The U.S. now believes that it is going to remake the Middle East, issuing threats right and left to Iran and Syria, forcing the "road map" for peace down Palestinians' throats. After establishing the "facts on the ground" by occupying Iraq, it got European countries that had opposed the war to sign onto the occupation--to agree to back this as a U.S.-British occupation through the UN Security Council.

And there's the demonstration effect of the war itself. The idea that it was a pre-emptive war was a message to other countries in and outside the so-called "axis of evil" that the U.S. was prepared to name enemies and go to war with them--so they'd better get in line right now. The neoconservatives who are the intellectual godfathers of this envision a series of what they call "small wars" to enforce U.S. domination.

I'd like to talk about Bush's lies about weapons of mass destruction. One recent UN report said that there was no credible evidence that Iraq had anything to do with al-Qaeda. We said all along that weapons of mass destruction as a reason for the war was a fabrication and a ruse to win popular support here in the wake of September 11--when the war was about something completely different.

We also argued that, despite the massive outpouring of opposition, the war was going to happen--that it wasn't going to be stopped. This was because of the politics of the war. Because it was a war for oil and empire as far as the U.S. government and the people in the driver's seat were concerned, they were going to make sure the war happened no matter what. They weren't going to let the UN stop it, and they weren't going to let Jacques Chirac get in their way. They were going to have a war.

The war wasn't driven finally by Dick Cheney or Halliburton--in other words, the U.S. didn't go in because Cheney is the head of Halliburton, though they were the beneficiaries, as Rania laid out. But beyond this, there was a desire to control the second-largest reserves of oil in the world.

Oil is a strategic resource to the U.S., and any country that has a stranglehold on that main resource has a political lever against all their rivals that could potentially be a challenge to the U.S., economically and militarily. The U.S. getting its hands on that oil, which will actually become more important in the future of the world economy, means that it will have a stranglehold over the world economy. And over the countries that are the main demanders of that oil in the future--predominately, India and China, countries that the U.S. sees as somewhere down the line in this century becoming potential rivals for control, or at least competitors on the Eurasian land mass.

Now there is a question about whether the U.S. can really remake the Middle East. The neoconservatives use a lot of ideological phraseology about spreading democracy--that Iraq is the first domino in a kind of reverse domino effect.

I have no idea whether the Bush people really believe this stuff or not. It sounds good on the think-tank circuit, but from our point of view, it's pretty unlikely that they really do mean this. Because if you look at what they're doing in Iraq--the U.S. is basically setting up a government whose only reason for being is to sign onto the alliances with Israel, to sign away Iraqi resources to U.S. corporations and so on.

Obviously, that's no democracy. We also know that if there was actual democracy in places like Saudi Arabia, it's very likely that whoever would get elected would not be the kind of people the U.S. would be interested in dealing with. So a lot of this stuff is hot air. But what they do want is "stable"--or pro-U.S.--governments.

What they also mean by remaking the Middle East--something that is probably closer to reality than the rhetoric--is to reorganize the structure of control and reorganize the deployment of U.S. troops and war materiel around the region. The want to redistribute the U.S. military footprint by putting all of their major military assets in small Gulf countries with small populations and ruling classes completely tied to the U.S.

Is Iran next on Bush's hit list? We have to say that it's certainly possible, because with Iraq out of the way, Iran is the major player in the Gulf that isn't in U.S. orbit. But after the war in Afghanistan and in the Gulf, the U.S. military essentially rings Iran with troops and bases. Bush has warned Iran already that it will not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. And his attack dog John Bolton, a State Department official now, slipped the leash the other day and actually said that the Bush administration would go to war to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Invading Iran would not be like invading Iraq. The population is three times the size. The land mass is four times the size. The population has generally rallied around the regime when faced with foreign threat. It has more popular legitimacy in some ways in that Iran has an elected president. Unlike the U.S.

When they talk about going after Syria and Hezbollah, again, you're talking about going after a particular organization that is highly integrated into a society--and an organization that is looked on as nationalist heroes for having driven Israel out of Lebanon. This is big talk coming out of the U.S. administration. Whether they can actually pull this all off is still an open question.

They definitely have an advantage, but the war continues in Iraq, and each day that the war continues, resistance grows. Fifty-five U.S. soldiers have been killed since the end of the so-called war. And I think that number will only get bigger as the war goes on. At least a third or half of U.S. combat power is right now tied down in Iraq, and it looks like the Pentagon will have to increase that to put down what looks like the beginning of a developing mass anti-imperial, anti-colonial opposition to the occupation.

Like all empires before, the U.S. thinks that it's invincible. And the people in charge talk about how they're bringing civilization to backward people and all that. But they're setting themselves up for a fall, because the growing opposition to the occupation will continue. We must support it--and demand that the U.S. get out, with no qualifications. Our starting point is that the U.S. has to get out of Iraq.

The longer the occupation goes on, the more the question will exist in U.S. society. I think there is already a fair amount of questioning below the surface that never ends up in the opinion polls.

But many soldiers themselves and their families, when they hear these reports, have to ask, "What the hell are we doing there? Democracy? What is this?" The underlying result is that poor or working-class people from this country are being sent overseas to oppress other people. That has the same kind of effect it had in Vietnam. At the same time, back home, jobs are being cut, schools are growing worse, veterans' benefits are being cut.

You can see how the underlining class dynamics can come to the surface. It's our job to offer a political explanation for that and help get people to see the possibilities in that. To be better able to respond to these events--to not be confused by the lies that comes out in the media--we have to develop a clear anti-imperialist point of view.

This used to be thought of as leftist rhetoric. But in the last two years, imperialism and even the word itself has been rehabilitated for use by the right--held up as a good thing. Max Boot, one of the main ideologues of the right, has said: "If we want Iraq to avoid becoming a Somalia on steroids, we better get used to U.S. troops being deployed there for years, possibly decades to come. If that raises hackles about American imperialism, so be it. We're going to be called an empire whatever we do, so we might as well be a successful empire."

The people in this room will agree that we aren't interested in the U.S. being a successful empire. We're interested in that empire being stopped. We're interested in giving solidarity to those fighting against it. We're interested in helping to organize a resistance to it here. We're interested in seeing it defeated.

Forget Max Boot. It's better to talk about someone like Mark Twain, who said over 100 years ago--in relationship to the U.S. occupation of the Philippines--that he used to think of himself as an imperialist because he believed the idea that the U.S. was brought into the world to spread democracy. But, he said, "The more I've thought about it since, I've seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We've gone there to conquer, not to redeem. So I am an anti-imperialist, I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

That's where we stand. We are opposed to the eagle spreading its wings in the Middle East and anywhere else in the world. We have to commit ourselves to build an antiwar movement that also sees anti-imperialism at the core of its struggle. The antiwar movement was a tremendous upsurge around the world, and we have to state that proudly.

But we also recognize that it didn't stop the war. We don't draw the conclusion that this was impossible. We have to get into a dialogue with people who were involved in it and say that the underlying reason we were not able to stop the war is because of the system drove that war.

We have to draw the conclusion that it's not good enough to organize an antiwar movement, or even an anti-imperialist movement. We have to organize a movement to get rid of the system that breeds wars. We need to talk about building a socialist alternative as well.

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