As this is being written, almost one month into President George W. Bush’s Operation Enduring Freedom, huge majorities of Americans support Bush and the war. One government after another has signed on with the "war on terrorism." Respectable opinion leaders openly advocate overthrowing governments and installing Western colonial regimes around the world. Draconian new laws–threats to free speech and civil liberties–have been rammed through the U.S. Congress. Arabs and Arab-Americans are victims of attacks and racial profiling. The global justice movement has been derailed.

Yet even as the warmongers appear to be riding high, cracks in the pro-war, pro-Bush consensus have appeared. Hawks like Sen. John McCain, concluding that Bush’s strategy has so far been ineffective, have called for greater escalation of U.S. firepower. On the other hand, media pundits who initially assured a U.S. walkover now openly worry about a Vietnam-style "quagmire."

"Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad," the New York Times’ R.W. Apple wrote October 31. "Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia."

As the U.S. prosecutes the war, we can expect the doubts and antiwar opposition to grow. People opposed to Bush’s war must refuse to be cowed, because the upsurge in support for Bush, militarism and other right-wing policies will not last. To figure out where we go from here, we have to assess the state of world politics, the economy, U.S. politics, and our movement.

For the time being, the U.S. is forcing all questions in world politics to become subordinate to the "war against terrorism." Bush’s September 20 speech to Congress put it bluntly: "You are either with us, our you are with the terrorists." He is trying to recreate the feel of the Cold War where all political questions were subordinated to the world struggle for influence between the U.S. and the USSR.

Within a few weeks, virtually every major country in the world jumped into the "war on terrorism." For the first time ever, NATO invoked Article Five of its charter, declaring the attack on the U.S. an attack on all NATO alllies. Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed aside his generals’ objections to join Bush’s war. Even China, the U.S. enemy of choice before September 11, has offered intelligence and back-channel pressure on its ally Pakistan to join up with the U.S.

These allies have their own reasons for jumping into bed with the United States. Germany’s participation in the war is another step down its desired path to becoming a player in world affairs. Japan is looking to rewrite its U.S.-imposed constitution to allow its military to venture overseas. Russia hopes to win more than simply Western silence for its genocidal war against Chechen rebels, newly dubbed as accomplices of Osama bin Laden. It hopes to use the war in Afghanistan to further project its influence into Central Asia, while simultaneously being accepted as a "European" power. China hopes to project its influence westward, too.

More than "terrorism" is at stake in the war, as many articles in this issue point out. The U.S. ability to assert its dominance in the world and the struggle for control over the most valuable resources of world capitalism–oil and gas in the Middle East and the Caspian Sea region–stand out as key underlying drives in what Bush calls the "first war of the 21st century."

The Western ruling classes are digging in for a long fight, as the Financial Times laid out: "The cold war had its ups and downs before it ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"The struggle against international terrorism requires patience, resources, and political will. These virtues helped the West to prevail in 1989; they are no less essential today."

As they’ve made clear, the "war on terrorism" won’t stop in Afghanistan. As the Financial Times editorialized:

In the longer term, however, the war should be viewed as an extended campaign of containment. The enemy is international terrorism. Afghanistan is the immediate theatre of military operations; but it cannot be excluded that other targets move into focus, should the U.S. establish a direct link with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Nevertheless, the war has already exposed the rotten foundation of tyranny and oppression on which the U.S. bases its power. The U.S. government condemns terrorism, but it backs Israeli terror in Palestine every day. The U.S. preaches democracy and freedom, but it counts the medieval Saudi monarchy and Pakistan’s military dictatorship as its key allies in the "war on terrorism." Millions of people living in the Middle East and Asia oppose the war. These contradictions can only grow as this world-wide, open-ended war unfolds.

The stakes Bush and most of the world’s leading ruling classes have set for themselves are high. But so are the problems they will sow for themselves. A policy that openly declares its intention to overthrow governments at will and to fight wars from Indonesia to Colombia is a recipe for spreading instability and destruction around the world.

IT HAS become cliché to say that September 11 "changed everything." But one thing that didn’t change was the world economy’s quick plunge into recession. September 11 may have accelerated the economy’s drop, but it certainly didn’t cause what is shaping up to be a major world-wide recession.

In late October, the World Trade Organization estimated that worldwide trade in 2001 would increase only 2 percent over 2000–down from a 12 percent increase from 1999 to 2000. Asian economies tied heavily to exports to the U.S. high-tech market, like Singapore and Taiwan, contracted by 2.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, in the third quarter alone. Japan remained mired in its near decade-long slump. German economic growth for 2001 is expected to be only 0.7 percent.

So Bush’s "war on terrorism" breaks over a world whose three largest economies"–in the U.S., Japan, and Germany–are in a recession that looks like it will only get worse. Despite this, investors and figures like Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin seem committed to the rosy scenario that expects a quick bounceback in 2002. By the end of October, the financial markets shot past their September 11 levels and investors were telling pollsters they were optimistic about a quick economic recovery. But there is plenty of reason to be skeptical about these hopes.

Putting aside the unknown (and probably hyped-up) impacts of September 11 on global business–from the paralyzing of the U.S. Postal Service to multi-billion increases in insurance premiums–the world economy has lost its driving force. U.S. gross domestic product fell by 0.4 percent in the third quarter–the sharpest drop since 1991. The U.S. economic boom that shaped the economic and political terrain for most of the last decade hasn’t simply hit a bump in the road that will shortly be smoothed out.

As the Economist explained:

The biggest reason for thinking that consensus forecasts for the American economy are too complacent is that the root cause of this recession is not terrorism, but rather the economic and financial imbalances that built up during the late 1990s. Firms overinvested and overborrowed on the back of inflated expectations about future profits. Households borrowed heavily too, believing that share prices would rise forever. These excesses will take time to unwind.

Why the pessimistic assessment? First, only about 75 percent of U.S. industrial plant is being used, suggesting that much more capital will be scrapped. In all of the advanced industrial countries, this capacity utilization gap is at its highest since the pre-Second World War industrial buildup. Second, corporate profits declined by more than 30 percent in the last year–the sharpest drop since the 1930s. And third, world commodity prices are at their lowest level in 15 years, suggesting that falling prices–deflation–is a continuing threat.

The Economist concludes, "Even with a mild recession in America, then, this could still turn out to be the most severe world recession since the 1930s."

In the 1997—98 economic crash, the U.S. provided a market of last resort for exporters and speculators pulling their money out of Asia, Brazil and Russia. The U.S. trade deficit ballooned to record levels. In 2001-02, a recessionary U.S. doesn’t provide the same haven for these money grubbers. Instead, the U.S. has spread its recession around the world. U.S. government stimulative policies–lower interest rates, more tax cuts and increased military spending–will provide a boost to the U.S. economy in 2002. But it’s unlikely to be enough. And much of this policy is simply a handout to the rich and corporations, who won’t invest in a global environment of persistent overcapacity.

A prolonged slump in the U.S. and around the world is likely. Deteriorating economic conditions–combined with the political instability the war has introduced"–is producing a volatile mix. The 1997—98 crash in Asia led directly to Suharto’s overthrow in Indonesia. The next few years will throw up many more tests for working people around the world.

The government response to the attacks blew some conventional wisdom aside. Preserving the budget surplus was no longer to be the end-all and be-all of Washington politics. Suddenly, the federal government spigots opened. From rebuilding New York to "fighting terrorism," money was to be no object. Within a few days, Congress spent the entire budget surplus.

The "imperial presidency"–brought low during Watergate and dragged into the gutter during the Clinton impeachment fiasco–made a comeback. The brain dead punditocracy began comparing the bumbling Bush to Lincoln and FDR. Bush considered ruling by decree.

Out of more than 535 members of Congress, only one–California Representative Barbara Lee–voted against the extraordinary blank check for war Bush received on September 18. The Democratic-led Senate pushed through the administration’s wish-list of police-state "antiterrorism" legislation–and then forced the House to accept it. In the end, only a single senator, Wisconsin’s Russell Feingold, voted against this shredding of constitutional rights.

Bush’s authority skyrocketed because the Congress and the so-called opposition Democratic Party decided that Bush couldn’t be challenged. For once, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott told the truth when he said that "there is no opposition party" in Congress. "The Democratic response on terrorism has been best symbolized by Senator Tom Daschle’s embrace of the president on the night of Mr. Bush’s speech about the attacks to a joint session of Congress," wrote liberal Jeffrey Toobin in the New York Times October 28. "The Democrats’ watchword has been bipartisanship, which has largely meant, in real terms, acquiescence to the Republican agenda."

It’s not just that Democrats fear challenging a popular president. It’s that they are as committed to imperialism as are the Republicans. Let’s not forget that Democratic President Harry Truman launched the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Figures like Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman have campaigned to push the "war on terrorism" to Iraq.

As we go to press, more than 1,000 people–most of them Arabs and immigrants""–have been detained, virtually incommunicado–in a federal antiterrorism dragnet. Universities have already handed over confidential records to federal investigators. And journalists and professors who have criticized the war drive have been fired, suspended, or threatened.

There is no doubt that the domestic right wing, which had been on the defensive before the attacks, gained new confidence. Its attempts to silence all critics of the war have succeeded in many quarters. But in the pockets of antiwar resistance, political polarization has also made thousands of activists more convinced of their own ideas.

Even among the broader public that isn’t necessarily opposed to the war, the Bush administration’s arrogance and blind devotion to corporate greed has laid the groundwork for future opposition to Bush and his Democratic collaborators.

Bush and the right repackaged a host of unpopular measures, from "fast-track" trade authority to oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, as "antiterrorism" measures. Congress–with virtually every Democrat supporting it–rushed through a $15 billion aid package to airline bosses while stiffing airline workers. The bosses took the money and ran, meanwhile laying off nearly 100,000 airline workers. The Republican right pushed through a Bush-backed "stimulus package" that consists of $254 billion of handouts to corporations and the rich.

So while singing the praises of "national unity" and congratulating ordinary workers for their heroism in rescuing the victims at the World Trade Center, Bush and his cronies continued to show themselves as members of the most anti-worker administration in decades. This was made even clearer during October’s anthrax terror in Washington. Federal officials–even Capitol Police dogs–received antibiotics, while postal workers most exposed to the threat were ignored. Two postal workers died as a result.

"This is an administration that will let its special interests–particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest theocrats of the right–have veto power over public safety, public health, and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime," wrote the New York Times’ Frank Rich.

When anthrax struck, the administration’s first impulse was not to secure as much Cipro as speedily as possible to protect Americans, but to protect the right of pharmaceutical companies to profiteer. The White House’s faith in tax cuts as a panacea for all national ills has led to such absurdities as this week’s House "stimulus" package showering $254 million on Enron, the reeling Houston energy company (now under S.E.C. investigation) that has served as a Bush campaign cash machine.

As resentment over these policies grows, "national unity" will start to crack. And this growing class anger will intersect with the antiwar movement.

Given the speed with which the government and media began beating the war drums after the September 11 attacks, the degree of antiwar opposition that developed was impressive. The size of vigils, demonstrations, and meetings attempting to organize an antiwar opposition in the first week after the attacks rivaled the size of similar activities months into the build up to the Gulf War. This quick start owed to the fact that many of these initial efforts grew out of networks of activists already mobilized in the global justice movement.

The initial impulse in this opposition centered on calls to mourn the victims of September 11 and for peace. As it became clear that the government would be launching a war, this opposition had to face harder questions. Many in this new movement didn’t have the answers.

One of the main casualties on the left was the global justice movement. Despite the movement’s energy and growing influence before September 11, it did not have a clear understanding of the connection between the U.S. and Western trade and economic policies it condemned and U.S. imperialism. To be sure, many of the global justice activists who jumped into antiwar activity intuitively understood the connection. But many others remained confused and immobilized. And while some of the movement’s leaders denounced the war, others have ignored the war or refused to mobilize against it.

Even before the International Monetary Fund and World Bank decided to call off their September 28—30 meeting in Washington, D.C., elements of the Seattle coalition had already pulled out from the planned protests. In a gesture to national unity and under pressure to call off protest "in respect for the dead" the AFL-CIO withdrew. Subsequently the AFL-CIO announced its support for the war. The bosses and the administration rewarded the AFL-CIO’s patriotism with layoffs and an airline bailout bill that stiffed workers.

Support for the war came from other parts of the left as well.

"There is a real threat of further attacks, so…action designed to hunt down members of the terrorist network and those in the Taliban government who collaborate with it is appropriate," the Nation editorialized on October 29. Not content to leave the building of the case for war to George Bush, the Nation has decided to campaign for a "just war" in Afghanistan.

"I have never since my childhood supported a shooting war in which the United States was involved, although in retrospect I think the NATO war in Kosovo achieved beneficial results," wrote Richard Falk in the Nation’s lead article.

The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II. But the justice of the cause and of the limited ends is in danger of being negated by the injustice of improper means and excessive ends.

The perpetrators of the September 11 attack cannot be reliably neutralized by nonviolent or diplomatic means; a response that includes military action is essential to diminish the threat of repetition, to inflict punishment and to restore a sense of security at home and abroad.

One could quote dozens of similar pro-war statements from leading liberals. With their guides in the Democratic Party fully behind the war effort, all that’s left for them is to devise the elegant legal and literary justifications.

A few questions are in order. First, why do the liberals accept the Bush government’s identification of the culprits and the solution? The public evidence against Osama Bin Laden the U.S. and British governments released wouldn’t be enough to convict him in a trial. Even if bin Laden and al Qaeda are behind the attacks, does anyone seriously believe the Bush administration will consult Professor Falk to make sure it won’t employ any "improper means" or seek "excessive ends?"

The notion of "justice" has been central to much of the antiwar organizing so far. This is understandable, as people around the world reacted with revulsion to the September 11 attacks. Most antiwar meetings and committees have felt pressure to concede that "something has to be done" to bring the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks to justice.

The problem comes in with the solutions that an antiwar movement can pose. Unfortunately, it doesn’t set the terms under which "justice" will be served. There is no supranational, and impartial, court or police force that can arrest and try the September 11 terrorists.

What’s more, any judgment based on the notion that no one should get away with killing innocent civilians would have to place the September 11 perpetrators in the rear of the dock, behind the likes of Henry Kissinger–responsible for killing millions in Southeast Asia–or Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila. Or every U.S. president and British prime minister who has overseen the murder through sanctions of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis since 1990.

The only "solution" on offer is the one Bush, Blair, Putin, and the rest are offering"–war "against terrorism." That’s why people like Falk, who try to invent a rationale for a "just war," end up providing "critical support" for Operation Enduring Freedom. And that’s not to mention those like Nation writer Christopher Hitchens, who openly cheer on the U.S. war machine.

So any serious antiwar movement has to proceed from the starting point that it must oppose this war–not offer up suggestions to Bush and Co. about how to fight it more cleanly. Anyone concerned with ending terrorism should be concerned with ending the terrorism of the U.S. and its allies raining destruction on one of the poorest countries on earth. And if we want to eliminate the conditions that cause people to volunteer as suicide bombers, there is much to do: demand a cut-off of aid to Israel; pull U.S. troops out of the Persian Gulf region; end the sanctions on Iraq; abolish the Third World debt.

The antiwar opposition also needs to educate itself on Washington’s real aims in the war on terrorism. In this regard, the antiwar movement has shown itself to be thirsty for ideas and explanations. The Los Angeles Times reported October 28 that many veteran peace activists and experts on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy find "their dance cards full" with numerous invitations to teach-ins and discussions, particularly on college campuses. This political education is a crucial building block for an antiwar movement. Just as sections of the global justice movement realized that they had to discuss political ideas and organization rather than simply tactics, the antiwar movement will be stronger when it develops a clearer understanding of this war and its aims.

This issue of the International Socialist Review includes many articles that attempt to answer some of the crucial questions facing the antiwar opposition today. We will publish similar articles in future issues. Understanding the truth of this war–that it is an imperial venture to enforce Washington’s interests around the world–will help us to build opposition to it. For this task, the politics of revolutionary socialism are as relevant after September 11 as they were before September 11.

However strong the right and the pro-war forces appear today, they can be taken on. We have to be able to answer key questions about this war so that we can convince the vast majority of ordinary people who are currently unsure or even mildly pro-war that they must oppose this war. We reject the idea that the antiwar activists should consider themselves an elite who "get it" amidst millions of brainwashed militarists.

Ordinary people who are losing their jobs and incomes are being told that they’re out of luck now that billions must be spent on the Pentagon. In the "antiterrorism" legislation the Congress passed in October and the climate of heightened security around the country, all of us have lost crucial civil rights. And do most people really want to live in a society where Arabs and Muslims"–or people who look like them–are constantly scapegoated and victimized?

Many more ordinary people can be won to our side, because this war is not in their interests.

WITHIN MINUTES of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, the attacks began. From the thousands of telephone threats called in to mosques, Muslim community centers, and schools, to hundreds of actual physical attacks, anyone who "looked" or "sounded" Arab or Muslim was a target for harassment, intimidation, or physical attack.

Since September 11, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has documented more than 700 reports of hate crimes nationwide, six of them resulting in death. In Mesa, Arizona, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a 49-year-old Sikh, was shot to death outside his gas station–no doubt because he wore a turban. In San Gabriel, California, an Egyptian was gunned down in his import shop. In Fresno, California, four teenagers shot Abdo Ali Ahmed, a 51-year-old convenience-store owner who had migrated to the U.S. more than 30 years ago and had eight children, to death.

Many more acts of violence have taken place, including the shooting of worshippers at a Seattle mosque on September 13, the arson of a Pakistani restaurant in Salt Lake City, and numerous beatings and physical attacks all around the country.

In addition to the violent attacks, there have been countless acts of discrimination against Arabs and Muslims–as in the case of Mohammad Mansour, an Iraqi immigrant who was told he could no longer be a lunchroom volunteer at his children’s elementary school. Arab and Muslim passengers at airports across the nation have been harassed, interrogated, and, in some cases, prevented from boarding airplanes due to the "fear" of crew and other passengers. At least two flights, one Northwest and one United, were delayed because the crews and other passengers refused to take off before Arab travelers were removed from the planes.

Particularly at airports, but certainly on a broader scale, racial profiling has been swiftly rehabilitated in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Commentators on the left and right, while wringing their hands, claim that the country has no choice but to place higher suspicion on those who "look" Arab or Muslim.

"There is an empirically responsible way of generating profiling. It has to be based on good intelligence collection and analytical capabilities," says Richard Bloom, director of terrorism, intelligence, and security studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

Michael Kinsley, a liberal commentator, perversely compares racial profiling to affirmative action–though they have opposite purposes. He asks, "Are we really supposed to ignore the one identifiable fact we know about them?" referring to means of locating terrorists–ignoring the obvious fact that Caucasian men weren’t profiled after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter, does these two one better. In a column in the Wall Street Journal titled "Profiles encouraged: Under the circumstances, we must be wary of young Arab men," she writes of calling the FBI to report two "mideastern looking men" that she sees videotaping a building on the street. She eventually realizes that "we know the profile of the bad guys–young, male, and from the Arab Mideast," and she "was relieved at the story of the plane passengers a few weeks ago who refused to board if some Mideastern looking guys were allowed to board."

So when George Bush throws a couple of lines about tolerance into his speeches and tells school kids that we shouldn’t discriminate–then rants that he wants Osama bin Laden "dead or alive"–it rings hollow.

As the ISR went to press, the U.S. had detained more than 1,000 people since September 11–and not one had been charged in the World Trade Center or Pentagon attacks. Officials had offered no public evidence of any detainee’s involvement in the plot or released any information about the status of their cases or the names of their attorneys. Four hundred of those detained had been cleared of any terrorist involvement by authorities but remained in custody for anything from immigration to traffic violations.

The FBI, frustrated in its attempts to get information from a few of those detained, has admitted it may resort to truth serum to get them to talk, or even to extraditing them to countries that employ harsher interrogation methods than the United States.

The U.S. is using the antiterrorism crusade to increase the surveillance authority of government agencies. On October 26, Bush signed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing the Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act into law. Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Washington National Office says, "Included in the bill are provisions that would allow for the mistreatment of immigrants, the suppression of dissent and the investigation and surveillance of wholly innocent Americans."

The legislation grants sweeping new powers to the FBI, CIA, and others, using a "secret court""–the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court–as the governing authority for issuing warrants. Lest one think that this court might provide a badly needed check on FBI powers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that "about the only thing known publicly about the seven-member panel created in 1978 that sits secretly in the basement of the Justice Department is that it has never rejected an FBI request for a secret warrant."

Along with granting "roving wiretaps"–the ability to conduct electronic surveillance wherever a person goes, rather than in a specific location–the bill allows the following:

John Nichols notes in the Nation magazine that the legislation may make the payment of membership dues to political organizations a deportable offense. He also points out that it gives the attorney general and the secretary of state the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and to block any noncitizen who belongs to those groups from entering the country.

According to writer and activist Marty Jezer:

The most dangerous part of the bill is Section 803 of the Senate Bill which creates a new crime, that of "domestic terrorism." Domestic terrorism is defined vaguely as to include the intention to "intimidate or coerce a civilian population" and to "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion." Any political demonstration can be deemed coercive and intimidating, as can speech or writing. A demonstrator (or an undercover police agent) who throws a rock or damages property (already illegal under existing law) could provide the government with the pretext to charge demonstrators with an act of terrorism. Moreover, any person who provides assistance to the demonstrators would also be liable for prosecution as a terrorist. The provisions regarding "domestic terrorism" are not meant to protect the country from real terrorists. They are, instead, an intimidating and coercive threat to free speech and public assembly.

THE U.S. labor movement was quick to endorse military action following the September 11 attacks. But soon afterward, unions were themselves the target of a concentrated attack. From tax breaks for corporations and the rich to mass layoffs and the abandonment of postal workers to anthrax, the war has already exposed the deep class divisions in the United States.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney voiced support for military action immediately following the September 11 attacks. Six weeks later, he wrote a Washington Post op-ed column exposing the hypocrisy of those who praise workers’ roles in recovery and relief efforts while forcing them to pay the price for the crisis.

"For the past month, everybody in America has been a worker wannabe," he wrote. "The painful irony is that the homage our nation pays is just lip service. While we’ve been singing the praises of workers, Congress is about the business of severing their lifelines."

Not only did Congress repeatedly block $2.5 billion in additional unemployment and medical benefits to laid-off airline and aerospace workers, but the House pushed through Corporate America’s wish list packaged as an "economic stimulus bill."

"Apart from its economic flaws, the measure is flat-out unfair," the New York Times editorial admitted. "Of the $54 billion in accelerated tax cuts, every penny would go to the top 30 percent of taxpayers. Half would go to the top 5 percent. Eighty percent of the benefits from the capital gains tax cuts would go to the top 2 percent of households."

IBM, for example, would get $1.4 billion under the repeal of the alternative minimum tax; General Motors would net $833,000; General Electric, $671,000.

By contrast, only $2.3 billion of the $100 billion in the White House’s plan would go to extended benefits for unemployed workers–if congressional Republicans allow it to become law, that is. And, as Sweeney pointed out, much of that money would come from raiding funds originally intended for health insurance for poor children.

Even if that aid goes through, federal and state labor laws restrict eligibility for unemployment compensation to just 39 percent of all employees. What is more, the recession is rapidly deepening, with corporations across the board seizing the war crisis to justify deep restructuring. Airlines topped the list.

"The [airline] industry is potentially headed toward its largest loss year ever, and there is absolutely no evidence of fundamental improvement on the horizon," said Samuel Buttrick, an analyst at the investment firm UBS Warburg–the day before the September 11 air attacks. US Airways, for example, was already talking of bankruptcy. And American Airlines, after promising to avoid layoffs in its takeover of TWA, cut 20,000 jobs in the wake of the attacks.

As International Socialist Review went to press, a new wave of layoffs was announced from such leading companies as phone giant SBC, Goodrich, Sears, copper giant Phelps Dodge, and Kodak. The number of claims for unemployment benefits hit 504,000, the highest figure in nine years, with unemployment reaching 4.9 percent, well above the 3.9 percent recorded in early 2000.

Those who claim that the war will boost the U.S. economy should take a closer look at history. During the First and Second World Wars, the government reined in anti-union employers, grudgingly accepted union organizing, established war labor boards to hammer out agreements on wages and prices, and sharply raised taxes on businesses and the wealthy. The total war mobilization of the 1940s–based the need to produce enormous quantities of ships, tanks, planes, and guns and to field massive armies–reduced unemployment to practically nothing.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War provided an economic prop for the long boom and an era of "partnership" between what used to be called Big Business and Big Labor. A steady increase in working-class living standards and the expansion of the welfare state helped to ensure social peace and to sustain working-class support for the war in Vietnam for years under both Democratic (Kennedy and Johnson) and Republican (Nixon) administrations. The relative dominance of the U.S. economy meant that employers were willing to make some concessions–although never without a fight.

Eventually, rank-and-file rebellion and the Black Power movement pushed the United Auto Workers (UAW) and other unions into opposition to the war, though longtime AFL-CIO President George Meaney remained a hawk on Vietnam to the bitter end. The more conservative building trade unions backed him in this, culminating in the infamous "hard hat" demonstrations that targeted antiwar protesters. With the exception of some small socialist organizations, the anti—Vietnam War movement itself made little effort to relate to the working class.

A quarter of a century later, the situation is very different. A more competitive world economy compelled U.S. employers to undertake an offensive from the Carter through the Clinton administrations. As a result, powerful unions such as the UAW and the United Steelworkers of America have been cut in half.

However, class polarization has led to a growth in working-class consciousness and pro-union sentiment. Strikes in recent years at big companies such as UPS and Verizon have shown that labor can fight and win. In addition, organized labor has developed real, if uneven, relationships with a new left based in the movement against corporate globalization.

In the months before the "war on terrorism," Bush approached labor with a good cop/bad cop routine. First, he pushed a series of attacks–scrapping health and safety regulations, threatening to ban airline strikes, pushing through a tax break for the rich. Next came the offer of collaboration. With the recession beginning to bite and membership declining, labor accepted the offer. The Teamsters and the AFL-CIO announced support for Alaska oil drilling, while the UAW backed the Big Three automakers’ successful bid to block improvements of SUV fuel-efficiency standards. International Association of Machinists (IAM) president Thomas Buffenbarger embraced Bush’s national missile defense plan, producing a special union magazine and video, apparently in the hope that layoffs in the Boeing commercial airline division would be counteracted by new defense industry jobs to build the missile shield.

The overwhelming support for the war by labor leaders seemed at first to indicate another round of collaboration with Bush. Most vociferous was Buffenbarger, who declared that IAM members "will be building the F-15, F-16, F-18 and F-22’s that will impose a new reality on those who have dared attack us. For it is not simply justice we seek. It is vengeance, pure and complete."

The reward for this patriotism, however, was the layoff of 30,000 workers in Boeing’s commercial airline group–an acceleration of the downsizing plan that Boeing had been pursuing for years. The picture is similar in other industries. Already, auto industry analysts on Wall Street are demanding that the Big Three automakers use the crisis to reopen contracts with the UAW in order to close plants.

In short, we will not see a replay of the wartime boom economies of the past century. And, despite Bush’s maneuvers, there won’t be much room for labor in the Republican White House. Half a century ago, the employers had to contend with a working class that was one-third unionized–with a far higher percentage than that in heavy industry. With fewer than one-tenth of private-sector workers in unions today, employers don’t feel the pressure to make concessions to labor. Any "partnership" will be on highly unequal terms. What is more, the "war on terrorism" won’t provide anything like the full employment of the 1940s war economy, when auto factories, for example, ceased to produce cars in favor of tanks and planes.

The employers and their allies in Washington have, on the contrary, repackaged their anti-union, anti-labor program as patriotism–and are pushing it harder than ever. As House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) put it: "The model of thought here, and quite frankly, the model of thought that says we need to go out and extend unemployment benefits and health insurance benefits and so forth, is not one that is commensurate with the American spirit here."

For his part, Bush used the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit to link his war in Afghanistan to his push for fast-track trade negotiating authority. He asserted the U.S. commitment to "opening the doors of trade and opportunity and therefore [improving] the lives of its citizens, versus the terror network, which has a dark view, an oppressive view, and no regard for human life." Besides a new push on trade, employers are certain to try to use the new rollback of civil liberties to restrict union rights.

Thus for all of the popular backing for the war at its beginning, the dynamics of recession and the employers’ offensive will undermine working-class support for the war. Instead of full employment, there will be mass layoffs and rising unemployment. In the place of the 90 percent income tax rate on the superrich seen in the 1940s, we will see a giveaway of tens of billions to the wealthy. Rather than an expansion of welfare, there will be further cuts in the remnants of the social safety net, which could threaten millions of workers with hunger and homelessness on a scale unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, even if the recession itself is much less severe.

Already, the contradictions of this war have compelled Sweeney to make statements that would have been unimaginable from Meaney in wartime. And some important groups of workers–from state employees in Minnesota to tank makers at General Dynamics plants in Michigan and Ohio–have shown the courage to strike to defend their interests.

All of this will strengthen our ability to make the case that this war is not in the interest of working people in the U.S.–and that organized labor should oppose it. Already, organizations of union officials and members against the war have been established in San Francisco and New York on a scale that took several years to achieve during the Vietnam War.

By exacerbating the already enormous class polarization in the U.S., a war that is popular today can contribute to radicalization on a much bigger scale tomorrow–and with roots in the organized working class.

"Get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must."

This was not a pronouncement by Osama bin Laden, but by Sen. John McCain in an article which ran in the Wall Street Journal exhorting the White House to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

McCain’s language and logic is identical to that used in the Vietnam War: "We cannot allow the Taliban safe refuge among the civilian population. We must destroy them, wherever they hide. That will surely increase the terrible danger facing noncombatants, a regrettable but necessary fact of war."

So, in its war against terrorism, a leading and respectable member of congress proposes that indiscriminate killing of civilians in the pursuit of a political and military goal is fully justified.

The McCains of Washington are basically saying: terror conducted by "our" side is acceptable, but "their" terror is evil and morally bankrupt.

The grounds upon which the U.S. fights and justifies this war is therefore the purest hypocrisy.

"The ruling class forces its ends upon society," wrote Russian revolutionary Trotsky, "and habituates it to considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality."

Thus the U.S. labels as terrorism only those terrorist acts which contradict its own interests. When terrorism suits its interests, it is no longer terrorism. It pours indignant scorn upon the perpetrators of September 11 and the al Qaeda network, but calls extreme right-wing contra death squads in Nicaragua "freedom fighters," as it once called Osama bin Laden and his Afghan fighters when they were fighting the Russians.

According to their morality, the bombing of the two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 were horrible atrocities, but the cruise missile strikes that destroyed Sudan’s capacity to manufacture needed antibiotics was justified.

The real practical difference between U.S. violence and the terrorism it decries is that its own terror is far more devastating than any that could be unleashed by the most far-flung network.

The revolutionary socialist movement has consistently opposed the methods of individual terrorism. "Social Democracy," wrote Trotsky, "has nothing in common with those bought-and-paid-for moralists who, in response to any terrorist act, make solemn declarations about the ‘absolute value’ of human life. These are the same people who, on other occasions, in the name of other absolute values–for example, the nation’s honor or the monarch’s prestige–are ready to shove millions of people into the hell of war."

As socialists, we must first point out the hypocrisy of Bush and his like, who think nothing of blockading Iraq and starving millions of Iraqi children or bombing thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and driving millions of them into refugee camps where they will freeze and starve, and then rant about how "evil" must be stopped.

Israel plays the same game. It denounces as "terrorism" all acts of resistance against its occupation of Palestinian land, and justifies its own systematic program of bulldozing, bombings and assassinations in the West Bank and Gaza as fighting "terrorism."

We therefore make a distinction between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed. "A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains," wrote Trotsky, "and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains–let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality."

We cannot share in Israeli leaders’ tears over the death of a right-wing extremist. Our attitude toward those who assassinated Rechavam Ze’evi, the former general, Tourism minister and leader of a far-right party that advocated the forced removal of all Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, is one of sympathy. Their actions were motivated by a desire to see an end to Israel’s terrorist occupation of Palestinian land.

That does not mean that Marxists advocate individual acts of terror as an effective means of ending oppression. Socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class, not the actions of small minorities. Therefore the methods appropriate to fighting for workers’ power is the collective mass action of the working class, organized democratically. Mass action builds the solidarity and fighting confidence of workers, whereas terrorism weakens it.

"In our eyes," Trotsky wrote, "individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission.

The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organization and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.

What, then, are we to make of the September 11 attacks? First of all, they were not terrorist acts even in the sense described by Trotsky above–misguided efforts by the oppressed to strike a blow against their oppressor. The targets were apparently chosen to kill massive numbers of innocent people. If the perpetrators were motivated by a hatred of U.S. policy in the Middle East (and this hasn’t been proven), the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks did not even target those responsible for America’s foreign policy. They targeted thousands of ordinary workers, immigrants and Muslims, many of whom are also victims of the corporate and military policy of the U.S. government. Moreover, rather than striking a blow against U.S. policies abroad, the attacks have strengthened them by handing Bush and Co. the green light to crack down on dissent at home and pursue their military agenda abroad unhindered. In this sense, September 11 was a profoundly reactionary act. The methods employed on September 11 were methods more common to Colombian fascist paramilitaries or right wing Cuban terrorists that the CIA trains and the U.S. "harbors."

But the horror of September 11 is no justification for the state-sponsored terrorism of the United States. The key issue today is the mass terror raining down in the form of "bunker busters" and cluster bombs over Afghanistan that are adding to the list of widows and orphans of September 11. We must stand against that terror, and with the people of Afghanistan who deserve the right to determine their own future.

IN1997, the U.S. government was forced to admit that it has run a training camp for Latin American dictators and death squad leaders for more than 50 years at the School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, in Columbus Georgia. SOA’s curriculum"–including torture tactics, anti-civilian warfare techniques, and mass terror methods"–has since been denounced in the pages of the New York Times and other major U.S. newspapers. Congress changed the school’s name, but its purpose remained.

Long-time opponents of U.S.-backed terrorism in a group called SOA Watch denounce U.S. hypocrisy. In a statement on the September 11 bombing attacks:

The recognition that some of the alleged perpetrators of these crimes were recipients of military training by U.S. forces or with U.S. aid grieves us deeply. This type of military training is embodied by the SOA.

During this time, we are mindful of our sisters and brothers in Latin America. We have seen the economic policies of the U.S.-backed World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank force people into abject poverty and an inescapable cycle of oppression. These policies are largely enforced by the 60,000 Latin American soldiers trained at the SOA, many of whom have received extensive training in civilian-targeted warfare….

As George W. Bush calls for an all-out war against "Terrorism," we wonder why he hasn’t closed the SOA, where millions of taxpayer dollars are being used to fund a training school for terrorists in our own backyard.

SOA Watch founding member, Father Roy Bourgeois, is currently on a speaking tour to mobilize antiwar activists to come to the protest this year, November 16-18, and throw light on America’s prominent role in terrorist training.

This is an enormously important protest for those opposed to the U.S. government’s war in Afghanistan. A massive march that exposes the hypocrisy of Bush’s condemnation of terror while training terrorists would be an important step in the fight against this war.

Ahmed Shawki, Lance Selfa, Paul D’Amato, Lee Sustar, Julie Fain and Sherry Wolf contributed to these editorials.