Those who set in motion controlled forces also set off uncontrolled forces.-- Frederick Engels

Imperialist War...on a Silver Platter

(NEW YORK, 10 November) --The killing of thousands of people on 11 September 2001 was the greatest possible gift to the Masters of War in Washington. Instinctive human solidarity and visceral outrage among American working people were easily molded and inflated --for now-- into a patriotic upsurge with overwhelming knee-jerk support for the gigantic, unfolding U.S. war drive. Domestic measures to restrict political space, press freedom, and civil liberties in the name of the "war on terrorism" have gained ground.

On 7 October the shooting war began with massive U.S. and British air strikes in Afghanistan and has continued unabated. Big-business politicians and media exult in the surreal spectacle of the super-sophisticated military machine of the U.S. global empire being employed against perhaps the most wretched and destitute place on earth, already devastated by over twenty years of war [ According to the United Nations, life expectancy in Afghanistan is 40, and one in five children die before the age of five. Illiteracy is 90 percent, and 70 percent of the population is undernourished. This horrid reality flows from: 1) Afghanistan's traditional semi-feudal backwardness and lack of industrial development; 2) the regressive legacy of the war between the Soviet Union, its Afghan allies, and the anti-Soviet mujahadeen resistance armed and directed by the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; and 3) the vicious tribal and factional fighting between the victorious anti-Soviet forces which led to the Taliban hegemony and which is ongoing. --I. N.)]. The first ground troop operations, in the form of special-forces commando operations, were publicly announced 19 October.

The U.S daily displays of awesome high-tech firepower are directed against the paltry military forces of an obscurantist, semi-feudal Taliban regime which is in power solely as a result of the conscious policies of Washington and its Pakistani and Saudi clients. Within days virtually all fixed military targets of the Taliban government were destroyed. The other "Phase I" target is ostensibly the al Qaeda organization of former U.S. ally Osama bin Laden, which has supported and all but taken credit for the 11 September attack and whose central organization is in Afghanistan.

Open-Ended War

The U.S. rulers promise that these first strikes are but a prologue and that Afghanistan is just a beachhead. They are publicly projecting an open-ended war that will last for years. The Bush Administration is preparing bourgeois public opinion for a long war that will go beyond the ostensible goals of overthrowing the Taliban government and crippling the al Qaeda organization. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte has written a letter to the UN Security Council stating, "We may find that our self-defense requires further actions with respect to other organizations and other states."

In a 16 October interview, President Bush said that while he expects, "people are going to get tired of the war on terrorism," U.S. military action may take "more than two years. There's a variety of theaters. So long as anybody's terrorizing existing governments, there needs to be a war." A few days later Vice-President Cheney went further, "this war may never end. At least not in our lifetime."

These statements underline that the "war on terrorism" declared after the 11 September disaster is essentially a pretext to implement much broader U.S. economic, social, and political requirements, [In his informative book Taliban (Yale University Press, 2000), Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid documents how U.S. oil giant Unocal and other energy outfits with the full support and aid of Washington were "Romancing the Taliban" trying to secure agreements to build a 1,000 mile pipeline across Afghanistan to transport the giant deposits of Caspian Sea oil and gas to potentially hugely profitable markets in south Asia and other Asian markets. Afghanistan was seen as the ideal location for the pipelines as opposed to U.S. adversaries Russia or Iran. Rashid shows how this was the key factor in U.S. decisive, behind-the-scenes support for the Taliban as it seized and consolidated power via Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The pipeline project would obviously be a top priority of a U.S./UN protectorate established in Afghanistan as a byproduct of U.S. military action. --I.N.]

The 11 September terrorist attack presented the U.S. rulers with a golden opportunity to assert their power, attempt to resolve old problems, and settle old scores. Washington and its lock-step big-business media unleashed a huge propaganda offensive aimed at smothering anti-war dissent and restricting information and public discussion.

While we can be certain that there will be resistance to all of this, and that it will grow as the coming cataclysmic events unfold, it should also be clear to all Marxists, anti-imperialists, and progressive-minded people that the drive toward sustained U.S. military action cannot be stopped in the short run. Bourgeois public opinion is secure for the initial strikes, and is likely to intensify with the first waves of casualties. [Lacking any independent political expression in U.S. politics, working-class opinion is inchoate and ideologically dependent on ruling-class direction. The trade-union officialdom has virtually unanimously fallen in line behind "our President" and "our country." Initial anti-war sentiment is largely the registration of the pacifist sentiments of a tiny minority. There have been small demonstrations against the war drive, the largest so far of 10,000 in New York City 6 October. --I.N.] Whether Washington's "war on terrorism" turns into World War III is a dynamic question.

Unintended Consequences

The form and initial parameters of Washington's opening assault is a subject of debate in all the councils of the imperialist world: within the Bush administration; in the U.S. congress; within the NATO political and command structures; and between the government bodies of Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. This debate spills out into the op-ed pages of the top bourgeois newspapers. After the 11 September attack, Washington received fulsome support from the European Union and Japan. But this support is not unconditional, and will likely unravel with military assaults beyond Afghanistan and al-Qaeda.

The agreed-upon Bush Administration policy is to limit "Phase I" to air and commando assaults on Afghanistan, supposedly to destroy the al-Qaeda cells and the Taliban regime. An apparent consensus has emerged that this is the best way to gain momentum for a more profound "Phase II" posing direct military confrontation with regional nation-states deemed as incubators of terrorism. Top on the list is Iraq but other potential targets included Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan. [The middle-class hysteria over anthrax-laced letters sent through the mail has somewhat diverted public attention from the day-to-day operations of the war. Those who wish for a more-or-less immediate extension of the war to Iraq have sought to pin the anthrax attacks on the Saddam Hussein regime. As of this writing U.S. investigative bodies remain publicly flummoxed. --I.N.]

This essentially tactical debate is constrained primarily by the law of unintended consequences. Specifically, the impact which the launching of sustained military action will have on the stability of social and class relations in a series of historic U.S. client states. It is a fairly comprehensive list: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. Add to that explosive mix the permanent drive of the Palestinians for self-determination. Indeed, the entire semi-colonial world --from Latin America to Africa, crushed by unpayable debt and marked by rising class struggles and political instability-- is watching the coming military conflagration in South Asia and the Middle East and will be swept into its whirlwind.

New Jersey Democratic senator Robert Torricelli summed up the worry of many in Washington when he told the New York Times that the "so many things...can be set in motion that are not now considered" and would be the "unintended consequences of... military actions." He cited specifically "the political impact on Pakistan, whatever realignment there may be in Iran, the new role of the Central Asian republics."

Torricelli is right to be concerned. The deepening of the "war on terrorism" will set in motion uncontrolled social and political dynamics. The status quo in the region will be forever and irreversibly changed.

The relationship of forces between and within states and between social and class forces that will emerge from the rubble of U.S. firepower will create an entirely new framework for the class struggle in South Asia and the Middle East.

Washington Needs a Quick Knockout

The decision by the Bush Administration to focus on "first things first" in Afghanistan through massive air strikes supplemented by in-and-out commando raids has after five weeks not dislodged the Taliban or brought home bin Laden's head on a platter.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan have begun to mount as over 2,000 bombing sorties and 3 million pounds of bombs have already been unleashed. U.S. and British officials defend the continued use of anti-personnel cluster bombs, which scatter lethal material in a saturated radius and are notorious for "collateral damage" --military euphemism for dead civilians. Ghoulish news conferences are held where military spokespeople and fawning journalists clinically gloat about the latest murderous techniques and hardware. [ Describing the use of the 15,000 pound BLU-82 "daisy cutter" which obliterates areas hundreds of yards in diameter, deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace wowed the awestruck reporters at a news conference when he said, "They explode about three feet above the ground, and as you would expect, they make a heck of a bang when they go off. The intent is to kill people." --I.N.]

Washington has conceded that its "smart bombs" have twice hit an International Red Cross food distribution warehouse, the headquarters of a UN mine-removal organization, an apartment complex in Kabul, a center for the elderly, and a hospital. Regrets have been duly offered. Afghan government claims of many hundreds of civilian deaths so far are contemptuously, but not convincingly, rejected by U.S. government spokespeople as "exaggerations" or "outright lies." The Qatar-based Arabic- language satellite TV news network Al Jazeera, which has a crew in Kabul, has documented numerous civilian casualties from U.S. bombing. [The offices of Al Jazeera were later bombed by the U.S. Air Force, as was the BBC. --editor]

"Phase I" of the long war continues longstanding U.S. military policy of considering civilian infrastructure as military targets. Refugees fleeing the chaos of heavily bombed Kandahar where water and electrical power are gone, are left to rot in the blistering desert heat at the Pakistan border, where cops literally beat them away if they try to cross. Five million Afghans, out of a total population of 25 million are already refugees in Pakistan and Iran.

Most dreadfully the daily bombing is threatening to facilitate the deaths of millions in what is shaping up rapidly as the most large-scale potential human catastrophe since the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Millions of Afghans already faced starvation due to a devastating drought even before the U.S.-British onslaught began. The daily bombing has seriously disrupted emergency food deliveries and exacerbated the already bleak situation. Devastating famine looms as the harsh winter season is weeks away. International organizations organizing food relief have pleaded for at least a pause in the bombing to facilitate food delivery. Some half a million Afghans living in remote mountain villages are without food as supply chains have been broken by the bombings, according to Oxfam International. "It is now evident that we cannot, in reasonable safety, get food to hungry Afghan people," Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser told the Washington Post . Oxfam has dismissed the ballyhooed food-package airdrops by U.S. military forces as "inconsequential...only reaching 1 percent of the people who need relief," according to the19 October Philadelphia Inquirer.

Washington is thus increasingly anxious to be able to declare a "victory" over the Taliban regime and begin the process of establishing a viable political entity and avoid the political cost of the coming human catastrophe. So far the bombing campaign is mainly delivering a mounting political cost. Washington has been unable to dictate a political alternative to the Taliban regime or patch together auspices for any alternative thus far in the hornet's nest of Afghan feudal, national, and religious rivalries and conflicts. As one wag told the Financial Times, the Taliban will be "easier to remove than to replace."

But Washington has not found the Taliban regime "easy to remove" either. If anything, the first three weeks of bombing appears to have actually strengthened the Taliban. One sober article in the 18 October Wall Street Journal states, "Opposition Afghan leaders trying to fashion an anti-Taliban uprising say U.S.-led bombing has seriously undermined their efforts.

"Little about the Afghan military campaign appears to be going as U.S. officials expected....Instead of a thankful Afghan population, popular support for the Taliban appears to be solidifying and anger with the U.S. growing."

In Peshawar, Pakistan a major conference of exiled Afghan leaders of the Pashtun nationality (40 percent of the Afghan nationality and the base of the Taliban; also the dominant nationality in the northwest territory of Pakistan) met to plan an interim government to replace the Taliban and called for the bombing to end.

"We demand the warring parties of Afghanistan, the USA and its allies end their operations as early as possible...They should rather pave ground for a political solution and understanding to ensure on one hand protection of life of innocent people and on the other hand prevention of further destruction of Afghanistan," read one of eight resolutions adopted after the two-day conference attended by 1,000 Pashtun tribal and other leaders.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which is bitterly opposed to the misogynist Taliban regime issued a statement on 11 October opposing the U.S. bombing: "Again, due to the treason of fundamentalist hangmen, our people have been caught in the claws of the monster of a vast war and destruction.

"America, by forming an international coalition against Osama and his Taliban-collaborators and in retaliation for the 11th September terrorist attacks, has launched a vast aggression against our country.

"Despite the claim of the U.S. that only military and terrorist bases of the Taliban and Al Qaeda will be struck and that its actions would be accurately targeted and proportionate, what we have witnessed for the past seven days leaves no doubt that this invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and old of our country...

"Yesterday the U.S. and its allies, without paying the least attention to the fate of democracy in Afghanistan were supporting the policy of...Osama-fostering and Taliban-fostering...

"The continuation of U.S. attacks and the increase in the number of innocent civilian victims not only gives an excuse to the Taliban, but also will cause the empowering of the fundamentalist forces in the region and even the world."

Initial daily leaks by the Pentagon and CIA of actual or imminent defections of Afghan government forces have thus far proven to be more disinformation, wishful thinking, and "psychological warfare" than actual fact. Now the line from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on down is how "tough" and "seasoned" and "resilient" the Taliban troops are.

Nevertheless, it is inevitable that Washington will, sooner or not much later, overturn the Taliban regime, which is totally isolated internationally. Then its real challenges and problems will begin. What is developing now is how high a political price Washington will pay for its technical victory.

The Bush Administration made a conscious political decision to reject any negotiations with the Afghan government, which publicly discussed detaining and even extraditing bin Laden. Whether these public statements were 'sincere' or not is irrelevant. Washington's arrogant stance of "cough him up now" registered an already-made and irreversible decision to go to war in the name of fighting the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center -- a war whose actual aims are bolstering and strengthening U.S. capitalists' strategic (that is military, political, and economic) domination in the region, beginning with establishing a reliable client regime in Afghanistan.

Washington needs a knockout blow and an end to "Phase I" as soon as possible. But political advances have lagged behind military action on the ground. As pressure mounts over U.S. bombing and rising civilian casualties, the auspices and help of the United Nations will likely be needed to patch together a protectorate in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban. This complicated administrative task is becoming a real factor in the course of U.S. military action.

The so-called Northern Alliance is the only ground force that has been engaged in combat with Taliban forces. It is supported materially and politically by Iran, Russia, and India and is fiercely opposed by Pakistan. Until being put under heavy manners by the U.S. government, Pakistan was, along with Saudi Arabia, the main prop and sustainer of the Taliban, an allied government on its western border to "balance" a hostile India to its east.

The Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus is reeling from the collapse of its previous pro-Taliban policy and is fighting a rear-guard action to salvage something short of total isolation with the new political "dispensation" in Afghanistan. Washington is seriously concerned about growing instability in Pakistan where a massive political vacuum is growing. Pakistan can only continue to be squeezed, battered, and destabilized as the U.S. war drive deepens. [I am working on a more comprehensive analysis of the historic background and current crisis of Pakistan in the context of the U.S. war drive for the next issue of SeeingRed. --I.N.] The conditions for its future breakup are developing.

Pakistan is under mounting political pressure fed by the U.S. war. The reality of Pakistan is a devastating social and economic crisis intensified by a ruinous foreign debt. The Musharraf regime is begging Washington for an Afghan regime which it can "influence." Washington's conundrum is how to placate its historic Pakistani lackey --which it left holding the Taliban bag.

Nevertheless, as the mass starvation looms with the approaching winter, Washington has begun to bomb Taliban troops on the frontline facing Northern Alliance forces, a mere 25 miles from Kabul. Still the Northern Alliance does not seem to be an effective fighting force. [The Northern alliance is a direct continuity with anti-Soviet mujahadeen forces with popular bases among Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara nationalities in the northeast territory of Afghanistan. These forces were part of the first post-Soviet government that quickly imploded into murderous civil war. The Taliban emerged amid the war chaos and popular exhaustion --with open Pakistani and Saudi and covert U.S. backing-- as a military and political force capable of holding power and forging a relatively stable regime. --I.N.]

Washington has been Hamlet-like as it considers the contradictory box it has placed itself in with war on Afghanistan. Should it clear a path for a Northern Alliance seizure of Kabul by carpet bombing Taliban forces massed at the front lines facing Taliban troops?

Such a course would be a blow to Washington's Pakistani ally and its dreams of maintaining an allied regime in Kabul. Russian President Vladimir Putin has stepped up its own military aid to the Northern Alliance which he calls the "legitimate" Afghan government.

The current Iranian regime is also hostile to the Taliban government and is a key supporter of the Northern Alliance. Iran and Russia strongly oppose the inclusion of any "moderate" Taliban in a future Afghan government, which is being pushed by the Pakistan government and was backed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Despite the surface embraces between Bush and his "good friend" Putin and joint declarations that the Cold War is "truly over", Washington can hardly be pleased with the prospect of a government in Kabul allied with Moscow and Tehran.

Indeed there has been intense diplomatic activity in Tehran in recent days as one after another top-level European delegation arrives in the Iranian capital, where normalized relations with European Union countries are well advanced. On the other hand, there are many in Washington who want to place Iran in the gun sights of the U.S. military as soon as possible as a target for "Phase II" of the "war on terrorism". More prudent tendencies realize what a likely military and political disaster that would be and aim for some accommodation and collaboration with Tehran. Indeed, a major aim of Washington's current war drive is the unfinished business of regaining what it lost in the 1979 Iranian Revolution which overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a central strategic U.S. pillar in the entire region.

There is no political force in Afghanistan that can be called nationally based. The forging of a distinct Afghan nationality that transcends ethnic or tribal divisions is an unfinished historical task. Its resolution is dependent on breaking the class power of semi-feudal rural landlords cum warlords who are based on ethnic, national and religious divisions, which have been historically exploited by outside powers.

What Has Changed...and What Hasn't

On 11 September German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder said, "This day has changed the world." Indeed this has been a steady drumbeat and theme in the capitalist media, and not only in politics and history. Everything from movies to comedy, from music to sex habits will be transformed, say the cultural pundits. The editor of Vanity Fair magazine declared the "end of irony", perhaps not aware of Osama bin Laden's previous employment by the CIA and alliance with the U.S. government.

But the "world" has not changed. The purpose of the war drive and the unremitting propaganda accompaniment is precisely to change it. And it surely will, in ways unknown, unexpected, unintended, and uncontrolled.

In reality, Washington and its European allies --handed the opportunity on a silver platter by terrorists-- are compelled to reverse the world political and economic reality they have faced throughout the 1990s. September 11th presented the chance to get off the political defensive and to obscure class and social divisions through a manufactured patriotic unity. The "war on terrorism" is an attempt to seize the moral high ground in the pursuit of economic, political, and strategic aims in a contemporary world situation marked by a crisis-ridden world capitalist order.

The September 11th attack, despite its spectacular nature and sheer magnitude, does not change what was the objective reality on September 10th and remained so on September 12th. There are still billions of people living on dollars a day. There are still six to ten million children who starve to death every year, and many millions more who die of preventable diseases. There are still billions who cannot read or write, whose children will never see a school or hospital. There is still growing and widening inequality and imperialist obstacles to industrialization and development for the vast majority of human beings on the earth.

September 11th did not do away with a deepening world economic crisis, marked by regular international financial near-meltdowns, synchronized recession in North America, western Europe, and Japan. September 11th did not erase the unpayable and unsustainable $2 trillion Third World debt which is the Achille's Heel of the imperialist status quo. [The first week of November saw the de facto default of Argentine government bonds, after a year of desperate maneuverings by the Argentine rulers and the International monetary fund. --I.N.] The massive propaganda offensive launched out of the carnage of September 11th aims to divert attention away from the growing consciousness and resistance by workers and peasants to the system of "neoliberal globalization" in every corner of the globe and to subsume that into the "war on terrorism". The 11 September attack will be used by Washington to push forward as far as possible a drive against all legitimate liberation movements and to smear all anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle --peaceful or armed in self-defense-- as "terrorist".

This will fail.

Mass expectations and demands to cancel Third World debt, lift economic sanctions, open imperialist markets and end the unequal terms of trade (low prices for Third World raw materials and resources, high prices for "Western" machinery and finished goods), will not go away. Neither will intensified pressure on Washington to force significant Israeli concessions to Palestinian self-determination.

The war drive may allow the employers to successfully pressure workers to make "sacrifices" in the name of patriotic unity. Enough wage cuts, unemployment, and cuts in social benefits and other entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare, combined with a massive boost in deficit war spending, would facilitate a rise in the rate and volume of profits and a renewal of economic growth. But that remains to be seen and is by no means automatic. The course of economic development and recovery is tied up with the course of the unfolding war. The prospect for smooth sailing is daunting, especially if and when Washington deposes the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and routs the al-Qaeda forces.

The war unleashed by Washington, initially dragging its principal European allies, who are also its competitors behind it, will, however, accelerate the course of events. It will intensify and explode many contradictions which have been building up in the past period. It will revolutionize all existing social and political relations. Governments and states will fall. New progressive forces will sweep the Third World, with class dynamics and results far different and unintended from what Washington desires and expects.

War is the ultimate destabilizer. Bush and Blair's war is centered in a region already choking on social and economic crisis and political instability. Uncontrolled forces --classes, nationalities, and states-- are being set in motion. New alliances and blocs are formed as old ones are ripped apart.

Imperialist Hypocrisy

I'm amazed that there's such a misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us...I just can't believe it. Because I know how good we are. --George W. Bush

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has spent a decade promoting democratization, human rights, and economic development... American encouragement contributed to democratic conversions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.... If it is now thanked with blind hatred, it may doubt whether to go on. --Washington Post editorial October 16, 2001

The more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate them or to deny them--in short to introduce a conventional hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters. --Frederick Engels

As the "long war" unfolds, spurring revolutionary upheaval in the Arab and Islamic worlds and, sooner or later, resistance among workers in the imperialist world , the history, legacy, and contemporary realities of U.S. policies will not be able to be swept under the rug with knee-jerk, self-righteous, patriotic bromides. That genie is out of the lamp now, and can never be shoved back in.

It goes without saying that Washington's "war on terrorism" is stunning in its hypocrisy and double standards. During World War #2 it was proud U.S. and British policy to slaughter innocent civilians in German and Japanese cities, as the Nazis had done to London, Rotterdam, and Warsaw. Carpet bombings of German cities such as Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin actually concentrated on working-class districts with absolutely no military value. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were incinerated simply because of their nationality. These innocent civilians were obscenely identified with the Nazi and Japanese dictatorships which actually oppressed them. This mentality culminated in the atomic bombing by Washington of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki --cold-blooded war crimes.

In Indonesia in 1965, the CIA (with supporting help from the British MI6 intelligence service) set in motion a military coup which put the dictator Suharto in power for the next 34 years. In the weeks following the coup some 800,000 civilians --many on lists provided by the CIA-- were slaughtered: trade unionists, members of the Indonesian Communist Party, peasants active in struggles to own their own land. In Guatemala, it is estimated that 100,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the death squads of the military dictatorship installed in that country after the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1953 once it began to implement a timid land reform.

In Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos the massive U.S. war from the mid-1960s to their final withdrawal in 1975, the U.S. dropped on these small countries more bombs than used in all military theaters combined during both previous world wars. Some three-and-a-half million innocent peasants and other civilians were murdered over the course of the war.

inst the Nicaraguan Revolution and the potential of its extension to El Salvador. Washington created, trained, armed, and directed --largely out of the most vicious remnants of the ousted Somoza dictatorship-- the contras. For nearly a decade, the contras targeted civilians, peasants, workers, and professionals trying to develop the country. Over 10,000 were murdered and the country was devastated.

In El Salvador over 70,000 civilians were slaughtered by right-wing death squads, totally intertwined with a Salvadoran government and military propped up by Washington.

Nevertheless, the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran revolutionaries, like the Vietnamese, always made a distinction between the U.S. government and the U.S. people. They sought to win over the American people as allies in opposition to the policies of the U.S. government, never viewed U.S. working people as targets for terrorist attacks.

The political wind in Washington's sails at the same time poses huge political problems, already apparent as the war drive unfolds. Washington must carefully calibrate its military action so that the political fallout does not create conditions that undermine the foundations of imperialist domination throughout the Third World. But war, and its pressures, have their own dynamics. As Engels warned, controlled forces do unleash uncontrolled forces. Old contradictions, long considered resolved, return with a vengeance. If the price of destroying their Frankenstein monster bin Laden, his organization, and his Taliban hosts is to facilitate the emergence of progressive, democratic, and genuinely revolutionary forces from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia and beyond from the rubble of U.S. firepower, then it will be a pyrrhric victory indeed.

Ike Nahem is a New York locomotive operator. See the epilogue to this article, "New Phase of Long War Looms" (written 24 November) in this issue of SeeingRed.

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