The following statement was released June 26 by James Harris and Laura Garza, Socialist Workers candidates for president and vice president of the United States.

Workers and farmers in the United States and throughout the world should demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops and military hardware from the Middle East.

The roots of the attack on a U.S. military installation in Saudi Arabia lie in the decades-long imperialist oppression and exploitation of workers and peasants in the region and the plunder of the natural resources in the Middle East that Wall Street considers as its own. The latest round of these attempts at domination have been the bloody U.S.-led assault on Iraq in 1991, Washington's backing of the colonial settler state in Israel, and the U.S. rulers' unceasing efforts to erase once and for all the legacy of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Trying to impose a regime more subservient to Washington, U.S. bomber planes and armored vehicles mowed down more than 150,000 Iraqis, many of them Fleeing civilians or soldiers, during the Persian Gulf War. Now, U.S. troops have set up a permanent presence in Saudi Arabia to defend capitalist control of the oil fields and an increasingly weak monarchy, and enforce sanctions against Iraq - an embargo that has led to the deaths of an estimated half million children since 1991.

These actions, along with Washington's military and economic support for Tel Aviv and its subjugation of the Palestinian people, are what have earned the U.S. government the enmity of the peoples of the Mideast.

Working people the world over should rejoice in the growing numbers of militants - from Saudi Arabia to Palestine and Ireland - who resist imperialist subjugation and press the struggle for national liberation. It is this resistance - and the possibility that more bellicose actions by the new Israeli government may turn it into open rebellion by million of toilers in the region - that made representatives of the capitalist regimes at the Arab League summit in Cairo nervous. It is the same resistance that makes Washington, London, and other imperial masters tremble.

Meeting in Lyons, France, U.S. president William Clinton, British prime minister John Major, and the heads of the other "Group of Seven" states immediately declared they would step up actions against so-called terrorists. Major commiserated that the British Crown too has had problems with those who protest imperialist occupations, most recently those fighting for Irish self-determination.

The biggest perpetrators of terrorism on a world scale - the ruling classes from Washington, Paris, London, and Tokyo - will now try to justify taking measures that will further impinge on the democratic rights of working people under the guise of fighting terrorism. They will try to impose more policies like Paris's Vigipirate, under which soldiers have stopped and harassed some 2 million people on the streets, especially targeting North African immigrants. Clinton recently signed a so-called counterterrorism bill that seeks to deny immigrants the right to appeal and can label them as supporters of terrorism based on evidence that can be kept secret.

Our campaign urges working people the world over to oppose such attacks on democratic rights and to stand in solidarity with those fighting to remove the boot of imperialism from their necks. We should speak out against Washington's attempts to strangle those governments that refuse to bow to U.S. dictates, including Iran, Libya, and socialist Cuba.

Above all workers and young rebels today need to be armed with the facts to understand what is happening in the world, why, and what we should do about it. Our campaign supporters will be stepping up sales of socialist literature, such as the issue of New International that contains "Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's assault on Iraq." And we pledge to join with other fighters to demand: U.S. troops out of the Middle East! End the sanctions against Iraq and Iran now!  
 
 
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