FEBRUARY 27–War drums have been beating in Washington for the last four months. The rulers of the United States, who brag of being the “sole remaining superpower” on the face of the earth, have been gearing up for a “showdown” with Iraq. Unless Saddam Hussein would bow to the U.S. diktat and allow “United Nations” military spies free run of the Near Eastern country, American president Bill Clinton would unleash a rain of death. This was no idle threat coming from the self-appointed global policeman. The Pentagon dispatched no less than three nuclear aircraft carriers (the Nimitz, Independence and George Washington) to the Persian Gulf, where they were joined by a British carrier (the Invincible), while hundreds of U.S. warplanes armed with thousands of bombs stood ready, and more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel were moved into the region. U.S. war chiefs leaked plans for an initial around-the-clock bombing campaign lasting for days with the intensity of the 1991 aerial bombardment of Baghdad, and which would be continued at will. This was all supposed to force Iraq to allow “inspections” looking for chemical and biological weapons. 

This entire orchestrated onslaught is a crude exercise in imperial power threatening to crush a semi-colonial country. All the talk of controlling “weapons of mass destruction” is just kicking sand in the eyes. The enforcer of this prohibition is the superpower that is armed to the teeth with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. is the only country that has ever dropped an atomic bomb in wartime, killing tens of thousands of Japanese and Korean civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Saddam Hussein might use the chemical weapons that he might have? The U.S. plastered Vietnam with chemical weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange, in a slaughter that killed millions of Vietnamese. The war danger comes straight from the U.S. and its NATO and UN allies/flunkeys who pose as “peacemakers” even as they rattle their cruise missiles and engage in bullying aircraft carrier diplomacy. The U.S. says that the latest Iraq crisis, like the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, is about the bloody tyrant Saddam who holds sway on the Tigris and Euphrates. No, it is about blood-drenched U.S. imperialism trying to enforce its untrammeled domination of the world. 

On February 22, UN general secretary Kofi Annan signed an agreement with Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi capital, following “red lines” dictated by the White House and hand-delivered by U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright. According to this “deal,” the UNSCOM “inspection teams” will have a license to penetrate anywhere in the country, including into so-called presidential sites, presumably searching for CB weapons in Saddam’s bedroom or basement. If Washington holds off on launching its bombers and missiles, it’s clear to all that this is only an intermission. Clinton announced that he would keep the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf “in force” and threatened that if the accord broke down (i.e., when the UN “inspectors” stage a provocation on instructions from New York and Washington, as they have done in the past), then the U.S. would strike “at a time, place and manner of our choosing.” The UN is currently drafting a resolution embodying this threat in diplomatic language. From the standpoint of the U.S. rulers, the Annan-Hussein agreement just buys them some time to get their capitalist-imperialist “allies” into line and to overcome resistance on the home front.

In this conflict, it is the duty of workers, opponents of imperialism, and all those who stand on the side of the oppressed against their oppressors to take a forthright stand on behalf of the Iraqi people against the threatened attack. All appeals to the UN for negotiations are worse than useless–they are playing into the hands of the warmongers. The Internationalist Group calls to defeat the U.S. war moves and to defend Iraq against imperialist attack! 

Moreover, the issue goes beyond stopping the threatened military slaughter. For the last seven and a half years, Iraq has been subjected to a brutal imperialist economic embargo and blockade, enforced by a U.S. armada in the Persian Gulf. This “peaceful” strangulation of Iraq, which was supported by many liberals and reformists as an “alternative” to bombing, is itself an act of war. UN “aid” teams supervise a program of planned starvation, doling out rations of less than 2,000 calories per day to the population. We demand: Down with the imperialist blockade! Break the starvation embargo! 

Meanwhile, UN “inspectors” careen around Iraq in their 4x4 vehicles like yuppie sheriffs looking for weapons, to ensure that Iraq is disarmed the next time the imperialists decide to strike. U.S. planes patrol the skies, periodically shooting down Iraqi planes and bombing Baghdad every time that American presidents feel a need to show their strength. We demand: Down with the deadly sanctions against Iraq! U.S./UN/NATO out of the Persian Gulf!

And while the military vise on Iraq is being tightened by the generals and capitalist rulers in Washington, we have the spectacle of bourgeois politicians speaking from the platform at antiwar demonstrations. The prime example is Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general under Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War as antiwar protesters were beaten bloody by cops and feds outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. 

Such liberals have at most tactical differences with the current policy emanating from the U.S. government. As Marxists we understand, as history has repeatedly shown, that the fight against imperialist war must be waged through class struggle. We warn: Today’s Democratic “doves” are tomorrow’s (and yesterday’s) hawks! For workers action against imperialist war!

What is behind the current war drive against Iraq? Why is Washington so intent in going after Saddam Hussein? Needless to say, there are scores of capitalist dictators around the world who are just as bloody, but are fulsomely backed by the U.S. Is it because last October, Baghdad expelled some U.S. weapons “inspectors,” saying they were spies? Is it because after that Iraqi authorities refused to allow UNSCOM teams to “inspect” some installations which they declared high-security or presidential sites? Hardly. Those are just Clinton’s pretexts.

In the first place, the UNSCOM teams are nothing but spies, and everyone knows it. Not only do they report to UN headquarters on New York’s East River, their “inspectors” on loan from the U.S. and British military directly brief their superiors on the Potomac and the Thames. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal (11 February) reported, there have been cases of “American Unscom inspectors telephoning their offices in Washington directly from Baghdad to pass on information, using U.S.-supplied phones.” They are in effect forward spotters, providing a list of targets to be taken out in the next air strikes.

Secondly, Iraq is hardly the only country to insist on “sovereign sites” that are not open to inspection. The United States, for example, has massive stockpiles of chemical weapons, thousands of times more than anything Iraq might have. Utah is full of them, for example, as attested to by the dead sheep who periodically appear when various gases leak out. But under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the U.S. has still not ratified, it can refuse to authorize inspections. Israel also has stockpiles of chemical weapons, as well as hundreds of nuclear warheads. It has refused to sign the nuclear proliferation treaty, or to ratify the chemical weapons treaty, and it certainly won’t let anyone inspect its nuclear installations at Dimona, saying disingenuously “our nuclear deterrent has got nothing to do with proliferation” (Financial Times, 24 February). In fact, the Zionist rulers have locked up former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu in solitary confinement for more than a decade because he revealed their atomic arsenal.
Another argument is that Saddam Hussein has actually used chemical weapons, against Kurds in 1988. Of course, he was then an ally of the United States in the drawn-out Iran-Iraq war, during which time the U.S. supplied Iraq with the organisms used to produce anthrax, botulism and other diseases. For that matter, Britain not only has chemical weapons, it used them, in Iraq, in an aerial bombardment of villages in 1920 to put down a burgeoning popular revolt against its imperialist dominance of the country. Winston Churchill, then minister of war, commented haughtily: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes” (quoted in the Militant, 2 March 1998).

The real aim of the U.S.-orchestrated campaign of war threats and ultimately military action against Iraq is to graphically demonstrate the world domination of Yankee imperialism. The American rulers, from Wall Street to the White House and the Pentagon, deem themselves to be “masters of the universe,” and they want to show everyone who’s the boss. An important part of this is control of petroleum supplies. Washington wants to have its hand on the oil spigot, so it can turn it on or off at will. This is directed not so much at Iraq, although the Seven Sisters oil monopolies are still upset over the nationalization of their properties there, as at the U.S.’ imperialist allies and rivals. The U.S. imports very little oil from the region, which goes overwhelmingly to Japan and Europe. 

Oil supplies were a major issue in 1990-91. In that respect, the U.S. is more interested in former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, as American oil companies pour money into Baku and Kazakhstan. A new “great game” is developing over access to Central Asian oil, with wrangling over pipelines (actual and projected) through Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. This is behind Washington’s recent halting steps toward rapprochement with Iran, and its annoyance over deals between French and other European oil companies and the mullahs’ regime in Teheran. In fact, Washington might like to increase Iraqi oil production just now in order to drive the OPEC price down even more than its present low level.

What’s behind the obsession to “punish” Iraq is Washington’s desire to demonstrate its global power. Far from “stumbling” into war,  as liberals lament (for example, an article on “Drifting Toward the Use of Force” by retired U.S. army colonel Daniel Smith of the Center for Defense Information), the government’s policy is quite deliberate. Like the British in the 19th century, Clinton would like a “nice tidy little war” just now. It might help the administration out of its current troubles over “Monicagate” in Washington. But mainly it would be used to discipline the U.S.’ imperialist allies and rivals. 

Thus it goes hand in hand with current plans to expand NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was always intended to “keep the Germans down and the Russians out” of Europe, while ensuring U.S. dominance. Although the Soviet Union has been destroyed by counterrevolution, these goals remain the cornerstone of U.S. policy in Europe. Thus a key objective of the present campaign against Iraq is to force the French and Russian rulers to acquiesce to Washington’s plans. At a NATO “defense” seminar in Munich, German chancellor Kohl’s representatives made it clear they would toe the line, offering up German air force bases for staging attacks on Iraq even though no one asked them to.

While the Russian and French governments kept dragging their heels on U.S. demands for UN approval of bombing Iraq, the Arab governments were also notably reticent. Although they were pliant enough in 1990-91, allowing their territories to be used as staging grounds and symbolically joining the U.S.-led anti-Iraq “coalition,” this time only Kuwait would agree. (Kuwait was set up in the 1920s as a British protectorate in order to put the squeeze on Iraq, controlling its narrow corridor to the sea below Basra. It has played the same function ever since, while the discovery and exploitation of huge oil supplies has allowed the arrogant rulers of this tiny sheikdom to lord it over a population consisting mainly of immigrant workers without rights. Contrary to the liberals who lamented over “poor little Kuwait” in 1990-91, Marxists shed no tears for this imperialist-dominated enclave.) 

The Arab rulers’ reluctance was due to the mounting anger over U.S. actions in the Near East. Clinton and Albright have acted as protectors of the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, as this Zionist hawk brazenly rips up the Oslo “peace” accords, sponsoring new settlements and refusing to turn over land to even the most limited Palestinian “administration.” Those accords were no victory for the Palestinian population, which continues to suffer under the boot of the Zionist army, together with the well-armed Zionist settlers, while the West Bank and Gaza Strip are economically strangled by Israel. Yasir Arafat, head of the “Palestine Authority,” is the administrator of a big prison camp for Palestinians. As if to demonstrate this anew, Arafat’s police shut down a number of radio stations and banned all pro-Iraqi demonstrations on orders from Washington.

The assorted sheiks, emirs, kings, colonels and presidents who rule over the Arab masses were concerned that a new U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq, inevitably producing civilian casualties which Washington refers to cynically as “collateral damage,” could awaken furious protests among their subjects. Thus they preferred to contain Hussein through “negotiations.” Those who genuinely wish to combat imperialism, however, must fight to sweep away all the capitalist rulers of the Near East, from the Zionist militarists to the nationalist officers to the mullahs and antediluvian royalty, through international socialist revolution. In doing so, it is necessary to seek proletarian unity with the Hebrew-speaking workers, recognizing the right of self-determination of all the peoples of the region and joining together in common class struggle against the imperialists and their satraps.

Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein is a typical bourgeois nationalist butcher. His hands are red with the blood of Kurds, Shi’ites and Communists that he has slaughtered over the decades of his rule. He came to power in league with U.S. rulers, who feared the kind of mass uprising against imperialist domination that swept Iraq in 1958, and in which the Iraqi Communist Party betrayed. However, as Stalinist nationalists the ICP has always sought to make common cause with bourgeois politicians rather than fighting for international socialist revolution. And thus it sacrificed its once considerable support in the heavily Kurdish north on the altar of Iraqi nationalism, whose principal vehicle was the Ba’ath Party now led by Saddam. This ultimately led to the arrest and execution of scores of ICP members and leaders.

Authentic communists oppose any political support to the regime of Saddam Hussein and fight for the right of self-determination for the Kurdish people, carved up by the imperialists among four capitalist states (Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey), in the aftermath of World War I, and for a socialist republic of united Kurdistan. This requires a struggle against the several bourgeois states which today brutally oppress the Kurdish minorities, as well as against the rival clans and bourgeois Kurdish nationalists who have sold out the Kurds to one enemy after another. That struggle must be waged centrally against the overlord that dominates the entire region, U.S. imperialism. Yet the various Kurdish nationalists and Iraqi oppositionists instead signed up with Washington during the 1990-91 Gulf War and actually became paid agents on the payroll of imperialism. This can only lead to tragedy for the Kurds, as the CIA backing for the Barzanis’ Kurdish Democratic Party did in the 1970s, and as the cynical “Operation Provide Comfort” did in 1991.

Communists fight for the unity of the Kurdish working people with the laboring masses of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria in common revolutionary class struggle, to bring down the Saddam Husseins and all the exploiters and oppressors. The fate of all the toilers of the region, no matter what their nationality or country, is intimately bound up together. Vital resources from water to oil can only be equitably shared in a socialist federation of the Near East. As the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained in his theory and program of permanent revolution, in countries of belated capitalist development in the imperialist epoch the tasks of national liberation, agrarian revolution and democracy can today be achieved only through workers revolution, supported by the peasantry, which would necessarily undertake socialist tasks and must extend internationally to the heartland of imperialism. For this what is required above all is the leadership of communist parties built in the struggle to reforge an authentically Trotskyist Fourth International.

In the last several weeks, as Clinton and his war chiefs were daily escalating their threats against Iraq, making it clear to all that an attack was imminent, they decided to do a little preparation of “public opinion” with a phony “town meeting” in the style of an Oprah Winfrey talk show, to be televised on the “bombs over Baghdad” network CNN. But much to their surprise, widespread skepticism in the population and vocal opposition to the war moves broke through even this tightly controlled format. As liberals and conservatives from the “select” audience politely questioned Albright and war secretary Dick Cohen, student and leftist antiwar protesters chanted opposition from the bleachers. Around the country, teach-ins and protest demonstrations against the war threat spread, drawing crowds of several hundred each in numerous places.

Although the numbers were relatively small, this was an indication of the potential for mobilizing large-scale opposition to the imperialist war moves. However, while expressing “dissent” over particular government policies these demonstrations were in fact tied to the imperialist system that produces these endless reactionary wars, and to the capitalist politicians–Democrat and Republican alike–who will whip up support for the next round of war-mongering. In fact, it is the Democrats, who pose as the “people’s party” of American capitalism, that have most often unleashed imperialist wars, from the massive carnage of World Wars I and II to Korea and Vietnam to Clinton’s invasions of Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. Usually the butchery is carried out in the name of “human rights”  and classless “democracy,” the bourgeois catchwords appealed to by many antiwar organizers.

U.S. rulers are still wary of a “Vietnam syndrome” in the population. As the New York Times (9 February) headlined: “History’s Moral for U.S.–Goliath Can Lose, Too.” What they are worried about is the bourgeois defeatist sentiment produced by a losing imperialist war, as when the peasants and workers of Indochina defeated and drove out the tens of thousands of U.S. troops in a massive expeditionary force, the carpet-bombing U.S. Air Force and the million-strong South Vietnamese puppet army. The Vietnam battle that lasted three decades, from 1945 to 1975, was fundamentally a class war, which resulted in the establishment of a workers state, albeit bureaucratically deformed. Washington is still smarting from the images of the North Vietnamese smashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, just as it is over the images of armed Cuban workers parading off gusano prisoners in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

Eight decades ago, at the outbreak of WWI, the Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin declared that the only way to combat  the wars unleashed by the capitalist rulers was through class war of the working people against their exploiters and oppressors: while many reformist “socialists” lined up with “their” capitalist “fatherland,” and many centrist socialists turned to impotent pacifist appeals to the bourgeois rulers, Lenin’s Bolsheviks called on the victims to rise up against their oppressors. Turn the imperialist war into civil war was their battle cry. Out of this struggle came the 1917 October Revolution, giving rise to the first workers state in history. Isolated in an economically backward, predominantly peasant country and subjected to relentless imperialist pressure, in the absence of successful workers revolutions in Europe that could come to its aid, the young Soviet republic suffered bureaucratic degeneration, as political power was seized by a conservative nationalist bureaucracy under Stalin. 

Trampling on the program of world socialist revolution–the program of Lenin, Trotsky and the early Communist International–Stalin put forward the pipedream of building “socialism in one country.” This anti-Marxist dogma meant opposing socialist revolution elsewhere, which the Stalinists did with bloody determination and disastrous results, from Spain in the 1930s to Indonesia in the 1950s and Chile in the 1970s. This policy, codified in the watchword of “popular front” with sections of the bourgeoisie, paved the way ultimately for the destruction of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe as the imperialist bourgeoisies refused to “peacefully coexist” and kept up the pressure to wipe out any kind of workers state. The final destruction of the Soviet Union was heralded by Gorbachev’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 in the vain hope of appeasing the U.S. imperialists. A year later, the Kremlin treacherously approved the imperialist blockade of Iraq and the subsequent Desert Slaughter. The subsequent counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union greatly emboldened the imperialists.

Today the imperialists’ drive for counterrevolution is being waged against China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea, where the Stalinist rulers continue to dangerously foster pro-capitalist forces. Trotskyists fight for revolutionary defense of the deformed workers states, through proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucratic betrayers and socialist revolution in the capitalist countries. In this struggle we call on the workers movement to fight against the vicious Yankee imperialist embargo/blockade of Cuba, by which Washington has sought to undo the revolution and starve the population into submission for more than three and a half decades.

In the face of the current U.S./UN offensive against Iraq, we call for workers action against imperialist war moves. While reformists seek to pressure bourgeois liberals to lobby Washington, as communists we seek to mobilize the class power of the proletariat in action. This can take the form of workers demonstrations, hot-cargoing of war matériel, and strike action against imperialist attack. Such actions are possible. On the first day of the bombing of Iraq in 1991, there were strikes of several hours, largely spontaneous, in a number of factories in the area of Milano, Italy. In France, a couple of weeks later, CGT union dockers in Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, an installation of the port of Marseille-Fos, refused to load 29 containers with arms and munitions bound for the Gulf. The fascists accused the Communist Party (PCF) and CGT union federation of “permanent treason against the French army in combat,” and the CGT dock workers local in Port-de-Bouc was machine-gunned, with graffiti proclaiming “dock workers = traitors to the fatherland.” In fact, the PCF and CGT leaders supported the blockade/embargo of Iraq, and arranged for the war matérial to be shipped from the military port of Toulon. But the French dockers’ courageous action shows that workers mobilization against imperialist war is possible. 

The fight for mobilizing workers power against imperialist attack goes back to the founding of the Communist International. During the Rif War in the early 1920s, in which the French colonialists brutally put down insurgents in Morocco, the Communist Party of France mobilized dock workers to boycott war matériel. But with the advent of the popular front in the 1930s, the PCF went over to the defense of French imperialism. Today, France’s rulers–both the conservative president Chirac and the popular-front cabinet under “Socialist” premier Jospin–differ with Washington over bombing Iraq mainly because they want to grab trade deals with Baghdad when the sanctions are lifted. This inter-imperialist rivalry will not stop them from approving military action if Clinton really turns the screws. Yet in response to the recent war escalation, the LCR (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire) of Alain Krivine published an article under the title “The Roots of the Crime” (Rouge, 20 February) in which it denounces the U.S. war mongers but says not a word against French imperialism and its “socialist/communist” administrators. It’s not surprising that a large majority of the LCR members want to drop both the words “communist” and “revolutionary” from their name, for certainly they are neither.

In the U.S., as at the time of the 1990-91 Desert Slaughter, most of the left is desperately seeking Democratic doves to ally with. So far they have Ramsey Clark, the perennial bourgeois ally of the reformist Workers World Party (WWP) of the late Sam Marcy. The latest issue of Workers World (26 February) argues in its lead article that: “The U.S. government has no legal authority to launch an attack on Iraq. Read the Constitution. The president–and certainly the Joint Chiefs of Staff–cannot declare a war.” These Constitutional cretins go on to argue that there is no UN mandate either. Such “legal” niceties never stopped U.S. rulers in the past, nor will they now. By making such appeals to bourgeois legality, the perennial popular-frontists of WWP only aid the  war-mongers by encouraging them to put a “democratic” cover on their slaughter, as they did in ’91. Meanwhile, the National Emergency Coalition to Stop the War Against Iraq, whose sponsors include the WWP and various allied groups, called for a national march and rally under the slogan “Don’t Bomb Iraq!” So instead the U.S. should continue the economic blockade, military inspections, no-fly zones and the rest of the imperialist strangulation? And now that the bombing is temporarily postponed?! We say: U.S./UN hands off Iraq!

The National Emergency Coalition is a classical antiwar popular front, such as the NPAC (National Peace Action Coalition, led by the SWP) and the PCPJ (People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, led by the Communist Party) at the time of the Vietnam War. Appealing for the support of imperialist liberals, they refused to take sides with the victims of imperialist attack, while attempting to exclude and even using physical violence against revolutionaries. Today, the same line is taken by all the reformists, from WWP to the moribund CP to the social-democratic International Socialist Organization, who seek to silence those who call for defense of Iraq and oppose the Democrats. 

There should be no mistake about what a new imperialist war on Iraq would entail. In 1990-91, the death toll was well over 100,000 from the bombing and battlefield attacks. For all of the hoopla about “smart bombs,” a General Accounting Office study last December reported that at least 40 percent missed their targets entirely. Of eleven strategic sites attacked by F-117 “stealth” bombers, only two were destroyed. One of the sites that was destroyed was an air raid shelter, in which more than 200 people were incinerated. Another was a baby food factory. It is now admitted that the U.S. was attempting to assassinate Saddam Hussein by bombing every building where they thought he might be, just as they tried against Libyan strongman Qaddafi in 1986. The rest of the munitions, along with more bomb tonnage than was dropped on Germany in World War II, caused “collateral damage.” 
At a speak-out at Harvard University against the threatened U.S. attack on Iraq, a supporter of the Internationalist Group declared:

“In 1991, Desert Slaughter killed thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, and the U.S./UN-sponsored sanctions since then have led to the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children. Now the capitalist bosses and their politicians are gearing up for more death. U.S. imperialism is the biggest butcher and terrorist in the world. This is a period of inter-imperialist rivalry, of the division and redivision of the world for profits, and it will lead to another world war if not stopped by the world’s workers led by revolutionary vanguard parties.

“This is business as usual for Democrats and Republicans abroad, but what’s their program for working people, for black and Hispanic people, for women, for gays and lesbians, for all the oppressed here in this country? Just ask Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant savagely brutalized last year by racist Brooklyn cops. Just ask the thousands of victims of the racist slave-labor, union-busting ‘workfare’ schemes. Just ask all the immigrants under constant, murderous attack along the militarized U.S. borders. Just ask the entire generation of minority youth criminalized by the racist, phony ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on crime.’ Where is the enemy? The enemy is here at home! The enemy is the two-headed ‘Republicrat’ party of the bosses, and any talk of the Democrats as a ‘lesser evil’ is a cynical lie....

“The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union was a terrible blow for the international working class, but capitalism itself is unstable and crisis-ridden, and the struggles of workers and the oppressed, from France to Mexico, from South Africa to Algeria to Indonesia, from the Palestinians under Zionist oppression in the occupied territories to the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq–all of these struggles cry out for the program of revolutionary proletarian internationalism! We say: Down with the sheiks, mullahs, emirs, kings, colonels and Zionist rulers! For revolutionary workers parties in the Near East and everywhere! Iraq needs a revolutionary workers party to lead the workers and peasants to overthrow the butcher Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime.

“The only thing that will stop imperialism’s inevitable drive to war are multiracial revolutionary workers parties organized in a reforged Fourth International with a Leninist-Trotskyist program. This is the crisis of revolutionary leadership that we face today, and that the Internationalist Group in the U.S. and Mexico, along with our comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil in Brazil and of the Permanent Revolution Faction in France seek to resolve.” n

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send an e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com