Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Bush inflames world tensions
U.S. imperialism threatens Iran, North Korea and Venezuela
By Fred Goldstein

As the Bush administration prepares for its second term, it is attempting to overshadow its crisis in Iraq and its growing world economic contradictions by escalating international tensions over Iran and North Korea.

Even as the U.S. military was announcing its need for additional forces and the January elections in Iraq were in doubt, assurances by Ahmad Allawi and the puppet government there notwithstanding, Bush was in Latin America at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit promoting his phony "war on terrorism."

Instead of discussing the economic crisis being pushed onto the APEC countries in Latin America and Asia by Wall Street's war of the falling dollar, Bush converted the conference into a platform to denounce Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for having nuclear ambitions.

Powell opens up attack on Iran

It was outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell who set the stage for Bush's attacks on Iran. He astonished the world, while talking to reporters on his way to Chile, by reenacting the infamous UN Security Council speech in which he had made unsubstantiated and false accusations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as a run up to the war.

Powell did a repeat, this time about Iran. He repeated unsubstantiated charges, made by a counter-revolutionary group trying to overthrow the Iranian government, that Iran was working on nuclear weapons. The Iranian version of Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Council, this so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran suddenly turned up with aerial photos allegedly showing a nuclear weapons site. But who has forgotten the aerial photographs of so-called mobile chemical weapons factories in Iraq that Powell displayed at the UN? They turned out to be harmless civilian trucks.

CNN reported from Washington on Nov. 19 that Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hussein Moussavian, responded, "This allegation is timed to coincide with the next meeting of the board of governors of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. And every time just before the meeting there are these kind of allegations either from the United States or terrorist groups. And every time these allegations have proven to be false."

The Iranian government recently announced it had suspended its refinement of nuclear fuel in accordance with an agreement with the IAEA negotiated by France, Germany and Russia. Bush then demanded that the suspension be verified. The Bush administration has been trying to get the IAEA to put sanctions on Iran. This agreement to suspend the refinement of nuclear fuel avoided the sanctions, to the chagrin of Washington.

Much of the APEC conference in Chile was turned against the DPRK. After consulting separately with the heads of state of China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, Bush tried to give the talks a spin of unity against the North Koreans. He told the North Koreans to "get rid of your nuclear weapons."

However, according to a Nov. 22 United Press Service dispatch, Chinese President Hu Jintao and South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun "have not backed down from their strong opposition to a harder line" towards the DPRK. Roh told an audience in Los Angeles, according to UPS, that a hard-line policy over North Korea's nuclear weapons would have "grave repercussions," adding, "There is no alternative in dealing with this issue except dialogue."

Roh is considered by the Bush-Cheney forces and the right-wing "regime change" advocates in and close to the administration as the head of the "appeasement" faction of the Liberal Democratic Party in South Korea. Washington is seeking to bolster hard-line elements that will support its policy of undermining socialist North Korea.

Assassination in Venezuela smells of CIA

Another major development as the Bush administration approaches its second term is the assassination on Nov. 18 of Danilo Anderson, a Venezuelan attorney who was investigating the signers of the April 2002 coup declaration against President Hugo Chávez.

This assassination has political significance not only for Venezuela but for all of Latin America and the world. It was undoubtedly the work of the CIA. And it comes as Bush loyalist Porter Goss takes over the CIA with a vow to wage a more risky, aggressive espionage and operations campaign.

The assassination of Anderson has its roots in Miami, home of the CIA-supported counter-revolutionaries of Latin America, where F-4 commandos from Venezuela are openly training assassins and contras and where Chávez opponents have openly called for his murder on Miami's Channel 23. (Granma, Nov. 22)

This assassination has echoes of a previous CIA assassination in Chile. Gen. Rene Schneider was killed in October 1970, just before elections which Salvador Allende, a socialist and head of the Popular Unity coalition, was expected to win. The assassination was a death warning to Allende from the U.S. government, carried out on the orders of Henry Kissinger and executed by the CIA and the Chilean military.

Goss has undoubtedly executed the orders of the Bush-Cheney regime, timed for Bush's visit to Chile and just before Chávez was scheduled to go to the Ibero-American summit, as well as to Iran and Russia.

Unlike Allende in Chile, who restrained the masses in their struggle and who was a civilian, Chávez has mobilized the mas ses and also is a military officer who has struggled with counter-revolutionary forces on many fronts. Following the assas sination of Anderson, Chávez made a lengthy speech to the people from the presidential palace in which he said: "The groups who have their material and intellectual actors here, and we are certain out of the country also, have sent us a message and we have received it, but not how they, the assassins, would have liked for us to receive it. They have misjudged us again." (vheadline.com)

Another sign of the hard line Bush is taking in Latin America was his meeting while at the APEC summit with Colom bian President Manuel Uribe. It signaled the administration's intention to continue funding "Plan Colombia," the huge military package aimed against the FARC and other revolutionaries who for decades have fought against Colombia's oligarchy and its death-squad government.

Self-delusion of imperialist 'moderates'

The capitalist media have been rife with speculation over the direction the new Bush regime will take. In the face of the makeover of the administration to the right, with the ouster of Powell and the almost complete monopolization of key positions by the Bush-Cheney hard-line loyalists, the hope of the moderate imperialists in the establishment for a shift towards the center are fading fast.

But the moderates, seeing their right-wing opponents filling post after post, have found a straw to grasp onto. David Sanger, one of the New York Times's top political reporters, wrote a lead story in the Sunday, Nov. 21, Week in Review section entitled "Hawk Sightings Could Be Premature."

While duly noting that things could move to the right, Sanger offers the thought that "it has been quite a while since the words 'Axis of Evil' sprang from the president's lips. And during the election campaign, it was clear from the president's words and actions that the limits on American power had begun to sink in on this White House."

To bolster his sense of relaxation, Sanger points out that "Iraq has made it harder to be hawkish in this White House, not because desires to act have changed, but because it has tied down American combat troops and magnified the need to juggle scarce military resources.

"With roughly 130,000 troops stationed in Iraq for a while--and hundreds of thousands more supplying them, training to replace them, or just coming off duty there--Mr. Bush and Ms. [Condoleezza] Rice lack the kind of flexibility to deal with crises around the world that they had four years ago."

This is the kind of thinking that should be summarily dismissed by the anti-war and working class movements. Never has such a right-wing, militaristic grouping of the ruling class establishment had such a complete grip on the capitalist state. And to rely on the alleged "rationality" of the right-wing cabal in Washington to act as a restraint on new foreign adventures would be the height of folly.

Indeed, Harry Truman launched the adventure against North Korea in 1950 and he was a moderate. Lyndon Johnson was a moderate Democrat and he launched the vast escalation of the adventure in Vietnam after supreme militarist Gen. Douglas MacArthur had warned the U.S. military never to fight a land war in Asia. Jimmy Carter launched a failed adventure against the Iranian Revolution at its height, and he was a Democrat and a moderate.

It would be the worst case of hiding one's head in the sand to rely on the existence of unfavorable circumstances as a barrier to new military adventures.

U.S. imperialism, in its struggle to feed its economic domination of the world and the capitalist lust for profit, has acquired a mighty military machine and cannot for long refrain from using it to seek military domination and conquest. That is its history. Its utilization of its productive economic machine for expanded exploitation requires new resources, new markets, new wage slaves. It is adventuristic by nature.

The resistance of the Iraqi people, along with the steadfastness of the North Korean and Iranian governments in resisting the intimidation and bullying of Washington, has posed enormous obstacles to the Bush administration's original intentions of overthrowing those governments.

At the end of May last year, when the Pentagon generals met, all smiles, as conquerors in the Republican Palace in Baghdad, they projected that by September of 2003 they would reduce their troop strength in Iraq to 30,000 and begin the gradual complete phaseout as they moved a puppet government smoothly into place. They thought they had successfully overthrown the first government in Bush's "Axis of Evil." Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz were patting themselves on the back and undoubtedly looking forward to the next campaigns of "regime change." It was clear that the Iranian and North Korean governments were on the hit list of the Bush administration.

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal actually represent objectively the deepest aspirations of the U.S. ruling class when they exert all their efforts, under the guise of preventing nuclear proliferation, to overthrowing the Iranian and the North Korean revolutions and bringing about "regime change." Both revolutions--the first bourgeois nationalist, the other socialist--committed the same offense that the Iraqi government committed: they kicked out their colonial rulers and established sovereign states independent of imperialism.

The anti-war and working class movements must do everything in their power to stop these right-wing adventurers from expanding their aggression. Mass mobilization against the representatives of the exploiters in the White House, the Pentagon and Wall Street is the only way to stop them.

http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/cabinet1202.php