Five years after the U.S.-led war against Iraq, Washington is keeping up its persistent squeeze on Baghdad and stepping up its attacks against the Iranian government in Tehran. This underscores what the Pentagon was not able to accomplish in the slaughter: imposing a protectorate in Baghdad with its war against Iraq and shifting the relationship of forces against the toilers in the region.
The U.S. rulers had sought to use military might to install a reliable regime subservient to their interests. They aimed to secure more control over oil reserves in the Gulf in order to deal economic and political blows to their imperialist rivals in Japan and Europe, who are heavily dependent on Mideast oil.
After the hated client regime of Shah Reza Pahlevi was overthrown in 1979, the U.S. capitalist class never recovered from blows dealt by the revolutionary upsurge of workers and peasants in Iran. While Washington continues to howl about the "terrorist" state in Iran, its competitors in France and Japan have refused to comply with the sanctions it seeks to impose on the regime. Tokyo is not about to turn its back on a major oil supplier. Nor is Paris willing to surrender a source of hefty profits at Washington's behest.
This political situation reflects the heightened competition between the world capitalist powers in a period of deflationary pressures on the rulers' profit rates and narrowing access to markets. As the imperialists battle among themselves for domination of large chunks of the globe - for the right to superexploit billions of human beings - capitalism is marching toward another world war.
Today NATO, with Washington at the head, is embarked on a war drive in the Balkans, with the goal of overthrowing the workers state in Yugoslavia. All of the conflicts among the imperialist powers that began to surface in Iraq are sharper this time.
To help lay the political ground for Washington's latest probes against Iraq and Iran, as well as Yugoslavia, a flurry of features in the U.S. media have played up the fifth anniversary of the Gulf War. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who took direct control of the slaughter, and others have tried to justify what was done there. But the TV images of the killing zones where tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqis were massacred don't sit well with many working people.
That's why vanguard fighters and youth must take advantage of the heightened interest to broadly sell New International no. 7, featuring the article "Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq." This magazine tells the truth about Washington's murderous actions, and the reasons behind them. It explains how socialist workers and youth responded, campaigning first against Washington's war drive, and continuing once the bombing started, among co- workers, at factory gates, on picket lines, and in the streets. And the New International points the road forward for working people today - building a communist movement that can lead the struggle for the working class to take power out of the hands of the warmakers.