is also about cancelling commercial contracts and defence-related arrangements.'

The Pentagon plan - and the language expressed by officials close to Rumsfeld - has horrified State Department officials, who believe that bullying other countries to follow the US line will further exacerbate anti-Americanism and alienate those European countries that might support a United Nations resolution authorising a war.

German industry earns billions of euros every year from supporting the US Army Europe which, although reduced from its Cold War heights, still totals 42,000 troops and 785 tanks - almost three times as many as the British Army owns. Many of these soldiers and their fighting equipment, including Apache helicopters, have already been sent to the Gulf.

German industry is heavily involved in supporting the US presence. Among the defence companies which stand to lose out are missile-maker Diehl, aerospace and defence giant EADS Deutschland, armaments maker Rheinmetall and vehicle maker KraussMaffei Wegmann.

There is also a US Air Force contingent of about 15,000 service people with bases at Bitburg, Frankfurt-am-Main and neighbouring Ramstein. where the commander doubles as part of the Nato command. This force includes nearly 60 F-16 fighter bombers and a squadron of A-10 tankbuster aircraft.

Rumsfeld and his staff have made no attempt to hide their fury at Schröder's 'treachery and ineptitude' over Iraq. Last week Schröder leaked to reporters a Franco-German plan (for avoiding war by increasing the number of UN weapons inspectors) before informing his American counterparts.

'After this, Germany is finished as a serious power,' one of the sources added. 'This is simply not the way to conduct diplomacy at a moment of international crisis.' One diplomatic source said Rumsfeld was 'furious at Germany. He is a bruiser and it looks as though he means to do it'.

Under these plans, the US would move its troops in Europe eastwards to countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, all of which have strongly supported America's line against Saddam Hussein.

Germany would suffer considerable financial loss if US forces were withdrawn from the country. The bases provide jobs for local people as everything from administrators to cleaners, and are huge customers for dairy products and bread.

The specific issues targeted are the real battleground for this titanic SYSTEMIC crisis that the world has been plunged into.

And clearly, thoughts about causing DAMAGE to the German economy, regardless of the terrible diplomatic breach that these preparations and outbursts will cause, are what have been UPPERMOST in American imperialist thinking for some considerable time during this gradually escalating warmongering hysteria, superficially about "terrorism".

Washington was ready with this trade-war onslaught for unleashing the very minute that Germany, (or Japan, or France, or Britain, or Italy, or anyone else) piped up to declare its OWN interests threatened by the way that the USA was insisting in conducting the Western imperialist warmongering offensive to cow the planet and make it accept ALL of the burdens of the coming global economic collapse, rather than having the monopoly-capitalist powers accept their responsibility for the systemic collapse, and bear all of the economic burdens themselves (and putting themselves out of business as world imperialist dominators into the bargain).

It is not remotely in the interests of "morality", or the Iraqi people, or "peace", or "democracy", etc, etc, that France, Germany, Belgium (three of the most vicious imperialist powers in history, and still very much addicted to the proceeds of Western monopoly-capitalist world economic domination) plus other exploiting bourgeois powers, have taken a stand against America's specific warmongering agenda, - but purely for the sake of rival French and German trade-war calculations once the further international economic implications of the anti-Iraq offensive become clear.

Even this early in the approach towards World War III, this can be detected in the irreconcilable virulence of the national chauvinist insults being flung around everywhere; in the specific historic analogies constantly being dredged up from previous inter-imperialist world-war economic conflicts; and from the speed with which the national press of the biggest imperialist bully, for example, has so eagerly and readily universalised the Big Power conflict: 
The "petulant prima donna of realpolitik" is leading the "axis of weasels" in "a chorus of "cowards". It is an unholy alliance of "wimps" and ingrates which includes one country that is little more than a "mini-me minion"; another that is in league with Cuba and Libya, with a bunch of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" at the helm. 

Welcome to Europe, as viewed through the eyes of American commentators and newspapers yesterday, as Euro-bashing, and particularly anti-French sentiment, reached new heights. In a barrage of insults and invective which ranged from the basest tabloid rants to the loftiest columnists on the most respected newspapers, European-led resistance to America's war plans in Iraq was portrayed not as a diplomatic position to be negotiated but as a genetic weakness in the European mindset which makes them reluctant to fight wars and incapable of winning them.

The front page of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post yesterday shows the graves of Normandy with the headline: "They died for France but France has forgotten".

"Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers on the line to fight today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?" asks the  pugnacious columnist Steve Dunleavy. "Talking appeasement. Wimping out. How can they have forgotten?" A cartoon in the same paper shows an ostrich with its head in the sand below the words: "The national bird of France."

American wrath has been reserved for those nations which oppose their leadership, particularly following the decision to oppose shifting Nato resources to Turkey. "Three countries France, Germany and their mini-me minion, Belgium - have moved from opposition to US policy toward Iraq into formal, and consequential obstructionism" argued the Wall Street Journal in an editorial yesterday. "If there is a war [the Turks] will face the danger of direct attack that is not feared in the chocolate shops of Brussels". The front page of the National Review blares "Putsch" with a sub-headline: "How to defeat the Franco German power grab."

While the jibes maybe puerile, the possibility that the Bush administration and commercial outlets might follow them up with punitive measures has struck some as pernicious. An ad, due to come out soon, shows three German-made cars, including an Audi and a BMW, driving towards the camera with a voice saying: "Do you really want to buy a German car?"

If there has been any European country that has attracted more contempt than others, it is France. In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens described Jacques Chirac as "a positive monster of conceit... the abject procurer for Saddam... the rat that tried to roar". In the Washington Post, George Will opined that the "oily" foreign affairs minister, Dominique de Villepin, had launched France into "an exercise for which France has often refined its savoir-faire since 1870, which is to say retreat - this time into incoherence".

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman argued that France should be removed from the security council and be replaced with India. "India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, its become silly." The Wall Street Journal editor, Max Boot, argues: "France has been in decline since, oh, about 1815, and it isn't happy about it. What particularly galls the Gauls is that their rightful place in the world has been usurped by the gauche Americans."

At its ugliest, the transatlantic bile is becoming increasingly personal. When France Inter radio's correspondent in Washington, Laurence Simon, started to explain her government's position to Fox News (owned by Murdoch) she was interrupted by the presenter. "With friends like you, who needs enemies;" she was told as she was taken off air.

A BITTER verbal duel between Donald Rumsfeld, once a wrestler and US Navy pilot, and Joschka Fischer, a former street-fighting student rebel, set the tone of an astonishingly knockabout transatlantic security conference in Munich, which ended yesterday in fierce disagreement.

The collision between the tart-tongued US Defence Secretary and the increasingly frayed German Foreign Minister over the inevitability of a war against Iraq laid bare not only the depth of the split, but also its bitterness.

War is "never the first or easy choice", Mr Rumsfeld said. But he made starkly clear that war is imminent. "Sorry, but I'm not convinced!" blurted out Herr Fischer, speaking passionately and without notes. "Why now?... Why are we in a situation where we should resort to violence exactly now? You are going to have to occupy Iraq for years and years. Are Americans ready for this?"

Outside the conference, watercannon trucks separated the delegates from 20,000 peace demonstrators wearing death masks and chanting: "Go home Rocket Rummy."

News of the nascent Franco-German peace plan to smother Iraq with inspectors and UN troops further inflamed American sensitivities, not least because US officials heard about the plan only when journalists told them.

"We keep on hearing about how Nato is a big family," Professor Christian Hacke, of Bonn University, said. "But you can see here that this is a family which would embarrass Ozzy Osbourne."

For most of the time it seemed as if the Americans and Europeans were talking different languages; the syntax of Nato, devised in the 1950s, has become garbled.

German politicians typically prefaced their questions with intense speeches aimed at a domestic audience. Mr Rumsfeld, with a wolfish smile, sometimes snubbed them or gave  an entirely irrelevant answer. "I can't remember the rest of your questions," he told Angelika Beer, the Green Party leader, and turned away from her. He laced his speech and his discussion time with the reprimands of a disappointed schoolmaster. Germany and France were behaving "outrageously" by refusing to help to defend Turkey. The UN had "taken the path of ridicule".

Yet the robust Rumsfeldisms were out-trumped by Senator John McCain, who accused Germany and France of "vacuous posturing". Both the Republican speakers saw Iraq as the ultimate test of whether the UN could survive, much as the 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia exposed the League of Nations. Germany and France were unravelling the very system of international security that they claimed to support. When Joseph Lieberman the Democrat senator, took a similar line, the Germans realised that they were not the target of a one-man Rumsfeld crusade.

It is noteworthy that while the Americans can pour out the vilest insults doubting the battle-courage, loyalty and competence of the French and Germans, the Europeans are in no position at all, at official level, to reply with the obvious counter-insult about US warmongering imperialism, - because France and Germany are still warmongering imperialists themselves when they can approve of the target, place, time, and type of blitzkrieg to be inflicted on some wretched Third World scapegoat.

Petty-bourgeois public opinion, on the other hand, has taken a much more decisive turn against the essential contradictions of the imperialist propaganda system itself.

Insights close to an objective materialist understanding (Marxist, class-based) of the US warmongering tyranny (or at least many of its propaganda tricks) are beginning to get massive publicity from the million-fold editions of capitalist newspapers themselves. In particular, the historical nonsense spouted by Western groupies, likening an anti-war stand to 1930s "appeasement", has forced out polemical replies placing, not Saddam Hussein, but Bush and Blair as closest to Hitler and Goebbels 1930's role on behalf of warmongering aggression:

The parallel between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Nazi Germany is transparently ridiculous. In the late 1930s, Hitler's Germany was the world's second largest industrial economy and commanded its most powerful military machine. It openly espoused an ideology of territorial expansion,  had annexed the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia in rapid succession and posed a direct threat to its neighbours. It would go on to enslave  most of Europe and carry out an industrial genocide unparalleled in human history.

Iraq is, by contrast, a broken-backed developing country, with a single commodity economy and a devastated infrastructure, which doesn't even control all its own territory and has posed no credible threat to its neighbours, let alone Britain or the US, for more than a decade. Whatever residual chemical or biological weapons Iraq may retain, they are clearly no deterrent, its armed forces have been massively weakened and face the most powerful military force in history - Iraq's military spending is estimated to be about one per cent of the US's $380bn budget. The attempt to equate the Iraqis' horrific gas attacks on Kurds and Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war with the Nazi holocaust is particularly grotesque - a better analogy would be the British gassing of Iraqi Kurds in the 20s or the US use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.

Appeasement is in any case a misnomer for what was an attempt by rightwing governments in Britain and France in the 1930s to befriend Germany and accommodate Nazi expansion. There was certainly a widespread yearning for peace in the aftermath of the butchery of the first world war. But the appeasers were something else: effectively a pro-German fifth column at the heart of the conservative elite, who warmed to Hitler's militant anti-communism and sought to encourage him to turn on the Soviet Union. Chamberlain even hoped for an alliance with Nazi Germany. Fascist sympathies were rampant throughout the establishment, from Edward VIII to newspapers like the Mail which now denounce opponents of war on Iraq as traitors - while mavericks like Churchill and what would now be called the hard left resisted the Munich sellout. In none of this is there the remotest analogy with current efforts to prevent an unprovoked attack on sanctions-drained Iraq. And of course none of the opponents of appeasement in the 1930s ever argued for pre-emptive war on Nazi Germany, but for deterrence and self-defence. 

Just as absurd, against the background of the European-US standoff, is the increasingly strident insistence of the war party that it was the US which saved Europe from Nazi tyranny in the 1940s. It isn't necessary in anyway to minimise the heroism of US soldiers to balk at such a retrospective reworking of the facts. Quite what the Russians - who lost perhaps 27 million people in the second world war (compared with 135,576 US deaths in Europe), bore the brunt of the European fighting and, in Churchill's words, "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine" - are supposed to make of this fable is anyone's guess. Particularly when Russia - along with France, Germany and China - is opposing the current war drive and is presumably therefore regarded by war supporters as ranked among the appeasers.

The idea that those opposed to US aggression against Iraq can be compared to the appeasers of the 1930s is simply risible. But if appeasement - unlike the form it took in the 1930s - is regarded as an attempt to pacify a powerful and potentially dangerous power, it sounds far more like the behaviour of Tony Blair's government towards the Bush administration. Of course Bush's America cannot be compared with Nazi Germany - it is far more in the traditional imperial mould. But Britain's apparent attempt to steer the US away from unilateral action, if that is what it has been, shows every sign of failing. Instead, Blair has ended up lining up behind a hard-right US republican administration with the political heirs of Mussolini and Franco in the teeth of British and global opinion - and helped to fracture the US-dominated post-1991 global order into the bargain.

Hitler analogies have long been the stock-in-trade of Anglo-American war propaganda - perhaps not surprisingly, since the second world war still retains near-universal legitimacy, just as Nazi Germany remains the archetype of an aggressive, genocidal state. Nasser was the first to be branded the new Hitler in the 1950s, while those who opposed the Suez war were damned as appeasers. But there have been a string of others, from Ho Chi Minh to Gaddafi, Milosevic to Mullah Omar. All were compared to Hitler while British or US bombs rained down on their countries. Just how devalued this currency has become was on show this week when the Tory historian Andrew Roberts argued that the Iraqi regime should be equated with the Nazis because both had "gassed their racial and political enemies" and Iraq fires at British and US aircraft patrolling the illegal no-fly zones over its territory.

It would be tempting to put these latest invocations of the second world war down to ignorance if it wasn't that those making them clearly know better. What they are in fact engaged in is a crude attempt to rewrite 20th century European history to justify a war of aggression in the Middle East.

And the Guardian has given space to Professor David Harvey's near-Marxist exposure of war as Western imperialism's regular, sick routine when faced with periodic insoluble "overproduction" crisis wiping out profits and paralysing the whole capitalist economy:

Why, when the most urgent threat arising from illegal weapons of mass destruction is the nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, is the US government ignoring it and concentrating on Iraq? Why, if it believes human rights are so important, is it funding the oppression of the Algerians; the Uzbeks, the Palestinians, the Turkish Kurds and the Colombians? Why has the bombing of Iraq, rather than feeding the hungry, providing clean water or preventing disease, become the world's most urgent humanitarian concern? Why has it become so much more pressing than any other that it should command a budget four times the size of America's entire annual spending on overseas aid?

In a series of packed lectures in Oxford, Professor David Harvey, one of the world's most distinguished geographers, has provided what may be the first comprehensive explanation of the US government's determination to go to war. His analysis suggests that it has little to do with Iraq, less to do with weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with helping the oppressed.

The underlying problem the US confronts is the one which periodically afflicts all successful economies: the over-accumulation of capital. Excessive production of any good - be it cars or shoes or bananas - means that unless new markets can be found, the price of that product falls and profits collapse. 

Just as it was in the early 1930s the US is suffering from surpluses of commodities, manufactured products, manufacturing capacity and money. Just as it was then, it is also faced with a surplus of labour, yet the two surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably matched. This problem has been developing in the US since 1973. It has now tried every available means of solving it and, by doing so, maintaining its global dominance. The only remaining, politically viable option is war.	

In 1941, it used military spending to the same effect.

After the war, its massive spending in Europe and Japan permitted America to offload surplus cash, while building new markets. This strategy worked well until the early 1970s. Then three inexorable processes began to mature. As the German and Japanese economies developed, the US was no longer able to dominate production. As they grew, these new economies also stopped absorbing surplus capital and started to export it. At the same time, the investments of previous decades began to pay off, producing new surpluses. The crisis of 1973 began with a worldwide collapse of property markets, which were, in effect, regurgitating the excess money they could no longer digest.

The US urgently required a new approach, and it deployed two blunt solutions. The first was to switch from the domination of global production to the domination of global finance. The US Treasury, working with the International Monetary Fund, began to engineer new opportunities in developing countries for America's commercial banks.

The IMF started to insist that countries receiving its help should liberalise their capital markets. This permitted the speculators on Wall Street to enter and, in many cases, raid their economies. The financial crises the speculators caused forced the devaluation of those countries' assets. This had two beneficial impacts for the US economy. Through the collapse of banks and manufacturers in Latin America and East Asia, surplus capital was destroyed. The bankrupted companies in those countries could then be bought by US  corporations at rock bottom prices, creating new space into which American capital could expand.

The second solution was what Harvey calls "accumulation through dispossession", which is really a polite term for daylight robbery.

These are the processes which, alongside the depredations of the IMF and the commercial banks, brought the global justice movement into being. In all cases, new territories were created into which capital could expand and in which its surpluses could be absorbed.

Both these solutions are now failing.

As the east Asian countries whose economies were destroyed by the IMF five years ago have recovered, they have begun, once more, to generate vast capital surpluses of their own. America's switch from production to finance as a means of global domination, and the government's resulting economic mismanagement, has made it more susceptible to disruption and economic collapse. Corporations are now encountering massive public resistance as they seek to expand their opportunities through dispossession.		

So all that remains is war and imperial control.

Attacking Iraq offers the US three additional means of offloading capital while maintaining its global dominance. The first is the creation of new geographical space for economic expansion. The second (though this is not a point Harvey makes) is military spending (a process some people call "military Keynesianism"). The third is the ability to control the economies of other nations by controlling the supply of oil.

Strategic thinkers in the US have been planning this next stage of expansion for years. Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary for defence, was writing about the need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s. The impending war will not be fought over terrorism, anthrax, VX gas, Saddam Hussein, democracy or the treatment of the Iraqi people.

And all Washington's hypocritical posturing about Iraq's "lies, evasions, and cover-ups" and against the anti-war lobby for its "ostrich-like hiding from the truth", and for "censoring the reality" about war and its necessity, - has only provoked a remarkable attack on the USA's own lying propaganda in wartime to conceal the real situation of war:

On February 25 1991 the war correspondent Leon Daniel arrived at a battlefield at the tip of the neutral zone between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daniel was one of a pool of journalists who had been held back from witnessing action the previous day, when Desert Storm's  ground war had been launched.

Daniel had seen the aftermath of modest firefights in Vietnam. "The bodies would be stacked up like cordwood," he recalled. Yet this ferocious attack had not produced a single visible body: It was a battlefield without the stench of urine, faeces, blood and bits of flesh. Daniel wondered what happened to the estimated 6,000 Iraqi defenders who had vanished. "Where are the bodies'?" he finally asked the First Division's public affairs officer, an army major. 'What bodies?" the major replied.

Months later, Daniel and the world would learn why the dead had eluded eyewitnesses, cameras and video footage. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company,' said Colonel Anthony Moreno. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted ploughs and Bradleys to obliterate an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches.

The finishing touches were made by armoured combat earthmovers (ACES). These massive bulldozers, with armoured cockpits impervious to small-arms fire; smoothed away any hint of the carnage.

What happened in the neutral zone that day is a metaphor for the art of war in an era when domestic politics is often more important than the predictable outcome on the field of battle. In 1991 American voters rallied behind President George Bush Sr for the seemingly bloodless confrontation with Saddam Hussein. Neatly hidden from a small army of journalists was the reality of war - a reality that can make these very same voters recoil in disapproval. 

His son is likely to use the same sort of tactics to blind one of the world's freest and most influential media establishments.

According to White House officials, no final decisions have been made by Bush, Cheney and current defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We're still negotiating with the media," said one administration official. But Bush has already implemented ground rules that require journalists to give up their mobile and satellite phones to military commanders who would control the movements of these so-called pool reporters during Desert Storm II. If the final rules, organised by the Pentagon, are anything like the pool system  designed by Bush Sr and Cheney in 1991, the world will be given a cloudy mixture of video footage and misinformation that will fog the reality of war.

Daniel, the wire service veteran, was part of the 1991 pool system. About 150 American journalists, photographers and film crews were scattered among attacking units. Their reports were supposed to be fed to a rear headquarters and then shared by hundreds of journalists from around the world. "They wouldn't let us see anything,' said Daniel, who has seen just about everything there is to see in war. Not a single eyewitness account, photograph or strip of video of combat between 400,000 soldiers in the desert was produced by this battalion of professional observers.

Most of the grisly photos from Desert Storm seen today were the work of independent journalists who raced to the "Highway of Death" north of Kuwait, where war planes had destroyed thousands of vehicles in which Iraqi soldiers had fled after the start of the ground war. The area was free of the military handlers who routinely interrupted interviews to chastise soldiers into changing their statements while reporters stood back, or forcibly removed film from cameras that captured images deemed offensive by an Army public affairs officer.

Cheney, brimming with contempt and hostility for the press, saw journalists as critics of the military who must be contained. 

A stunning victory in 1991 was the media's agreement to permit the Pentagon to censor journalists' reports before they were printed or broadcast. In the past the Pentagon had left censorship up to individual reporters. During 10 years of war in Vietnam, not one journalist violated self-imposed rules against reporting, for example, specific locations of attacks.

As a result, the conventional wisdom was that the government was not violating the First Amendment to the Constitution: that Congress "will make no law to abridge [. . .] freedom of the press". Only a handful of journalists went to federal court to challenge the government censorship imposed by Bush, Cheney and Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: The court ruled the suit moot - the war was over - but invited the press to try again so that the issue might be settled. It never was.

The media was more duped than cowed. Cheney won over some people with the promise that places in the pool would give them an advantage over competitors.

For independent journalists, life was much more difficult. More than 70 operating outside the pool system were arrested, detained, threatened at gunpoint or chased from the front line. Army public affairs officers made nightly visits to hotels and restaurants in  Hafir-al-Batin, a Saudi town on the Iraqi border. Reporters and photographers would bolt from the table. The slower ones were arrested.

But when the ground war started the mighty were hamstrung along with the mediocre. The Associated Press, which benefited most of all from a system that turned all journalists into wire service reporters, sent photographer Scott Applewhite to cover victim's of a Scud missile attack near Dahran. The warhead had hit an American tent, killing 25 army reservists and wounding 70. It was the single biggest loss to Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm. Applewhite, an accredited Pool member, was stopped by US Army military police. When he objected, they punched and handcuffed him while ripping the film from his cameras.

Cheney made sure it was just as bad for the rest of the pool. When the ground war started, the defence secretary declared a "media blackout",  blocking all reports.

As a result, reports and film were delayed or "lost" by military commanders so that most of it arrived too late for most deadlines. Neal and Schwarzkopf provided the bulk of briefings and videos in Saudi Arabia, and these were the first reports to filter through; many became the basis of the most lasting perceptions of Desert Storm. Gun camera footage always showed empty bridges or aircraft hangars being destroyed by "smart bombs" - laser-guided munitions that never struck a single human. But only 6% of the munitions used against Iraq could be guided to a target. Over 94% were far less surgical during the 30-day air war, which often saw 400 sorties a day. Those bombs depended on gravity and variable winds, and were capable of causing "collateral damage" to nearby unarmed civilians.

The global television audience was awed by Tomahawk cruise missiles roaring from the decks of US Navy warships at sea. But less than 10% hit their targets. The missiles accuracy depends on landmarks that can be spotted by an on-board camera that can shift the weapon's direction. But the featureless desert led many Tomahawks to wander away like so many lost patrols. according to Pentagon studies.

Schwarzkopf conducted televised briefings about the allied counter-attack on Saddam's Scud missiles that had terrorised Saudi Arabia its well as Israel. Yet an air force study after the war showed that Iraq had ended up with as many Scud launchers as it had possessed before the war started.

Weinberger took control of the US media when Reagan found himself in a deepening hole in Lebanon. 

On October 23 1983, 241 US Marines died after a truck laden with explosives destroyed a makeshift barracks at Beirut airport. The massacre suddenly focused attention on the ageing actor's foreign policy decisions as the reports and pictures showed the removal of American bodies. Within 48 hours of the bombing, the president dispatched the first wave of 5,000 American troops to Grenada in the Caribbean.

But the invasion angered Thatcher. Grenada was linked to the UK as a member of the Commonwealth. Only the previous week, Washington had informed London that there was no need for outside intervention, as local political turmoil was likely to play itself out without further bloodshed. Geoffrey Howe, Britain's foreign minister, was explicit. "The invasion of Grenada was clearly designed to divert attention," Howe said in an interview. You had disaster in Beirut; now triumph in Grenada. 'Don't look there,' " he said, gesturing with his forefinger, "'look over here."

Reporters were banned from Grenada. Those who tried to land on the island, such as Morris Thompson of Newsday, were arrested and imprisoned on US ships offshore. All details and videos were supplied by military reporters and photographers at Pentagon briefings.

The media barons howled, but little changed. When Bush Sr invaded Panama in 1989, journalists were once again banned. Democratic congressman Charles Rangle of New York still insists that as many as 5,000 civilians in Panama City were killed by US invaders. But there are no pictures, no eyewitness accounts.

Bush was caught bantering as flag-draped coffins arrived at an air force base in Dover, Delaware - a military mortuary. Later that week, Bush ordered the press banned from covering the arrival ceremonies for the fallen: President Clinton continued the ban. And his successor, President George Bush, also wants to keep the dead out of the national limelight.

And it is the collapse of Washington's "democracy" posturing that could become one of the most valuable outcomes of all from this propaganda furore which the imperialist warmongers are currently losing badly.

Having carved out its "democratic" and "humanitarian" credentials via the most astounding brainwashing phenomenon in modern society's history, the Cold War against the attractions of a planned socialist world, imperialist warmongering has now got to try to live up to its own bogus claims of being on the side of "justice", "freedom", and "equality" in the moment of provoking a billionfold questioning from its citizens because of launching the same aggressive armed tyranny it used to falsely accuse communism of.

And the American ruling class is coming out of it staggeringly badly.

Even the pro-war Observer cannot stop stitching Washington up in article after article.

In particular, the rotten US identification with the Zionist Nazi-colonial tyranny over the Palestinian nation and homeland is drawing increasing scorn, especially when tied in with the USA's fostering of total Arab corruption, backwardness and subservience-to-American-interests as the only way of accommodating Zionism's murderous landgrab imperialism and dangerous regional warmongering tyranny:

In the past 30 years, America has vetoed 34 resolutions that criticise Israel and seek to restrain its behaviour. These failed most recently in a demand for the restoration of land seized from the Palestinians and a cessation of construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Even in the relatively minor case from November 1990, when the UN wanted to send three Security Council members to Rishon Lezion, where an Israeli gunman had shot seven Palestinian workers, the US vetoed the wishes of the other 14 countries on the council. Over three decades Arabs have come to understand that the cards are stacked against them. What is important, but rarely understood in the United States, is that each case against Israel seems just as compelling in Arab eyes as the need for Saddam's disarmament is to George Bush. Now that America wants the permanent members of the Security Council to vote for a new resolution, or at least seek a definition of 'serious consequences' in 1441 as meaning military action, Europeans should remind the US of this appalling record of bias and seek to link the discussion about Iraq to the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. November 1967 - the famous resolution 242 which underlines that Israel must return territory acquired in war.

This is still active, but 35 years on the Israelis remain in material breach of 242, a breach made all the more flagrant by continued building and settling in the occupied territories.

Despite Israeli denials, the message is clear. Israel is not prepared to exchange conquered territory for peace and would appear to prefer to become embroiled in a dirty war with terrorist groups rather than give up a square inch to the Palestinians. Israeli defiance of 242 and the subsequent resolutions have been a chronic destabiliser in the Middle East. The Israelis will not shift and the US has done almost nothing to make them. In fact, its financial and military support has achieved the opposite of compliance. If France or Russia had undermined Security Council resolutions against Iraq to this degree, we can only imagine the indignation and rage of men such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. So Americans want it both ways. That is not unusual for the world's dominant power, but to claim that a disarmament of Saddam should be undertaken primarily to secure peace in the region is to neglect the permanent threat to peace caused by Israel's intransigence. Although discussions in the Security Council over the next week will focus on Iraq, Israel should be brought into the picture. The European are in a position to insist on linkage - joint resolutions that address both Iraq and Israel and have equal force in the eyes of the world.

Compliance in Israel is just as much a requirement as it is in Iraq.

How can the British be so totally committed to American foreign policy in the-Middle East - where they have much longer and deeper experience when it is so rash and dangerous, and at odds with British interests?

The hawks in Washington, clearly in the ascendant, are becoming clearer about their objectives. They want the invasion of Iraq to be followed by a programme of remaking the whole Middle East, following far-reaching plans with long antecedents and ingredients including a document, A Clean Break, written in 1996 for Benjamin Netanyahu, when he was Prime Minister of Israel.

They envisage an end to pan-Arab nationalism and provide the opportunity for peaceful relations with Israel and the United States, and more secure access to oilfields.

But it is naïve to assume that democratic elections will benefit Western interests in the current climate of confrontation with Islam. Angry young Arab voters could well favour radical Islamist candidates, as they have done in Algeria - who would bring to power regimes with much more anti-Western policies than their predecessors.

And no British diplomat who has followed the twists and turns of past policies in Washington can feel confident about the success of American adventures in the Middle East. The interventions in both Iraq and Iran have been inconsistent and dangerous, helping to provide weapons and finance terrorist groups which later turned against them.
 
THE RECORD of both the CIA and the State Department in dealing with Saddam Hussein appears still more irresponsible as new documents appear, showing how they gave him massive support in the mid-Eighties to help him win the war against Iran, then allowed him to re-arm before he invaded Kuwait in 1991.

The record of American oil diplomacy in the Middle East is no better, as companies have helped to corrupt autocratic rulers then turned against them, provoking nationalists and encouraging fundamentalists.

International oil executives are now much less confident of the benefits of war than the hawks in Washington. George Bush and Dick Cheney, both former oilmen, portray the war as providing secure oil supplies. But a post-war occupation of Iraq could make all Arab oil producers vulnerable to a backlash of Islamic revolt.

British oil companies cannot have much confidence that a war against Iraq would safeguard their interests. BP, which pioneered the discovery of oil in Iraq, fears being sidelined by American companies.

The British have their own record of mishandling and misjudging Middle Eastern nations, many of which they helped to create, including Iraq, after the First World War. When Sir Anthony Eden invaded Egypt in the Suez war of 1956, he never seriously considered the aftermath, which aroused Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East and did huge damage to British businesses, particularly the oil companies who were not consulted about a war supposedly in their interests.

Britain learnt many lessons from that huge mistake and tried to work more closely with Arab countries afterwards. Now Washington seems set on a reverse path, back to colonisation, military intervention and occupation. For the British to support such a policy is to reject their own experience and to forfeit precious goodwill.

Few British diplomats believe that the defeat of Saddam Hussein will weaken terrorists round the world while many suspect that the war and occupation will help to provoke more terrorism - as Osama bin Laden evidently intends. The British still find it hard to understand how the Americans have switched their prime target from al-Qaeda to Saddam.

The Foreign Office is much more sensitive to Arab opinion, and the grievances of the Palestinians, than the State Department. Tony Blair has promised that a war on Iraq would be followed by pressure on Israel to negotiate peace with Palestinians - but there is little evidence Washington will exercise that pressure, while a war on Iraq would give the Israeli army an opportunity for further expansion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

Britain is doing no service to itself, or to Israel, by supporting a hawkish American foreign policy in the Middle East. However speedy and successful the first victory over Saddam, the aftermath will be perilous and bitter. The British people may well look back on the Iraq war of 2003 with the same puzzled questions that they asked after Suez. How could they have been so misled, by such a small group of people, to move against both their instincts and their interests?

But a middle-class propaganda reformist onslaught against American imperialist warmongering, no matter how crucially it helps provoke broader revolutionary consciousness in tandem with however-massive "peace" demonstrations it inspires or is inspired-by, - is no answer at all to the really vital question of how is Washington's aggressive blitzkrieg response to insoluble economic crisis to be terminated??????

And there is only one answer, and that is through the DEFEAT of American military domination (plus the DEFEAT of any or all of whatever allies the USA can cobble together for its degenerate bullying "solution" to crisis by waging an insane "war on evil").

And the prospects for such defeats are just about the brightest things around, and INFINITELY greater than even the very wildest estimates.

And the proof is staring everyone in the face right now, in Afghanistan, in Argentina, in Nepal, in Colombia, in Pakistan, all over Africa, in Bolivia, in Ireland, in Venezuela, and all over East Europe's descent into criminal cultural degeneracy and poverty-ridden inequality (compared to the triumphs of the continuing workers states in China, Cuba, etc, etc). 

On the one hand, the global economic crisis continues relentlessly to descend into utterly depraved chaos; and a worldwide rash of colossal communist revolutions, which all the American guns in the world will not be able to resist, is only a matter of time. And the last hope in this capitalist press report on Bolivia's coming breakdown and revolutionary anarchy, - a trip to Washington for yet more crisis-creating dollar-bill pollution, - is ultimately the most doomed "solution" of all since it is the dollar's COLLAPSE itself which will be one of the final catastrophes in this insoluble imperialist-system crisis. 

Givesy-backsy handouts from the world exploitation thief have not rescued Argentina from chaos, will not rescue Bolivia, and will not save the next 100 countries, either, from edging ever closer to revolutionary communist anarchy as the global imperialist system crashes completely:

Bolivia is the latest casualty of the meltdown that has swept across Latin America bringing economic collapse and civil disorder. 

Desperate to avert further bloodshed, a government mission led by the Foreign Minister, Carl's Saavedra, flew to Washington to meet White House officials, the Treasury and multilateral banks to secure an aid package that might save Bolivia from economic implosion. Speaking before the Permanent Council at the Organisation of American States, Saavedra warned of dire consequences if the aid money did not come through. 'The situation is not complicated in Bolivia, it is dramatic,' he said. 'We fear that as of next week, on Monday or Tuesday... the conflict will begin in earnest.'

US-led war on drugs has forced Bolivia to eradicate 90 per cent of its coca, the raw material for cocaine, impoverishing coca farmers, mainly indigenous people; and causing unrest and ethnic tensions.

IT HAS BEEN a weekend of funerals in La Paz as thousands draped flowers over the coffins of nine policemen who were among at least 33 killed in vicious riots that spread across the Andean nation last week.

Striking police officers returned to work on Friday, restoring a tentative calm, but fears persist that a 48-hour general strike beginning tomorrow will catapult the country back into chaos. The strike, organised by the Central Bolivian Workers' Union - the country's largest - is in protest against the government's economic policies and to demand the resignation of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Nationwide blockades by independence-seeking indigenous people and coca farmers are also planned.

Last week's violence was triggered when the 22,000 strong police force and other government employees mutinied against a salary tax, triggering two days of riots as troops were called in to restore order. Despite criticism of its handling of events, the government refused to take responsibility, denouncing the riots as an attempted coup, the product of a 'conspiracy' against democracy.

'After a careful and lengthy evaluation, the clear conclusion is that in the final hours [someone] was managing a coup d'état against democracy,' said presidential spokesman Mauricio Antexana, without identifying any one group.

Rioting was quelled on Friday when police returned to patrolling the streets of Bolivia's cities, amid cheers from frightened citizens. The toll has been high: 33 fatalities, hundreds of injured and £15 million of losses incurred through looting and destruction in South America's poorest nation.

It is a disaster that has been long in the making. Successive governments have embraced economic reforms that have left Bolivians feeling poorer than ever.

The riots began as a protest against a government plan to raise income tax to 12.5 per cent in response to demands from the International Monetary Fund that Bolivia reduce its deficit from, 8.5 per cent of the budget to 5.5. Previously, the government depended on a value added tax paid on goods and services. The system was subject to fraud by Bolivians who submitted fake invoices to get exemptions.

The rioting only stopped when the president announced that the tax increase would not go ahead.

Argentina's president, Eduardo Duhalde, directly accused the IMF of causing Bolivia's crisis, saying: 'It's the same as what happened here,' referring to Argentina's economic crash in 2001 that led to unprecedented impoverishment and sporadic violence that continues to date.

'The IMF wanted to reduce salaries,' said Duhalde, 'and the result is people in the street, brothers fighting each other, and a months-old government staggering.'

The revolt began on Tuesday night when officers refused to begin patrols and demanded a 40 per cent pay increase to offset the tax rise.

On Wednesday, La Paz's 10,000 police went on strike, joining thousands of government employees who marched through the capital. Government employees, largely the only workers who have regular, taxable salaries, stormed the square outside the presidential palace and broke into government offices.

Police looked on without taking action as students smashed windows. The carnage began in earnest after Sánchez de Lozada gave orders to send in the army, pitting the security forces against  each other. Television footage showed soldiers firing at the police headquarters across the square after police officers fired tear gas at them.

State buildings burnt through the night as firefighters joined the police in their protest. The disorder spread across the nation.

'I've been a doctor here for 30 years and I've never seen such a bloody day,'. said Eduardo Chávez director of the capital's main public hospital.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, American attempts to bring back under imperialist sway any country which has fallen through the net into potentially revolutionary anarchy - such as Afghanistan, - have proved equal FAILURES.

Afghanistan should have been easy. With all America's financial and technological firepower, rebuilding a simple backward country to a moderately successful living standard from the utter depths of degradation from 20 years devastating civil war should have been child's play, - especially in the Americans suffering no interference from any hostile outside power such as the Soviet workers state had to put up with from destructive CIA/Mojahedin non-stop massive subversion and sabotage all the time it was helping the first Afghan workers state heroically transform tribal-feudal Afghanistan into an amazing place of industrial, educational, social, and cultural progress. 

But with no interference from outside, and with the massacre or imprisonment of every anti-capitalist in sight, - the 'benevolent' US imperialist invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is largely only producing humiliating anti-colonial resistance, once again, such as led to the 1970s communist revolution in the first place. In this remarkable capitalist press admission from no less than the Times newspaper of record, one American officer is reported as effectively saying that the US intervention was facing DEFEAT, - "just like the Russians", - from timeless native hostility (forgetting to mention the huge difference: - no superpower is bribing the Mojahedin hostility this time):

President Bush boasted in his State of the Union address that America had "liberated an oppressed people" and vowed to reconstruct their shattered infrastructure.  The fierce fighting that has erupted in southern Afghanistan over the past month serves as a sharp reminder that, even as America prepares for an Iraq war, its efforts to pacify Afghanistan are far from over. Indeed, large parts of the country are once more on the verge of anarchy.

Provincial Afghan authorities claimed yesterday that 17 civilians had been killed in American bombing raids against al-Qaeda targets. 

There are almost daily attacks not only on American soldiers and their Afghan allies, but also on foreign aid agencies and civilians.

Security in the Pashtun dominated south has deteriorated rapidly, with a string of attacks apparently inspired by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the  former Mujahidin commander and warlord. His fighters are believed to have taken on US troops in fierce fighting around their cave complex outside Spin Boldak last month and later to have launched an offensive against Afghan government forces in Kandahar province.

Even the capital, Kabul, where Germany heads an international peacekeeping force, is unstable, with a recent grenade attack on US soldiers and the arrest of a group of men plotting to blow up an American military installation.

President Karzai, the leader of the interim Government, cannot leave his palace without the protection of former American special forces soldiers.

Roger King, the American military spokesman in Afghanistan, said. "It's still primarily a combat mission, to seek out, destroy and capture members of al-Qaeda and those who support them."

The problem for the soldiers charged with that mission is that the enemy is all too often out of reach. All along the Pakistan border, former Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters have taken refuge in lawless tribal areas, from where they mount hit-and-run attacks.

Reports from the tribal areas suggest that support for Taleban and al-Qaeda forces there has grown steadily in the past few months, since the two border provinces of Pakistan came under the control of ultra-religious Islamic parties sympathetic to their cause.

"They know it's a sanctuary. They come and go as they please," Major David Woods operations commander at Salerno Base, said.

Day after day, on this almost forgotten frontline in the War on Terror, American soldiers stationed at remote bases such as Salerno along the Pakistani border face a barrage of rocket and grenade attacks and sniper fire from suspected Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters. Some Pakistani border guards are said to have actively aided their efforts, guiding them in the direction of American bases.

While American military officials are cagey about discussing the presence of al-Qaeda and the Taleban inside Pakistan, for fear of angering their Pakistani allies, hostilities on the ground have exploded into the open, with Pakistani border guards firing across the border on American special forces based at Shkin.

Even on the Afghan side, there are many sympathetic to the cause of those trying to oust the Americans, and finding out who is helping the attackers is far from simple. The American forces here are largely dependent on the local population for tip-offs about their enemies, but in a society riven by tribal feuds, choosing who to trust can be fraught with danger.

Local tribes have been known to use the al-Qaeda label against their rivals in order to settle scores, and all information is now treated. as suspect unless the informers' motives are known.

Resentment of the American presence and sympathy with the ousted Taleban stop many from passing on what they know. The south and east of the country are Pashtun areas where many are angered by their apparent exclusion from the Government in Kabul. Others are simply scared of the consequences of association with the "enemy".

"They're not giving us much information because they're not sure if we're staying," Major Woods said. "I can't tell if we will or not. The people who at any time have the most guns rule the area and one day that will be someone else."

The pressure of attacks and threats has already hounded the Americans and their allies out of one border base, Lwara, in neighbouring Paktika province. The fear now is that a war in Iraq may galvanise al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters to launch larger-scale attacks backed by others disgruntled over an American war on another Muslim country.

With the enemy showing little sign of giving up, the Americans may be here for a long haul. Military officials say, they expect the 8,000 US troops in Afghanistan to stay for up to two years before scaling back can start. Other are more pessimistic. One highranking military official said: "I think we're looking at a presence here of 10 to 20 years."

In the meantime, there is little sleep for those on guard along the long and dangerous border. More than 300 of the 1,000 men at Salerno Base spend their nights on guard. "They are patient, they will try to wear us down over time," Major Woods said. "It was time that beat the Russians."

Afghan officials said yesterday that at least 17 civilians were killed in a US-led bombing raid in southern Afghanistan. Haji Mohammed Wali, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial authority, said the relatives of the dead had been pouring into local government offices.

"The people came crying, saying their relatives had died or were missing," he said. Their accounts suggested that mostly women and children had been killed.

US military officials based at Bagram, north of Kabul, said they had been conducting an operation along a mountain ridge in Helmand targeting suspected Taliban fighters. If the account of  civilian deaths proves accurate it would mark one of the most serious bombing errors by the US military in Afghanistan for several months.

Last July, 48 people were killed and more than 100 injured when a US gunship attacked a wedding party in Uruzgan province in central Afghanistan, the home of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

At the time the US military insisted its aircraft had come under fire and since then American soldiers patrolling the Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan have faced growing resentment and guerrilla attacks.

US officials said the latest raids in Helmand began on Monday. The troops called in B52 and B1 bombers which targeted the ridge for eight hours with 2,000lb JDAM "smart" bombs. A Danish F-16 was also involved in the raid, dropping a 5001b GBU-12 bomb.

On Tuesday after the bombing, US troops arrested 12 armed men believed to be Taliban suspects near the village of Lejay in the Baghran valley, Col King said. He said the operation, code-named Eagle Fury, was still under way.

"The intensity to a certain extent depends on the enemy," he said. "If the enemy presents itself in a posture to attack us, then we will engage them."

Jilani Khan, who runs a money-changing business in Baghran, near the site of the bombing, said US and Afghan soldiers had cordoned off the area. He said American soldiers had told villagers they were hunting for Mullah Omar.

In Helmand, Mr Wali said he had passed the accounts of civilian deaths to the central government in Kabul. There had been more bombing in  the area on Tuesday night, he said, but it was unclear if there had been more civilian deaths.

A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai in Kabul said the government had asked the US not to launch bombing raids during the three-day Islamic Eid-al-Adha holiday, which began on  Tuesday.

"The government prefers they shouldn't bomb in respect of Eid days, unless it is very necessary," said Tayab Jawad.

Even in backward and chaotic Afghanistan, this sums it all up.

The crisis-ridden and terrified Western imperialist system would like to eradicate ALL anti-imperialist rebels now, whatever their aims or background, in these perilous times when contempt for Western domination and its FAILED INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC SYSTEM is breeding straightforward anti-imperialist political revolt everywhere.

It is a thoroughly reactionary ambition to effectively set the world history clock back one hundred years, and it simply is undoable. It cannot be done, and it won't be done.

The idiot Jack Straw boasted to the explosively-divided UN Security Council meeting: "Forceful intervention into Iraq to disarm it will achieve the same glittering successful outcome for Western interests and world progress that the civilised world's triumph in Afghanistan has miraculously produced."

But with the full force of economic crisis-to-come not even hitting Britain yet, New Labour's imperialist-system stooging cannot even prevent the home country from degenerating into a nightmare-for-all of criminal disaffection.

The current Sunday Times reports:

MORE than a third of adults have suffered a crime in the past year, much of which has gone unreported, according to the largest independent study into lawlessness.

The study, based on a sample of more than 17,000 people, suggests that no fewer than 17m Britons were victims of crime, from assaults to burglaries and vandalism.

Only half reported the offences to the police, indicating that the true scale of crime is far higher than official statistics show. Even when the police were summoned, victims complained that officers failed to respond in a fifth of cases, and said only 13% of the crimes were solved.

The study, which suggests there are at least 4m more offences than officially listed in the government's figures, undermines claims by David Blunkett, the home secretary, that crime is under control.

It indicates that not only is there a "hidden" and unreported crime wave, but also that crime is increasing. The rate is eight percentage points higher than a similar official study, based on interviews with householders, published last summer.

Professor Mike Hough, director of the criminal policy research unit at South Bank University, said the results showed that people's fear of crime was justified, despite claims that concerns were exaggerated.

"I used to say that fear of crime was a problem in its own right, but now I realise that people are right to worry," he said.

"People who are at risk of burglary know who they are and are understandably concerned."

More than 23,000 adults were questioned by e-mail about their experiences and attitudes in the study commissioned by The Sunday Times and conducted by Experian, a consumer research company. Of these, 17,052 responses were used to achieve a representative and statistically significant panel.

Just over 36% of those questioned said they had been the victim of at least one crime, and 20.5% were targeted twice or more by criminals in the past year.

The study mirrors the government's British Crime Survey (BCS), which is based on quarterly interviews with 10,000 people drawn from a panel of 38,000 householders. The government study found 27.8% of people were victims of crime.

Statisticians believe the higher crime rate uncovered by the Experian study may be partly explained by a rise in crime since the last BCS in July 2002 and marginally more affluent interviewees. The BCS surveys only England and Wales, but Experian included Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Most of those questioned by Experian felt crime was getting worse. They blamed government inaction.

And this is not a failure of policy after six years of Labour government, but a reflection of the global FAILURE of the imperialist system to do justice for any people or any issue on Earth.

This hated system is unreformable, since it is precisely capitalism's dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost exploitational essence which creates the inbuilt insoluble contradictions, inevitably guaranteeing relative failure and subservience to the overwhelming majority of people within any country, and to the overwhelming majority of nations on Earth, relative to the handful of successful imperialist Great Powers.
Imperialism will meet DEFEAT in falling into economic collapse in the first place.

It will meet DEFEAT in failing to stop country after country degenerating (or advancing, to look at it another way) into revolutionary anarchy.

It will meet DEFEAT in failing to re-pacify "rogue countries" where anti-imperialist revolt has already got "out of hand" in Western eyes.

And eventually, the USA and/or its "allies' rivals will meet DEFEAT in this general warmongering onslaught to curb all "rogue states", (to divert from the crisis and to cause as much global devastation as possible in a vain attempt to physically wipe out the paralysing "overproduction" economic crisis which is now totally undermining Western rule).

This demented warmongering hysteria could even start with a DEFEAT of sorts in making it embarrassingly difficult to pick on Iraq as the first scapegoat.

And that in turn could produce another DEFEAT such as the humiliation of the Bush regime, and even the toppling of the Blair gimmick-government of public relations (PR) and spin.

But the great delusions of "democracy" and "reformism" still rule, and replacement governments would only be quickly back in the same insoluble capitalist crisis, - only next time more successful in creating the necessary warmongering hysteria (endless "security alerts" and "asylum-seeker terrorist danger" and the like, in stunt after stunt of life-threatening provocations to be blamed on evil-axis foreign enemies", etc) to get more international blitzkrieg diversions going.

It is direct military DEFEAT there, eventually, which is likely to begin the final nails in the imperialist system's coffin, - costly and humiliating setbacks which will sooner or later feed back into anti-imperialist revolts at home as capitalism proves that it can no longer answer anyone's problems on Earth.

That final REVOLUTIONARY DEFEAT at home will alone ultimately put an end to imperialist-system crisis.

Clearly, what all this entire perspective needs is to rebuild an international party of Leninist revolutionary theory as rapidly as possible, - the programmatic understanding and perspective of which can only be built OPENLY and CONSCIOUSLY.

It is the UNDERSTANDING of world socialist REVOLUTION which must finally win the day. Build Leninism. EPSR

E P S R

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

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

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

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

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

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

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