Organise To:

Stop The Countdown To War

WITH A mixture of bribery and bullying, the United States and Britain will spend the next few days trying to organise a majority in the United Nations Security Council for a war against Iraq.

Dave Nellist, Socialist Party councillor Coventry and Stop the War Coalition steering committee

The weapons inspectors are about to report again – but with 12 empty weapons shells and a few missiles with ‘go-faster stripes’, they haven’t yet delivered anything useful to justify Bush’s war timetable.

So as the troop build-up in the Middle East accelerates, so does the international pressure from millions of ordinary people determined to stop Bush and Blair’s war for oil.

The millions who demonstrated on 15 February – in 600 towns and cities in 60 countries across the globe – are trying to stamp their authority on events. Those millions are the real international community.

But as powerful a message as the anti-war war demonstrations were, can they alone stop this war?

American imperialism, with the support of New Labour, is wedded to a course of war designed to show any country seeking to deviate from the “American way” that it will face “serious consequences”. Their strategy is to capture and dominate key regional resources, particularly oil, defending the interests of a few giant multinationals, corporations and banks.

Their tools are military and economic, but also the domination of most of the media, whose central message is that the present economic and political system is the best way of organising society’s resources.

International capitalism is highly organised – linked by a thousand threads.

To oppose the start of war, or to bring a war once started to an earlier end, requires comparable organisation – not merely the raw power of numbers – but a worked out strategy and a clear vision.

It also requires a sustained and coordinated campaign of mass, civil disobedience, including industrial action as is now being discussed in trade unions up and down the country and internationally.

The Socialist Party is working, as part of the Stop the War Coalition, to build a mass, democratic anti-war movement, linking hundreds of local groups in schools, colleges, workplaces and communities.

We have also worked for several years to spread support for the idea of the need for a new, mass party of the working class, rooted in the trade unions and working class communities across the country, capable of popularising a socialist alternative to war and terror endemic in a capitalist system. That task is becoming ever more urgent. Join us.