Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, LondonSW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.]
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No 1254 Oct 26 2004                                              25p Weekly
Northwest seminar Sat December 4.

They still want warmongering, and it still means that World War III catastrophe will be the only final result. Revolutionary perspectives desperately needed for civilisation to proceed. Total rubbish about "war with Islam". Further elaboration of 2005 Perspectives (draft).
The plan remains for the American Empire to turn this uncontrollable mess of a "world system" of theirs — "free-world imperialism" — to OPEN WARMONGERING everywhere.
That way, US imperialism stands some sort of chance, the Empire believes, in still coming out on top in the world when this huge historical mess and human disaster finally collapses into total world hostility and chaos.
The evidence continues to pile up all around, taken direct from how the "free" capitalist press itself is "reporting", manipulating, and manufacturing the "latest news" and "world developments".
At the top of this scandal remains the clear way that the "opposition" (in the USA and Britain, leading the warmongering) refuses to "oppose" even now, this catastrophic World War III imposition on the world, which has begun now in Iraq and the Middle East generally. 
From their words and chance, unguarded remarks, it remains clear that the brilliant BBC TV series "The terror of nightmares" has marginally (philosophically confused) begun to confirm from a résumé of Cold War and post Cold War facts, a decision was taken long ago in the West that a "new world order" had to be imposed on this planet to wind up the Soviet "evil empire" and to make the world permanently safe for exploitational imperialist Western "democracy" and privatised commercial rule of the world, — to destroy once and for all the ideas of having, one day, a planned, rational, state-run world of strict rules and regulations, replacing privatised anarchy which rules now.
And minds EVERYWHERE are beginning to realise what disaster of warmongering civilisation and humanity now faces. Because the neo-con warmongering programme cannot succeed or stop with just the neo-colonial blitzkrieg and occupation of Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.
This will do nothing to "solve" the global "imperialist overproduction crisis" (see EPSR Box for original Marxist sources). 
The failing American Empire's final target for war must be Japan, German, French, British, and other monopoly-imperialist rivals, — World War III eventually, exactly as World Wars I and II were unleashed on the planet by Western imperialist world control when they equally could find no better way forward out of their uncontrollable rivalry and "freemarket" economic anarchy consequences than using their military power to forget the iron laws of economic control and go directly (eventually) to war with each other for global "superiority".
All official real argument and reason has disappeared.
The die is cast, the decision made.
Only WAR and blitzkrieg-terror will do, "discipline" or some substitute imperialist bullying or terrorisation of the planet lies ahead.
Total lies will be told from now on about the coming world economic collapse from now on, picturing the world as in a "grip of evil" etc, etc, "which must be confronted and smashed ultimately", — as an "explanation" of the dominant monopoly-imperialist economic system's total inability to explain or understand the system's law-governed "over-production" crisis (see EPSR Box), or come up with any other "solution" other than total world military bullying of all regarded as "trouble-makers", or "not team players", or "rogue states", etc, etc.
This will mean inter-IMPERIALIST World War III eventually because zapping and blitzkrieging a series of minor "rogue states", no matter how many, will NOT have any great effect at all on the problem of IMPERIALIST "over-production", to repeat the point.
That problem can only be sorted out by STOPPING THE SYSTEM OF MONOPOLY-IMPERIALIST EXPLOITATIONAL ECONOMIC ANARCHY which rules the world now. And the despairing American Empire's turn to warmongering as the "solution" to an "eternal world of American prosperity rule" which is all now going wrong because of iron economic laws undermining the crap and ignorance and deliberate neglect coming out of the White House for decades now, is eventually to turn militarily on Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and every other international monopoly—commerce force which is clearly the "cause of the American Empire's problems" — just by being there.
This was EXACTLY how inter-IMPERIALIST World Wars I and II were inflicted, with catastrophic effects, on the planet, — again after much initial zapping of minor powers and much initial skirmishing around the world for the major imperialist powers to warn EACH OTHER about how "tough" they were, about how "determined", etc and about what "invincible" military powers they had become, etc, etc, etc.
But already these beginnings towards WW III are a DISASTER of sorts, — a crucial historical concept to grab hold of.
First, the imperialist dominant system will have its way (after a fashion, in the teeth of growing opposition worldwide), but it will eventually become a TOTAL DISASTER in one way or another, mainly because its "great, free-world," Western imperialist military triumphs simply will not materialise.
There could be masses of destruction for the planet, as now in Iraq and the Middle East.
But the PEOPLE of the world are changing.
They are not suitable any longer (made unsuitable by capitalism's own globalising developments (see EPSR Box and study Marxist science)) to be any longer militarily bullied by Western neo-colonial imperialism or told how to run their lives or what sort of lives they should lead.
And so the whole idea of eventually "taming" Iraq, the whole Middle East, and eventually the entire Third World, — with help from local stooge/middle-class regimes such as is currently being set up by the CIA and the American Empire military occupation of Iraq, — will eventually come to a historical dead-end and a nonsense-nothing anyway. (And it is already half-way there anyway, as best as can be objectively judged.
For already a CLASS WAR is what is raging inside Iraq, on top of the anti-imperialist Resistance, which is still growing (see capitalist-press admissions).
Like all class wars in history, it is bloody and "disgusting" if people choose to look at it that way. But like all civil wars, as the one in Iraq, — always they are started by the RULING CLASS, — those who shout "disgusting" the loudest (with their international bourgeois friends), — despite having always STARTED the violence.
From the start in Iraq, as capitalist press admissions themselves below agree, the areas of "resistance" to this American domination have been brutally and systematically MASSACRED, — with the Iraqi middle-class stooge "provisional government" (Empire-appointed) tut-tutting and expressing "regret", etc, (occasionally) about the deaths and destruction continuing, but basically not lifting a finger to do anything about it,(basically pleased that the class "enemy" is being tamed by the Empire where they are not sure they can do it any more).
As already explained in the EPSR, this continues the capitalist-bourgeois state racket of Saddamism (set up by the US imperialists in the first place in the early 1970's as a "bulwark against communism" which Saddam cleverly ran as a "pro-Soviet" and "semi-socialist" state but in reality NEVER getting the capitalist bourgeoisie off the backs of the Iraqi ordinary people and poor, who all suffered intolerably under 13 years sanctions, and who all reacted in civil-war disgust when Saddam's chauvinistic and military bluster finally collapsed ignominiously and in greater torment and suffering than ever for the ordinary Iraqi people in just one week in 1993.
Now, totally confused and leaderless as the ordinary Iraqis are, they are putting up their OWN fight against Western military occupation and permanent rule, and against the stooge Iraqmiddle-class regime which pretends to be prepared to be an "independent" government again of Iraq one day. (It is a total lie and a nonsense. The only aim is to be part of a vast American Empire of world control.)
Hence some of the nature of the war continuing now, — the deliberate suicide bombings and massacres of all who work for or serve this stooge American-Empire "Iraqi" middle-class regime in some way or other:- the recruits get bombed; they get massacred; the dubious Christian churches get bombed; dubious Western "aid agency" people get taken hostage; dodgy "helpers" who in fact are helping build American Empire bases get taken hostage; etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, — often with grisly consequences.
But this is CIVIL WAR, — as best as the ordinary long-suffering Iraqi people can work it out and fight it, still without any real leadership or guidance.
Now new arguments are raging internationally as "new trade unions" have re-appeared inside Iraqto say that "we must keep the Occupation troops here; we must keep the provisional Iraqi government; we must defeat this "foreign" Resistance-terrorism which is all that is now "holding Iraq back", etc, etc, etc.
But the ordinary Iraqis are saying "rubbish" to this line of argument, for the moment.
"We are not going back to the old Saddam ways", they are trying to say. "We are certainly not going back to colonial rule", they are saying.
And partially to its credit, the international anti-war coalition is putting up a bit of a fight against this monstrous "Iraqi trade union" stunt to pull all of the American Empire's chestnuts out of the fire for it.
"Stop the War. Get the troops out", remains the half-hearted pacifist reformist cry, — still for a bit longer. "Win the Civil War. Defeat the American Empire and all its stooges" will be better when it finally begins to crystallise in world understanding.
To prevent class-war understanding from catching on in the world as the only way forward now for civilisation, the Western ideological brainwashing machinery is beginning to make a big fuss that this is a "fight for survival" against "warlike Islamic fundamentalism and terroristic Jihadism".
This is TOTAL NONSENSE.
Of course much of the militant Third Worldis an Islamic culture, and there will long continue some elements who fight imperialism claiming "Allah, o akbar" and other cultural rallying cries against the West.
But all this is utterly trivial or meaningless in the end.
It is an historic, global, anti-imperialist struggle which is now unfolding, — purely incidentally and by chance with some Islamic background and connections. 
There is no "religious onslaught" going anywhere, — least of all the "capture the world. Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Hamas in Palestine, the Moslem Brotherhood, odd groups here and there, can be labelled all they like as the "core of the Resistance" but it is NONSENSE.
It is their anti-imperialism, inspiring billions who are NOT Islamic and have no interest in it, which is really worrying the West.
Putting the label "Islamic extremism which wants to take over the world and the West" is just another propaganda lie with which the global imperialist system is imposing international warmongering.
Sadly, the excellent new BBC TV series by Adam Curtis, the "Terror of Nightmares", has further helped sow this barmy idea that the world is now in the grip of an ideological-religious struggle between the neo-con American Empire warmongers on one side, and the Bin Laden/Moslem Brotherhood tradition on the other.
Curtis' brilliant series, tracking the origins of the neo-con warmonger grip of the American Empire all the way back to 1971 and beyond (when Rumsfeld and Cheney first got into the White House with their crazy long-term plan to
"Win" the Cold War", "Destroy the Soviet Evil Empire", and turn the whole world back away from all further idea of planning and state socialism to a "free" world of "democracy" for all and universal monopoly-capitalist consumerism, commercialism, and privatisation which will give the world trouble-free, endless, everlasting prosperity".
Their destruction is now completing; their "reconstruction" is under way; and the world is in the greatest, most insane, most irrational mess/crisis that it has ever been.
Some of the fightback is by Islamics.
But that is PURELY incidental.
Billions of others are fighting back against this warmongering insanity too, and they are nothing whatever to do with Islam.
One of the biggest fights is developing within the West's own intelligentsia and middle-class.
People of reason everywhere are in outrage at what is going on in blitzkrieging and collective punishments (mass bombing, etc, torture — all invented by imperialist colonial "tyranny to start with 100 years ago, along with concentration camps and hostage-taking and killing, — and all in popular memory perfected during the Second inter-imperialist World War when German imperialism was the big pace-maker for the imperialist warmongering, "solutions" to the growing world slump problems of the 1930s. 
Here follows part of endless more evidence-admissions, taken from the bourgeoisie's own "free" press, of this intellectual revolt growing, of the understanding that this warmongering is NAZISM reborn, and of the detailed propaganda-provocation preparations to spread this blitzkrieging to Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Palestine (via the genocidal Zionist war), Sudan, and anywhere else that can be roped in as a "rogue state" and "the threat really to all our prosperous and peaceful futures on Earth", etc, etc, etc, via a million lies, half-truths, and propaganda falsifications and provocations.
First came the evil provocation speech written by the CIA and delivered to the South East Asia conference by Western stooge Desmond Tutu which virtually called for blitzkrieg-invasion NOW in the interests of his fellow-Western-stooge Aung San Suu Kyi, the ex-Oxbridge socialite; and this monstrous provocation seems possibly to have been tied to a CIA coup attempts in Myanmar around Khin Nyunt who suddenly had to be ousted from the premiership for corruption.
Tutu's warmongering provocation ran:
Where are the statesmen, the visionaries of our time, with regard to Suu Kyi's nonviolent struggle for freedom? The words of protest at her detention from world leaders ring hollow when they do not translate into action.

Whatever one's view of the war in Iraq, it continues to divide the world. Questions over whether diplomacy had been fully exhausted, whether there was a legal basis for the decision, whether the true aims of the war have been revealed, all persist. 

I don't want to go into these questions here. But the sincerity of governments on both sides of that divide are being tested by Myanmar. Are both sides truly committed to helping end the rule of oppressive dictators, and to using all non-military means at their disposal to do so? With Myanmar, the answer so far has been a tragic no.

Suu Kyi and the people of Myanmar have not called for a military coalition to invade their country. They have simply asked for the maximum diplomatic and economic pressure against Myanmar's brutal dictators. The generals in power refuse to honor the express wishes of a nation.

The international response to this barbarity has been so weak that the generals can smell the inertia; they feel they can continue to get away with these things without sanction.

state terrorists from Myanmar will sit and dine with your leaders. The same leaders who proclaim a war against terror every time they are on television or in the newspaper.

The "coalition of the willing" and the "coalition of the unwilling" ultimately have to show each other that something concrete can be done on Myanmar. For the "willing" it's to show that they will use other non-military instruments at their disposal to pursue justice, and for the "unwilling" it's to prove that they have the determination to deal with a dictatorship like Myanmar's, to prove they are not appeasers of tyranny.

If you protested the war in Iraq, ask your government what it is doing to support Myanmar's peaceful struggle against its own oppressive dictatorship. For those who praised their governments for being against the war in Iraq, ask your governments what they are doing to make Myanmar a shining example of how alternatives to war can be effective. 

Because at the moment, governments on both sides of the Iraq debate show no gumption, no will to apply serious pressure on the oppressive dictatorship in Myanmar.

Myanmar, Asia, indeed the world, have a golden opportunity. We have a charismatic leader determined to lead her movement and her people in the way she would choose to govern, peacefully, with respect and with human dignity. Just as Nelson Mandela no longer belongs only to South Africans, I believe that in the future Suu Kyi will be a shining light for Asia and the world.

We must continue to ask the question, whose side are we on? We cannot be neutral in the face of such barbarity. For those who know oppression, inaction is the most painful.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Next came an onslaught on Sao Toméby a white South African fascist, virtually calling for an American imperialist blitzkrieg:
Like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the strategically positioned Sao Tomé could be vital as Washington increasingly deals with what General James Jones, the commander of U.S. European Command, which covers most of Africa, calls the continent's "large ungoverned regions." 

Jones's deputy, General Charles Wald, says Sao Tome could be an ideal site for a so-called temporary Forward Operating Location from which U.S. forces could jump to regional hot spots like Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia.

The United States already projects itself across Africa through a Voice of America transmission station on Sao Tome. The Americans are studying how to expand the tiny airport and dredge a deep water port. 

Menezes, who was briefly deposed in a bloodless coup last year, makes no secret of his desire for a U.S. security umbrella. "We are a tiny island with big neighbors," he says. "We welcome the Americans."

Yet President Fradique de Menezes looks at the surrounding equatorial waters and dreams of the four billion barrels of oil that may lie beneath, which could give his country one of the world's highest per capita incomes.

"We have come late to the oil business," he recently told a group of visiting American business executives. But Menezes imagines this former Portuguese colony as Dubai, Taiwan and Diego Garcia wrapped into one. The Americans could not come too soon. West Africa already provides 15 percent of U.S. crude imports, which should increase to 25 percent within 10 years.

First, security. "If you don't protect your wealth, you are not safe," General Wald tells regional leaders. The United States is already training African forces in counter-terrorism.

But lots of oil with little security is an invitation for turmoil. Nigerian waters are now the world's most dangerous, with rebel militias and smugglers stealing 100,000 barrels of oil worth $1.5 million every day. Insurgents succeeded in temporarily shutting down nearly half of the country's oil production last year. Osama bin Laden has declared that Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 120 million people, half of them Muslim, is "ready for liberation."

September" should be the beginning of a major U.S. effort to train and equip local defense forces. Cameroon and Sao Tome have received significant debt relief under the International Monetary Fund's and World Bank's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative.

Menezes insists that Sao Tome is "determined to avoid the past mistakes of other oil countries."

Stanley A. Weiss is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan Washington-based organisation.

Next comes news that the uncontrollable revolution in Colombiacould be next for blitzkrieg:
trade union leader Pedro Jaime Mosquera has been found assassinated with signs of torture in the north-eastern Colombian region of Arauca. The circumstances surrounding Pedro's death are still unclear although his union, fensuagro have said that they believe that the Colombian State is responsible for the murder.

Pedro was the Vice-President of fensuagro (the union representing agricultural workers) in the region of Arauca, and was well known internationally having represented Colombia at the first European Social Forum in Florence two years ago.

The detailed plans revealed in the Sunday Times for invasion of Syriafollow this, closely tracked by a new threat to Belarus:
PRESIDENT BUSH has set his sights on ousting Aleksandr Lukashenko as President of Belarus

Mr Bush approved plans to support Belarus's opposition and impose sanctions on its Government after police broke up protests

Opposition leaders and Western observers accuse Mr Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, of rigging the referendum and persecuting critics to prolong his iron-fisted rule over his ten million people.

The EU, which has condemned the referendum, is considering imposing "smart" sanctions on Belarus, officials say.

"At a time when freedom is advancing around the world, Aleksandr Lukashenko and his Government are turning Belarus into a regime of repression in the heart of Europe," President Bush said in a statement. "There is no place in a Europe whole and free for a regime of this kind."

On Wednesday President Bush signed the Belarus Democracy Act, which calls for the promotion of democracy through aid to political parties, NGOs and the independent media and forbids US federal agencies from giving financial aid to Belarus.

"This bipartisan legislation demonstrates America's deep concern over events in Belarus and a commitment to sustain those Belarussians who must labour in the shadows to return freedom to their country," Mr Bush said.

The Foreign Ministry in Minsk said: "This openly hostile act leaves us with nothing but great sorrow. Now, the United States will be solely responsible for repairing relations with Belarus."

Backing all this warmongering, astonishingly, are the disgraceful imbecile comments by a German "Green":

Joschka Fischer is the man with the alternative view.

As foreign minister and vice-chancellor of Germany, Mr Fischer is still exploring the path ahead.

"There cannot be world order without the US. It is the only country that can project global power," he told a meeting hosted by the London School of Economics and the Centre for European Reform.

"But neither the US nor Europe alone can defend against the totalitarian threat of terrorism. The west must ... find a way to create a strategic consensus."

Far from dwelling on the bitter schism between Germany and the Bush administration over Iraq, Mr Fischer stresses the importance of the transatlantic relationship to both Europe and the US.

America was struggling in the face of ramifying global challenges, he said. Others were struggling to create counterbalances to US power — an apparent reference to the French president Jacques Chirac's attempts to sustain the concept of multipolarity.

But this debate was out of date, Mr Fischer suggested. Globalisation, economic interdependence, limited resources, increased mobility, and the mass media and information technology revolutions were binding countries ever more closely together. A "second pillar" must be erected alongside US power, round a reformed, revitalised United Nations.

Afghanistan, where Germany is heavily committed, showed what could be achieved if countries acted in concert, he said.

So much for "alternative" politics — riddled with imperialist-reformist illusions; bourgeois to the core; and totally ANTI-COMMUNIST in its really serious essence.
And Fischer's real interest in "alternative UN legitimacy"??? None at all. The blind eyes continue. Germanyis now the third biggest arms dealer, seller, and maker in the world. 
"Binding countries ever more closely together"??
Yes, to aid the imperialist monopolies? continued profitability (they hope) and continued world domination.
And Afghanistan remains a sick joke, abandoned by the West once after imperialist war had wrecked the place behind the Mojaheddin, and ready now to abandon most of it again, having again carried out a "triumphant" warmongering:

But the Taliban regime and its seemingly irrational social regulations can be better understood if seen in the context of Afghanistan in the mid-to-late Nineties. For all their failings, the Taliban brought security to many areas where there was none. 

Impositions that were shocking in the cities were not impositions at all in the vast majority of Afghanistan. In the dusty hill villages of Paktia or Oruzgan province, of Ghor or Faryab. Yet the reasoning behind this extreme rigour deserves understanding and even, controversial though it may be to say so, a degree of sympathy.

Many Taliban had seen their families destroyed, their fathers killed, their fields deliberately despoiled, their culture splintered and their homeland sucked into a welter of violence. The attraction of the clear certainties of a rigorous interpretation of Islam to those steeped in such chaos is easy to comprehend. They believed that all that had gone wrong in their lives could be attributed to modernity, to newness, to change. 
They wanted a revolution in the original sense of the word, a turning back of the clock. 

There was a blackness, a trauma, at the heart of the Taliban movement. Outside the Ministry of Religious Affairs, I once saw a painted slogan: 'Every breath is a breath closer to death.' A year later it had been replaced with: 'Throw reason to the dogs. It stinks of corruption.'

There was a perversely logical rationale behind the bans. The Taliban imagined the life they had lost as an idealised version of rural tribal society. That life, with its supposed purity and social justice, could be enjoyed once more if everybody followed the Shariat, the corpus of Islamic law, particularly where it intersected with local traditions that were threatened by change.

The city dwellers were seen as collaborators. Kabul, to the rural Taliban, was Babylon and its women were the whores. And the Taliban behaved accordingly.

As the years of their rule progressed, and their international isolation deepened, the Taliban drew closer to the Gulf-based strands of Islam followed by men like Osama bin Laden. 

Even as late as 1998 the Taliban were almost astonishingly simplistic. Bored, waiting for an interview with the minister for religious affairs, I once asked his guards, a detachment of religious police charged with enforcing the minister's harsh edicts, if I could join them. 

They looked me up and down and then conferred. Of course, they said, if l really wanted to. There followed another debate. One came over and shyly asked if I was a Muslim. No, I told him and asked if that was a problem. He looked grave and spoke to his colleagues again. A minute later he returned, all smiles. No problem, he told me, if I came with them to the mosque for dawn prayers the next day I could convert and there would be no trouble at all.

The shame is that the attention of the world is now drifting elsewhere. Last November, I wandered through the hospital in Kandahar, the main city in southeastern Afghanistan. 

The sound of steady sobbing echoed through empty rooms. In one wing I found children dying of malnutrition. A handwritten sign stuck up in a corner told me I had found the 'therapoetic feeding centre'. The bathos was terrible. Two years after their country had been invaded by the world's richest and most powerful state, five-year-olds were starving to death. 

A few days later I drove out to the village of Sangesar, where the Taliban had been founded 10 years ago. I spoke to the locals gathered for Friday prayers at the mosque where Mullah Omar, the reclusive one-eyed cleric who led the movement, once preached. Did they want the Taliban back, I asked. No, they said. They wanted a well.

And what is in store for the ordinary people of Iraq?? The same cynical tyranny, courtesy of Western imperialism:

Patrick Graham is a journalist who worked in Iraq from November 2002 until August 2004 for the Observer, Harper's and the New York Times magazines. He is writing a book about his experiences 

Falluja is already now being bombed daily, as it is softened up for the long-awaited siege. It has been a gruelling year for its people. First, they were occupied by the US army's 82nd Airborne, an incompetent group of louts whose idea of cultural sensitivity was kicking a door down instead of blowing it up. 

Within eight months of the invasion, the 82nd had killed about 100 civilians in the area and lost control of Falluja, leaving it to the US marines to try and retake the city last April. After killing about 600 civilians the marines retreated leaving the city in the hands of 18 armed groups, including tribesmen, Islamists, Ba'athists, former criminals and an assortment of non-Iraqi Arab fighters said to be led by the Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Fallujans have now been offered a choice: hand over the outsiders they dislike (mostly Arabs) who are protecting them from the outsiders they really hate (the Americans), or get blown apart by the world's most lethal killing machine the US marines. Recently, a Bush administration official told the New York Times the bombing was driving a wedge between the citizenry and the non-Iraqi fighters. If, indeed, the civilian population is being bombed for this end, this is a grave war crime.

Last April I found myself inching across a bridge into Falluja holding an old white T-shirt: in front of me, marines blocking the bridge, screaming at me to go back; behind me. a large group of Iraqis yelling at me to go forward so that they could follow me through the roadblock and rescue their families. After a while, the marines opened the bridge allowing hundreds of women and children to stream out, but stopped the boys older than 16 and men younger than 60 from leaving the city. Preventing civilians from leaving a battle is against the Geneva conventions — although battle doesn't capture what a meat grinder the city had become in that first week of the assault, when the majority of civilian casualties were killed, blown apart by precision, and often inaccurate, airstrikes.

The dead were buried in gardens or in mass graves in the city's soccer field. For three weeks 5,000 marines surrounded the city of 340,000 — think an assault on Cardiff. The marines created a moving front line of humvees and tanks, cutting Falluja off. In the air, helicopters and fighter planes bombed a city without air defences, while unmanned drones circled continuously, looking for targets.

During that first week, I was told by Iraqi fighters that the marines nearly took the city after capturing a lot of rebel ammunition: stockpiles of land-mines and homemade rocket launchers that plugged into car lighters. Oil barrels with distances painted on them lined the streets so the rebels could register mortars. The mujahideen were more than a few foreign fighters and Ba'athists, as the US army had been telling everybody.

Initially, the majority of civilian casualties came from bombing that caused "multiple blast wounds, lost limbs, abdomens blown open," as Falluja's doctors told me. According to the Geneva conventions, force must he proportionate and when these images appeared on Arabic television — dead families stacked on top of each other — it looked anything but proportionate; it looked like mass murder.

I made it back into Falluja during the second week of fighting by using fake Iraqi ID. I was accompanied by a translator who told people I was a brother suffering a brain aneurysm. We left Baghdad and drove down roads guarded by guerrilla fighters. The countryside from Ramadi east to Falluja and then to Baghdad was in revolt. We had to pass through resistance lines to get to the marines and then through insurgents to get into the city. It was the marines who were surrounded, not the rebels.

The Americans have more than enough troops to attack Falluja, but as soon as they do the area will once more erupt, and it will take everything the Americans have to control the surrounding villages of Habbaniya, Khaldiya and Al Kharma. According to the Iraqi president. Ghazi al-Yawar, there is a good chance that when the marines hit Falluja again, even Mosul, home to three million Sunnis will explode. Unlike the US army, Mr Yawar knows what he is talking about and understands the way the tribes are grouped in northern Iraq, to an intricate web of families that runs through the Sunni triangle. If Mosul is pushed over the edge, holding the north will be like trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker by hand.

At a clinic, the doctors rolled their eyes at the mention of the mujahideen, but most of their anger was directed at the Americans. The hospital, which lies across the Euphrates, had been cut off from the rest of the city by the marines — another questionable act under the Geneva conventions.  Worse still, the doctors said, several of their colleagues had been shot by snipers along with ambulance drivers, both grave breaches of the laws of war. At this point, most civilians being brought in had head and upper body wounds, most likely from marine snipers. Nothing I saw during the bombing of Baghdad could have prepared me for Falluja under siege.

I have spent time with both resistance fighters and the US army, and there is no question the marines can take the city. But the US has a developed a habit of winning engagements while losing the war.

Sheikh Khaled al-Jumeili, the chief negotiator for the city, who was arrested on Thursday when peace talks broke down after city leaders rejected demands from the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, to hand over "foreign terrorists," including the Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

He said peace talks to end the standoff in the city would remain suspended as a protest against his detention by US troops, who had accused him of representing the militants.

Falluja clerics insist that Zarqawi, whose Tawhid and Jihad movement has claimed responsibility for multiple suicide car-bombings and hostage beheadings, including that of the British contractor Ken Bigley, is not in the city.

"The fact is that I am negotiating on behalf of Falluja people — civilians, kids, women — who have no power.

And yet the West pretends to make an issue of "mass graves". When the records are finally drawn up, 9O% of the "mass graves" will be found down to the imperialists' own murder-tyranny on the Iraqi people.
Obviously, with no revolutionary leadership yet, there remains some "foreign" infiltration and some resistance carried out for not much more than lumpen-criminal self-support, as Western propaganda keeps pretending is the whole story.
But this is TOTAL NONSENSE, as these American Empire admissions now report:

Senior American officials are beginning to assemble a new portrait of the insurgency that has continued to inflict casualties on American and Iraqi forces, showing that it has significantly more fighters and far greater financial resources than previously estimated.  the hardcore resistance numbers between 8,000 and 12,000 people, a tally that grows to more than 20,000 when active sympathisers or covert accomplices are included, according to the American officials.

These estimates contrast sharply with earlier intelligence reports, in which the number of insurgents has varied from 2,000 to 7,000 fighters.

The critical variable, these officials note, remains the large segment of the Iraqi population that still has not decided whether to actively support the new government. 

USofficials said the most significant challenge to the stabilisation effort comes from domestic insurgents, and not from foreign terrorists. 

"What makes it more difficult is that you're dealing with an insurgency without a single face," said a senior army intelligence officer. "It's not just one group of insurgents rallying under one cause. It's multiple groups with different causes loosely tied together by the threads of anti-US sentiment, some sort of Iraqi nationalism, Muslim-Arab unity." 

"What we don't see yet is a unifying leader of the insurgency," said Brigadier General John DeFreitas, the senior USintelligence officer in Iraq.

One Pentagon official said the evidence pointed to some planning across regional boundaries, but no national insurgent network.

But a Pentagon official said that even the new Iraqi security forces have been penetrated by insurgents.

And now comes the start of the real military escalation, — with Britain once again supinely playing the role of expendable aircraft carrier for the war-bound American Empire:

Tony Blair has secretly agreed to allow President Bush to site US missiles on British soil as part of the new US"son of Star Wars" programme, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The confidential deal goes far beyond the official position that Britain is providing enhanced radar provision for the US national missile defence programme.

The siting of the interceptors on British soil would represent the most significant new military USpresence in this country since the withdrawal of cruise missiles 13 years ago.

Sixteen interceptor missiles are being positioned in bases in Alaskaand California this year. The intended location of the remaining 24 is a closely guarded secret, although it is known that the Pentagon wants to site some in Europe.

An offer to site missiles in Yorkshirewas made in a meeting in Washington in May this year and that preparations are well under way to overcome public and parliamentary opposition.

The meeting, one of a series held to discuss US-UK collaboration on the programme, was attended by senior officials from the British embassy, a deputy to John Bolton, the Pentagon's secretary for arms control, and staff from the US State Department.

British diplomats gave an agreement "in principle" to siting interceptors at RAF Fylingdales, but asked that no formal request be made until after the next general election.

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned that the move would "represent a disturbing new step" in international relations and posed a "possible threat to the security of Russia".

The Foreign Ministry also hinted heavily that siting US missiles in Britain or elsewhere in Europe could lead to a new arms race with the US — a threat that will alarm ministers and opponents of the proposal.

And so the knives of civil strife are getting sharper:

Back in April 2002, the prime minister committed himself in principle to backing George Bush's plans to remove Saddam Hussein, come what may. Recently leaked documents have confirmed this, and should be set against repeated statements by Blair and his ministers in the run-up to war that military conflict was "not inevitable". Five key deceptions followed Blair's commitment.

1) Saddam could be peacefully disarmed This focuses on Iraq's 12,000-page declaration handed to Hans Blix and UN weapons inspections team in December 2002. The idea publicly encouraged by Blair in advance of the declaration was that if only Saddam would "come clean'' on weapons of mass destruction, war would be avoided. As the Iraq Survey Group CISG) has confirmed, Saddam did comply in large measure, if not in all detail, and had, up to a decade before, rid himself of WMD. Therefore the declaration was not the act of defiance and breach of UN resolutions portrayed by Blair and Bush. 

2) Foreign governments agreed on the intelligence This has been one of the UKgovernment's favourite themes but it is simply not true. Many of the primary sources in Iraq were pooled, and much of the raw intelligence — which we now know to have been of dubious quality — was shared. But analysts from foreign intelligence services drew different assessments. The French and Germans had no evidence to show that any of the alleged munitions were even close to being weaponised and they told the British.

3) The war was waged to protect the authority of the UN.  This is the new fallback position, the last remaining attempt at a casus belli: that Saddam was in breach of UN resolutions and was thereby bringing the organisation into disrepute. Most UN members preferred Blix to be the judge of that. And in any case, which resolutions was Saddam actually in breach of if he did not have the WMD? Certainly not 1441, which was passed in November 2002. Indeed the non-existence for a decade of WMD raises questions about the lawfulness not just of this war but also of Blair's first military venture, the Operation Desert Fox air strikes on Iraqin December 1998.

4) The French scuppered the second UN resolution This arose from a television interview given by President Chirac a week before the war, in which he said: "Whatever the circumstances, France will vote 'no' because she considers this evening that there are no grounds for waging war in order to achieve the goal we have set ourselves, that is to disarm Iraq." 

Chirac's position was wilfully misconstrued by Blair and by Jack Straw, who had been informed by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's then ambassador to the UN, that attempts to secure a majority on the security council for a second resolution had foundered. Blair needed a scapegoat for his diplomatic failure, even though he knew France's position was no longer pivotal. When the French ambassador confronted the political secretary of the Foreign Office, Peter Ricketts, he was told: "It's such a gift, we won't stop there." 

They didn't stop there. Britainwent on to assert, as we now know again falsely, that if France and one other permanent member of the security council had come on board, the pressure would have been unsustainable and Saddam would have to have "disarmed".

5) The threat posed by Saddam's WMD was growing In his address to the nation at the start of the war. Blair stated that the threat posed by Saddam "is real, growing and of an entirely different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before". 

Blair might have been excused for overstating the intelligence in September 2002, but by the eve of war, as one official told me at the time, the evidence was ''going away". The briefing given to Robin Cook in late February by John Scarlett, then head of the Joint Intelligence Committee confirmed this.

The last formal JIC assessment of WMD had been in December 2002. Blair was happy to make a categorical statement even though he had declined to order a fresh analysis for three months. Lord Butler, in one of the most damaging passages of his report in July, recorded his surprise "that policy makers and the intelligence community did not, as the generally negative results of UNPROVIC inspections became increasingly apparent, re-evaluate in early 2003 the quality if the intelligence."

The British and the Americans knew that Blix's "failure" to find WMD was not the result of lack of effort. They were increasingly concerned that the weapons might after all not exist. In public they did not say so, knowing the damage that would cause politically and legally.

Within a couple of months of war ending, Straw was already admitting that stockpiles would not be found. Blair held out with the line: wait until the ISG has reported. For all the apologies, non-apologies and semi-apologies about the intelligence on WMD, the ISG's report, the Butlerfindings and other evidence show that the falsehoods in the September 2002 dossier were anything but an aberration. 

Remarkably, even the tame reformist "Anti-war Coalition" is beginning to have a go against the universal pro-Western pro-imperialist muzziness and confusion; and against the treacherous move by the ex-Stalinist, ex-Saddamist" trade-unions" in Iraq to approve the American Empire Occupation and the Provisional Iraqi stooge government, and to condemn the "terrorist resistance":

• Abdullah Muhsin is at odds with the facts when he writes that he did "not offer voting advice to trade unions on Labour's Iraq motions" (We are nobody's pawns, October 23). In fact, his advice was printed in the party's official daily briefing for all delegates and in a special "open letter to trade union delegates", in which he wrote that an early date for withdrawal of troops "would be bad for my country, and would play into the hands of extremists". 
Carol Turner 
Secretary, Labour CND

Abdullah Muhsin speaks for a group that has usurped the representation of Iraqi workers using Saddam's law No 71 of 1987, and by means of administrative orders of the US/British occupation and its Iraqi governing council. His communist turned neo-con faction helped provide political cover for war and sanctions. The group was key in the consolidation of the Saddam dictatorship, and now it is allied to the occupation. 

Kamil Mahdik 
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Universityof Exeter

It would be a disaster for the anti-war movement if Unison and the other unions were to use ill-judged and excessive criticism of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) as an occasion to depart from the Stop the War coalition. The IFTU letter to delegates at the Labour party conference has been used within Unison to try to justify a failure to support our union's anti-occupation policy. It provided an excuse for union leaders who, for their own reasons, did not wish to confront Tony Blair.

Many trade unionists regret the way in which the IFTU was used against the anti-war movement in Brighton. The choice presented to the Labour party conference was either to call for Tony Blair to "set an early date" for troop withdrawal or to support a statement legitimising the occupation until December 2005 at the least, and beyond under certain circumstances. Regrettably, the conference voted for the latter option.

This leads back towards the crucial world-philosophical question that mankind needs to return to a perspective of some kind, the sort of perspective that the whole world had postwar of "socialism and a planned world eventually". This was a universal vague understanding, — made deliberately vague by the deliberate confusion and stupidity of Stalinism, built on nationalist complacency and theoretical ignorance.
Killing this perspective his been the real aim of the neo-con counter-revolution.
As it once united the whole of the anti-imperialist world, so it must now return to unite the planet to a vision of a planned socialist world for all.
But the key to this, next time, must be the Marxist-Leninist understanding that no progress of any kind can "be made without the REVOLUTIONARY DEFEAT and total destruction of the imperialist monopoly bourgeoisie which has ruled the world for the last 800 years and is now embarking on yet another World War and destruction just in order to keep in power for itself.
All compromise or "reform" plans for imperialist warmongering must go (Stalinism, Trotskyism, Trade-unionism, Stop the war coalitionism, etc, etc)
The world will have no choice anyway. Imperialist warmongering will carry on until STOPPED, — (after its breakdown in total humiliating disaster here, there, and everywhere, and after civil war like the one in Iraq.)
All truck with other "soft" compromises must go too, like the international charity industry (Red Cross, Oxfam, Care International, Médecins sans Frontièrs, etc, etc, etc, who are all 99% good people, but who have all been spawned by the neo-con counter-revolution as alternative ways of finding the soft underbelly of potential "rogue state" targets for eventual blitzkrieg warmongering, exactly as the kindly UN Iraqi weapons inspectors were really only sent in to find weak spots in Iraq for eventual American Empire invasion forces, as Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, has now revealed (last EPSR).
China, too, if it survives the world slump, will be faced with the choice as well; — will it continue its half-hearted "path of socialism" or will it be conned that a "world war on terrorism" makes more sense????, as the arrogant racist complacent West collapses in military and economic ignominy.
There is no real worry about "fascism" coming into this confused, chauvinist, foreign-hating, warmongering mess.
It is already here. The worst "fascist" regimes in history have been the simple, straight-forward conservative tyrannies like the Bush and Blair regimes.
German NAZISM came onto the historical scene in very particular historical circumstances which are no longer repeatable; and so such a genuinely murderous, racist, warmongering, chauvinistically-convinced power to damage the world can probably never be repeated.
How many in Britain and the USA want to go to war internationally to fight as stormtroopers?? They're not mad keen about staying in Iraq as part of the American Empire "defence" forces, with mutinies already going on, etc. and the gung-ho fascist-troop elements already not doing very well in battle, or enjoying their humiliations.
Connected to other European monopolies?? From where are such willing stormtroopers coming????
NAZI Germany was a one-off.
Two or three million mad Zionist fanatics are happy to return down that NAZI path, but they will be swamped and crushed as failed imperialist war turns into bitter civil wars and national-liberation wars everywhere.
All the fanatical Zionists will manage is to become instigators of catastrophic World War III, or kill each other, as now in rage over Gaza retreat.
More next week on the privatisation disasters of the Western world economies and the total economic anarchy and deliberate ignorant neglect of world economic control (impossible anyway under capitalist "free-markets" and monopolies)which will finally bring the imperialist Western system down in ruins.
Meanwhile, a small foretaste from capitalist press own admissions of what this inhuman imperialist monopoly system is really beginning to mean for ALL the ordinary people on the planet Americans included:
The wealth gap between white households and Hispanic and African-American families in the US has widened significantly, with the last recession inflicting a heavy toll on minority households, a new study said yesterday.

An analysis of US census data by the Pew Hispanic Centre revealed that the 2001 economic downturn deepened a legacy of economic discrimination, with Hispanics and African-Americans harder hit and taking longer to recover.

By 2002, that produced a further deterioration of the economic divide, where minorities own only a fraction of the wealth enjoyed by whites. The median net worth of white households was $88,651, or 11 times greater than Hispanic families ($7,932) and 14 times greater than African-American families ($5,988).

"We have always known about the wealth gap, but what is new and disturbing is that the gaps are increasing." said Roderick Harrison, a demographer at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies. 

"What you are seeing here are the historic disadvantages of black and Hispanic populations from generations ago being carried over:'

The American working class might yet be the first to turn.
Build Leninism. EPSR

LATEST LETTERS WEEKLY WORKER
Anti-semitism
It seems there's no pleasing Royston Bull (Letters, September 30). It is not enough for him that Roland Rance has actively supported the Palestinians for decades, remains a consistent opponent of Zionism and holds to the creation of a single democratic, secular state. No, in addition to this, Rance and others must confess that the founding of Israelwas '"one of the foulest acts of imperialist hypocrisy ever, and certainly the most endlessly poisonous colonisation of all time".

Such a crass lack of reason and proportion cannot be viewed as anything other than a reflection of Mr Bull's vicarious anti-semitism (a charge he always sneers at but always fails to disprove). Indeed, in his EPSR rag. Bull has stated that Zionist oppression of the Palestinians makes the crimes of the Nazis and the USwar on Vietnam look "mild in comparison".

The Palestinians need active solidarity, not shrill denunciations of "world Jewry" from third period tanky -reactionaries like Bull. 
John Black email

Whose interest?

Well, at least no-one can accuse Royston Bull of dissembling. The two-state solution in Palestine, he tells us, is an "evil fraud", and a unitary, democratic and secular Palestineis "utopian". What then, is the solution? According to Bull it means "driving this rotten Zionist stunt into the sea".

For decades, a mainstay of Zionist propaganda has been the lie that the Palestinians intend to 'drive the jews into the sea'. This position has been frequently and explicitly rejected, both by the P'LO and its constituent organisations, and by the islamist forces of Hamas and Islamic jihad. 

We might ask whose interest is Royston Bull serving by trying to revive and propagate this untrue claim? It's certainly not that of the Palestinian people. 
Roland Rance email

Refreshing

While not wishing to intrude on what appears to be some very old WRP feuding, I must say that the charges against the EPSR of anti-semitism and homophobia are really quite erroneous: in fact deliberate misrepresentation.

Having read the EPSR with great interest for some time now, I find nothing of this nature in it and I would like to thank you for drawing my attention to this publication whose revolutionary fervour is quite refreshing. There's no such thing as bad publicity!
David Morgan email

Anti-semitism

Yes. John Black (Letters, October 7). But how does the world arrive at a '"single democratic, secular state" of Palestinecovering the whole country? After 60 years of sectarian Zionist/imperialist tyranny, you surely don't still have naïve faith that the 'free-world' will provide it? To keep believing in Utopias long after all the evidence has come in that they are impossible may not display the "crass lack of reason and proportion" and "vicarious anti-semitism" that you bizarrely accuse me of (you mean you disagree with me? Well, why not just say so), but it is not really worldly or useful. 

A hopelessly wrong turning was taken by post-war Stalinist revisionism to re-sanitise 'western imperialism'. It remains a monstrous affront to history; and the self-liquidation by the workers' states, the subsequent sick turmoil of a 're-marketed' Russia, and the planet now being dictated to for warmongering by a philistine imbecile like Bush, plus the triumph of cheap consumerist culture everywhere, is asking human intelligence: is this rapacious, market-led degeneration the best that organised social understanding can come up with? 

There is no choice. 'Democratic control' has always been the imperialist class's best joke. Markets rule until stopped.

It is revolutionary war which alone can now take civilisation forward. 

Asking revolutionaries to arbitrarily impose a revolutionary war on the planet is a hopeless plan. But the imperialist 'overproduction' economic crisis has given progress towards World War III on a plate, starting in Serbiaand Iraq with deliberate, unnecessary warmongering by the crisis-worried American empire. And it is already a war disaster for a variety of historical reasons. Defeat looms for western imperialism.

Turn this hated warmongering into civil war to bring down imperialism. With no leadership, half the Middle Eastmasses have already got the message. As the sides line up in the civil wars flowing out of World War III, the Palestinians who have assured Roland Rance (Letters, October 7) that they do not wish to "drive the Jews into the sea" will be in an unheard minority. The whole Jewish entity in Palestine will be right with the American empire, as it crumbles in war. 
Royston Bull Manchester

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

***********

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

*********

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

*******

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

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

Why trust Britain in Ireland if not in Iraq? - Adams

SPEAKING at a seminar on The Lessons of Ireland at last week's European Social Forum in London, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams questioned why, if people in Britain do not trust the government over Iraq, they continue to trust them on Ireland.

Addressing a session of the European Social Forum organised by the Wolfe Tone Society, Adams recalled how the various abuses now being revealed in Iraq, such as the beating of prisoners and dirty tricks, had all been used by the British Army in Ireland. 

"It is important for people who live here in Britain to grasp the necessity to campaign for Irish independence. If you don't trust this government on Iraq then why do you trust them on Ireland? Remember, if you come from Britain it is being done in your name," said Adams.

The Sinn Féin president stressed the lessons that people in Britain can learn from the experience of the Irish. "What the British establishment did to my country they will do here to you. The approach has already been seen with first the miners and now the Muslim community," said Adams. 

He called for an end to the Union and the establishment of a relationship of equality between the island of Ireland and Britain.

Adams stressed the need at home to persuade the unionist community to step forward into a more peaceful future. 

"While the Good Friday Agreement has lots of guarantees for the rights of nationalists and unionists, if the unionists could come round to seeing that then it would be huge step forward," he said. "There is no point in having a united Ireland if the unionists don't feel comfortable in it. It is key that people feel a sense of empowerment."

The Sinn Féin leader stressed the need for people to seize freedom for themselves. "There needs to be a movement for social progress that empowers people to take ownership of their own lives," said Adams.

To a question about whether Sinn Féin would go into partnership in government with Fianna Fail, Adams did not rule out the possibility but thought it highly unlikely. "I cannot see us being involved in a coalition with a conservative party without a strategy for Irish unity," said Adams.

He was highly critical of the role of the mass media over the years in reporting Six-County affairs; which he described as disgraceful. He recalled that even now they are not reporting bombings and shootings against people in the nationalist community. 

"One huge issue is collusion and that has never been dealt with properly in the breadth of the media," said Adams. "I have enough confidence in the British people that if they were told what had gone on in Ireland they would not stand for it. For that reason they are not told. They are given misinformation and disinformation."

Addressing the issue of the wall being built to separate Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East, Adams called for its immediate removal. "The peace walls in the North will have to come down in time, but the wall in Palestine should be abolished forthwith."

The Sinn Féin leader called on people in Britain to campaign against the indefinite internment without trial of people in British prisons. 

Adams, who was interned himself in the 1970s, drew a vivid picture of what it was like to be confined in a small space for day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. He drew a comparison with being held indefinitely in a bathroom, having to ask when you want to go to the toilet, having no TV, no radio and no link with the outside world. 

"Many in Ireland spent 24 years in prison in such conditions and walked straight back out into the struggle. The fact is that the British Government could hold people as long as 24 years in those degrading conditions. They will do it unless you actually campaign against it. There also needs to be support for the families," said Adams, who the praised the work of prisoners' support groups in London, who had helped the families of Irish political prisoners over the years.