Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]       
No 1217 January 27th 2004                                                                                                                                25p

Toppling this lying Blair regime of American imperialist stooges would usefully jolt this whole fraudulent system of corrupt "parliamentary democracy" but would only lead to just as decadent a replacement, and yet more "new reform" nonsense pledges. The 'Respect' worthies and their fake-'left' followers could not be getting their situation assessment more wrong. All Labourism has had it, "New", "Old", and "Alternative". The whole imperialist system is in historic crisis, and only class-revolution worldwide can now move civilisation on. The tail-ending of crowd-drawing "socialist" celebrities was already hopelessly barren more than 150 years ago. 

The rising tide of fake-'left' activism, in step with ever deepening imperialist world crisis, will, by its sterility, only emphasise the key understanding of Marxist-Leninist revolutionism.

Spontaneously combusting international class & national forces are the only power that CAN and WILL stop world-ruling American imperialism from inevitably continuing its warmongering rampage regardless of now near-universal "civilised" condemnation.

But that spontaneous combustion can get nowhere far, or lasting, without being armed with a scientific explanation of why monopoly capitalism has brought the world to these warmongering economic crisis, and why the system cannot possibly be "reformed" out of this catastrophic scenario.

The week-end's middle class "socialist" challenge to New Labour's war and privatisation pro-imperialist programme, postured exactly as predicted with "reform" daydreams coupled with outrageous "democratic" stitch-ups to keep everything in the platform's hands.

These 'Respect' worthies explained nothing of the previous political failures they had all come from, and inevitably could guarantee nothing about their political futures when a better offer or more opportunism might see them all doing a Livingstone.

There was not one word of commitment to any particular world view of how civilisation's future MUST be.

The entire vast literature of Marxist-Leninist science, - demonstrating how proletarian revolution, into a PLANNED whole-world technological modernity, is civilisation's only serious development possibility, steadily being revealed taking the long view, ending the destructive contradictions of all class-conflict based historical progress hitherto, - is kept well out of sight by these terrified petty bourgeois.

Very little of the working class, therefore, will be misled by this bogus "socialist" and bogus "anti-war" celebrity posturing, - there being nothing put up to believe in other than yet another rehash of 'Old Labour', following on innumerable similar previous such 'Clause IV' pointless exercises like the SLP, the 'Militant' Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, the various CP "peaceful road" factions, the SSP, etc, etc, etc, etc.

The penny still refuses to drop that it was EXACTLY 'Old Labour' which spawned New Labour and acted much the same as New Labour for 100 years, holding back the working class with false "reformist" promises in order to prop up British imperialism, in ALL its warmongering and economic activities essentially, as the "alternative” party of government UNTIL NO LONGER CREDIBLE, which is when New Labour had to be born.

New Labour, Old Labour, replacement old Labours, - they are all the same "reformist" joke, propping up the imperialist system which cannot possibly be "reformed" and yet still remain a competitive, monopoly capitalist, "free" market.

And since all these various celebrity sects always have and always will remain consciously and determinedly COUNTER-revolutionary by every ounce of personal instinct, class instinct, and social position instinct, then workers will always sense this and will never be likely to seriously mobilise en masse behind any of these mountebanks.

Historically, workers did it once behind Labour, and what did they get???

Warmongering imperialism and capitalist crisis never disappeared, and are worse today than ever before.

The next serious history-making move by the working class will be to revolution.

'Respect' may yet make a few small waves, but if workers do get conned to any extent, it will largely be due to the bogus "revolutionary" sects around the fake-'left' who are sniffing round the 'Respect' worthies in a farcical living contradiction of their own specious reasoning for such opportunism.

Despite covering themselves by jeering that Respect would not get far by reducing its appeal to workers to a bare minimum of least controversial "reforms" (the LCD lowest common denominator principle), insisting that a full "revolutionary" programme would be needed on the contrary, - these Trot and Stalinist-minded fake-"communists" nevertheless either all joined up or else lent support of some kind to this latest pathetic opportunist exhibition.

So what is exposed here???

The utter fraudulence of these sects' own pretensions to any "revolutionary understanding".

The necessity at all times for Marxist Leninist scientific truth about the revolutionary essence of all world history is in no way at odds with a Bolshevik Party using sensible tactics at all times to, for example, split its enemies when the revolutionary forces were still too weak to do otherwise.

Signing the robber peace at Brest Litovsk with German imperialist warmongering to avoid a certain crushing was one famous example, as was signing the Hitler-Stalin pact to avoid becoming the West's sole intended target for renewed German imperialist warmongering aggression.

Going to international trade conferences to sign economic agreements to break the West's embargo was another, rather than going to preach communist revolution.

But what "necessary" tactics make it wise or essential for these bogus Trot "revolutionaries" to pretend to workers that the opportunist confusion of the likes of Loach, Monbiot, Serwotka, and Galloway MUST be supported in their joke "socialist", and joke "anti-war", and joke "anti-imperialist" posturing??????

The formal explanation of "to turn Respect into the reborn Bolshevik Party that our class-struggle needs" is a sick joke on several levels, but the implication that these ludicrous anti-communist worthies can be the godfathers of renewed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science only reveals that these fake-'lefts' still haven't the faintest idea of what Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science is all about.

The truer explanation for this opportunist fawning is that the fake-'lefts' are always afraid that some collection of celebrity smart-arses like Galloway, Monbiot and Loach MIGHT just succeed as a "new socialist party" and steal the thunder of all these bogus "revolutionary" sects. 

What an even more desperate poverty of intellect and poverty of spirit this feared perspective reveals among the fake-'lefts'. For what would any "successful party" of such grotesque opportunists as these celebrities signify other than something abominably shallow and insincere and confused which might as easily spark a reaction towards fascism as a serious class-revolution towards communism. 

For any workers other than these anti-communist fake-'left' sectarian frauds, casually or blindly supporting such opportunist posturing shallowness (as Respect has so far produced) ought to be a worry.

One very CORRECT tactic Marxist-Leninist science indicates in this area of work is the occasional need to support some prominent 'left' pretensions as a rope supports a hanged man, - the Bolshevik attitude briefly towards the initial 1920s rise of the Labour Party in Britain.

It is a tactic that might have been appropriate for a Bennite breakaway from Labour, or was needed for Scargill's 'Clause IV' revolt to form the SLP.

But Galloway's odd record and resisted expulsion is hardly in that league of needing to test-to-destruction the "genuine socialist alternative" claims of a Benn or a Scargill to make a deliberate break in order to build a completely new party.

And even if it were, all past experience shows that the fake-'left' mentality (anti-communism) will ALWAYS get its tactics wrong in such situations anyway.

The 'new party' posture can only be engaged in by revolutionaries if they SERIOUSLY intend to test it to destruction. 

But what happens is that all the demagogic posturing garbage is alone being fed upon, and in no time at all the "revolutionary" entrists have become as dumbed-down as the opportunist nonsense that they have gone in intending to cure. This process notoriously destroyed the old Communist Party in Britain, a once mighty force with its own daily paper, two MPs, dozens of councillors, and a large professional cadre force. 

But pursuing the "peaceful road to socialism" in the parliamentary exhaust fumes of joke 'left' Labour MP's in the ludicrous delusion of eventually forming "a socialist majority in the House of Commons" meant that in the end, the CP's own "revolutionary" understanding (such as it was, limitedly) was reduced to nothing, and the party self-liquidated in embarrassed shame.

By switching its cadre training to opportunist gobbledegook, the Communists ended up with a Party that could only speak gobbledegook by the end.

The WRP turned to shallow, multi-colour, news-stand populism and ended up the same way. For years, the SWP has been relentlessly going down the same route.

And by uncritically sucking up for so long to Scargill's philistinism, the Lalkarites have recently shown alarming signs of intellectual degeneracy, no longer even able to fathom out the ABC of Marxism-Leninism.

And equally unexplained is the logic of this surreptitious uncritical entryism.

If to meet in a bigger telephone box is the height of "revolutionary" ambition, then why stop at Respect or the SLP????

Why not do what the Stalinist CP, Ted Grant, and Gerry Healy understood, and join the Labour Party/TUC labour federation if the "big numbers" are what it is crucial to pursue????

Certainly there is the odd expulsion purge to put up with; but just go back in again, as the Grantites decided but the Militant Taafites didn't (and where are they now?).

And why this low-level SWP entryism now when the Cliff SWP rejected Labour entryism??? 

The historical loss of confidence throughout the 'left' is the only explanation.

Which is only another way of saying the historical loss of all their marbles.

To Marxist science, tactics may indeed be endlessly flexible and never fixed, - but the matter of putting forward the totally truthful REVOLUTIONARY perspective on civilisation's one and only possible development is nothing whatever to do with tactics.

It is the entire philosophical understanding and motivation of ALL Marxist-Leninist political activity.

If the essential revolutionary understanding of history is NOT guiding the ever-new, ever-changing, ever-requiring-fresh-analysis political circumstances, then eventually only total stupidity will prevail, - as eventually befell Moscow's doomed Stalinist Revisionism (replacing Marxism-Leninism), and is now, reducing the fake-'left' to a complete joke.

Instead of joining the Alliance, or Respect, or the SLP, and telling dumbed-down lies on the doorstep in order not to "alarm" the working class, serious-minded anti-imperialists need to redouble the struggles to penetrate deeper into the monopoly capitalist world's insoluble economic and warmongering crisis. Our own ignorance of how the international balance of class and national forces will lurch next, remains the biggest burden workers have to bear by far.

US imperialist warmongering remains deep in confusion and gloom with morale among its frontline forces continuing to deteriorate towards mindless violence and despair.

And this astonishing situation for "the world's greatest-ever empire" is unlikely to improve rapidly because the background economic and political circumstances, producing mindless warmongering aggression on one side and ferocious Third World anti-imperialist revolt on the other, not only are not getting better but are rapidly deteriorating faster than ever.

Fear of total economic chaos and collapse remains the main underlying driving-force towards imperialist war-panic but also remains the most difficult issue to get to grips with due to the now vast complexities of the international dollar economy, and due to the incredible dishonesty, secrecy, and competitive treachery of the major monopoly capitalist powers.

Even America's most successful individual economic imperialist, George Soros, is using his huge influence to admit to the USA being driven by fear, and also, indirectly, to admit that economic clarity and solutions are hard to unravel:

The US can lose its dominance only as a result of its own mistakes. At present the country is in the process of committing such mistakes because it is in the hands of a group of extremists whose strong sense of mission is matched only by their false sense of certitude.

This distorted view postulates that because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. That is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.

We may have more difficulty in perceiving the absurdity of pursuing supremacy by military means, because we have learned to rely on military power and we particularly feel the need for it when our very existence is threatened. 

But the most powerful country on earth cannot afford to be consumed by fear. To make the war on terrorism the centrepiece of our national strategy is an abdication of our responsibility as the leading nation in the world. The US is the only country that can take the lead in addressing problems that require collective action: preserving peace and economic progress, protecting the environment and so on.

Whatever the justification for removing Saddam, there can be no doubt that we invaded Iraq on false pretences. Wittingly or unwittingly, President Bush deceived the American public and Congress and rode roughshod over our allies' opinions.

The gap between the administration's expectations and the actual state of affairs could not be wider. We have put at risk not only our soldiers' lives but the combat readiness of our armed forces. We are overstretched and our ability to project our power has been compromised. 

The costs of occupation and the prospect of permanent war weigh on our economy, and we are failing to address festering problems both at home and globally. If we ever needed proof that the neo-cons' dream of American supremacy is misconceived, Iraq has provided it.

It is hard to imagine how the plans of the defence department could have gone more awry. We find ourselves in a quagmire that is in some ways reminiscent of Vietnam. Having invaded Iraq, we cannot extricate ourselves. Domestic pressure to withdraw is likely to build, as in the Vietnam war, but withdrawing would inflict irreparable damage on our standing in the world. In this respect, Iraq is worse than Vietnam because of our dependence on Middle East oil.

Nobody forced us into it; on the contrary, everyone warned us against it. Admittedly, Saddam was a heinous tyrant and it was a good thing to get rid of him. But at what cost? The occupying powers serve as a focal point for attracting terrorists and radicalising Islam. Our soldiers have to do police work in full combat gear.

And the cost of occupation is estimated at a staggering $160bn for the fiscal years 2003-2004 $73bn for 2003 and $87bn in a supplemental request for 2004 submitted at the last minute in September 2003. Of the $87bn, only $20bn is for reconstruction, but the total cost of reconstruction is estimated at $60bn. For comparison, our foreign aid budget for 2002 was $l0bn.

There is no easy way out. The Bush administration is eager to get the United Nations more involved but is unwilling to make the necessary concessions. We have no alternative to sticking it out and paying the price for our mistake. Eventually a different president with a different attitude to international cooperation maybe more successful in extricating us.

The US is not the only country at the centre of the global capitalist system, but it is the most powerful and it is the main driving force behind globalisation. 

The European Union may equal the US in population and gross national product, but it is far less united and far less comfortable with globalisation. In military terms, the EU does not even qualify as a power, because members make their own decisions. 

Insofar as any nation is in charge of the world order, it is the US. That is not to suggest that other countries are exempt from having to concern themselves with the wellbeing of the world. Their attitudes are not without consequence, but it is the US that matters most. 

If Bush is rejected in 2004, his policies can be written off as an aberration and America resume its rightful place in the world. But if he is re-elected, the electorate will have endorsed his policies and we will have to live with the consequences. But it isn't enough to defeat Bush at the polls. 

The US must examine its global role and adopt a more constructive vision. We cannot merely pursue narrow, national self-interest. Our dominant position imposes a unique responsibility.

Soros is just as contemptuous of the Bush regime's specific military-aggression mismanagement and wrong-headed pre-emptive mentality, but being of a natural economic imperialist mind himself, his 'alternative' reading of how the USA SHOULD rule the world sounds less arrogant but just as sick and doomed by its very allegiance to a reactionary and degenerate system. 

That outdated and backward nastiness in the fundamental relationships in civilisation, - namely all the productive connections in the international economy, - came just vaguely into focus in hints of a fullscale currency war being unleashed by the USA against every rival economic imperialist power, - as revealed by capitalist press reports themselves on the scary mystery of America's huge (and unrepayable) domestic budget and international payments deficits:

JAPAN'S Ministry of Finance has lost more than £40 billion in the past financial year trying to bet against currency speculators, The Times has learnt.

Cabinet Office insiders admitted yesterday that the currency losses have spiralled out of control after a renewed attempt by the Finance ministry to prop up the dollar and talk down the value of the yen.

The insiders told The Times that losses in a special ministry account that holds the Government's intervention reserves are expected to soar to Y7.8 trillion (£40 billion) by the end of the financial year. This month the Government has already spent a record sum trying to prevent the yen from rising too high against the dollar, a movement that would hurt Japan's all-important exporters, on whose prosperity all hopes of an economic recovery are pinned.

However, in trading in Tokyo yesterday it was clear that Japanese exporters were also preventing the massive currency intervention programme from succeeding. As the yen fell to Y107.50, a number of caretakers were understood to be dumping large amounts of their foreign earned dollars on the market.

When the ministry's huge losses are officially confirmed later this year, Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister, will face pressure to prove that his controversial currency intervention strategy is working.

The battering to the ministry's foreign exchange account arises because the department is selling its own currency for dollars. As the value of the greenback continues to plunge, so too does the value of the dollars that the Government has already purchased.

At the start of fiscal 2003, the ministry assumed an average exchange rate of Y121 to the dollar. That was revised up to Y115 in November. Last week the yen rose to just over Y105.

The special account's paper losses will be realised once the ministry begins to unwind its huge holdings by selling dollars at these lower levels, in exchange for yen. However, currency analysts polled by The Times yesterday suggested that the outlook for the dollar/ yen exchange rate looks set to favour a continued slide in the greenback. This means that Japan is likely to continue accruing vast paper losses.

One currency broker in Nomura, the Japanese securities house, said: "The [ministry] is like an intervention junkie at the moment. The effect of each shot of dollar buying is getting less and less, which means the shots have to be bigger and bigger. The odd shock move makes only a very temporary difference."

Japanese monetary authorities have effectively confirmed to The Times that the losses will not deter them from trying to swing the currency markets. So far this year, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) has bought an estimated $20 billion and officials have assured markets that the intervention will continue.

In a surprise move yesterday, the BoJ eased monetary policy in what some economists said was an attempt to offset the failures of its intervention efforts. The central bank raised its liquidity target under its quantitative easing policy by Y3 trillion to a new range of Y30 trillion to Y35 trillion, a margin that gives the BoJ scope to help the finance ministry's battle against the rising yen.

However, beyond that measure, analysts and BoJ sources have pointed out that Japan does not, in fact, have many policies to choose from, beyond more costly intervention. The BoJ has virtually no scope for serious monetary easing and Mr Koizumi's structural reform programme has tied the ministry's hands in piling on more fiscal spending.

By inflicting its warmongering debts on its rivals in this way, forcing them to soak up this obscene and destabilising dollar inflation or face having their exports priced out of world markets as their own currencies (and therefore domestic costs) rise inexorably against the ever-cheapening American currency and American domestic costs.

This is open trade war at its most ruthless and devastating.

Now it is no longer steel tariffs or subsidised agricultural exports to worry about.

From this conscious and deliberate currency war, the world's most successful "free market" exporting countries are being told by the USA to forget about "fair competition" and be dictated to by the American imperialist warmongers instead, about how well their economies are going to be allowed to do.

It is not quite spelled out in the above report, but this currency depreciation racket is economic blackmail on a prodigious, World-War-inducing scale.

The reserves of most countries and most multi-national corporations are held in dollars.

Japan, for example, has been investing its vast export earnings for decades in American Government stock (i.e. financing US state debts in return for a guaranteed small percentage interest plus utterly reliable investment security).

But if Japan and others do not continue to soak up these ever vaster quantities of American state debts by recycling their export dollar earnings into buying up US Government stock, then not only will the never ceasing floods of newly printed US dollars start to collapse in value (the tendency now), but the worth of all the PAST investments too (also denominated in dollar values) will begin collapsing as well.

What a racket. "Lend me some money, some of those dollars your exports to us have earned (and exports elsewhere, frequently paid for in dollars too).

"Now lend me some more, even though my chances of paying you back this ever-growing fortune become increasingly smaller.

"And if you don't keep lending me this money (i.e. buying up this US Government debt), then we will deliberately let our currency collapse further and further until all your past investments (i.e. all your historic monetary reserves) become absolutely worthless."

Feebly, Japanese imperialists are slowly trying to change the nation's anti-war mood by embracing more and more militarism (troops to Iraq; open visits to "illegal" Japanese war shrines; etc) and by trying to rewrite its US-imposed "peace constitution" so as to grant Tokyo permanent licence to use military force to settle its international disputes, an option currently constitutionally forbidden.

For years, the law against a Japanese standing army has been flouted by the emergence of a vast and well-equipped 'self-defence force', but how far Japanese imperialism would think it worth going in order to be able to look US imperialism in the eye is so far not at all clear.

America's aggressive bullying being fought against openly may possibly remain something beyond the powers of all bar Russia and China, even though Germany and Japan can probably be assumed to have kept up with all the necessary know-how for very advanced weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, even if staying short of developing them in practice.

But resistance on a worldwide scale to American bullying of the kind that the Iraqis and Afghans are causing such turmoil with, could provide a very fitting end to this greatest empire since Rome, — Rome having collapsed in very similar circumstances, its superpower might and its arrogant aggressiveness despised by the whole world and facing ever-rising and unbeatable mass resistance.

The pro-imperialist press admits that this is now happening too:

But the problems between the United States and its neighbours run much deeper. They also stem from the arrival in the past few years of a cohort of left-of-centre leaders in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. They have always been regarded with coolness by the Bush Administration, suspicious of any Clinton-style Third Way.

Even more serious is the rift with Venezuela, one of America's most important suppliers of oil. Both sides have steadily made the dispute worse, to the point where it is hard to see how Monterrey can offer rapprochement.

Many of the 34 leaders attending the summit are angry at what they see as American arrogance in forcing migration and terrorism on to the agenda. The meeting, they claim, was supposed to focus on the alleviation of the 200 million people living in poverty in the continent — nearly half the population.

Many also object to Bush's desire to expand the Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2005, fearing loss of jobs. It is perhaps the single area where the ideologies of Left-ish governments clash most clearly with those of Washington. Brazil and even Mexico have said that Monterrey is not the place to debate the trade pact.

There is also widespread popular opposition to the war with Iraq. Last year Mexico and Chile refused to use their seats on the United Nations Security Council to support Bush.

The result of two years of friction is that Bush arrived yesterday from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with little common ground agreed. 

The summit was supposed to sign up to a common vision for democracies on the North and South American continents, but the weekend was spent in worsening spats between officials frantically trying to stitch its words together. 

Even America's closest imperialist friends have started telling it openly that the chosen anti-crisis measures of a universal warmongering offensive against all "rogue states" and every "axis of evil” is proving catastrophic for the monopoly capitalist system's stability, security, and survival, — as reported in their own bourgeois press:

THE West is losing the War on Terror and Osama bin Laden is winning it, according to a panel of security experts who challenged President Bush's claim that he was making the world a safer place.

President Bush said in the State of the Union address on Tuesday that "because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better".

However, the analysts, speaking at the opening session of the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, were unanimous in giving warning that the War on Terror was doing more to recruit terrorists than to defeat them.

Their warnings were backed by an opinion poll commissioned for the meeting of world leaders and business people, which showed that most people think that the world is becoming less safe. In Europe, 64 per cent thought that the world was becoming less safe, compared to just 15 per cent who thought it was becoming safer. In North America, 47 per cent of people think the world will be less safe for the next generation, compared to 24 per cent who think it will be safer.

"We are not safer," Jessica Stern, lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, said. "Going into Iraq in the way we did, without broad international support, really increased the ability of al-Qaeda and its sympathisers to 'prove' that the objective of the United States is to humiliate the Islamic world, more than it was to liberate the Iraqi people. People in Muslim-majority states have more confidence in Osama bin Laden than President Bush."

Gareth Evans, the former Australian Foreign Minister and head of the International Crisis Group think tank, said: "The net result of the War on Terror is more war and more terror. Look at Iraq — the least plausible reason for going to war — terrorism — has been its most harrowing consequence."

He said that since September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda and its associates had carried out attacks in Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. He said that each individual terrorist attack was now claiming more lives than previously.

Security and terrorism are themes of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, held in Davos. It is being attended by more than 2,280 participants from 94 countries, including 31 heads of state or government.

Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, said: "The biggest price we have paid is that we have lost the high ground. While Bush has led the War on Terror, it has become a chief recruiter for al-Qaeda."

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, said that terrorism now was far more deadly than 20 years ago because of the rise of suicide bombing and because terrorist groups around the world were co-co-ordinating their activities. 

THE very survival of the world order is under threat, Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, said in a remarkably apocalyptic speech to the World Economic Forum.

The warning was symbolic of the almost tangible fear that permeates this year's meeting of the world's political and business leaders in the luxury Swiss ski resort of Davos. The delegates' discussions focused on the wars on terrorism and Iraq, the supposed confrontation of civilisations and the reaction against globalisation.

Mr Annan told the forum: "The prevailing atmosphere has shifted from the belief in the near inevitability of globalisation to deep uncertainty about the very survival of our tenuous world order."

Government ministers, chief executives, ambassadors, academics, princes and religious leaders, often reached similar conclusions in workshops and seminars. Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group and a former Foreign Minister of Australia, said: "There are little stirrings of optimism, but great causes for pessimism."

The lack of confidence was highlighted by the conference questioning what was once taken for granted.

One session asked: "Globalisation or de-globalisation: what is best for the world's poor?"

There were calls from Mr Annan and others to rebalance the world agenda away from the war on terrorism to Third World development.

Mary Robinson, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and now president of Oxfam, said: "There is an assessment that we are failing to address the real problems of poverty, disease and, inequality."

And as if the Bush warmongering regime did not have enough troubles from an increasingly hostile international environment, the Government's own American stooges are now stabbing it in the back with remarkable gusto: 

O'Neill's threat is to a president unusually dependent in an election campaign on fear and credibility to sustain a sense of power and inevitability: He sounds an alarm against an unfit president who lacks "credibility with his most senior officials", behind whom looms a dark "puppeteer", as O'Neill calls the vice-president, and a closed cabal.

Invading Iraq was on the agenda of the first "principals" meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), of which O'Neill was a member, months before September 11, and relentlessly pushed. Regressive tax cuts creating massive deficits were implemented without economic justification as "the administration has managed to kill the whys at every turn".

When the political team distorts basic economic numbers on tax cuts and inserts them into the 2001 state of the union address, O'Neill yells: "This is complete bullshit!" It is "something that knowledgeable people in the US government knew to be false". The business executive is shocked at the derogation of policy in favour of corporate interests — a "combination of confidentiality and influence by powerful interested parties". He learns that moderate Republicans like him; that Christie Whitman, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, sees her efforts to affirm policy on global warming "slaughtered" by Cheney and the politicos; and that secretary of state Colin Powell "may have been there, in large part, as cover”.

Bush appears as a bully, using nicknames to demean people; he is querulous (when Bush waits impatiently for a cheeseburger, he summons his chief of staff. " 'You're the chief of staff. You think you're up to getting us some cheeseburgers?'... He all but raced out of the room"); he is manipulated ("'Stick to principle' is another phrase that has a tonic effect on Bush" — used by his senior adviser Karl Rove to push for additional tax cuts); he is incurious; and, above all, he is intently political. When Bush holds forth it is often to show that he's not Clinton. He informs his NSC that on Middle East peace "Clinton overreached", but that he will take Ariel Sharon "at face value" and will not commit himself to the peace process: "I think it's time to pull out of that situation." Powell is "startled".

The "inscrutable" Cheney emerges as the power behind the throne, orchestrating leaks to undermine opposing views. He uses tariffs as "political bait" for the midterm elections. When O'Neill argues that out of control deficits will cause a "fiscal crisis", Cheney cut him off. 

'Reagan proved deficits don't matter,' he said... 'This is our due."' 

In the end, Cheney fires O'Neill, the first vice-president to dismiss a cabinet member.

O'Neill's revelations cut deeper than mere polemics. They have been met not by any factual rebuttal but by anonymous character assassination from a "senior official" — "Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"

Then the White House announced O'Neill was under investigation for abusing classified documents, though he said they were not and the White House had shovelled carefully edited NSC documents to Bob Woodward for his shining portrait of Bush at War. Quietly, O'Neill and his publisher prepared an irrefutable response. Soon they will post each of the 19,000 documents underlying the book on the internet. The story will not be calmed.

THE American who led the hunt for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the last eight months resigned last night, saying that he did not believe Saddam Hussein had possessed such an arsenal for a decade.

"I don't think they existed," said David Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last [1991] Gulf War and I don't think there was a largescale production programme in the 90s."

Dr Kay's comments will be deeply embarrassing for President Bush and Tony Blair, who went to war last year to eliminate what they called the imminent threat posed by Saddam's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry. They are also bad timing for the Prime Minister, coming days before the publication of the Hutton report.

Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, told The Times that Tony Blair must now admit he was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Cook said: "I have never doubted that Tony Blair acted in good faith but he cannot now go on insisting he was right.

"Next week, in his response to the Hutton report, is a good opportunity to put the record straight and to recognise that mistakes were made."'

Just two days ago Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, repeated his conviction that the weapons existed, telling a radio interviewer. "It's going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all of the cubby holes and ammo dumps in Iraq." But last night the Administration signalled a major downgrading of the hunt when it appointed a replacement for Dr Kay who has said publicly that he does not believe any weapons of mass destruction will be found.

Charles Duelfer, a former top UN weapons inspector in Iraq and a frequent critic of Dr Kay's approach. said in a TV interview this month: "The prospect of finding chemical weapons, biological weapons is close to nil." He added that the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) leaded by Dr Kay had been "talking to a lot of Iraqi scientists. They've had every incentive to show them where they are, and they have come up with nothing."

In what would amount to another major climbdown, the Administration also appeared to be on the verge of bowing to Shia pressure by changing its plans for choosing a government to assume power in Iraq this summer.

The White House said it wanted the United Nations to send a team to Iraq to examine the feasibility of holding elections so soon. Under Washington's existing plans, power would be handed to a transitional government appointed by caucuses on July 1, with proper elections next year.

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, ordered a halt to recent street demonstrations in favour of elections to encourage the UN to send a team. "Direct elections are possible," said Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council with very close ties to Washington.

Washington has been quietly reducing the size of the 1,400-strong ISG, and has reassigned dozens of linguists to the counter-insurgency effort.

Dr Kay was viewed as a hawk who expected to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. In a report to Congress last October, he presented evidence of illicit weapons programmes in Iraq but said his team had found no actual weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Bush cited Dr Kay in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, saying he had found "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related activities. Had we failed to act the dictator's [WMD] programmes would continue to this day."

The sordidness of the Bush and Blair regimes continuing to lie through gritted teeth that their pre-emptive war on Iraq as declared ("To halt the threat to US and UK homeland security from Weapons of Mass Destruction, available on a scale and with an immediacy (within 45 minutes) that brooks no further delay in invading, neither for further UK weapons searches to take place, nor for any United Nations approval of an invasion") still remains justified in general and even still valid in the strict terms of its declaration, — is continuing to do untold damage to Western imperialist credibility.

The wretchedly cowardly radio and television interviewing still refuses to put the boot in and still allows Blair, Straw, and Co to hide behind "security" advisers when these are just employed civil servants, just like any others, whose advice, gathered-information, and research notes, however "expertly" put forward from long experience in the job, nevertheless only ever emerge in the public domain as the Minister's "own" decisions.

These were Blair and Straws "security" judgements, no-one else's, just like all other decisions governments make on all other subjects.

And they were ludicrous lying crap, — deliberate Goebbels-Nazi-propaganda warmongering, consciously delivered.

But even this gigantic, buck-passing "responsibility" farce is not the real issue.

Feed Blair to the wolves or let him stay on instead of some equally naff replacement stooge for American imperialist interests, — the real question shaking the West apart is "has imperialism already bitten off more than it can chew with its monstrous blitzkrieg onslaught on the Middle East in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, — with more and more warmongering threatened in all directions????????????

But the bitterest part of this conundrum, as with the bleating by Soros, is how can Western imperialism stop now?????

This Western imperialist tyranny over the Middle East (and over all the rest of the Third World too, for that matter) did not, by a huge distance, just start with the recent Iraq and Afghanistan blitzkrieg invasions. 

This tyranny has always been the PERMANENT relationship between Western imperialism and the Third World, regularly erupting in punishment blitzkriegs, especially against periodic Middle East revolts, but also including the PERMANENT colonising mailed-fist presence of so-called "Israel", the UN-approved genocidal theft of Palestine from its native population via systematic ethnic cleansing. 

But the local "worm" despised by Jew colonisation, is finally turning. And Jenny Tonge's understanding of suicide bombings by a people who can take no more, really is "oil on the flames" as her appalled bourgeois critics have screamed in their counter-revolutionary Western fearfulness.

The trouble this colonisation is in, requiring ever-vaster repression in order to survive, exactly reflects the long-term trouble that the long-standing Western imperialist domination of the Whole Middle East is in.

Blitzkrieg tyranny is LOSING. But the only answer is more and more blitzkrieg tyranny.

This rotten fascist history is even now openly admitted by Zionist historian Benny Morris, — in between the lines of his latest attempt at "justification" for the NAZI-colonial massacres, — Western imperialist backed and financed, — which alone made it possible for the monopoly-capitalist international Jewish freemasonry to steal this country from its Palestinian people, based on largely-crap biblical myths about a tenancy 3,000 years ago:

December 1982, came the first fading, pre-Xerox photocopies, neatly stacked in files in an archive outside Tel Aviv. They recorded the doings during late 1947-1948 of the Palmah, the strike force of the Haganah, the main Jewish underground militia in Palestine. They were still classified but I had been given access. 

Some of the documents, such as Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin's order to the Yiftah Brigade of July 12 1948 to expel the inhabitants of the just-conquered Arab town of Lydda, shed light on the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. 

The documents showed that the 700,000 or so Arabs who had fled or been driven from their homes in the area that became the state of Israel in 1948-49 had not done so, by and large, on orders from or at the behest of Palestinian or outside Arab leaders, as Israelis were educated to believe.

The picture that emerged was a complex one — of frightened communities fleeing their homes at the first whiff of grapeshot, as they or neighbouring villages, were attacked: of communities expelled by conquering Israeli troops: of villagers ordered by Arab commanders to send away women, children and the old to safety in inland areas; and of economic privation, unemployment and general chaos as the British mandate government wound down.

The better-organised, economically more robust and ideologically more cohesive and motivated Jewish community weathered the flail of war; Palestinian society fell apart. But the critics failed to note the work's major methodological flaw — the relative lack of basic military and intelligence documentation describing the operations that led to the Palestinian exodus. According to Israel's archives law, military documentation was to remain sealed for 50 years, intelligence documents for longer. But during the 1990s, the Haganah and IDF archives began to open up their files from 1948 to public scrutiny. At the same time, additional papers became available in other archives. including the protocols of the 1948 Israeli cabinet deliberations. While this giant declassification did not alter my main conclusions from 1988, the new documents shed a great deal of light on all major aspects of the creation of the refugee problem.

This has allowed me, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, to enhance the treatment of pre-1948 Zionist thinking about transferring — or expelling — the Palestinian Arabs, which Arab critics had accused me of downplaying. Zionist historians, meanwhile, had charged that I had accorded the subject too much significance and that the pre-1948 Zionist leadership had never supported transfer. The newly available material shows that the Israeli critics were wrong: the Zionist leadership in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, from David Ben Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, through Chaim Weizmann, the liberal president of the World Zionist Organisation. and Menahem Ussishkin and Zeev Jabotinsky, had supported the idea. In 1928, Frederick Kisch, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, told Weizmann that he had "always been hoping and waiting for" a solution of "the racial problem of Palestine" by way of a transfer of its Arabs to Mesopotamia. And, in 1930, he wrote that "it should not be impossible to come to an arrangement with [King] Faisal [of Iraq] by which he would take the initiative in offering good openings for Arab immigrants. . .

On January 30 1941, Weizmann met with the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maiskii, where they spoke of a possible solution to the Palestine problem. According to Weizmann's account, Maiskii said "there would have to be an exchange of populations. Dr Weizmann said that if half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews [from Europe] could be put in their place. That, of course, would be a first instalment. . .

Dr. Weizmann said that the distance they had to deal with in Palestine would be smaller they would be transferring the Arabs only into Iraq or Transjordan."

But this pre-1948 transfer thinking had been significant: it had readied hearts and minds in the Jewish community for the denouement of 1948: From April, most Jewish officers and officials had acted as if transfer was the state's desire, if not policy.

No doubt, Arab fright and flight was leavened by reports of real and imagined Jewish atrocities — and there were many real ones, as the recently released documentation shows. Pillage was almost de rigueur, rape was not infrequent, the execution of prisoners of war was fairly routine during the months before May 1948 (the country was under British administration and the Haganah had no PoW camps), and small - and medium - scale massacres of Arabs occurred during April, May, July and October to November. Altogether, there were some two dozen cases. 

Birth Revisited describes many more atrocities and expulsions than were recorded in the original version of the book.

Whole villages, especially in the Jewish dominated coastal plain, were also ordered to evacuate. There is no doubt that, throughout, the departure of dependants lowered the morale of the remaining males and paved the way for their eventual departure as well.

Looking at the big picture, there can be no avoiding the simple Arab argument “No Zionism - no Palestinian refugee problem".

Since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the early 1990s, the Palestinian leadership has demanded that Israel both accept responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem and accept the refugees' "right of return", as embodied in UN general assembly, resolution 194 of December 1948. From June to August 1948, the Israeli cabinet endorsed a policy of barring a return, arguing that a mass return of those who had fought and tried to destroy the Jewish state would mortally threaten the state's existence.

Were 3.5 to 4 million Palestinian refugees - the number listed in UN rolls - empowered to return immediately to Israeli territory, the upshot would be widespread anarchy and violence. Even if the return were spread over a number of years or even decades, the ultimate result, given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, would be the same; gradually, it would lead to the conversion of the country into an Arab-majority state, from which the (remaining) Jews would steadily emigrate. Would Jews really wish to live as second-class citizens in an authoritarian Muslim-dominated, Arab-ruled state? This also applies to the idea of replacing Israel and the occupied territories with one, unitary binational state, a solution that some blind or hypocritical western intellectuals have been trumpeting.

Imperialist admissions of just part of the truth, - exactly as the EPSR has always explained it. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

"The so called Independent Monitoring Commission is designed to facilitate the undermining of the Good Friday Agreement by the British government. It is unacceptable that an Irish government should be party to this."

THE shambolic sop to unionists, otherwise known as the Independent Monitoring Commission, came into effect yesterday. The body, which is entirely outside the realm and spirit of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), is the only element of the two governments' 2003 Joint Declaration that they have seen fit to implement.

There can be no doubt that the four commissioners, John Alderdice, John Grieve, Richard Karr and Joe Brosnan, (no women), who are supposed to monitor paramilitary activity in the Six Counties, will be used as a smokescreen to justify arbitrary acts of exclusion by the British Government. There can be no doubt whatsoever that its attentions will focus entirely on republicans.

Successive British Secretaries of State have already suspended the Assembly on four occasions. The additional powers given to the Secretary of State by the IMC will be used similarly.

Within the IMC's terms, a British Secretary of State can unilaterally expel a Minister from the Executive in the Six Counties, without the cross-community vote in the Assembly set out in the GFA. And only the British appointees to the Commission get to decide whether a minister is guilty of 'misconduct'.

STALLED

The two governments have so far stalled on their commitments across a range of issues, including policing, de-miltarisation, human rights and equality. But there will be no commission to monitor their progress, or lack of it.

The IMC was set up at the behest of the UUP, which, incidentally, was also the party for which the British Government suspended the Assembly last year. The largest nationalist and unionist parties in the Assembly now are either totally opposed to it, in the case of Sinn Féin, or completely disinterested, in the case of the DUP.

Alex Maskey reiterated Sinn Féin's position on the body yesterday.

"Many nationalists are angered by the fact that the two governments have proceeded with this measure, which is outside the terms of the Agreement, while choosing to stall on their commitments," he said. "The powers of exclusion which are now being granted to the British Secretary of State contradict democratic norms and contravene the rights of the electorate."

The new body is being heralded as a means to bolster public confidence. But confidence in the process will hardly be improved by the British government giving itself even more power to bring democracy in the North to a halt.

Opposing the Bill on behalf of Sinn Féin, the party's Dáil leader, Caoimhghín Ó Cáoldin, said:

"The British Act is disgraceful legislation and the agreement signed by the Minister is, with respect, a disgraceful one, which should never have been entered into by an Irish Government.

"The very name of the Bill is a falsehood. The Commission will not and cannot be independent. Politically, it was established as a sop to the Ulster Unionist Party dissidents, the very group since made politically irrelevant by the result of the Assembly election. The Commission will, in effect, be a creature of the British Government and will rely on Information from British Intelligence, the British Army and the PSNI to fulfil its functions. This is the effect of the Bill and the British legislation to which I have already referred.

'The McDowell-Eldon agreement, this legislation and the British legislation will be open to constitutional challenge as being in clear breach of the Good Friday Agreement.

"Strand one, Article 25 of the Good Friday Agreement provides that the Assembly, voting on a cross-community basis, may remove a Minister from office. The Northern Ireland (Monitoring Commission) Act, the British equivalent of this legislation, allows the British Secretary of State unilaterally to remove a Minister from office when a motion for exclusion cannot attract cross-community support. This is in clear breach of both the spirit and the letter of the Good Friday Agreement. The British Act goes further and allows the British Secretary of State to exclude someone from office in 'exceptional circumstances'.

"The so-called Independent Monitoring Commission is designed to facilitate this undermining of the Agreement by the British Government. It Is unacceptable that an Irish Government should be party to this through the McDowell-Eldon agreement. The so-called Independence of the Commission is glaringly exposed in Article 6 of that agreement, which lays down that the mechanism by which the commission considers claims of misconduct by Ministers only involves the members of the commission appointed by the British Government. The only shared position is the 50/50 sharing of the cost of the commission's work.

This legislation is a recipe for the continuation of the British and Unionist serial collapsing of the institutions and postponement of democratic elections. As we speak, the Assembly remains In suspension by order of the British Government at the behest of unionism, despite the renewed democratic mandates secured at the recent Assembly elections.

"I do not intend to waste time addressing the detail of the functions of the commission, except to state they are a sham. There is not even the pretence that the activities of the British Government and its armed forces will be monitored in any way. The British Government will face no sanctions, nor will the Irish Government for any failures on its part. I will not address the personnel of the commission as established in shadow form. Suffice to say that if it was composed solely of Nelson Mandela, it could not be independent.

"Article 5 of the McDowell-Eldon agreement purports to address the issue of de-militarisation, or 'normalisation' as it is described. It is a legislative trick because it is entirely negated by section 15. The Commission shall monitor any programme undertaken by the British only after they decide to undertake such a programme once 'satisfied with commitments that have been given on an end to paramilitary activity'. Otherwise, the Commission can only monitor so-called normalisation at the request of the British Government — so much for its so-called Independence.

"The Bill and the shabby agreement come before the House on the very day the Government proposes to publish its section of the Cory report and while the British Government continues to refuse to publish its section, and one week after the Barron report exposed the British Government's refusal to cooperate with the inquiry into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, yet we are being asked to establish a commission which will rely on the same British military, police and intelligence services for information. Such information will be supplied to the British Secretary of State, who may use it to expel a Minister without a cross-community vote in the Assembly.

"The British refused to co-operate with Mr Justice Barron, citing national security interests, yet the McDowell-Eldon agreement enshrines British national security interests In Article 13.

"The so-called Independent Monitoring Commission will not decide what those interests are. If the British say no to any request from the Commission on the basis of national security, that will be the end of the matter.

"The Irish Government has stated that it is against any renegotiation of the Good Friday Agreement. Regrettably, this Bill and the British legislation that preceded it are rewriting that same agreement and without negotiation."

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

Preening colonial reactionaries must now make their "last stand" work.

IT WAS supposed to be a triumphant procession but somehow the notion of descent, of coming down a step or two, even a whiff of the abyss, accompanied Jeffrey Donaldson down Stormont's marble staircase as he and his new colleagues this week staged his defection to the DUP for the media.

Donaldson declared himself "proud" to be taken on by "Dr Paisley" and the DUP. "It is a team that I believe is capable of providing leadership to the unionist community. It will not be like the leadership of the party I have left, a leadership that did not know how to negotiate properly, a leadership that has failed the unionist community," said Donaldson.

Fellow 'dissidents' David Burnside and Martin Smyth failed to join Donaldson in his move from the UUP to the DUP but he was accompanied by Arlene Foster and Norah Beare. The defection of three standing MLAs reduced the UUP's Assembly seats to 24 and increased the number of DUP seats to 33. As a sitting MP, Donaldson's defection has also rendered the DUP the largest northern party in Westminster.

And Ian Paisley was there to relish the moment. It was a historic day for unionism, said Paisley. Unionism was moving forward not back, "certainly not going back to a table to try and get armed terrorists once again into the government of Northern Ireland", insisted the DUP leader. In DUP doublethink, 'moving forward' is just rhetoric for going nowhere.

And many media commentators believe that's just where Jeffrey Donaldson is headed. The DUP leadership may have been prepared to entice Jeffrey with the promise of a place on the negotiating team but as Tom McGurk of the Sunday Business Post pointed out, Donaldson "may well have chosen the wrong ship to board".

"Can you think of a more dangerous scenario for the ambitious young Jeffrey than that in which Young Ian is circling Peter, circling Dodds and circling Sammy?" Can the steel factories of Sheffield supply enough knives for the faction fight after the Big Man's departure?" asked McGurk.

So was it an historic or merely a histrionic day for unionism? From under the dark statue of Craigavon it was hard to tell. Towering above the DUP's latest recruits, the unionist icon stared directly ahead, his immobilised form the perfect metaphor for the moment. For here was unionism preserved in aspic.

And the image was no coincidence. When Peter Robinson joined Paisley for a photo call with Donaldson and his two satellites under the shadow of Craigavon, their message was clear to both unionists and nationalists.

For Brian Feeney of the Irish News, the message couldn't have been bleaker. "Unionists believe they own the North and will not accord equal status to nationalists' political aspirations," said Feeney. "They're saying you can't share in running this place if you're not a unionist and there's no indication they'll ever say different."

Indeed, Feeney's vision of politics in the Six Counties has become so bleak that you begin to half expect this long time anti-republican to call for armed insurrection as the only logical corollary to his analysis. Steady, Brian, steady. 

The unionist veto has indeed a long and ignoble history here in the north but it is not simply a matter of a 64 majority in the Assembly or the fact that "unionists haven't changed since power-sharing was first proposed in 1972".

Unionist domination in the Six Counties, since the imposition of partition, has been underpinned by the mass repression of the nationalist community. It has taken many forms, from the stark brutality of sectarian pogroms to mass detention through internment, from forced emigration through the sectarian denial of homes and jobs to disenfranchisement, from kangaroo courts to extra judicial executions.

The difference between then and now is very simple. Mass repression of the nationalist community is no longer a viable option. The northern nationalist community has emerged out of 30 years of conflict more focused, more confident and more ambitious. That's the political reality both unionism and the British are now being forced to come to terms with. The genie is out of the bottle and any attempt to replace the stopper only acknowledges the past; it cannot return it.?