The U.S. rulers, with virtual unanimity, are beating the war drums for a NATO bombing campaign, under the false pretense of concern over the massacres of Albanians in Kosova by the regime in Belgrade. "Time to Shoot or Shut Up" was a typical headline in the October 12 issue of Newsweek magazine.
The planned U.S.-led assault has nothing to do with stopping a "humanitarian catastrophe, "saving lives" or defending the national rights of Albanians in Kosova. Washington's war moves in the Balkans are aimed at increasing its dominance at the expense of its rivals in Europe. The U.S. wealthy class is pressing to take another step toward using its military arsenal to crush the resistance of workers and peasants and reimpose the system of wage slavery in Yugoslavia and the other workers states in the Balkans.
Washington established itself as the major imperialist power in Europe on the corpses of the Yugoslav people, after conducting 3,000 bombing and shelling attacks in Bosnia between 1994 and 1995. This laid the groundwork for an invasion of 60,000 NATO troops, who have occupied Bosnia since late 1995. Three years later, the U.S. rulers still have not gained one inch toward their goal of restoring capitalist social relations in Yugoslavia.
Washington, which is pressing to extend the imperialist military occupation in the Balkans, is just as opposed to the Albanian people's struggle for independence as the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, in the chauvinist war he is leading in Kosova, is doing the dirty work for the imperialists. But he is proving unable to suppress the fighting capacity of the Albanian toilers, whose resistance reflects the underlying strength of the workers state. The U.S. rulers know they will have to take on and try to defeat working people directly in order to reimpose their class rule.
The imperialist powers face the challenge of wiping out the remaining social conquests won through the 1945 socialist revolution in Yugoslavia, in which an alliance of millions of workers and peasants overthrew the landlord and capitalist exploiters and began organizing a thorough-going land reform, economic planning, and a state monopoly of foreign trade that abolished the profit system.
NATO's occupation of Bosnia and its planned assault on Kosova are one link of Washington's military encirclement of the workers states in Russia and other former Soviet republics. The U.S. class of super-wealthy families is preparing, with cold-blooded awareness, to organize an eventual bloody counterrevolution against the workers and farmers in these countries.
The latest issue of the Marxist magazine New International, which features the article "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," is an excellent tool to get into the hands of fighting workers, rebel-minded youth and others opposed to the imperialism's march toward fascism and war. It is supplemented by the Pathfinder book The Truth about Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose U.S. Intervention and New International no 7, featuring "The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq."
Active workers should take these tools to fellow working people on strike picket lines, to campuses, and to political events. We should discuss with them co-workers and other fighters. In particular, the Socialist Workers election campaigns around the country will be one of the primary ways to carry out the effort to explain the truth about Washington's war moves in the Balkans and why working people should join protests to demand:
No to the U.S. war moves!
Imperialist troops out of Yugoslavia!
Support the Albanian people's fight for independence in Kosova!