INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF PEOPLES' STRUGGLE |
Oppose
the US WAR OF AGGRESSION and
the entire imperialist system of terror and plunder By
Jose Maria Sison General
Consultant International League of Peoples’ Struggle 10
November 2001 A month has passed
since the US began its war of aggression against Afghanistan and the
Afghan people on 7 October 2001.
Cruise missiles, cluster bombs, bunker busters, daisy cutters and
other types of bombs continue to hit the civilian population and civil
infrastructure of Afghanistan. The US has already
killed and wounded thousands of Afghan civilians.
It has forced the displacement of millions of Afghans and made
them vulnerable to starvation, disease and death, especially during the
approaching winter. It has
dismantled the work of UN and other international agencies concerned
with refugees, medical assistance, relief and rehabilitation.
It has destroyed such infrastructure as dams, electric plants,
water systems, hospitals and schools. The cowardly
high-tech bombing campaign being undertaken by the US is well on the way
of directly and indirectly causing the death of so many times more
people than those killed (less than 5000) in the 11 September 2001
attacks in the US. The
terrorism of those responsible for these attacks pales in comparison to
the terrorism and barbarism of the genocidal US war of aggression
against Afghanistan and the Afghan people. True to its nature as
the No. 1 imperialist power, the US is using the September 11 attacks as
the pretext for conquering Afghanistan and imposing US hegemony over
Central Asia and South Asia.
It seeks to have a firmer grip on these global regions and
develop a second oil route via Afghanistan from the Caspian Sea and
Central Asia in addition to the route via Turkey to the Mediterranean. The objective of
having these two oil routes is to frustrate the wish of Germany and
Russia to build an oil and gas pipeline directly to Western Europe as
well as the plan of China to extend a similar pipeline across her
borders. The US is
determined to keep both Germany and Japan dependent on the US for their
fuel supply. But under the cover
of so-called anti-terror coalition, these losers of World War II are
able to widen the way for rearming themselves and taking a combat role
in wars of aggression. Although
they now follow the baton of US imperialism, they gain war capability
that would enable them someday to challenge US hegemony.
In various imperialist countries, the economic crisis is breeding
the forces of fascism and war. Currently, the US has
gained military bases in such recesses of Central Asia as Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan. In the
meantime, Russia and China bend to the wishes of the US imperialists in
the vain hope of ending efforts of the US to instigate and manipulate
ethnic and religious conflicts in Chechnya and Xingjiang.
They also expect to gain concessions from the US elsewhere. However, the US is
laying the basis for sharp contradictions with both Russia and China in
the near future. It has the
propensity for holding on to military bases abroad for the purpose of
expansion. As it succeeds in gaining a foothold in Central Asia, it will
tighten its grip on the resources of the region and manipulate the local
governments against Russia and China. The US is using in
Central Asia and South Asia basically the same strategy and tactics that
it has used for gaining overall hegemony in the Middle East through the
war of aggression against Iraq and in Eastern Europe through the Balkan
wars. In South Asia, the US
is using the Pakistani government to undermine and overthrow the Afghan
government. The Musharraf
regime is actively collaborating with the US but demands that the
bombing campaign be “short and targeted”.
It is increasingly afraid of Pakistan’s Muslim population,
which sides with the people of Afghanistan against US imperialism.
The longer the US war
of aggression against Afghanistan runs, the bigger is the prospect of an
upheaval in Pakistan. Furthermore,
India is now agitated by the growing closeness between the US and
Pakistan and is taking aggressive actions in connection with the issue
of Kashmir. In the Middle East,
the Israeli government is using the “anti-terrorist” line of the US
to depict the Palestinians as terrorists and to slaughter them. The US is thus finding itself in serious self-contradiction
as it supports the barbarism of the Israeli government and tries to woo
the support of the Arab and Islamic countries.
Arab and Islamic
countries (especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan) are demanding the
immediate establishment of a viable Palestinian state in order to fend
off charges that they are mere puppets of the US and thereby avert the
rise of popular movements against them.
Acting as the No. 1
terrorist and No. 1 plunderer of the world, the US is now intensifying
its contradictions with peoples who want revolution, nations that want
liberation and countries that want independence.
It labels them as terrorists and threatens to go after them in a
“global assault on terrorism”.
It has gone so far as to announce that it has the license to
assassinate anti-imperialist leaders. The US is using the
11 September attacks and the so-called war on terrorism to push the
curtailment of democratic rights in the US and in the entire world, to
obscure the root causes of the global economic crisis and to aggravate
this crisis by delivering more public resources to the monopoly
bourgeoisie, especially the military-industrial complex, and by
intensifying arms production and wars of aggression. On a global scale,
the broad masses of the people are fighting back along an
anti-imperialist, antiwar and democratic line.
The International League for Peoples’ Struggle is doing
everything it can on its own and in cooperation with all other forces in
a broad international united front to oppose the US imperialist system
of terror and plunder. All over the world,
the anti-imperialist, antiwar and democratic movement is growing.
The level of mass participation in protest actions is sharply
rising. So far, the
most widespread, most frequent , biggest and most militant mass actions
against the US war of aggression have broken out in Arab, Islamic and
other third world countries. The mass protests in
the US have also been the biggest among those in the industrial
capitalist countries. There
is a growing realization among the American people that the US has
become the target of popular hatred because it has incurred so much
blood debt through wars of aggression and counterrevolution as well as
through the daily violence of superexploitation. The broad masses of
the people suffer the daily worsening conditions of oppression and
exploitation and are outraged by the concurrent bankruptcy of “free
market” globalization, the curtailment of democratic rights and the
war of aggression against Afghanistan.
They wish to liberate themselves from the clutches of US
imperialism and its diehard puppets and attain national independence,
democracy and socialism. #
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