Reds Told to Expand, Launch More Attacks

For more than five years, the Bush regime has failed to defeat the Al Qaeda, which it has accused of responsibility for 9/11. Instead, it has concentrated its war of aggression on Iraq on false pretenses in violation of international law. This war has resulted in the death of more than 1.2 million Iraqis, the displacement of more than 4 million and the devastation of the economy and social infrastructure of Iraq. But it has also cost the US death casualties of 4,000 troops, serious injury to more than 30,000 and other illnesses of 260,000. The US has already officially allocated up to the present USS700 billion on the wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, exceeding the cost of war in Vietnam. Actual total cost of the war to the US has already run up to more than US3trillion, and this is estimated to double or triple before 2010. The US has put itself in a quagmire because of its greed for the oil resources of Iraq and its scheme to strengthen its hegemony over the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Because it is sinking in the quagmire in Iraq, the US is losing effectiveness even within the ambit of the Middle East and Central Asia. Farther away, it is still regarded as the sole superpower, but a fading one that is afflicted by industrial decline and financial crisis and whose military power is overextended and ineffective at close quarters fighting. In all global regions, the US has dual relations of economic cooperation and competition as well as political collusion and contention with other imperialist powers and certain regional powers.

The US and its closest imperialist allies have dual relations with Russia and China in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, with China in East Asia and Africa and with India in South Asia. In Latin America, the current Chavez government can dramatically stand up against the US policies because of US overextension elsewhere in the world. As the crisis of the world capitalist system worsens, there is increasing multipolarity and complexity and the tendency of the imperialist powers to struggle for a redivision of the world in terms of economic territory and political hegemony.

Various forms of anti-imperialist resistance are being waged by the people in imperialist countries and in all other kinds of countries. But the most decisive forms of anti-imperialist struggle are those that involve the struggle between armed revolution and armed counter-revolution. In this kind of struggle, the people answer the central question of revolution in the most effective way. The revolutionary armed struggles for national liberation and democracy in the Philippines, India, Colombia and other countries are playing an important role in taking advantage of the current and prospective crises of world capitalism. They show the way how to carry out the politico-military revolution to enable the people to carry out social revolution and defeat imperialism and its reactionary allies.

II. Arroyo Regime aggravates Crisis of Ruling System

The Arroyo regime has aggravated and deepened the chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal system beyond what the Marcos fascist regime and the succeeding pseudo-democratic regimes of Aquino, Ramos and Estrada did. The systematic application of the US-dictated policy of neoliberal or “free market” globalization has thoroughly prevented economic development through national industrialization and genuine land reform and has kept open the floodgates to US and other foreign monopoly firms in violating economic sovereignty and selling out the national patrimony through the denationalization of the economy, liberalization of investments and trade, privatization of public assets and the most anti-social and anti-environmental forms of deregulation.

The Philippine economy has remained dependent on raw material (agricultural and mineral) production for export and the semimanufacturing of consumer goods for reexport to the imperialist countries in exchange for the far higher valued imports of essential consumer and producer goods, components of semimanufacturing, fuel and food. The Philippines is an agrarian country, but its agricultural production has been lopsidedly in favor of certain export crops and is subjected to dumping by foreign agricultural producers. Thus, it has become a net food importer at an increasing rate. Currently, it faces the grave problem of shortage and soaring price of rice. This problem has already caused malnutrition on a national scale and starvation in certain areas.