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Join the mailing list: info/subscribe/unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] . ===================================================================================== CP of Britain, Imperialism - the Real Axis of Evil ------------------------------------------------------- From: Communist Party of Britain, Wed, 01 May 2002 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.communist-party.org.uk ===================================================================================== Dear Comrades, We are sending you a recent article published in the Morning Star by our party's general secretary Robert Griffiths. We hope you find it of interest. Yours in Comradeship, Kenny Coyle International Department -- This article first appeared in the Morning Star, Britain's only socialist daily newspaper http://www.poptel.org.uk/morning-star/ Axis drowned in blood Communist Party general secretary ROBERT GRIFFITHS explores the history of Western intervention in the nations labelled by the US as an "Axis of Evil." THOMAS Evan Nicholas was a bard, dentist Welsh nonconformist preacher and founder member of Britain's Communist Party. He once remarked that he "didn't have to go to America to discover that it's a land of gangsters. "Some of them are in prison, but most of them are in the government!" That is as true today as it was in the 1930s and it has been throughout the intervening period. Current gangster-in-chief George W Bush has used his State of the Union address to declare war on the "Axis of Evil." Iraq, Iran and People's Korea are supposedly developing and accumulating weapons of mass destruction and so must be stopped. Who says so? The world's biggest stockpiler of mass-destruction weapons - the US regime which wages wars for peace, fights terrorism with terror and bombs civilians to defend civilisation. What the peoples of Iraq, Iran and Korea have in common is that oceans of their blood were shed in the 20th century as the direct result of US foreign policy. The US invaded Korea in 1950 wrapped in the flag of the United Nations, having gerrymandered a resolution through the UN security council after excluding People's China and producing a walkout by the Soviet Union in solidarity. Ostensibly, the US intervention was in order to rebuff a military offensive allegedly launched by North Korea against the South. In reality, it was to prop up the corrupt regime of US puppet Syngman Rhee, who had just arrested his victorious opponents in the southern elections. As the war swung back and forth over the 38th parallel between the two Korean states, US forces combined a "scorched earth" policy of retreat with an enormous aerial bombing campaign in the north. As General Emmet O'Donnell, who was head of US Bomber Command, commented, "I would say that the entire, almost the entire, Korean peninsula is just a terrible mess. "Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name. Just before the Chinese came in, we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea!" US and British forces slaughtered more than two million Koreans whose crime had been to fight for a united, socialist homeland. Napalm and other chemical weapons were used. There is also substantial evidence that US aircraft dropped germ warfare canisters in two regions of North Korea and over the border in Chinese Manchuria. Outbreaks of cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox and encephalitis were reported from 1951 onwards. When Labour MP SO Davies raised the issue in the House of Commons, government ministers denounced the charges as "outrageous" and "a communist fraud!" The whole controversy was recounted in my biography of SO Davies, drawing upon contemporaneous US "establishment" sources and an unpublished report by Saap van Ginneken given to me by former CIA agent Philip Agee. Since then, state documents released in the US have confirmed almost all the circumstantial evidence, including the US rescue and re-employment of Japanese scientists who had developed the bacteriological weapons used against Chinese civilians in World War II. While wading up to their knees in Korean blood, the gangsters governing the US fought by proxy to drown the anti-imperialist revolution in Iran led by Mohammed Mossadeq. Elected prime minister on May Day 1951, his government had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Although an oil-rich country, nine-tenths of Iran's population were illiterate and half of all children died before reaching their first birthday. Most of the oil profits had been going to Anglo-Iranian's British shareholders, while the British government took more in taxes on those profits than the Iranians received in royalties. Retaliating against the nationalisation, Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his successor Winston Churchill succeeded in organising an international boycott of Iranian oil. British intelligence agents Christopher Woodhouse, Samuel Falle and Bruce Lockhart met their CIA counterparts in Washington DC at the end of 1952 to discuss the situation. According to the CIA report on Iranian operations - which was written in 1954 but has been disclosed only recently - Britain's MI6 representatives departed from the agenda to propose joint action to replace Mossadeq's democratic government by a royalist-backed military dictatorship. An operational plan for the coup was finalised in British colony Cyprus between British intelligence agents Norman Darbyshire and H John Collins and the CIA, and then endorsed in London by Commander Maurice Firth and Major Paddy Keen. Churchill gave it his seal of approval on July 1 1953, followed 10 days later by US President General Eisenhower. The CIA would use $1 million to organise and finance an opposition movement, including the parasitic royal family, right-wing army officers, reactionary clerics and mercenary newspaper proprietors. British expertise was recruited to bribe Iranian MPs and hire bazaar merchants to head the street gangs. Monarchist General Zahedi was selected by the CIA to lead the coup, although, at every stage, the US would call the shots rather than the "long-winded and illogical Persians." The shah of Iran was persuaded by his twin sister and British agents to issue decrees dismissing Mossadeq and installing Zahedi, having heard the secret code-words so helpfully broadcast by the BBC World Service. Gangs of hired thugs were then put onto the streets, distributing leaflets and posters fabricated in the name of Iran's powerful Tudeh (People's) Party. They destroyed the premises of anti-Mossadeq groups and bombed the home of a leading cleric - all, as we now know, planned by MI6 and the CIA in order to portray the Tudeh communists as unpatriotic and anti-Islam. Even so, the coup would have failed had not US and British diplomats and agents provided shelter, propaganda, arms, vehicles and royalist mobs to rescue the plotters. Counter-mobilisations by Tudeh and other progressive forces were then attacked by police - trained by the father of Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf, the butcher of Basra - and by reactionary and ultra-left elements. General Zahedi took power on August 19, Tudeh Party offices and a theatre were burned and thousands of members were arrested, tortured and imprisoned on the basis of lists supplied by MI6 and its informants. After a series of show trials, communist leaders and former Mossadeq ministers were shot. The invertebrate shah flew back from Rome to preside over 40 years of a corrupt but pro-Western police state. Under new arrangements, the oil began to flow even more strongly than the blood - although US capitalists now received more than 40 per cent of the profits. CIA documents confirm that the coup was not primarily about oil - Britain had plentiful profits and supplies from elsewhere. It was driven more by the fear that "economic collapse would be followed by a communist takeover of the country." Similar concerns prompted the CIA to back the Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party in Iraq, despite the latter's formal commitment to socialism. A popular revolution led by General Kassem had overthrown the autocratic monarchy in 1958. Although Kassem turned against the growing Iraqi Communist Party, he also forged closer links with the Soviet Union. The CIA rightly reckoned that the pan-Arab, anti-Soviet Ba'athists would be amenable to Western bribery in a drive to topple the general. The agency's Cairo station nurtured Ba'athist exiles such as Saddam Hussein, who had fled there after an abortive attempt to assassinate the Iraqi leader. When Ba'ath overthrew Kassem in 1963, the coup was co-ordinated between CIA agents and military officers, using an electronic command centre in Kuwait. Lists compiled by CIA stations across the Middle East enabled the new regime to murder 5,000 Iraqi communists and progressives. The mood in the US embassy in Baghdad has been summed up by attache James Atkins, who noted: "We were very happy. They got rid of a lot of communists. A lot of them were executed or shot. This was a great development!" The Ba'athists lost power but regained it in 1968, with Saddam as their deputy leader. CIA assistance had been secured in return for oil and sulphur concessions to the US. Although the regime pursued a strategy of constructive engagement with the Soviet Union and briefly with the Iraqi Communist Party, raising the living standards of millions of poor Iraqis, Saddam later touted for business from his old allies. The US and other imperialist powers armed the Baghdad regime and encouraged it to invade Iran in 1980, after the overthrow of the shah and the elevation of Ayatollah Khomeini. More than a million lives were lost in that first Gulf war. US spokespeople today are keen to point out that Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people - as well as on the Iranians - when he gassed the Kurds at Halabja in 1988. What they want us to forget is that he bought the technology from the US, while his operatives were being trained in Britain. Even after that atrocity, US policy under Reagan and Bush senior was to extend billions of dollars in export credits to Baghdad. Only Saddam's invasion of Kuwait brought the policy to an end. Gangsters? Al Capone and Legs Diamond only killed innocent civilians in ones or twos - and then usually by accident. The gangsters who run the US have no compunction about wiping out civilians in hundreds and thousands at a time - deliberately and always in the name of freedom. Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRITAIN UNIT F11, 1ST FLOOR, CAPE HOUSE, 787 COMMERCIAL ROAD, LONDON E14 7HG TEL: (44) 208 517 9722 FAX: (44) 208 517 9733 WEB: http://www.communist-party.org.uk E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *End* --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
