On post-election trip
Bush inflames world tensions
U.S. imperialism threatens Iran, North Korea and
Venezuela
By Fred Goldstein
As the Bush administration prepares for its second term, it
is attempting to overshadow its crisis in Iraq and its growing
world economic contradictions by escalating international
tensions over Iran and North Korea.
Even as the U.S. military was announcing its need for
additional forces and the January elections in Iraq were in
doubt, assurances by Ahmad Allawi and the puppet government
there notwithstanding, Bush was in Latin America at the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit promoting his phony
"war on terrorism."
Instead of discussing the economic crisis being pushed onto
the APEC countries in Latin America and Asia by Wall Street's
war of the falling dollar, Bush converted the conference into a
platform to denounce Iran and the Democratic People's Republic
of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for having nuclear
ambitions.
Powell opens up attack on Iran
It was outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell who set the
stage for Bush's attacks on Iran. He astonished the world,
while talking to reporters on his way to Chile, by reenacting
the infamous UN Security Council speech in which he had made
unsubstantiated and false accusations that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction as a run up to the war.
Powell did a repeat, this time about Iran. He repeated
unsubstantiated charges, made by a counter-revolutionary group
trying to overthrow the Iranian government, that Iran was
working on nuclear weapons. The Iranian version of Ahmad
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Council, this so-called National
Council of Resistance of Iran suddenly turned up with aerial
photos allegedly showing a nuclear weapons site. But who has
forgotten the aerial photographs of so-called mobile chemical
weapons factories in Iraq that Powell displayed at the UN? They
turned out to be harmless civilian trucks.
CNN reported from Washington on Nov. 19 that Iran's top
nuclear negotiator, Hussein Moussavian, responded, "This
allegation is timed to coincide with the next meeting of the
board of governors of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy
Agency]. And every time just before the meeting there are these
kind of allegations either from the United States or terrorist
groups. And every time these allegations have proven to be
false."
The Iranian government recently announced it had suspended
its refinement of nuclear fuel in accordance with an agreement
with the IAEA negotiated by France, Germany and Russia. Bush
then demanded that the suspension be verified. The Bush
administration has been trying to get the IAEA to put sanctions
on Iran. This agreement to suspend the refinement of nuclear
fuel avoided the sanctions, to the chagrin of Washington.
Much of the APEC conference in Chile was turned against the
DPRK. After consulting separately with the heads of state of
China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, Bush tried to give the
talks a spin of unity against the North Koreans. He told the
North Koreans to "get rid of your nuclear weapons."
However, according to a Nov. 22 United Press Service
dispatch, Chinese President Hu Jintao and South Korean
President Roh Moo-Hyun "have not backed down from their strong
opposition to a harder line" towards the DPRK. Roh told an
audience in Los Angeles, according to UPS, that a hard-line
policy over North Korea's nuclear weapons would have "grave
repercussions," adding, "There is no alternative in dealing
with this issue except dialogue."
Roh is considered by the Bush-Cheney forces and the
right-wing "regime change" advocates in and close to the
administration as the head of the "appeasement" faction of the
Liberal Democratic Party in South Korea. Washington is seeking
to bolster hard-line elements that will support its policy of
undermining socialist North Korea.
Assassination in Venezuela smells of CIA
Another major development as the Bush administration
approaches its second term is the assassination on Nov. 18 of
Danilo Anderson, a Venezuelan attorney who was investigating
the signers of the April 2002 coup declaration against
President Hugo Chávez.
This assassination has political significance not only for
Venezuela but for all of Latin America and the world. It was
undoubtedly the work of the CIA. And it comes as Bush loyalist
Porter Goss takes over the CIA with a vow to wage a more risky,
aggressive espionage and operations campaign.
The assassination of Anderson has its roots in Miami, home
of the CIA-supported counter-revolutionaries of Latin America,
where F-4 commandos from Venezuela are openly training
assassins and contras and where Chávez opponents have
openly called for his murder on Miami's Channel 23. (Granma,
Nov. 22)
This assassination has echoes of a previous CIA
assassination in Chile. Gen. Rene Schneider was killed in
October 1970, just before elections which Salvador Allende, a
socialist and head of the Popular Unity coalition, was expected
to win. The assassination was a death warning to Allende from
the U.S. government, carried out on the orders of Henry
Kissinger and executed by the CIA and the Chilean military.
Goss has undoubtedly executed the orders of the Bush-Cheney
regime, timed for Bush's visit to Chile and just before
Chávez was scheduled to go to the Ibero-American summit,
as well as to Iran and Russia.
Unlike Allende in Chile, who restrained the masses in their
struggle and who was a civilian, Chávez has mobilized
the mas ses and also is a military officer who has struggled
with counter-revolutionary forces on many fronts. Following the
assas sination of Anderson, Chávez made a lengthy speech
to the people from the presidential palace in which he said:
"The groups who have their material and intellectual actors
here, and we are certain out of the country also, have sent us
a message and we have received it, but not how they, the
assassins, would have liked for us to receive it. They have
misjudged us again." (vheadline.com)
Another sign of the hard line Bush is taking in Latin
America was his meeting while at the APEC summit with Colom
bian President Manuel Uribe. It signaled the administration's
intention to continue funding "Plan Colombia," the huge
military package aimed against the FARC and other
revolutionaries who for decades have fought against Colombia's
oligarchy and its death-squad government.
Self-delusion of imperialist 'moderates'
The capitalist media have been rife with speculation over
the direction the new Bush regime will take. In the face of the
makeover of the administration to the right, with the ouster of
Powell and the almost complete monopolization of key positions
by the Bush-Cheney hard-line loyalists, the hope of the
moderate imperialists in the establishment for a shift towards
the center are fading fast.
But the moderates, seeing their right-wing opponents filling
post after post, have found a straw to grasp onto. David
Sanger, one of the New York Times's top political reporters,
wrote a lead story in the Sunday, Nov. 21, Week in Review
section entitled "Hawk Sightings Could Be Premature."
While duly noting that things could move to the right,
Sanger offers the thought that "it has been quite a while since
the words 'Axis of Evil' sprang from the president's lips. And
during the election campaign, it was clear from the president's
words and actions that the limits on American power had begun
to sink in on this White House."
To bolster his sense of relaxation, Sanger points out that
"Iraq has made it harder to be hawkish in this White House, not
because desires to act have changed, but because it has tied
down American combat troops and magnified the need to juggle
scarce military resources.
"With roughly 130,000 troops stationed in Iraq for a
while--and hundreds of thousands more supplying them, training
to replace them, or just coming off duty there--Mr. Bush and
Ms. [Condoleezza] Rice lack the kind of flexibility to deal
with crises around the world that they had four years ago."
This is the kind of thinking that should be summarily
dismissed by the anti-war and working class movements. Never
has such a right-wing, militaristic grouping of the ruling
class establishment had such a complete grip on the capitalist
state. And to rely on the alleged "rationality" of the
right-wing cabal in Washington to act as a restraint on new
foreign adventures would be the height of folly.
Indeed, Harry Truman launched the adventure against North
Korea in 1950 and he was a moderate. Lyndon Johnson was a
moderate Democrat and he launched the vast escalation of the
adventure in Vietnam after supreme militarist Gen. Douglas
MacArthur had warned the U.S. military never to fight a land
war in Asia. Jimmy Carter launched a failed adventure against
the Iranian Revolution at its height, and he was a Democrat and
a moderate.
It would be the worst case of hiding one's head in the sand
to rely on the existence of unfavorable circumstances as a
barrier to new military adventures.
U.S. imperialism, in its struggle to feed its economic
domination of the world and the capitalist lust for profit, has
acquired a mighty military machine and cannot for long refrain
from using it to seek military domination and conquest. That is
its history. Its utilization of its productive economic machine
for expanded exploitation requires new resources, new markets,
new wage slaves. It is adventuristic by nature.
The resistance of the Iraqi people, along with the
steadfastness of the North Korean and Iranian governments in
resisting the intimidation and bullying of Washington, has
posed enormous obstacles to the Bush administration's original
intentions of overthrowing those governments.
At the end of May last year, when the Pentagon generals met,
all smiles, as conquerors in the Republican Palace in Baghdad,
they projected that by September of 2003 they would reduce
their troop strength in Iraq to 30,000 and begin the gradual
complete phaseout as they moved a puppet government smoothly
into place. They thought they had successfully overthrown the
first government in Bush's "Axis of Evil." Rumsfeld, Cheney and
Wolfowitz were patting themselves on the back and undoubtedly
looking forward to the next campaigns of "regime change." It
was clear that the Iranian and North Korean governments were on
the hit list of the Bush administration.
The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal actually represent
objectively the deepest aspirations of the U.S. ruling class
when they exert all their efforts, under the guise of
preventing nuclear proliferation, to overthrowing the Iranian
and the North Korean revolutions and bringing about "regime
change." Both revolutions--the first bourgeois nationalist, the
other socialist--committed the same offense that the Iraqi
government committed: they kicked out their colonial rulers and
established sovereign states independent of imperialism.
The anti-war and working class movements must do everything
in their power to stop these right-wing adventurers from
expanding their aggression. Mass mobilization against the
representatives of the exploiters in the White House, the
Pentagon and Wall Street is the only way to stop them.
Reprinted from the Dec. 2, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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