In Lebanon workers and farmers have never forgotten the blows dealt to their struggles by the treacherous regime in Damascus. They see an opportunity in the weakening of the Syrian regime to get the boot of the Syrian rulers off their necks—and they are seizing it.

In northern Iraq the Kurds are taking the opening provided by the downfall of the murderous Hussein government to press for greater autonomy. This is sending shudders through the capitalist regimes in neighboring Syria, Turkey, and Iran who see the Kurdish flag flying for the first time at outposts across the border from their own oppressed Kurdish populations.

The Egyptian regime is feeling the consequences too. Washington’s close ally Hosni Mubarak has ruled with an iron fist since the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat in 1981. But this too is beginning to crack under the weight of imperialism’s drive in the region carried out under the banner of “liberty and democracy.”

While the war and aggressive course of world imperialism has resulted in immediate gains for Washington, its actions have also opened space in Iraq and throughout the region for the working class and peasants to organize and fight to advance their interests. And where this political space is opening working people are stepping in and beginning to look for ways to use it.

From the space to advance the freedom struggles of oppressed nationalities, to openings to advance the struggle for women’s emancipation, to greater possibilities to push forward the fight for the separation of religious institutions from politics and the state—throughout the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa, and beyond—the uncontrollable social repercussions of imperialism’s aggression will continue to unfold. That is the future the imperialists can do nothing to avoid.

There are surely countless more manifestations of this today, but these three examples serve well to point out the responsibility revolutionary-minded workers, farmers, and youth have today to use the political space wherever it has opened—and regardless of how it has been opened—to circulate propaganda that popularizes and explains proletarian politics, and shows the working-class line of march toward power.

In spite of the deep hatred among workers and farmers in Iraq for the imperialist occupiers, there is no organization today leading a revolutionary national liberation struggle in Iraq. The hated Baathist forces that are at the head of the armed campaign in Iraq are incapable of doing this. The bombings directed at the majority Shiite population during the Ashura religious holiday and the massive blast February 28 in Baghdad that left 135 Iraqis dead highlight the fact that the interests of these groups are antithetical to those of the majority in Iraq.

Washington is using the brittle anti-working class character of governments like the Baath Party regime of Bashar Assad in Syria to continue to make advances along its course in the Middle East. The imperialist squeeze on Damascus is having a visible effect. Washington is getting results when it puts the screws on the Syrian government to cooperate in cracking down on Iraqi Baathist forces. The de-facto acceptance by the Assad regime of U.S. military operations inside Syrian territory along the Iraqi border is one more example of this.

Whatever the progress Washington and its imperialist rivals make against these regimes, however, nothing instigated in the citadels of finance capital can prepare the imperialists for the moment when the unintended consequences of their offensive shifts the relationship of forces to the favor of the oppressed and exploited. Imperialism cannot forestall indefinitely the momentous class battles that the decaying world system of capitalism will produce. For the new generations of workers and farmers coming into a world of growing capitalist disorder, the space is expanding to advance the fight to build an instrument capable of ending this brutal system once and for all—a revolutionary party of workers and farmers. This is the task facing those who are seeking to get both imperialism and the brutal bourgeois governments that serve it off the backs of humanity.
 
 
Related articles:
Lebanese gov’t resigns amid sustained protests
Under U.S. pressure, Syrian gov’t turns over Iraqi Baathists  
 
 
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