The opening of the military assault on Iraq by the combined military forces of the Washingon, London, and Canberra regimes poses to all humane and progressive individuals throughout the world the grave responsisbiliyt of understanding "why" the planet has descended, once again, into another barbarous war. The duty to comprehend the causes which underlie the bombardment and invasion of Iraq is all the greater because such an understanding enables all of us to work more effectively for the ends of world peace and true human liberation. At the outset, it must be stressed that the causes of this particular military conflict are, in essence, no different from those underlying forces which produced the onslaught against Afghanistan in 2001-present, the assault on Serbia in 1999, the first attack on Iraq during 1991, and, also, the mass slaughters referred to today as World War I and World War II. While there can be absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the top personnel in the current regime in Washington, DC are monumentally corrupt and profoundly reactionary individuals, it should be noted clearly that these loathsome personal qualities -- however deserving of our condemnation -- are far more the progeny of massive world-historic forces than they are the cause of the present aggression against Iraq. That the latest attack on Iraq is not mainly the product of the fact that the top figures in the Bush regime are without any ethical scruples whatsoever is basically proved by looking at how all the American administrations over the course of the period from 1898 to present have conducted their foreign policies. I made 1898 the beginning of this timeline simply because, during that year, the ruling elite of America launched its first truly imperialist military adventure -- the Spanish-American War. The war, which was promoted at that time by the political, business, and media elites of America as a campaign to liberate foreign peoples suffering under the harsh rule of Spanish colonialism, instead resulted in the bloody colonizations of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 20 years after the ruling financial elites of the different Western European nations had commenced their conquest of the entire African continent, the plutocracy of America set out to seize total control of the labor, natural resources, and markets of 4 far-flung territories. Again, while the American and Western European government leaders who launched these military campaigns can accurately be regarded as cruel, heartless, and inclined to lie in all their public utterances, it must be reiterated that these assaults on "less-developed nations" were, at root, expressions of the basic politico-economic contradictions which stand as the basic causes of the present war in Iraq. First, I will describe the contradiction which stems from the fact that, while the world economy is a profoundly integrated and unified whole global system, the planet is divided into somewhere around 200 nation- states which (at least nominally) possess sovereign political and legal powers. The "carve-up" of Africa conducted in the last quarter of the 19th century, as well as the Spanish-American War in the closing years of the 1800s, occurred because the economic elites -- the capitalists -- of both America and the Western European countries controlled industrial and financial companies which had grown to mammoth proportions. During the last third of the 19th century, more and more of these industrial and financial concerns reached the point at which their profit levels could no longer be increased simply through the exploitation of the labor sources, natural resource stores, and consumer markets of their "home countries." Thus, a handful of nations -- Japan, Western Europe, Canada, and the US -- became the points of origin for the overwhelming majority of these colossal, globe-trotting financial and industrial enterprises. The other countries in the world -- including the great majority of the nations in existence then as now -- had their markets, labor, natural resources, as well as political systems -- effectively controlled by the capitalists who hailed from a handful of the so-called "advanced states." Eventually, however, the capitalist elites originating from these imperialist states came into conflict with one another. It proved impossible for them to maintain a stable situation whereby the ruling class of each imperialist state was granted some less-developed countries which were their exclusive property to plunder. Increasingly, phenomenally rich indivuduals from the imperialist states began to develop controlling interests in massive banks and insurance companies which, in turn, loaned to and took effective control over large industrial firms. In this manner, a small number of incomprehensibly wealthy individuals came to develop the conglomerate, a form of business organization in which a number of firms in different sectors of the economy are completely controlled by the owners of one "core" financial firm. So, for 40 years or so prior to the start of World War I in 1914, the dominant tendency throughout the entire planet was increasingly towards the formation of international economic networks which placed all economic agents in all countries in a position of mutual interdependence vis-a-vis one another. Of course, this net result was not planned for by any of the owners of the various conglomerate companies which sprang up during this period -- it was simply the consequence of the fact that the owners of all the enormous oligopoly firms were obligated to orient themselves towards the world market as a condition for enhancing their own level of profits. This analysis shows us that, even if the elites from the different capitalist nations could unite together and form a one-world capitalist government -- an outcome so incredibly unlikely that it is worth addressing simply to enhance the sharpness of our theoretical analysis -- bloody wars would not cease. The second contradiction responsible, in the broadest sense, for the current attack by Washington's on Iraq is that, while, within the context of capitalism, each business-owner pursues only their own profit interests, today the entire global economy is a product of cooperation -- unconsciously entered into -- between all the significant economic "actors" in existence. Thus, given the fact that the intense competition for profits is the motor force underlying the whole capitalist system's operations, it is inevitable that certain owners of huge businesses will resort to violence to achieve supremacy over other firms that are simultaneously their rivals and their unwitting collaborators in the construction of an interdependent world economic system. Returning to our historical timeline, I noted that the outbreak of World War I occurred in 1914. Chauvinists and militarists from America, Britain, and France at that time argued that the war was simply and purely a product of "German aggression." Only in the most superficial sense was this obvious propaganda claim true. Given the interpenetration of all countries' economies by the giant firms which originated in the imperialist nations of America, Japan, and Western Europe, and given the fact that this tying together of all the worlds' nations into an integrated global economic system occurred within the framework of capitalism, based as it is on the frenzied competitition of all conglomerates against one another, it was inevitable that certain sections of big business would attempt to bring "order" and "stability" to the whole system by becoming the unchallengeable hegemonic powers within it. In short, World War II had the same basic causes. While, unquestionably, the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler?s regime in the period leading up to and during World War II surpassed even the grisly killings which took place in World War I - the so- called ?War to end all Wars,? - both of these conflicts had the same root causes. The massive corporations which dominated the German economy in 1914 and 1939 (not to mention today) saw that the only way to rescue their profit levels was to turn all of the countries of Europe into colonies - that is, nations with natural resources, labor sources, and product markets which are all thoroughly under the control of the giant firms originating from the aggressive power. In both cases, the attempt by one imperialist power to become the total overlord of the world system - or at least a whole continental economic system -- triggered intense frictions with the other imperialist powers, none of which had any intention of being put into the same position which they had so frequently put poorer, less-developed nations. Thus, it is evident that the very existence of numerous imperialist states is a recipe for inter-imperialist conflict, as each annexationist power sees the conquests made by another of its rank as coming directly at its own expense. At the conclusion of the Second World War, the infrastructures of all the rival imperialists - save the United States - were, if not completely destroyed, then badly damaged. No fighting was done on the soil of the United States, so, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was clear that America?s economic advantage over the other capitalist-imperialist powers had grown from the level it stood at in the period immediately preceding the conflict. All the other capitalist-imperialist states had no choice but to accept that Washington would lead them in the struggle against ?World Communism,? a system that was supposedly under the direct control of the bureaucrats who ran the USSR regime. Thus, tensions between the various capitalist-imperialist states diminished markedly from the levels they had stood at in the period immediately preceding WWI and WWII. Throughout most of the Cold War period, the dominant elements within the US government felt very strongly that the position of the capitalist-imperialist states, American capitalist system, and the whole capitalist world economy, faced a number of grave, potentially lethal threats. Among these threats were: the recurrence of an economic collapse like the one that had devastated the entire world during the 1930s; the rise to power - even if by electoral, legal means - of radical left-wing forces in economically devastated nations like Japan and a number of Western European states; the growth of independence movements in numerous African and Asian nations which for so had long been oppressed by the imperialist regimes. Under these conditions, it made sense for Washington to pursue a political course which -- however pro-capitalist and imperialist it may have been -- was certainly less aggressive and rapacious than the set of policies which the current American ruling class endorses today. In the economic sphere, the elite intellectuals and government policy planners coming from the US and the UK developed a comprehensive world financial-industrial plan as a means of preventing another slide into a catastrophic downturn like the one that plagued all the countries of the world during the 1930s. The key elements of this plan included providing massive financial assistance to all the ravaged imperialist states in Japan and Western Europe as a means of preventing these nations from experienced renewed economic collapses which may well have triggered electoral successes for left-wing, anti-capitalist forces within these same nations. Furthermore, the Western European nations were forced, as a condition for receiving these infusions of financial aid, to base their varied manufacturing industries on the basis of the assembly line method - - a system of production which had served American big businesses relatively well against their foreign rivals during the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. As a part of this development, the Western European states were encouraged, or, more accurately, pressured, to integrate their national manufacturing industries into a continent-wide system of production; the first overt step in this direction was the formation of the European Coal and Steel Organization. **** (check this again ari) *** Furthermore, the entire world economic-financial framework was organized on the principle that, while the movement of capital across national borders was a profoundly destabilizing process, the trade of goods between different countries should be encouraged as much as possible. In this manner, during the period lasting from 1945 through 1973, the governments of the imperialist states -- while unable to prevent recessions -- managed to achieve a relative economic stability by means of establishing a globally regulated financial and economic system overseen by the United States, the nations whose currency and general economic position undergirded the entire system. The economic policies undertaken by the different imperialist states in this "golden age" of a relatively stable capitalism were fairly similar to each other. As a corollary to the measures pushing the international integration of productive structures and the policies restricting the ability of money capital to move from one nation to the other, the various imperialist states implemented reformist policies which featured, among other elements, measures such as low interest rates and fairly expansive welfare states. Taxes were structured in a relatively progressive manner, hitting the most affluent citizens hardest. This "golden age" of capitalism was characterized not only by America's uncontested dominance within the capitalist-imperialist bloc, but also by the general successes of the bourgeois liberals within the different national ruling classes over their more conservative rivals. The liberals understood all too well that, without some concessions, however tactically motivated and limited they may have been, the working class and the poorer people may well have been driven to overthrow the whole rotten superstructure of capitalist rule. Thus, during this period, we see half-hearted -- though not entirely inconsequential -- measures like the Great Society being enacted. Within the highly restrictive framework of bourgeois democracy, programs like this represented a fairly substantial contribution of the economic surplus to the workers and the poor. But, it must never be forgotten that measures like this did not greatly reduce the massive gaps between the bourgeoisie and the workers that existed in that time, nor did they in the least take state power out of the hands of the former class. During the Cold War period, US foreign policy was driven by the principle of containment. Because of the desires of the workers within the imperialist states for higher living standards, and also because of the uprisings of the oppressed masses in the former colonial countries against their weakened imperialist overlords, there existed certain limitations on Washington's application of military force around the world. In other words, the pursuit of all-out war against the USSR, anti-colonial forces in the so-called "Third World", mainland China, the other Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe would have required the expenditure of such massive sums of public money that the limited social reformist schemes encated domestically would have had to be curbed or eliminated entirely. And the American working class, remembering well the extreme privations experienced during the Depression, was niether willing nor able to make such a sacrifice to the economic and political elites based on Wall Street and Washington. Furthermore, the fact that both the regimes in the USSR and in China developed atomic weapons meant that any attempt by Washington to pursue nuclear war against these states likely would have meant the total annihilation of life in America as well. Thus, the US policy was one of "containing" the major Stalinist regimes; this policy, championed by the bourgeois liberals" was, of course, consistent with such horrific crimes against humanity as: the launching the Korean War, starting the bloodbath in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, playing key roles in the installation of brutal and oppressive despotisms in Greece, the Congo, Iran, Chile, Indonesia, and in many other places. This is a very incomplete list. Furthermore, it should be emphasized that the CIA attempted unsuccessfully to put fascist-style regimes into power in a number of other different countries, as well. The key element of "containment" was the waging of all-out direct war or destabilization campaigns against all nations -- with the exception of China, the USSR, and the Eastern European countries -- which did not subordinate themselves directly to Washington's dictates. There were powerful elements within the highest levels of the American state apparatus who felt that "containment" was tantamount to letting "Communism" dominate the world, and thus was just another name for treason. General MacArthur's demand -- rejected by President Truman -- that the US drop numerous atomic bombs near the North Korean-Chinese border as a means of dissuading the Beijing regime from interfering in the war on the Korean peninsula was reflective of the attitude held by the important faction within the US establishment which advocated "all- out" war against "Communism." But, in general, from the mid 1940s through the mid 1970s, this even more reckless faction of the US establishment tended to lose out to the faction supporting the course of "containment." The reason for the triumph of the bourgeois liberals over the more fascist elements of the American bourgeoisie was that the growth of the US economy in this golden age of world capitalism made a policy of unrestrained aggression somewhat less critical to the predominance of American owned big corporations within the global economy. The foregn policy orientation of Washington began to change with the onset of a prolonged systemic crisis of the global capitalist economy during the early 1970s. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the economic supremacy of the US over the other capitalist states had been formalized through the Bretton Woods monetary system, a set of arrangements which established fixed currency exchange rates for all major currencies. The dollar was linked directly to gold at the rate of 35 dollars for an ounce of gold, and all major national currencies within the capitalist world were likewise set at a certain rate vis- a-vis the dollar. This system, which had contributed to the relative stability of world capitalism in the quarter century or so after the end of the Second World War, fell apart due to insoluble contradictions. By promoting the integration of the productive structures of different Western European states, by forcing Japan and the different Western European states to develop "American- style" advanced techniques of manufacturing, and, not least, by providing these countries with fairly substantial sums of cash, Washington had essentially created new economic rivals for itself. The outflows of financial aid from America did not produce a negative external balance for the US at first, because the recipient nations were so prostrate economically that their manufacturing industries simply had no chance of competing in world markets. But as the Japan and the Western European states began to be nursed back to economic health, they began to export; the long and short of the situation was that America soon began to import more than it exported. Combine this development with the policy of sending cash infusions to the imperialist nations in Japan and Western Europe, and it becomes obvious that that the US economy eventually found itself afflicted with substantial deficits in both its current and capital accounts. This was untenable, because, by the late 1960s, the amount of gold held in Fort Knox -- the gold which officially backed up the entire international currency regime -- fell under the amount of dollars, which, at the rate of 35 dollars per ounce of gold, rested in various Western European accounts. Thus, in the early 1970s, the entire system of regulated global capitalism, and with it, America's position of uncontested global economic dominance, came to an end. Thus we see that, during the late 1970s, under the bourgeois liberal Carter administration, Washington pursued a foreign policy course which had as its basic aim not tyhe containment of, but the overthrowal of, the USSR. This strategic realignement by Washington was first evident in Afghanistan during the late 1970s. Here, starting with Carter, the CIA began providing support to reactionary landlords, clerics and other feudal elements that were waging a war against the secular Soviet-backed government in Kabul. The purpose of this policy -- and this was has been proudly admitted by Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Adviser -- was to induce the Soviets to militarily intervene in Afghanistan. This intervention, it was correctly believed by the Washington policymakers, would prove costly for the Soviets in money, manpower, and international reputation. With the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the office of the Presidency, the turn towards a policy of "rollback" -- again, not containment -- of the Soviet Union became explicit. Aid to the mujahideen -- including Bin Laden -- was stepped up. At the same time that it intensified its efforts to destabilize and undermine the USSR and "communism," Washington heightened its attacks upon the workers of America. Actually, as noted above, the decision to try to induce the collapse of the USSR began in earnest under the bourgeois liberal Carter administration. Furthermore, not only did it initiate the policy of trying to precipitate the collapse of the USSR by drawing the forces of the Kremlin into a quagmire in Afghanistan, but the Carter administration also got started on eliminating or rolling back the socio-economic reforms and protections that American workers had achieved through decades of militant struggle. Through implementing the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries, the Carter administration not only devastated the living standards of workers in these particular economic sectors, but it also sent a general notice to all workers in the country: the days when the government pretended to be an impartial and neutral arbiter between labor and capital are over. In the second half of his term in the White House, Carter also agreed to appoint Paul Volcker to the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Volcker used his power as head of the nation's central bank to raise the short-term interest rate to something around 21% -- a level far, far above the previous record high level. The policy - maintained both during Carter's term and in Reagan's term -- created a deep economic recession and the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By raising interest rates to such a high level and thus creating such a large pool of unemployed workers, the conservative Volcker was able to do what the dominant elements of finance and industrial capital in America had long been demanding -- the condition whereby workers could no longer demand wage increases which outsripped, even if only marginally, the rate of inflation. Thus, inflation-adjusted wages, in decline since the early-mid 1970s, continued their slide downhill during the late 1970s and throughout the entire decade of the 1980s. This policy was complemented by Reagan, who, by intervening in, and thus breaking, the strike of the air-traffic controllers' union in 1981, made clear that his administration would openly side with the emploers in their struggle against workers. Reagan also stacked the National Labor Relations Board -- a government commission given the duty of resolving disputes between workers and bosses -- with right-wing diehards who were well known for their antipathy to unions and thr working class in general. To prove that the turn towards the right by the government of America during the late 1970s and 1980s was not an isolated phenomenon, one need only look at the developments in Britain at the same time. Here, the right-wing Thatcher administration raised interest rates to very high levels, and, at the same time, intervened with the full force of the state against various strikes launched by workers. To emphasize again the fact that the foreign policy of a capitalist-imperialist government is but an extension of the economic policies which that same regime pursues domestically, one might note that Thatcher launched the bloody military assault against Argentina known as the Falkland Islands War simultaneous with her pursuit of the high-interest policy policy and other anti-working class measures, such as the state campaign against the strike of the miners. Turning towards the period since 1990, we should emphasize that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe was seen by the ruling class of America as a development which gave it any absolutely free hand to pursue the most unrestrainedly imperialist and anti-working class measures. It is no coincidence that the first bloody assault on Iraq occurred in 1991, just slightly over a year after the Kremlin regime had started the path which lead inevitably to the complete dissolution and collapse of the old USSR. If the USSR still been a hostile, nuclear-armed, and non-capitalist adversary to the US in 1991, the first savaging of Iraq -- referred to in most history books as "The Gulf War" -- could never have happened. For the bureaucrats who ran the old USSR, Iraq possessed great regional, commercial, and geostrategic singificance, and, any devastation of this country posed a grave threat to the interests of their regime. But once Gorbachev signalled his desire to reach a rapprochement with US imperialism on Washington's terms, the American policymaking elite knew it could proceed with its ruthless assault on Iraq. The restoration of capitalism within, and the full-scale disintegration of the USSR was pregnant with consequences for a number of different state regimes which, during the Cold War Period, had attempted, through their pursuit of various internal economic and foreign policies, to balance between the two existing centers of world political power -- Washington and Moscow. Now, there was no choice. For example, the government of India, previously maintaining friendly relation with the USSR, quickly adopted the economic policies demanded of it by Western-dominated financial institutions such as the IMF. After the fall of the USSR, a number of regimes in Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania, etc) immediately stopped utilizing socialist phraseology and quickly accepted the IMF-dictated policies which called for, among other things, the selling to rich private capitalists of industries which previously had been owned by the respective national governments of each country. The collapse of the Soviet Union also henightened tensions between Washington, on the one hand, and the regimes of the other imperialist states, on the other. The existence of the USSR had functioned as a kind of glue which tied together, under the hegemony of Washington, of course, all the different capitalist-imperialist states in their common crusade against "communism." But the sudden disappearance of non-capitalist regimes over a large chunk of the planet, combined with the gradual diminution of the US's economic lead over the other capitalist-imperialist states meant that tensions between the different capitalist Great Powers grew steadily over the course of the 1990s. The little-known covert and diplomatic backdrop to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda provides us with clear evidence that tensions between the different imperialist powers became ever more serious in the post Cold War period. In short, behind the scenes, the regimes in Paris and Washington were aiding the two primary conflicting military factions in Rwanda, the forces of the Hutus and the Tutsis. There are no places in the world, however far removed they might be from the consciousness of the ordinary citizens, that are unimportant to the profit-driven big financial and industrial corporations that totally dominate the policy-making processes in all of the capitalist-imperialist states. Left to its own devices -- that is, without a revolution of the working class and oppressed people to overthrow this unjust and rotten social order -- the internal dynamic of modern, or imperialist capitalism, leads inexorably to war. This is the inescapable conclusion that must be drawn from any serious reading of the last 125 years of world history. Faced with innumerable contradictions which it can neither fully comprehend nor truly overcome, the ruling capitalist elite in Washington has intensified its assaults on the living standards of the American working class, made considerable "progress" in eliminating a whole raft of basic democratic rights enshrined in the US constitution, and embarked on an program of unrestrained militarism and aggression abroad. As exemplified by both the theft of the 2000 Presidential election, and by the lack of any real opposition to this travesty from the Democrats, the other party of big-business, the American bourgeoisie -- or at least the clearly dominant section of it -- has decided to discard many of the external trappings of democracy. The leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress all gave their support to the Bush administration as it launched the latest bloody asault on Iraq. They did the same with respect to the invasion and subsequent colonization of Afghanistan. And it can never be forgotten that Clinton and the other bourgeois-liberals who head the Democratic Party have - in just the last decade -- launched such acts of imperialist aggression as the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995,the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan on the same day in 1998, the various missile attacks on Iraq throughout the 1990s, not to mention the attempted colonization of Somalia in the early 1990s, the invasion of Haiti in 1994, etc. Again, for reasons of space, I have here presented an incomplete record of Washington's recent misdeeds. The basic lesson that needs to be drawn from the tragic history which I have described in detail here is that, one way or another, some social force will attempt to assert its power over a world which is becoming, day by day, more and more integrated economically. The contradictions which inhere in both capitalism and in the nation-state system created by the capitalists of each imperialist country, ensure that the maintenance of capitalism in the future inevitably will lead the ruling elites of different Great Powers to attempt, by bloody military means, to "stabilize" the world by placing it under their own control. There is however, a different way for the world to be organized. The workers of each country must unite together in a joint struggle against the whole superstructure of inequality, militarism, and repression. The development of an iontegrated global economy means that, now more than ever before, true socialism is not only possible, but rational. Socialism -- the use of the massive technical and organizational resources of the global economy for the meeting of everyone's basic life needs -- represents the only way out of the dead-end which humanity currently finds itself in. The laternative facing humanity as a whole is, again, now more than ever -- "Socialism or Barbarism." We hope that, today, on May Day, and in the future, you will visit our website -- wsws.org -- and seriously consider joining our Party -- the Socialist Equality Party. Thank You.