THAT the US is preparing a new great war in the Middle East and the Gulf to destroy Iran and Syria is crystal clear from the fact that it intends to supply its strategic allies in the region, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with $63 billion of the most advanced weaponry in the next decade.
Israel is to get $30 billion of arms, an increase of 25 per cent over its current military aid figures. Egypt is to receive $13 billions worth and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States $20 billion worth of the most advanced US military equipment.
The US Secretaries of State and Defence, Rice and Gates, are to visit Egypt, Tel Aviv and Riyadh to make all of the necessary arrangements for waging the struggle against Iran, and its allies Syria and the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon.
At the same time in Iraq, the US is busily seeking to destroy its own puppet creation, the Maliki regime, and is arming the Sunni nationalist militias in western and northern Iraq to fight Al- Qaeda.
In other words the Ba’athists, who the US has spent $400 billion trying to destroy, are being brought back by a US regime desperate to bring together forces that it hopes will take the field for it against Iran. Leading the beating of the US war drums are Rice and Gates.
Rice said yesterday that Iran, not the US, was the region’s main problem.
Rice and US Defence Secretary Robert Gates are meeting Egyptian President Husni Mubarak and Arab ministers at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, as well as King Abdullah, to discuss Iraq.
Today she will be meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and President Shimon Peres and other senior ministers, while tomorrow she is meeting the Fatah leader Mahmud Abbas to discuss the establishment of a Palestinian state on a part of the West Bank.
Rice said yesterday: ‘The United States is determined to assure our allies that we are going to be reliable in helping them to meet their security needs. We have a lot of interests in common in this region: in the fight against terrorism and extremism; in protecting the gains of peace processes of the past and in extending those gains to peace processes of the future.’
During a stopover in Shannon Airport, Rice told reporters: ‘There isn’t a doubt, I think, that Iran constitutes the single most important, single-country challenge to. . . US interests in the Middle East and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see.’
The sale of satellite-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia, the first such sale to any Arab country, is thought to be part of the proposed $20bn arms deal with the kingdom and the other Gulf states – the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.
The only answer to the rabid war preparations of US imperialism and its Arab ruling class allies is the spread of revolution throughout the Gulf and the Middle East. The Iraqi insurgents must unite nationally and decide on a political and military leadership that will rid the country of the US and UK occupiers and their puppets.
The Ba’athists and nationalists must not repeat Saddam Hussein’s mistake, and allow themselves to be used by the US to attack Iran.
The Iraqi insurgents must hold out their hands to the Hezbollah in the Lebanon and Hamas and all revolutionary forces in Palestine to drive out the imperialists and their agents from the region to prevent the imperialists from organising a great slaughter in the Middle East and the Gulf.
Workers in the West must tell their own governments that they will bring them down if they take part in any attack on Iran. The British trade unions must spell this out clearly to the Brown government.
