After invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq the Anglo-American alliance, with various European supporters, has focused its attention on undermining the relative independence of Iran and Syria. Blair and Bush have made it clear that here too they seek regime change - i.e. to install compliant puppet regimes, which promote globalisation and submit absolutely to their “war on terror”. The occupation of Iraq has turned into a bloody quagmire for the US, so an immediate and unprovoked attack is neither militarily nor politically possible. Read more...

George W Bush cuts a beleaguered figure these days. Most Americans disapprove of his performance, and a CNN poll last month showed 60% opposed the war in Iraq, while 48% believed the US would eventually lose the war. More than one in four Americans wanted all American soldiers withdrawn by the end of the year. Read more...

What this war is about?

The war now being waged by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza is not a defensive national war but an expansionist and aggressive one – aimed at consolidating and increasing the seizure of Palestinian lands and turning Lebanon into another buffer state to guarantee its borders. It is also a war that Israel is waging as a proxy of United States imperialism and its ever-loyal British ally to advance the conquest of the Middle East and seize its vast oil reserves. Read more...

George W Bush, US president and commander-in-chief, visited Baghdad for five hours on 13 June. During that time, 36 Iraqis were killed. Meanwhile, 2,000 supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr took to the streets, chanting, “”Iraq is for the Iraqis!” Read more...

The 21st June was not only a day of handshakes between Bush, the Austrian chancellor Schüssel and the rest of the EU’s top politicians. It was also undeniably a day of protest against the Bush visit, against the aggressive, militarist policy of US imperialism but also of the European Union. Both the Austrian and the world press reported extensively about our actions (see below). Read more...

Iraq

After three years of occupation, life has deteriorated for the vast majority of Iraqis. A recent report by the IMF and United Nations said that living standards have declined since the invasion in 2003. A fifth of the population subsists below the poverty line, on less than a dollar a day. Half the population is unemployed and 60 per cent are dependent on government subsidised rations. Read more...

Most parts of the Swedish left have met the controversy around the racist caricatures of the prophet Mohammed with caution. In the Swedish CWI weekly, the Danish left is, amongst other things, accused of “acting as an advisor for the Danish government”. That is a critique one can easily agree with, and a brief look at the websites of Socialistiskt Folkeparti and Enhedslisten gives an even worse impression than the wording of that article. Read more...

Britain has deployed 3,000 troops in southern Afghanistan, for a three year stint, at a cost of £1 billion. Tony Blair, who famously said about Iraq that the price in British lives was “worth paying”, is again asking working class 22 year-olds to stump up the “blood price”. Read more...

The US air strikes on Somalia on Tuesday 9th January represent an escalation by the US imperialist warmongers of their interference in the affairs of Eastern Africa. They had recently supported, if not instigated, the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in December, which drove the Islamist forces from Mogadishu: now they have decided to lend more practical support with air attacks on positions of the United Islamic Courts (UICs). Read more...

Today Iraqis go to the polls to elect a 275 member parliamet, which will in turn choose government under the new constitution. Unlike the semi-boycotted January elections, mass participation in all parts of the population is widely expected. But who should the workers vote for? Read more...

War correspondent Robert Fisk gave a rare talk in London this week to launch his new book, The great war of civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East.

Weighing in at 1.7kg and 1300 pages, the book represents thirty years of Fisk's career as a journalist in Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosova, Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. His source consists of 328,000 notes made over those years, and his famous contact book. This makes Fisk sound like a figure from a bygone age when war reportage was "an honourable profession". Certainly his own record is an honourable one in an age when war correspondents are "embedded" with the invading and occupying forces. Read more...

The release of a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Tuesday 23 August found no evidence that Iran has been working on a secret nuclear weapons programme. The report was commissioned after traces of enriched uranium were found in equipment at Iran’s nuclear facilities two years ago. Iran’s claim that the uranium samples came form contaminated equipment bought second-hand from Pakistan has been vindicated. Read more...

Leading Sunni representative in the negotiations, Soha Allawi, said, “We will campaign among Sunnis and Shias to reject the constitution which has elements that will lead to the break-up of Iraq and civil war,” while his Shi’ite opposite number, Jalal al-Din Sagheer, rejoined, “The only possible change now is that the Sunnis become federalist.” Read more...

Many people in the West have seen the film “Apocalypse Now". Only very few Iraqis probably have. However, they are experiencing “Apocalypse Now” in real life, with horrific consequences.

Contrary to the ridiculous claims of Bush and his generals that security in Iraq is improving (it has permanently improved since May 2003, hasn’t it?), hundreds have died in the last few weeks alone. According to the official figures of the pro-American Iraqi Interior Ministry, the death rate of Iraqi civilians and police officers has averaged over 800 a month between August 2004 and May 2005. In other words, Iraq is officially experiencing every month 16 times what London suffered on 7th July! Read more...

Since the bombings, and especially since the discovery that the bombers were young British Muslims, the government and the press have tried even more vigorously to keep the question of the war in Iraq out of people’s minds.

Tony Blair, like George Bush, blames the bombings on “evil". He explicitly denies any link to the war: “If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of an elected Iraqi government? What was 11th September 2001 the reprisal for?" Read more...

Statement on the London bombings from the League for the Fifth International

The terrorist attack on the London underground and bus services, which has resulted in the death of dozens of people and serious injuries to many others, is an horrific act aimed at innocent people - workers, students, tourists - and deserves the most unequivocal condemnation by all socialists and progressive people. Both the survivors and the families of the victims deserve our deepest sympathy. Read more...

On Friday 13 May Uzbekistan armed forces opened fire on thousands of unarmed demonstrators including women and children in the eastern city of Andijan. It appears that some 500 people were killed. Rebellion spread on Saturday to the nearby town of Korasuv, where demonstrators opened a border crossing to Kyrgyzia. Read more...

Just when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wished that the British electorate would forget about far-flung adventures and concentrate on bread-and-butter issues like £200 tax relief for pensioners, and more nutritious school meals – the anti-war movement made a comeback. Read more...

Melbourne started the global anti-war demonstrations early with a rally and march on Friday March 18. The rally was lively, with over a thousand people, though this had dwindled to a few hundred by the time the march ended with a sit-in outside the main railway station. Read more...

Currently there is much human suffering in Darfur in western Sudan, including what is, in effect, ethnic cleansing. Well over a million people have been turned into desperate refugees by the Islamist regime in Khartoum, the country’s capital. The government has used bombers, helicopter gunships, paramilitaries from the regular armed forces and an estimated 20,000 janjaweed militia to terrorise the people of the region. Read more...

On 30 July the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution drafted by the United States threatening sanctions against Sudan if it does not disarm the janjeweed militia in the western Darfur region of the country. The resolution includes a provision permitting the “interruption” of economic, transport, communications or diplomatic measures.” – sanctions by any other name. Read more...

Nothing better symbolises the failure of US imperialism to stabilise its rule in Iraq than George Bush’s 153 minute visit to the country in the final days of last month. So unsure of the security arrangements, Bush left the White House in disguise to be secreted onto a plane and flown half way around the world to serve Thanksgiving dinner to US troops. Read more...

The end of May saw the Indonesian military launch an all out offensive on Aceh. In a land, sea and air assault 40,000 troops and military police stormed into villages throughout the province. It was Indonesia’s largest military operation since the invasion of East Timor in 1975. The aim is to wipe out the estimated 5,000 guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) who are fighting for independence. Read more...

"Why does the sinister regime in Pyongyang desire to run nuclear stations?” “How can we exclude the danger that North Korea might attack other countries?” US imperialism demands North Korea drop its nuclear programme and a number of bourgeois regimes in the region, like Russia, South Korea, China and Japan, also expressed their “concern” and their “hopes for a dialogue of North Korea with the international community". Read more...

The war against Iraq ended in swift battlefield victory for the United States – hardly a surprise given the shattered character of Iraq both economically and militarily. Given too the enormous global military preponderance of the USA, the open terrain of Iraq, the hatred of a majority of the Iraqi people for Saddam’s dictatorship, any other outcome was impossible. Impossible that is unless Saddam had actually possessed any usable weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Of course, he did not have such weapons and Bush and Blair knew that very well, as investigations in both the USA and Britain have revealed. Had they had any serious doubts on this they would not have launched their attack. Read more...

Since the Bali bombing, which mainly killed young Australian holidaymakers, Australia has been drawn even more directly into the “war against terror". But the media refuse look at the role of the west in installing the Suharto regime in Indonesia which was responsible for terror on a much greater scale than the Bali bombing. Read more...

Atal Behari Vajpai, the Hindu chauvinist Indian premier and Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf are threatening the desperately poor peoples of the subcontinent with enormous suffering and destruction. Read more...

Marshall Somerset reviews the film: The Fog of War: 11 lessons from the life of Robert S MacNamara Read more...

The preparations for war between India and Pakistan dramatically confirm our view that the United States’ victory in Afghanistan has not stabilised the world political situation or finally ushered in the long predicted new world order. Read more...

The US-led attack on Afghanistan is an atrocity. The war that Bush and Blair have unleashed from the comfort of Washington and Westminster will kill and maim thousands more innocent victims.

We have to be clear that in this war we want to see the imperialist coalition defeated, and that means supporting all Afghan military resistance against imperialism, including Taliban resistance. Why? Read more...