A US victory in the war with Iraq will mean the permanent occupation of the region by American forces and an effective partition of the country's territory. The launching of war in the Middle East lays bare the counterrevolutionary role of all the bureaucracies which presently dominate the international workers movement. Never has the crisis of leadership in the working class been so starkly posed. The gulf war would be impossible without the direct collaboration of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and China, which supported Bush's dispatch of troops, ships and warplanes, assisted the blockade of Iraq, and joined in the final UN Security Council vote authorizing war. As US bombs rained down on Baghdad, Gorbachev issued a brief statement blaming the conflict on Iraq.
Social democracy is equally complicit in the mass murder of the Iraqi people.
French President Mitterrand pushed a vote authorizing war through the French National Assembly only hours before the air strikes began, and other social democratic leaders, whether in office, like Hawke in Australia, or being held in reserve by the bourgeoisie, like Kinnock in Great Britain, gave their enthusiastic support to Bush. The American labor movement stands in full support of our country and of the men and women in our armed forces and their courageous efforts to bring this conflict to an early and decisive conclusion. This statement should be branded into the consciousness of every American worker. Like the White House, the Pentagon maniacs and the Democratic and Republican politicians in Congress, the AFL-CIO bureaucrats have blood on their hands. They share political responsibility for one of the great crimes of the twentieth century.