THE depth of the capitalist world crisis has set the US juggernaut lurching forward once again.
This time it is threatening Syria, and by implication North Korea with the same treatment that Iraq received from 1990 onwards, that is sanctions, starvation and invasion.
There is nothing novel in the US approach to provocation. It is repeating a message that was a lie in 2003, and is a lie today.
In 2003 the US went to war with Iraq, fuelled by the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Today the lie is being peddled that Syria was bombed by Israel last year because North Korea was building a nuclear war facility for Syria.
However the campaign has been launched in such an exceptionally disjointed and clumsy fashion, that it suggests that in the last days of the Bush presidency there are serious divisions within its inner cabal.
The threats to Syria have even managed to embarrass Israel.
First of all, Israel has up to 200 nuclear weapons, and there are no inspections of any of its facilities. Its leadership is allowed to threaten to wipe out Iran and the Iranian nation with a nuclear attack and not even receive a rebuke from the US, the UK or the UN Security Council.
Secondly, the Zionist leadership is currently having secret talks with Syria concerning a peace agreement that would involve Israel handing back the Golan Heights to Syria, and the US intervention has upset this development.
And finally ex-President Carter has just visited Syria and said that the US should be talking to both Hamas and President Assad. This is an assertion that the US leadership evidently felt there had to be a reply to.
As far as North Korea is concerned, the allegation that it was building nuclear war facilities for Syria is enough to scupper the current talks between North Korea and the US. These had been set up to try to bribe North Korea to give up all of its nuclear programme.
The Syrians have been more than able to defend themselves against the US verbal attack. They have pointed to the fact that the routine is old and completely discredited, and was last used in 2002-2003 when the US and the UK stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was developing a nuclear bomb.
Iraq was invaded in March 2003 and over a million of its people were butchered, and four million turned into refugees, with the US and the UK now forced to admit that Iraq had no wmds, and that the imperialists lied to the world about it.
Syrian officials stated yesterday that: ‘The Syrian government hopes that the international community and the American public, particularly, will be more cautious and aware this time around in facing such unfounded allegations.’
The head of the UN atomic watchdog on Friday hit out at the United States. IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei condemned the US, saying that the IAEA ‘deplores the fact that this information was not provided to the Agency’, adding that ‘Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the agency has a responsibility to verify any proliferation allegations in a non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT and to report its findings to the IAEA Board of Governors and the Security Council, as required.’
The developing world crisis, a combination of slump, banking collapses, the collapsing dollar, and a massive inflation in basic commodity prices, is clearly unnerving imperialism.
It is unleashing a drive to war that will be continued by the next US administration, whether it is led by McCain, Clinton or Obama.
This drive to war can only be dealt with by smashing capitalism and imperialism through the victory of the world socialist revolution. This revolution is now developing by leaps and bounds, driven on by the gravest economic crisis in the history of capitalism.
This crisis demands the building of sections of the Fourth International in all the major countries to provide the working class with the necessary revolutionary leadership.
