BUSH is trying to establish his ‘New Middle East’ on the bones of thousands of dead and injured Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children.
Even the Middle East’s chief feudalist, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, has warned Bush that there must be an immediate ceasefire or the entire region will be plunged into war, so angry are the Arab people of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf at the rape of the Lebanon and the destruction of the Gaza Strip.
Abdullah called for an immediate ceasefire yesterday. He told Bush: ‘If the peace option fails because of Israeli arrogance, there will be no other option but war.
‘No-one can predict what will happen if things get out of control.
‘The Arabs have declared peace as a strategic choice… and put forward a clear and fair proposal of land for peace and have ignored extremist calls opposing the peace proposal. . . but patience cannot last forever.’ However, US imperialism has not the slightest intention of instructing Israel to cease fire.
In fact, Condoleezza Rice was sent into the Middle East to pour oil onto the flames. She urged the Lebanese leaders to let the Lebanese army loose on Hezbollah and that the various Christian, Sunni and Druze groups should give it a hand. The ‘new’ Middle East is to be a hotbed of civil war. However, the Lebanese leaders refused this offer and said that the key issue was that there must be a ceasefire to stop Israel torching the Lebanon and murdering Lebanese.
Once this was done, everything else could then be discussed. This was out of the question for Rice who went off with a flea in her ear to Jerusalem via Cyprus.
Rice made it perfectly clear that US policy was designed to allow the Israeli murder machine plenty of time to do its work, laying the basis for a new Lebanon that would be firmly under Israeli control.
The Lebanese were shocked at Rice’s argument that the Israelis must be allowed to kill their citizens and their children, until the basis for the ‘solution’ favoured by the US emerged.
American imperialist policy is sacrosanct, the children of Lebanon are expendable, as were the children of Iraq back in 1999 when ex-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared the slaughter of Iraqi children through the sanctions policy to be a ‘price worth paying’.
When Blair was cornered by journalists at his press conference with the puppet premier of Iraq, Maliki, he embellished the Rice line, with a particularly disgraceful and degenerate rationalisation.
This was that it was better to let the Israelis do the job now, no matter how many children were killed, than to have an imperfect settlement that would mean Israel returning to war in the Lebanon in a couple of months’ time.
In other words, Bush’s new Middle East will only float on an ocean of the blood of its opponents, and it is better for the imperialists to see the struggle through now.
Blair can stomach the slaughter in Iraq and its spread into Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, to try and make sure that the imperialists get their way.
However, as far as the masses of the Middle East are concerned enough is enough, they do not want to see another child killed.
In the last period they have heard all of the Bush democracy propaganda, and then seen the reality, when a democratically elected Hamas Palestinian government is labelled terrorist and cut off from funds and aid with its ministers jailed.
Now they have had 14 days of an illustration that mass murder is an integral part of imperialist policy, which the US-UK imperialists are not prepared to give up.
The British working class however supports both the Lebanese and Palestinian masses.
It must take action against one of their chief tormentors by using its trade union strength to bring down the Blair government. It must bring in a workers’ government that will withdraw all troops from the Middle East and the Gulf and offer both the Lebanon and Palestine economic and political support and compensation for their ordeal at the hands of the Zionists and imperialists.
