A WORLD TO WIN    #16   (1991)

To the People of the Middle East and Arab World

Drown the U.S. Invaders in a Sea of People's War!

By the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement

Western drums of war have reached a deafening roar. Backed by a massive lineup of camouflage uniforms and tanks "made in USA" crawling through the Saudi desert, British, French, U.S. and other Western warships are choking the Gulf waters, while helicopters, fighter planes and stealth bombers darken the sky like a deadly swarm of locusts. The world's imperialist powers, headed up by the biggest criminals in the history of humanity -- the U.S.A. -- may have already unleashed this unprecedented firepower against you, the peoples of the Middle East, by the time you read this call. There can only be one answer to their outrageous crimes: rise up and defeat them!

To whatever fools they can convince, these puffed-up liars say they are teaching the Iraqis a lesson, they are fighting terrorism, thwarting new Hitlers, stopping nuclear weapons, restoring sovereigns to their rightful thrones. Well, aggression is the United States' last name -- they are the ones who have always squeezed and trampled other peoples and nations, who invaded Panama just last year, and Grenada before that, and in fact who finance and command the Zionist police post in occupied Palestine. The United States of Aggression make Hitler look like a neighbourhood bully, and they are the only ones to have ever committed genocide with nuclear weapons!

No, their war machine is not being cranked up to snatch back a few oil wells stolen out from under Al Sabah's nose in the imperialist-created bank-state they called Kuwait. They are shifting their forces for a long-term military occupation of the Gulf. Today the imperialists must realign and tighten up their guard dog states in the Middle East to forge and protect the "new world order" among bigtime thieves they have declared; they have decided that to achieve this, blood must flow, torrents of blood.

You have always hated and resisted them since they carved up this area of the world into their respective zones of influence and plunder at the end of the Ottoman Empire, first as colonial occupiers and then through the loyal servants they installed to run neo-colonial regimes for them. You have always fought back against them, against the vicious attack dog Israel, which they bred, trained and hired to crush your struggle alongside the reactionary armies of the Arab states. Now with their direct massive military invasion menacing high technology mass slaughter, the imperialists and reactionaries are closing the noose around their own necks, and each step of aggression they take to resolve their crisis draws the noose tighter. They are handing the ropes to you, the masses of the Arab world and the Middle East.

They swagger with big power pride at their piles of steel and sophisticated instruments of death, confident that with all their arsenal, wealth and the momentary consensus of imperialism's rulers worldwide, they are unstoppable, invincible. They are wrong: not only is it possible to beat them, they are doomed. Their overkill Rambo posturing in the Gulf only mirrors the enormity of their crisis. Their system is falling apart and the sickness has no cure: their empire is shaky, nearly every week there is an attempt to topple one of their puppet dictators, their economies and financial markets are on the edge of a precipice. Spiraling unemployment, homelessness and widespread rumbling from the masses at the bottom of society make their home base far from the politically stable headquarters they claim.

Their fundamental problem is that they are divorced from the people and always will be. It is the people in the long run who are powerful, not the reactionaries, and we have a solution for defeating the mighty armies of big exploiters. We will swallow them in revolutionary protracted people's wars, mouthful by mouthful.

The Only Solution: People's War

A people's war of liberation is the only way to devour the imperialist armies, their Zionist attack dogs and the reactionary forces of the Arab regimes. This type of war relies on the masses of people, most importantly the masses of peasants, those who have watched foreign powers in league with big capitalists at the head of the Arab states and feudal landlords rip away their land, ravage the economy and destroy their existence, spit and tread on their national aspirations while preserving the most backward traditions that keep them in chains.

The leader of the Chinese revolution, Mao Tsetung, developed the strategy of protracted people's war which enables revolutionary forces starting out from a weak position to take on a strong enemy by surrounding the cities from the countryside and to finally seize power. By leading a war against imperialism and reaction in a semi-feudal, colonised country to victory for the first time in 1949, Mao showed that in revolutionary war people are the most precious thing, that it is they who are decisive, not weapons. People with inferior weapons can defeat foes with superior ones. Their people's army can grow from small to big through a protracted war. Mobilised to fight a war of resistance, they can lure the enemy's powerful forces in close to them, then encircle and defeat them, by chopping them up piece by piece. As Mao said, the enemy fights his way, and we fight ours.

People's war is not only possible today, as boldly shown by the major advances of the revolutionary war in Peru under the leadership of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), but is needed around the world, urgently needed. The PCP, a participating party in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, started armed struggle ten years ago with a small guerrilla army using homemade weapons like huaraca slings, dynamite and small arms captured from the enemy. Without taking one bullet or weapon from any outside power, they have accelerated their war, consolidated the base areas under their command and grown to the point where they may soon contest for countrywide political power, now barely held together by the reactionary Peruvian state backed by both U.S. and Soviet imperialism. Knowing the Yankees will try to stop them, under the cover of the war on drugs or whatever other excuse, if the imperialists attack the PCP will turn their people's war into a broad anti-imperialist war of resistance, which will help spread revolutionary people's wars into other parts of Latin America.

In the Gulf we can fight such a war if we base ourselves on the revolutionary laws of people's war developed by Mao. We will fight in our own way, because this is how we can win. Our methods have nothing in common with those of the enemy and if we try to copy them or match his strength, weapon for weapon, we will always lose. The people don't need complicated weaponry to start. They will fight on their own land that they know the best, that is their home, in areas where the imperialists are weak and the masses have advantages, where the vast majority of the people can be won to support the revolutionary war.

The enemy will always have bigger armies, high-tech military equipment, refined skills and greater firepower, but we will fight in such a way that these things become an obstacle rather than an advantage for him. He will be like an elephant tramping clumsily and noisily through the mountains, stuck in the desert sands, hungry and thirsty where he is isolated from the people. The imperialists' modern weapons systems, rockets, air power and big troop movements depend on bulky and complex logistics, like the Apache tank-killing helicopters they've brought to the Saudi desert that require 24 hours maintenance for one hour service! For their 500,0000 troops they must fly in 4 million litres of water a day! They spend millions to recreate their artificial Western environment to make their elaborate armaments work and to be able to withstand the desert heat. But the masses know how to move through this terrain, how to eat and survive because this grueling existence is their daily life. Who needs imported cushions when the people have slept on date palm leaves for centuries?

We have the key to victory that the enemy will never possess: the masses of people. Relying on the ingenuity of the masses, especially the youth of the working class and the poor peasants, the people's armed forces can scatter the enemy's units, impair their logistics systems, develop "low-tech" to counter their high-tech as the Vietnamese learned to do. Our way of fighting will render their conventional type of warfare futile, however brutal it may be, and will turn their strength into weakness.

Throughout the Middle East and the Arab world millions of people are hoping that the Iraqi regime will deal serious blows to U.S. imperialism if it attacks, and the revolutionary communists completely understand these sentiments. But the hopes of the people are likely to be dashed once again.

The big armies of the Arab states like Saddam Hussein's, with his heavy artillery and Western training, will never win against imperialism, even if they try. The war rooms in Washington, Paris, London and Moscow know everything about his army up to and including his battle plans, because their military experts created it: he will fight just as they have taught him; they know what cards he holds and how he will play them. Hussein depends upon them for food and supplies. Over the past several years of his repressive rule, he burned down the wheat farms and razed the fruit trees of the Kurds, displacing hundreds of thousands of Kurdish peasants, destroying their villages and essentially ruining farming in that part of Iraq, instead of relying on them and building up agriculture. Who sold him his chemical gas to massacre thousands of Kurdish people right inside Iraq fighting righteously for their land and national aspirations if not the West? Hussein's big army with modern weapons looks to some like it can inflict damage on the invaders, but the problem is that he will never fight a thoroughgoing war against them because the interests of the exploiting classes he represents ultimately depend upon coming to terms with imperialism. He cannot represent the interests of the oppressed and their yearning for liberation.

The USA and its friends are preparing to fight a quick war based on air power so they can avoid protracted fighting as much as possible. Their biggest fear is getting tied down in a long drawn-out conflict, as George Bush has said. This is exactly what revolutionary people's wars in the Gulf and the Middle East will do to them, as the determined struggle of the Vietnamese people showed in Indochina when they drove out the modern and powerful Yankee enemy. The longer it goes on, the better for us. They have good reason to dread a protracted war -- not only will they suffer military defeats, but cracks and disagreements will begin to appear in their ranks, their temporary alliances will become strained, sometimes to the breaking point, and at home, people will rapidly awaken and rebel against the atrocities their rulers are carrying out abroad.

They have set up guardposts with armies throughout the Arab world and the Middle East, but everywhere they face hostile masses they have exploited and oppressed. We will fight them in as many places as possible, not on just one front where they have chosen to attack. The revolutionaries must force them to spread their forces out thin, drawing them in amongst the people as deep as possible. People's war can also be launched in those places where the U.S. is not now directly invading, to overthrow the reactionary states that are the watchdogs of imperialist interests. You long to combat the Zionists and imperialists face to face? Then why not seize hold of their crisis in the Gulf to step up the struggle at home, striking at these states, and this will be a major blow to their masters' forces tied down over in the Gulf.

Look at the powderkeg of Egypt, for example, which is seething with turmoil and has a huge rural population. Here revolutionaries can mobilise the masses to go directly up against Mubarak's reactionary regime, which also must be overthrown, and the Zionists will come running to help him, lured out of their tiny military base of Israel. This will give the Palestinians a freer hand to turn their intifada into a real people's war, which is essential if it is to deal decisive blows to the enemy. At the same time, the Arab masses will be able to help defeat Israel, which is the enemy of all of the oppressed in the region and not only the responsibility of the Palestinians to rout. Won't the Palestinians, who have faced the Zionist armed forces alone, be overjoyed if other fronts are opened up against imperialism and its allies? And think of the boost to the anti-imperialist struggle in the region if the Camp David kingpin is knocked down. Since they want to dominate the entire region, the imperialists and their Arab and Zionist flanks will spread out their forces in order to try to fight the people wherever they start wars against them in the Middle East and throughout the Arab world. This will only spur the masses to resist more and help people's wars gain momentum.

In the Arab world as in other oppressed nations, the cities are strongholds of the imperialists and their client regimes. In these countries we must centre our war in the countryside, not only because the main force of fighters is there, the peasants, whom the working class must lead, but also because the state apparatus is weaker there. We can make the best use of our methods in the countryside, encircling enemy forces trapped deep in our territory, capturing bases for ourselves and building our army. We will grow food there to become self-sufficient and mobile and we will politically arm the peasants to understand the revolutionary war, so that they can offer invaluable knowledge and means of support, including increasing numbers of soldiers, building up the worker-peasant alliance that is the backbone of the war.

In this way the masses led by the proletariat can carry out a long protracted war that over time allows us to gain on the enemy. Because we are weak, we must build ourselves up, mobilising our own initiative, little by little, through guerrilla warfare. We start small and grow larger, gobbling the enemy bite by bite, seizing arms from him, training more of our own soldiers and developing more extensive and powerful warfare. Gradually we become strong, and become able to fully bring to bear the role of the masses, so that they actively take their destiny in hand to defeat the enemy's armed forces, the key to overthrowing the old political rule and to enable the proletariat and masses to seize power and build a new society.

So the question is, who is going to encircle whom? If we truly rely on the masses, imperialism can't encircle us. Today the Communist Party of Peru is encircling the armed forces backed by Yankee money and expertise, attacking the enemy's lifelines of the imperialist-created cities. Let the "almighty" imperialists try to impose their U.N.-approved embargo on the PCP and people's army in Peru! Who will have trouble filling their stomachs then?

As the PCP is doing today, we will build the political power of the masses in the areas of the Arab countries and the Middle East that the people's army has liberated. We will train fighters from all over, produce our own food, set up new revolutionary political organs and begin to change the old relations among the people. This will provide an example, a taste of the future when the people and society are totally liberated, and we will call upon others to follow. When the enemy comes to try to snatch these bases away from us, the people will surround their forces and destroy them bit by bit.

Our revolutionary method of fighting will be connected to the new democratic revolution against feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism and imperialism as part of the process of building new societies in this part of the world and setting up red base areas for spreading the revolution to other countries. So protracted people's war relying mainly on the masses in the countryside where the enemy's rule is weaker is the key to defeating imperialism: revolutionary-minded workers and intellectuals who understand this must boldly take up the task of mobilising the peasants to fight such a war.

Needed to Guide a Genuine Liberation War:

Uncompromising Revolutionary Leadership

This strategy of people's war for defeating powerful imperialist enemies and liberating the oppressed by relying on the oppressed masses themselves is a Maoist strategy, connected to a whole method, ideology and plan for how to make revolution worldwide, and how to create a new social order without exploitation, wars and national oppression. This science of revolution, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, forged through both bright victories and bitter experience gained through the bloodsoaked uprisings of the downtrodden throughout history, as well as the positive and negative experience in building new revolutionary societies, owes its existence to the birth of the working class, whose liberation is dependent upon the destruction of imperialism and all types of exploitation and oppression. Because of this, it has a distinct advantage over other ideologies of not sharing any common ground with the oppressor. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought is the key to unlocking the future, a key that belongs to the oppressed.

In order to successfully lead a war of liberation, there must be a party, a group of revolutionaries politically and ideologically welded together with the science of MLMTT that systematically infuses the oppressed masses with the vision and method for such a war, and mobilises them to act upon this. Without such a party, people's war cannot be victorious, for class outlooks other than that of the international proletariat will compromise or capitulate along the way. In fact, this has been proved by several decades of just struggle of the Palestinian people.

While arousing the masses to fight against imperialism, Zionism and Arab reaction, the revolutionaries in the Arab countries need to wage determined struggle to form this type of Maoist party that the Arab masses have never had. The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement is already present in several countries of the region. But in most places the task of forging a vanguard party still remains. The situation in the Arab world today pushes this responsibility to the fore more urgently than ever.

Unmask all the Arab Impostors, Traitors and Servants of Imperialism!

Summing up the reasons why previous revolutionary struggles in China had won so little, Mao emphasised their failure to clearly distinguish real enemies from real friends. Under the pressure of crisis and the imperialist war of aggression in the Gulf, the masks are dropping from the sultans, sheiks and presidents one by one, revealing cringing flunkies who rush to line up behind their powerful Western masters to help stabilise the situation, and to suppress and squeeze you.

From your own experience you have seen the role of state presidents dressed in "anti-imperialist" military uniforms who militantly denounce the Yankee and foreign aggressors and strut as zealous opponents of Zionism, in order to better derail and channel the people's struggle, but use their repressive armies to attack you, the masses, and never the real enemies, despite the Arab nationalism with which they embellish their promises and bluster. Other two-bit sovereigns perform their services openly, like the palace regimes of the double-zeros -- the oil sheiks -- or petty kings like Hassan II, whose own cities are on fire.

Look at the hated Camp David capitulators who in exchange for continued imperialist protection have joined the pro-U.S. military lineup against Iraq in order to lend the invasion "Arab" legitimacy, using the Arab League and Arab summit to gain more disciples. They send Egyptian troops to shoot down their Iraqi sisters and brothers. These reactionary dogs have even provided 5000 Egyptian women to be prostitutes of the Yankee troops! The "left-wing" Baathist and Arab "patriot" Hafez Assad of Syria went from serving and depending on the Soviet social imperialists (who used to masquerade as friends of the people), to sending forces to fight alongside the U.S. invaders, and is actively cooperating with Washington's proposals to redraw the regional map in its favour! But why should he who counts on generous handouts from the oil princes' profits to bankroll huge arms deals balk at using these arms against other masses of the Middle East when he stood guard for the Christian Phalangist butchery of Palestinians at Tal al Zataar in Lebanon and massacred thousands of villagers in Syria?

Who has forgotten the 1970 slaughter of the thousands of Palestinian masses and freedom fighters by the Black September king in Jordan, whose future is now squeezed between a righteously furious Palestinian population and the U.S. imperialists who have always buttered his bread? Or what about that "democratic" impostor General Ben Ali of Tunisia, who dyes his hair daily to look younger than Saddam Hussein, but who depends for his survival on petro-dollars from Al Saoud and injections from the French and U.S. imperialists? His contribution is to feign opposition to the Arab-imperialist alliance -- he spouts today's fashionable lies that U.N. embargoes and votes have some "legal" mandate to justify imperialist bullying in order to blunt the masses' fury, while setting loose his police to attack their demonstrations against the war.

Why do these sultans, kings and petro-dollar or "patriot" presidents always make deals and compromises, selling the legitimate national aspirations of the people out? These political and religious chieftains are rooted in the reactionary classes that stand to gain from imperialism's plunder and exploitation of their countries and masses. They do their part by protecting this racket: the whole state machinery and backwardness of semi-colonial society work to serve imperialist interests, from selling off the national resources, to allowing a completely lopsided economy to develop, to the most important of all -- consolidating political power over the masses of people.

Whether these guard dog palace regimes show their teeth, or whether they pretend they are the agents of sweeping social change and "democratic openings" touted in Jordan, Algeria and Tunisia of late, their job is to keep you, the masses of this part of the world, fooled, passive and suppressed, and to give the imperialist sharks a freer hand. Besides loading up their Western and petrol-financed bullets at you, they use other powerful weapons like dividing the people by nationality, reinforcing reactionary "traditions" that keep women silent and subservient to men, and fanning narrow nationalist and religious sentiments and old feudal ideas, all to tighten their hold on you and to maintain some kind of stability.

Do we need any more experience with reactionary puppets and impostors?! No! We must tear off all the masks and step up the struggle against imperialism and against all its representatives and local enforcers!

Nor can the oppressed masses look to the obscurantist Islamic forces for salvation or liberation. Ten years of Islamic "revolution" in Iran have exposed the opportunist hangmen crouching behind this ugly and backward ideology to pervert the masses' nationalist and anti-imperialist aspirations while drowning their hopes in blood and tightening the web of collaboration with the imperialist powers, East and West.

Soviet Social Imperialist Snakes

The Soviet imperialists and their client states in the Arab world spread the poisonous idea that the Yankees and Zionists couldn't be defeated unless the people depended on Soviet aid. They trained Palestinian cadre in conventional warfare and pushed a strategy of large armies and heavy weaponry which has proven not to work: their goal was never to "assist" the overthrow of the reactionary state of Israel or wage a genuine war of liberation, but to disarm the anti-imperialist masses, using them as leverage in their rivalry with their Western counterparts. In fact the Soviet imperialists have always supported Israel's "right to exist", settling large numbers of Soviet Jews there, ready and trained to go into the Zionist armed forces, while at the same time buying off some Palestinians who opposed their U.S. imperialist rivals and financing a few client states of their own as rear bases, such as Assad of Syria. If they have replaced their mask with fangs to gang up on Iraq, this is in order to pursue their imperialist interests under the new conditions of "detente".

The Masses of People, Not Oil, are the Greatest Resource

The way you fight itself reveals what kind of society you aspire to: we of the oppressed classes led by the proletariat fight differently from other armies like Saddam Hussein's claiming to oppose imperialism, not only because we have the only strategy that can mobilise the masses to win, but because our goals are also different: we want to achieve a society that destroys the semi-feudal and semi-colonial economy as well as the political and cultural scaffolding that keeps this vicious system in place. We are not interested in sacrificing our sisters and brothers in heroic struggle only to persuade the imperialist powers to let some new overseers govern these societies and once again be reduced to misery and begging for life support from them or for cancellation of some "debts" (to them, of course) if we sign up on their oil industry payrolls.

Seizing the oil in order to use it against imperialism, is as useless as it is impossible. Oil is not a treasure, but a curse on the people of the Gulf. Only the imperialist system makes oil into a source of wealth and major club in world politics and it is this very system we must raze to the ground. When the proletariat and the masses seize power, they cannot build a society based on oil, for this will lead directly to a lopsided and crippled economy, back into depending on imperialism's grip, and these gangsters will again use it as a weapon against us.

In the Middle East and Arab states you have seen the people's basic interests sacrificed by rulers who are addicted to the few riches imperialism can sprinkle on them, like Saddam Hussein, who can only provide 20% of the country's food needs. In oil-dependent Algeria, which is still heavily rural, 95% of the national budget hangs in the balance of world oil prices, while the people must pay more for food and adjust to continually tougher austerity measures to keep the country afloat.

We must and will bring forward our own revolutionary leaders who refuse to share any ground with imperialism and its twisted man-eating view of human society, leaders who consider the people, not oil, the hope for the future.

Instead of taking it over, the new revolutionary society must do away with the imperialist-built foundation of the economy and develop in its place a new economy based on agriculture with industry as the leading factor in order to produce the basic means of livelihood for the masses to become self-sufficient. It is the masses of people, not oil, who are the greatest resource and whose creative genius we must rely upon to change the world. They can produce food and build industries for their own well-being, rather than slave in the oil fields to try to gamble in a game of oil markets that is already won by the imperialists. We don't need a society where oil finances a few big cities with modern high-rises and supermarkets stocked with imported luxuries for the privileged classes while the peasantry is ruined and growing numbers of the masses crowd into sprawling urban slums.

The working class and its party will lead the new democratic revolution as demonstrated by Mao, by smashing the old semi-feudal and semi-colonial relations, carrying out an agrarian revolution based upon the slogan "land to the tiller" and breaking away from imperialism's economic stranglehold. This is the necessary first stage to clear the way for socialist revolution and in order for the oppressed masses to become masters of their own destiny. Then the working class will unite the peasant masses to develop step-by-step new socialist forms of constructing a national economy, not based on exploitation, feudalism and imperialist dependency, but on self-sufficiency and cooperation. We will never lose sight of our goal of communism, where social classes have been finally eliminated for good, where one section of the people is not pitted against another with men oppressing women or one nationality dominating another. Sisters will be equal to brothers in every sphere, and the basis for Arabs dominating Kurds, Blacks or Berbers, for Persians lording it over Arabs and Kurds, or for the grey cloud of Turkish chauvinism to hang over other nationalities will be overthrown, along with all of these repulsive social relations and the imperialist and feudal oppressors that spawn them!

This is a future worth fighting and dying for -- it is the future our movement, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, stands for.

Only Proletarian Internationalism Can Overpower Imperialism's Divisions

Waging a people's war of liberation by relying on the masses of peasants to encircle the imperialists, front by front, is a strategy that the oppressed can apply in all the nations imperialism dominates. We are internationalists because we want to liberate the whole world, wipe imperialism from the face of the earth and move on to a higher form of society with the conscious labouring masses at the helm. But we also know that because we have this common enemy, we must rally the strength of our forces or we cannot win.

In the Middle East and Arab world, if our strategy is not also internationalist, relying on and mutually supporting the people's wars of all the masses of the region -- the Arabs, Kurds, peoples in Iran and Turkey, Algeria, Afghanistan, etc. -- we will not be able to generalise our war against imperialism and Zionism, spread their forces out thin, and turn them into kefta meat, battalion by battalion. However it can be successful if it is guided by the "nothing to lose and a world to win" outlook of the international proletariat.

Beginning people's war in the Arab world will truly be like a spark setting off a prairie fire, as Mao said. And if, for example, the NATO-prop country of Turkey opens up a flank of the imperialists' war by attacking from the North, this will inevitably be a great impetus for the people's revolutionary struggle inside Turkey.

Seize Hold of the Imperialists' Weakness

to Prepare their Downfall