There is a difference between problems the imperialist rulers face due to mistakes they can and will correct (underestimate them at your peril!), and those resulting from the dynamics of the world class struggle that they can affect to one degree or another but cannot avoid. The rout of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, as well as imperialism’s devastating, decade-long squeeze on Iraq topped off by the 2003 invasion, put the writing on the wall for governments and other bourgeois forces from North Africa through Southeast Asia that were at odds with U.S. imperialism….

The government that emerges from the January 30, 2005, Iraqi elections will have to balance the increasingly autonomous Kurdistan Region in the north and rival political forces from within the Shiite majority and Sunni minority. The Baathist regime was based among sectors of the Sunni population with a vested class interest in preserving the minority privileges whose consolidation was bestowed on them by British imperialism. Among the bloodiest dictatorships in Middle East history, over its more than thirty-five years in power it systematically organized the wholesale slaughter of dissenting Baathist forces, Communist Party members and those accused of being communists, along with Shiite and Kurdish leaders.…

The Bush administration in November 2004 relaunched the war in Iraq to consolidate power over the Baathist stronghold in the center of the country…. U.S. forces conducted this stage in the war with little opposition among the Shia population, who have themselves been targets for decades of Baathist terror, bombings, and assassinations. U.S. operations also enjoyed overwhelming support in Kurdish regions. Despite deep wells of hatred among the Iraqi toilers for the imperialist occupiers, the detested Baathist forces and their allies who are waging the war they didn’t fight in 2003 are antagonistic to and incapable of mobilizing and leading a revolutionary national liberation struggle in Iraq…. A telling confirmation of this fact has been the stunning absence of any broad outpouring of opposition to the imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq in the Middle East….

The unintended consequence of the imperialists’ course, however, is to open up space in Iraq and throughout the region for the working class and peasants to organize and fight to advance their interests…for oppressed nations such as the Kurds…for the fight to advance women’s rights.… That is the future the imperialists can do nothing to avoid.
 
 
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