AS THE world pauses to remember the thousands who perished in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center exactly a year ago today, let us not however forget the millions of people who were killed in the name of US imperialist wars of aggression, conquest and dominance of the world:

• the US-led bombardment of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attack which left it a wasteland, killed 5,000 civilians and replaced the repressive regime with another headed by Afghanistan’s brutal pro-US warlords;
• the deaths, injuries and destruction wrought by aerial bombardments on Iraq since 1991 which has damaged civilian infrastructure like dwellings, schools, hospitals and water sanitation plants;
• the war against Iraq that devastated the country and killed more than a million innocent Iraqis together with an inhuman embargo that has crippled the country till now;
• the killings accompanying the US-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine;
• the hundreds of thousands massacred, killed, tortured, forcibly disappeared and harassed by US-supported fascist dictators and puppet leaders like Marcos, Pinochet, Chun Doo Hwan, Duvalier, Idi Amin, Noriega, Suharto, Fujimori; Estrada, Macapagal-Arroyo;
• the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, vaporized by the dropping of the Atom bomb on August 15, 1945;
• the Korean War of the 1950s that caused the division of the country into North and South Korea resulting in families and friends cruelly separated up to the 21st century;
• the “secret, dirty wars” against the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia who fought for their sovereignty, while thousands of activists disappeared or died; and
• the Filipino American War that killed 600,000 Filipinos and which led to US colonial and later on, neo-colonial rule over the Philippines.

The warmonger, recklessly-ambitious, militarist, and imperialist George Bush Jr. is gearing for war against Iraq amid the appeal of millions of people to spare it already ravaged by war and the embargo of 1991, the warnings of the Arab leaders that a war against Iraq “would open the gates of hell” and the rumbling of world leaders who are divided on whether they would allow the US to launch a “preemptive war” to topple Saddam Hussein.

Yet, the bare-faced action of the US is threatening a nuclear warfare purportedly to prevent Iraq from using “weapons of mass destruction” against the US.

The US is now using the 9/ll trauma as a coverup for its refusal to be governed by the rules of the International Criminal Court, to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, to strengthen or revive military agreements with countries that tow the US line of combatting “terrorism” however ill-defined or illegal it may be against their own constitutions, to enlarge the network of foreign military bases including in the oil rich Central Asia where Afghanistan lies, and to abandon the charter of the United Nations.

The US is triumphantly employing terrorism with a capital T to justify its attack on the civil liberties and democratic rights of the American people especially the Arab-Americans and South Asian-Americans. Vice-President Dick Cheney calls it “the arrangement for the 21st century” that assaults whatever trappings of constitutional democracy remains in that country.

In the US itself, the supposed bulwark of freedom and democracy, criticism is now viewed as “giving amunition to America’s enemies” and met not by dialogue but by surveillance of all communication lines, warrantless arrests and detention for suspected “terrorists” or who are “Arab looking”, the use of citizen-spies on groups working for concerns, the creation of the Homeland Security office, plan to use the military in enforcing the internal security laws.

The US has become a Hitlerite state after 9/11!

Amid the war threats, particularly of nuclear warfare now hanging over the world today, the ILPS Philippine Chapter joins all peace-loving peoples in the memorial for the victims of 9/11 and US-instigated wars. We join their appeal for sobriety and rationality amongst world leaders and support their call for Bush to stop his madness of plunging Iraq and other countries in unjust wars.

We stand behind the Iraqi people in their staunch defense of their sovereignty and their homeland which was “the cradle of civilization”.

We are in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their continuing resistance to Israeli occupation and their just demand to return to their homeland and exercise self-determination.

We shall link arms with other anti-imperialist groups worldwide now campaigning against the continuing presence of US troops in the Philippines the “second front for the US war on ‘terrorism’”.

Together we cry, “US troops, out now! Strengthen international solidarity and advance the peoples’ struggle against imperialism!”

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