By Paul Roberts
On Wednesday President Obama made a nationally televised address to the US population to confirm the resumption of prolonged military activity in Iraq and its extension to Syria, albeit without the deployment of regular ground troops.
By Paul Roberts
The conflict in Iraq that has unfolded this past month, like the war in neighbouring Syria, is unlikely to be settled fast given the significant alliances assembled behind each side.
By Tom Castle
Propaganda in this country and by the other imperialist powers has sought to portray the use of chemical weapons as a uniquely barbarous act. Nick Clegg speaking in the Commons debate where the government lost in its initial efforts to authorise air strikes claimed they had not been used in a hundred years. More circumspectly, Foreign Secretary William Hague claimed they had not been used in this century.
Both are completely wrong and in trying to create a pretext for attacking Syria attempt to hide the role that the imperialist powers themselves have played in the use of chemical weapons. Chemical weapons are created by industrial processes. The most advanced industrialised countries, until recently solely the imperialist powers, have access to the most sophisticated chemical weapons, either for their own use or for sale to the reliable allies.
By Jane West
The murderous attack on a soldier in Woolwich yesterday was horrifying, and nothing justifies such a vile act. The only response that is appropriate – apart from expressing sympathy for the victim’s family and friends – is to isolate the approach of the perpetrators and for communities to stand together in condemnation of this attack, as Ken Livingstone spells out in the article we reproduce below.
First published: April 1991
The Gulf War was an overwhelming military victory for the United States. But what relation of international class forces did it create? And what conclusions flow for the coming class struggles?
On the military level the Gulf War was an overwhelming victory for the United States. In one sense this was inevitable. That the superior armed force of the imperialism, above all US imperialism, cannot be defeated by purely conventional military confrontation was a standard point made during the heyday of the colonial liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s – it was the backbone of the military ideas of Mao-Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, the African liberation movements against the Portuguese empire or in the struggle against Ian Smith’s ‘Rhodesia’. The original idea was that the imperialist enemy could not be defeated on the purely military level but had to be ground down by prolonged social mobilisation to which military action was subordinate – it was no accident that the NLF’s major military offensives during the Vietnam war coincided with US presidential election years. Only at the final stage, when the imperialist enemy had been ground down by political and social mobilisation, and localised armed action on that basis, could relatively conventional military struggle be engaged with a chance of success.
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