Faced with a deepening world economic crisis, Washington and its imperialist allies - who are also rivals -are driven to try to open up Russia and the other workers states in Europe and Asia for capitalist exploitation. But they are running up against the fact that they lost the Cold War. The noncapitalist social relations in the workers states proved stronger than the now-shattered Stalinist regimes there.

Despite decades of rule by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy, the most fundamental conquests of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, where for the first time the working class succeeded in taking and holding state power, have not been overturned. That fact is a strength for working people around the world and a thorn in the side of the capitalist masters, whose system is in an historic decline.

One of the imperialists' aims in World War II had been to drown the conquests of the Russian revolution in blood. When this was prevented by the heroic resistance by the toilers of the Soviet Union, combined with the refusal of U.S. GIs to continue fighting in 1945, Washington and its allies were forced to retreat and attempt to weaken the underpinnings of the Soviet Union and the newly formed workers states in Eastern Europe through pressure on the Stalinist apparatuses that ruled there. That was the origin and aim of the "Cold War."

The 1990 - 91 U.S.-led slaughter in Iraq was the first war following the opening of a world capitalist depression in which the stakes involved not only a war by imperialism to impose its will on the people of a semicolonial country, but also the jockeying for position among rival imperialist powers. U.S. capital made gains against its competitors in the Mideast - U.S. companies snatched up most of the contracts to rebuild Kuwait following the war, for instance. But Washington failed in its central aim of establishing a stable, subservient regime in Baghdad. In fact, the Gulf War destabilized the region more, intensifying every conflict and setting the stage for future wars.

The U.S. rulers' next major effort to assert their domination was on the European continent - in Yugoslavia. There, after years of fanning the flames of war between rival gangs of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy and undermining every attempt by its rivals to intervene under the banner of the European Union or United Nations, Washington was able to force through an agreement on a NATO-led intervention, spearheaded by U.S. troops and named after Dayton, Ohio.

As the latest upsurge in the struggle for self- determination in Kosovo has shown, however, the ability of working people in Yugoslavia to fight has not been crushed, either by the Stalinist bureaucracy or by the imperialist intervention.

The Clinton administration has used the intervention in Yugoslavia to establish a European beachhead for U.S. imperialism and as a springboard to drive to expand the imperialist NATO alliance eastward to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The only possible target of a remilitarized Poland is the Russian workers state - a fact of which millions of workers in Russia, as well as officials in Moscow, are keenly aware.

This world picture shows why it would be wrong to reduce the issue in Iraq to one of oil. While every capitalist power desires to have more control over this essential natural resource - and the regions where it can be obtained - that's not the main question at stake. Washington's war drive in the Mideast today is aimed at using its military weight to bolster its advantage over its capitalist competitors, as well as to get in a stronger position to attempt to restore capitalist rule in the chunks of the world that have been wrested from the grip of the world market system.

"No Blood for Oil" became a common slogan in 1990-91. It captured in a popular way a real aspect of the Gulf War. At that point the capitalist rulers still had the illusion that the breakup of the old Russian empire rebuilt by Stalin and his heirs could produce in those regions a durable balance of forces advantageous to imperialism. And Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and others in the Stalinist bureaucracy still had the illusion that collaboration with Washington's war drive would help them enter the world market system in stable way.

There are fewer such illusions now. The political stakes in Iraq are not just about the Mideast, but the enormous wealth in the workers states in the region surrounding the Caspian Sea and, most of all, Russia. That's why 36,000 U.S. troops with massive firepower at their disposal remain at the ready in the Arab-Persian gulf. That's why the U.S.-led provocations will continue over "inspections" that are an outrageous abuse of any nation's sovereignty.

Imperialism is not just mean policies against people in other countries. It is a system for maintaining the exploitation of the vast majority of humanity at home and abroad by a handful of extremely wealthy families. In the process, though, as The Communist Manifesto explained 150 years ago, capitalism creates its gravediggers - toilers in every country who have a common interest in ridding the world of this system.

Working people should celebrate and champion resistance by our side in every part of the world - Caterpillar workers rejecting the company's contract demands, public workers striking against cuts in social benefits in Germany, ethnic Albanians fighting for their national rights in Kosovo. The Militant urges its readers to join in these struggles, as well as in demanding all the "inspectors" and troops get out of the Mideast. In doing so, they should take every opportunity to explain imperialism and its aims, and work to build an international workers movement that can lead the toilers to power.  
 
 
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