Old lies in new bottles

How arrogant can they get? Even while submerged in a major crisis over lies they told to justify the dirty colonial war against Iraq, the U.S. and British imperialists are demanding that the world take their word for good coin when it comes to Iraq’s neighbors, Syria and Iran.

A United Nations Security Council resolution sponsored by the U.S., Britain and France—the three capitalist powers that dominate the world’s oil and gas lifelines, especially in the Middle East—is the latest pressure brought to bear on Syria. The resolution demands that Syria cooperate with a UN investigation into the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik al-Hariri being conducted by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who has named Syrian officials as suspects. The Security Council is threatening Syria with sanctions and even military action unless it cooperates with an “investigation” that already has put it in the dock.

Syria rejects the charges and points out that it had nothing to gain and a lot to lose from the assassination. It suggests the UN look elsewhere, particularly at the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Britain and Israel, all of whom are clearly trying to destabilize those countries in the area that resist the imperialists’ openly stated plans for total domination of the world’s most strategic region regarding energy resources.

The tight grouping of neocons who led the U.S. into the Iraq War made no bones about their plans for “regime change” next in Damascus. In April 2003, when they still thought they were winning in Iraq, they pushed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sov ereign ty Restoration Act through Congress.

The act is full of unsubstantiated charges, saying that Syria must halt its “support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, cease its illegal importation of Iraqi oil and illegal shipments of weapons and other military items to Iraq....”

Interviewed about these charges on CBS-TV on April 17, 2003, Syria’s deputy ambassador to the U.S., Imad Moustapha, replied, “Yesterday, instead of having to repeatedly refute all those accusations, we felt fed up, and we went to the Security Council, and we proposed a resolution, a UN Security Council resolution, in which we are to free the whole Middle East of all weapons of mass destruction. All weapons.” This, of course, would have included Israel, which possesses many nuclear weapons. Syria had called Washington’s bluff and the U.S. government suddenly stopped talking about Damascus’s “weapons of mass destruction.”

The 15-0 vote for the current anti-Syria resolution by the Security Council just confirms the reactionary character of this body, notwithstanding that it now “allows” 10 countries at a time to rotate onto the council in addition to the five permanent members. People’s China, which owes its tremendous development to its own revolutionary victories, has no excuse for supporting this resolution. The Chinese government has clearly put its desire not to antagonize the imperialist powers ahead of solidarity with other nations that, like China, are striving to develop and be free of colonial and imperialist oppression.

Whose land is presently occupied in the Middle East? Israel, which exists on huge handouts from the U.S., sits on land stolen from the Palestinians. It also continues to occupy the Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in the 1967 war. The U.S. and Britain are occupying Iraq. U.S. special forces are making incursions from Iraq into Syria, supposedly to stop “foreign fighters” from aiding the Iraqi liberation struggle.

Israel—outpost of Western imperialism

Israel is an outpost of Western imperialism in an area that has been struggling for its liberation from the oil lords for generations. It has hundreds of nuclear weapons, according to the authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Review of Britain. Why has there been no hue and cry from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the arms Israel uses to threaten its neighbors? Why is Israel not cited for defying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

Instead, the hue and cry in the global corporate media is against Iran, which no one claims has nuclear weapons, only a program to develop nuclear power.

Recently, the new leader of Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was condemned by all the imperialist states for saying, according to the Western media, that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” What did he mean? Was this a bloodthirsty exhortation to kill Jewish people, as they imply, or a political attack on Zionism, the ideology of an exclusively Jewish state implanted on the territory of Palestine?

Ahmadinejad expanded his remarks a few days later, according to the official Iranian news agency, IRNA. “The only logical solution to solve the Palestinian issue is to hold free elections with the participation of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories and a recognition of the nation’s legitimacy,” he said. Israel claims to be “democratic,” but it does not let millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants return to the homeland from which they were expelled by force, violence and even massacres, like the one at Deir Yassin in 1948.

In 1975, when the imperialists were unable to suppress the voices for national liberation so thoroughly as today, the UN General Assembly actually passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

During the U.S. Civil War, opponents of slavery wanted to see the Confederacy “wiped off the map.” They wanted the defeat of a political entity that oppressed millions of Black people. In the eyes of the slave owners, these Abolitionists were immoral and reprehensible, in the same way that the imperialist oppressors portray the nationally oppressed and their leaders today.

What the oppressed want is justice. It is those who grow rich at their expense, while arrogantly pretending to stand for “civilization” and “order,” who must be exposed and defeated.