- U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Feb. 18, 1998

With her trademark coarseness, Albright, addressing a meeting at Ohio State University in Columbus, put her finger on the true course of the propertied U.S. rulers not only toward Iraq, but the rest of the world. She was simply repeating her commander-in-chief, William Jefferson Clinton, who in his second inaugural speech in January 1997 proclaimed the United States "the world's indispensable nation." The message is that Washington - acting unilaterally and relying more and more on military force - will target for brutal punishment "those people" who don't "follow the rules" it sets.

To Albright's stunned surprise, a substantial number of people in the Columbus audience of 6,000 loudly challenged U.S. government plans to launch a military assault on Iraq. These protests by youth helped turn the "town meeting," designed to drum up public support for the bombing of Iraq, into a fiasco for Albright and company.

But such antiwar sentiment will not stay Washington's hand. The U.S. capitalist rulers are hell-bent on unleashing a slaughter against the Iraqi people. In so doing, their goal, which they failed to achieve in the 1990 - 91 Gulf War, is not only to overthrow the Iraqi government and install one more subservient to their interests. The ultimate target of the U.S. billionaires' war machine is the workers state in the former Soviet Union, whose workers and farmers they have yet to crush some eight years after proclaiming a U.S. "triumph" in the Cold War. The conflicts with Russia have sharpened over the past several years, particularly with the drive by Washington to expand NATO into Central and Eastern Europe.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman highlighted what he called "the NATO-Iraq connection" in a February 17 column. The aim of the U.S.-led assault on Iraq is to limit "weapons proliferation," Friedman claims, but to do so it must "work with" Moscow. Washington's drive to expand NATO is thus counterproductive, Friedman says, since it will provoke Moscow to expand, not shrink, its nuclear arsenal.

The opposite is the truth, however. The purpose of NATO has never been to "defend Europe" against attack, but to prepare an attack on the workers states in Central and Eastern Europe, and above all the Soviet Union. This has been graphically demonstrated in Yugoslavia, where following years of feeding the flames of slaughter, Washington pushed through the Dayton "peace" accord and spearheaded the occupation of Bosnia by U.S. and other imperialist troops. The aim of that military intervention is to overthrow the Yugoslav workers state over time and reimpose capitalist rule there.

In fact, Friedman provides a fig leaf for the U.S. course of military aggression that has been carried out over the bodies of thousands of workers and farmers in Bosnia and is now setting its sights on the Iraqi people once again. Far from being a case of "Madeleine's Folly," as the Times column is titled, Clinton picked Albright precisely to voice and personify this aggressive bipartisan course.

When Albright issues warnings to those who "break the rules," she's talking about cracking down on struggles - at home, and the world over - of striking workers, farmers fighting the loss of land, defenders of women's right to abortion, Black rights fighters, and others.

That's why a campaign within the working class to tell the truth about the employers' war drive must focus on explaining and opposing imperialism - the worldwide system of capitalist exploitation and oppression whose workings inexorably lead to bloody wars.

The world imperialist system is today weaker and more vulnerable than at any time since the end of World War II. From Southeast Asia to the heart of Western Europe, international capital faces a protracted deflationary economic crisis - one that heightens conflicts among the imperialist powers and between them and the peoples of the Third World and workers states.

Right now, working people and youth must keep our fire on the actual slaughter that Washington is on the verge of unleashing. Many liberal pacifists and middle-class radicals instead focus on the brutal economic sanctions, which they say are starving "the poor, suffering Iraqi children" instead of hurting the Saddam Hussein government. But that argument lends credence to the reactionary idea that Washington has a right to overthrow the Iraqi government - in a less "painful" way.

Likewise, at protests against U.S. policy in the Middle East, slogans such as "Diplomacy, not war" play into the hands of the ruling war makers. Imperialist diplomacy is part of their war drive. Liberal political forces that push such demands will join the war effort when the "diplomacy fails" and the U.S. and British governments start dropping their bombs.

In face of the patriotic war propaganda, working people must unconditionally defend Iraq's sovereignty. Working people have absolutely no interests in common with the imperialist ruling families, whose war plans against the people of Iraq are simply an extension of their war against the rights and livings standards of labor and its allies at home. We must instead point to the real threat to humanity: Washington. We should defend the common class interests of working people the world over and speak out to demand:

Stop the imperialist slaughter!

U.S. hands off Iraq!

Get all U.S., British, and other invading troops out of Mideast now!  
 
 
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