The new and criminal punishment that the USA wanted to inflict on Iraq has been avoided. The Arab and European governments dissociated themselves in the fear that an enormous anti-imperialist fire would break out and spread throughout the Islamic world; and Russia and China did the same in order to protect their own national interests as best they could. As a result, Clinton and the Pentagon have had to give up their plans for the moment.
The (old) lesson to be learnt from these events is that imperialism (even the super-imperialism of the USA) is not omnipotent and not capable of imposing its stranglehold on the world as it will, provided that the immensely more powerful force of the proletariat and working masses rises up against it. What is more, in this case, a concatenation of circumstances meant that even the simple (but very concrete) risk of such a rising was enough to avert a new series of death raids. The masters of the world are really beginning to understand that they are sitting on a powder keg with a thousand fuses already burning …
Although we are happy to see yankee imperialism suffering its first setback for a number of years, there is no point in deluding ourselves. The attack against the Iraqi and Arab-Islamic masses is being continued not only by the USA, but also by the entire Western world.
It is continuing with the infamous UN embargo that has caused more deaths (particularly among children) than the 1991 war itself; the slow suffocation of the Iraqi economy; the theft of petrol at zero cost; the guaranteed impunity of Israel in Palestine and Southern Lebanon; the chauvinist and racist propaganda against the Islamic peoples; and the special measures for controlling and repressing Arab and Islamic immigrants in the West.
The USA and European capitals may be divided as to the opportuneness of a new escalation in the war against Iraq, but they remain more than ever united about the need to keep the exploited but unbowed masses of Iraq, Islam and the entire Third World under the iron heel of their domination.
There is not, never has been, and cannot be in the future, any "good" and "peaceful" imperialism to set against that of the usual warmongering usurpers. There are simply two different imperialist policies aimed at reaching a goal that is common to all imperialist states: the limitless super-exploitation of the workers living in the dominated countries.
By the same token, there are not two United Nations – the UN "mediators" of today are the same as those who legitimised the yankee war as a "just" war and the murderous embargo against Iraq as a "just" punishment, and the same as those who have placed upon the shoulders of the Iraqi people the burden of an unpayable debt towards the Emirs of Kuwait and those of the entire Western banking system. The UN of Kofi Annan is the same lair of imperialist robbery and terrorism it has always been, promptly ready to justify upon command (the command of the major imperialist states that are its real leaders) any type of aggression and neocolonialist intervention necessary to protect imperialist interests.
It is for this reason that we cannot and must not lower our guard; but we can and must draw new strength and faith from what has happened in order to continue, extend and unify the fight against the imperialist system in the Islamic world, throughout the Third World, and in the metropoli.
This time, one interesting signal has come precisely from the United States: the failure to obtain "public consensus" in favour of war, some popular demonstrations by the slogan "Stop U.S. imperialism", and the opposition of the young to hyena-Albright (transmitted live throughout the world). We are sure that this sign of the gap opening up in the USA between the imperialist state and the vast non-exploiting majority of the population will not have gone unnoticed by the Arab-Islamic masses.
When such signals will begin to multiply, imperialism will begin to hear the tolling of its bell, and the "moment of truth" will also have come for all of the inconsequential forms of "opposition" to imperialism; because that will be the time of the reawakening of proletarian internationalism and the proletarian revolution – the objective of all of our work.