The U.S. rulers' military probes against the Iraqi people are an extension of the bosses' push to squeeze more out of workers in the United States. Under the pressures of declining profit rates Washington, London, Bonn, Tokyo, and the other imperialist powers are driven to extract more value out of the laboring masses not just at home but around the world, from Indonesia to Mexico. They compete for markets, sources of raw materials, and domination of the semi-colonial world. The U.S. military arsenal is a club for use against those who refuse to follow Washington's dictates, as well as for maintaining its political and economic dominance in a declining social system.

The Clinton administration's war moves in the Arab- Persian Gulf are aimed not only at dominating the toilers of Iraq and other countries in the Mideast. Increasingly, Washington's target is the Russian workers state, where one- sixth of the earth's surface has been torn from the system of wage slavery. Just as GM's auto barons are pushing for a showdown with UAW members, Washington is on a collision course with the Russian workers.

Since workers and peasants took power in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the "fundamental attitude" of world capitalism has been "to attack Russia, overthrow the nationalized economy, restore a capitalist regime, smash the foreign trade monopoly, open up the Soviet Union as a market and field of investments, transform Russia into a great colony, and thereby alleviate the crisis of world capitalism," explained communist leader James P. Cannon in the Pathfinder book, Struggle for a Proletarian Party.

The expansion of the NATO military alliance into Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic; U.S. troops occupying parts of Yugoslavia; and Washington's military moves in the Caspian Sea region are likewise aimed at tightening the imperialist noose around Russia. They are preparations for the day when the U.S. rulers will try to use military force to accomplish this task.

That's why it's important for working-class fighters to campaign using the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and the books and pamphlets distributed by Pathfinder to reach out to working people and tell the truth about Washington's military moves. These tools are key for drawing the lessons of past battles and to understanding the source of the intensified competition that is exacerbating capitalism's economic and social crisis. Washington's 1991 slaughter against the Iraqi people hailed the opening of new conflicts between imperialist powers that are provoked by the growing worldwide depression conditions. This deepening crisis can only be resolved in two ways - either by the wealthy classes around the world inflicting major defeats on the working class and labor movement or by toilers taking state power from the capitalists. In face of this, working people more than ever need to see ourselves as an international class that needs to unite workers and farmers across national boundaries to fight for the common interests of the exploited and oppressed, and struggle for a socialist world.  
 
 
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