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Oh what a lovely war

Abu Ghraib Offender Heads Back to Iraq Torture indispensible. --A military dog handler convicted for his role in the prisoner abuse scandal has been ordered back to help train the country's police. 02 Nov 2006 One of the men [Sgt. Santos Cardona] implicated in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal is returning to the scene of the crime. The U.S. military tells TIME that one of the soldiers convicted for his role in Abu Ghraib, having served his sentence, has just been sent back to serve in Iraq. His 23rd MP Company has been selected to train [!?!] Iraqi police. Lest it be thought that we are singling out this individual who has been brutalised in the service of his masters,let us be clear what our position is on this state of armed intervention,whether it is a war in any conventional sense of the word. The Declaration of Principles of the Socialist Party state that the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists to conserve the monopoly of the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, and that in order to stop this robbery the workers must capture the powers of government, including the armed forces, so as to turn them into an agent of emancipation. That is unquestionably the Socialist position as it was expounded by Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific Socialism The Socialist position is as follows: In society to-day there are two classes – the propertyless or working class and an idle class who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth. The latter use this ownership and control to force the workers to work for them, and to submit to being robbed of the greater part of the produce of their labour. The master class, being but a tenth of the population, can only keep possession of the means of production by their control (through the political machinery) of the armed forces. While the master class have that control it is hopeless for the workers to attempt to seize capitalist property. It is sheer madness, therefore, to expect that the capitalist class would, because the workers demand it, either abolish the armed forces or hand their control over to the working class. That would be to abolish themselves as a ruling class. Further, the interests of the capitalists of one country clash with those of the capitalists of other lands, especially in the matter of obtaining markets, and so long as capitalism lasts there will be this clash of interests, necessitating ever-increasing armaments and the inevitable appeal to arms. It is absurd then to waste time and energy in an endeavour to convince the capitalists that wars are superfluous and a curse under capitalism. ( The above is an extract from a 1910 Anti-war document) All the outcry about Iraq,Lebanon and so on just wont change anything until is is expedient for the powerful global elite who run capitalism to cut and run on this issue.One thing we can be sure about is the capitalist solution will give us more of the same . We need to begin the process of at least thinking about how to get rid of the cause of war, and make the capitalist system redundant.