The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.31           September 7, 1998 
 
 
Protest U.S. Bombings Of Sudan, Afghanistan  
Visible public protests - picket lines, demonstrations, speakouts - are needed now to condemn Washington's brutal, imperial acts of war against Sudan and Afghanistan and demand the bombings stop right away. Class-conscious workers need to explain that it's the U.S. government that's the number-one terrorist in the world.

The U.S. bombing of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, and of Afghanistan was not an act of "self-defense" as U.S. officials claim. It was a calculated act of imperial aggression. The Sudanese interior minister, Abdul Rahim protested, "This is an attack on our land, our sovereignty."

If they get away with it, the U.S. rulers will launch further attacks on sovereign nations. They will attempt more kidnappings and arbitrary arrests of individuals around the world. They will seek to widen police spying, harassment, and the flouting of the Bill of Rights at home - all under the pretext of fighting terrorism. In fact, U.S. officials have warned they may order new attacks. What will be the next country assaulted?

"Today we have struck back," declared U.S. president William Jefferson Clinton. But who is "we"? Clinton is not speaking for working people - in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Clinton and all other Democratic and Republican politicians speak for a tiny handful of super-wealthy families who own the industry, land, and banks in this country and whose profit interests reach around the world.

Working people here have nothing in common with the U.S. government or the employers it represents. Strikers at US West, farm workers fighting for a union in California, and other toilers here have everything in common with fellow workers and farmers in Sudan - such as the chemical workers whose factory was bombed in Khartoum - and in other nations targeted by Washington's barbaric acts. We are part of the same class and have the same enemy: Washington and Wall Street.

Washington says its military assaults on Afghanistan and Sudan were targeting "terrorist-related facilities" somehow linked to those responsible for the bombs that exploded in the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But U.S. officials don't even bother to offer any evidence to back their claims. Their message is: "We don't need to prove any facts. We're Washington, the indispensable nation," as U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright likes to refer to the U.S. government. This is like the cops who break down your door and tell you: "You don't have any rights. We don't need an arrest warrant - we are the law."

Or, as Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, put it, "If you punish the wrong guy for a particular act, that's not even so terrible, if you know for sure this is a bad guy."

Why does Washington launch these assaults? It is part of the U.S. rulers' increasing reliance on military force to further the interests of the declining U.S. empire. These attacks are of a piece with Washington's recent aggression against Iraq and its moves to deploy troops against the workers state in Yugoslavia. The U.S. rulers continue to threaten the Korean people with nuclear bombs. Anyone who doesn't bow to Washington is a target.

While the bombing of the U.S. embassies does not advance the interests of working people anywhere, one must ask: Why is it that U.S. embassies are the ones that are targeted? To put it differently: Why is the U.S. government hated so much around the world, including in Africa? It's because the U.S. empire, sinking its tentacles increasingly in all corners of the globe, is identified by millions as a plunderer of resources and the wealth produced by the sweat and blood of workers and peasants. State terrorism has been mastered by the U.S. rules to perpetuate and extend their domination and robbing of the wealth working people produce throughout the world. The bombings of the U.S. embassies are simply a case of chickens coming home to roost.

Washington is the biggest threat to the world. They have more chemical weapons than anyone. It was the CIA that ordered the 1961 assassination of anticolonial hero and Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, as U.S. officials recently admitted. It's Washington that supported the apartheid regime in South Africa for years. It's the U.S. government that bombed Libya in 1986, intervened in Somalia three years ago, and has supported successive military regimes in Kenya itself. They are the ones who have locked up 15 Puerto Rican political prisoners in U.S. jails, some for 18 years. All those who oppose Washington's criminal actions against Sudan and Afghanistan should speak out loud and clear. One good example is the New York Socialist Workers campaign, which, as we go to press, has called an emergency protest at the federal building in downtown New York.  
 
 
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