The countdown to war against Iraq has begun: the interests of international capital in the Middle East must be imposed.

The U.S., having become the sole “world policeman” after the collapse of Russia, is coming to impose its will in the Middle East, an area that has always been a source of conflict among the major capitalist countries.

It is not just about oil—its supply and price—but also about strategic dominance of the region. U.S. capital intends to penetrate the region, establishing military and commercial footholds there in order to boost Wall Street stock prices and protect the dollar against the euro, and it is compelled to pursue this goal by any means, peaceful or violent.

The accusations against Saddam Hussein of possessing weapons of mass destruction are merely a smokescreen. When, in the 1980s, he used chemical weapons against the Kurds, all the major capitalist powers scrambled to supply him with weapons so that hundreds of thousands of young proletarians in uniform could be slaughtered in the war with Iran. The hypocrisy of accusing Iraq of possessing “weapons of mass destruction” is compounded by the fact that all the major powers possess similar weapons and are fully prepared to use them. And they have used them—even if only “conventional” ones—from the slaughter in Afghanistan to Chechnya to the ongoing “civil wars” in Africa, financed by both governments and international corporations, not to mention Korea and Vietnam…

There is some grumbling coming from Germany, France, Russia, and China—certainly not because they are “lovers of peace” or horrified by the carnage that lies ahead, but only because they have their own financial, commercial, and oil interests to protect. They appeal to the United Nations, a forum of capitalist states, as if the UN’s blessing could make the war any less disgustingly bourgeois and anti-proletarian.

Whether the war is fought openly or a “peace” solution is imposed on the U.S., the interests of international capitalism will not be threatened, while death, brutality, hunger, and misery will continue to run rampant in the region. This is how Capital pursues its interests. Any alternative that is proposed will be nothing but an illusion, serving one capitalist group against another.

Only the international working class could have the strength to oppose capitalism’s deadly plans. The pacifism of the other classes—the petty bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the Church, and the “pro-Europeans”—is destined either for impotence or to become a tool of propaganda for one of the imperialist blocs. Only the proletariat has its own historical and social perspective, which it can impose only through its organized class strength and its emancipatory communist program, against all of Capital’s wars.