IN A situation where their NTC proteges are not even sitting securely in the saddle in Libya, the UK and the US ruling classes are actively preparing for their next military foray against Syria and Iran.
The coalition government’s cuts agenda, and the UK financial crisis, is obviously not being allowed to stand in the way of further imperialist adventures. No doubt, to pay the multi-billion costs involved, more hospitals, schools and universities will be closed, and hundreds of thousands more public sector jobs slashed.
The Libyan war was all about oil and reestablishing imperialism in Africa. War against Syria and Iran will be for complete domination over the Middle East, central Asian, and Gulf oil and gas riches.
The Russian and Chinese Stalinists are aghast at these prospects. However, it was their decision not to veto the UN Security Council resolution for a NATO-imposed ‘no-fly zone’ in Libya that opened up the floodgates for further imperialist wars of conquest.
The imperialists are now convinced that since the formula of defending civilian populations worked and allowed them to grab Libya, the same formula will work as far as Iran and Syria are concerned.
With the US ambassador withdrawn from Syria, the scene is now set for the right wing of the Syrian dissident movement to scream that there must be intervention and regime change in Syria, to save civilians of course.
Iran could not stand idly by and watch its Syrian ally being destroyed, it would consequently become the main target. No doubt the lies about wmds in Iraq, the ‘reason’ for the 2003 war, will be recycled for Iran and respun to state Iran is on the brink of possessing a nuclear bomb – when the US and UK definitely have thousands.
This formula is already being polished up with the ‘leak’ that the appropriate UN body is to make public ‘amazing revelations’ about Iranian nuclear capabilities.
With the ‘new revelations’ on hand, bankrupt Britain, which ‘cannot afford’ a Welfare State, free state education or the NHS, has already got its airforce in training to support a US missile attack on Iran, an operation that will cost billions, and be paid for with more hospital closures.
It was Lenin in 1916, in his work Imperialism, that got to the heart of the crisis of imperialism when he explained that the imperialist epoch was the highest and last stage of capitalism, and was the epoch of wars and revolutions, specifically the socialist revolution.
During the first great imperialist slaughter of 1914-1918 to redivide the world amongst the imperialist powers, he put forward the only revolutionary perspective.
This was the essence of his main slogans, that ‘the enemy is at home’, and ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’.
Driven forward by the crisis and armed with this perspective, the Bolsheviks became the main working class party in Russia in the period after the February 1917 revolution, and in October 1917 were strong enough to take the power and begin the world socialist revolution.
Today world capitalism is in an even bigger crisis, in fact, it is well into its death agony.
The response of the imperialist powers to the world banking crash and the slump has been to make war on the working class and the middle class at home and to wage war on all of the newly liberated areas of the world, so as to find a way out of the crisis on the bones of millions of people and the robbery of their national resources.
The News Line urges British workers to adopt Lenin’s slogans on who the enemy is and how to deal with him.
The same barbaric forces that are destroying workers jobs, benefits, wages, healthcare and education at home, have begun the slaughter of millions abroad to relieve them of their national assets.
Workers in the UK must stand in the same trench as the movements of national liberation.
Their contribution to the struggle must be to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government that will, in alliance with the workers and the poor of the world, establish the new socialist worldwide order and bury capitalism and imperialism.
