ICFI/WSWS public meetings in New Zealand and Australia
The Iraq War and the 2004 US elections
13 August 2004

The International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site will be holding public meetings in Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia to discuss the vital political and historical issues for ordinary people around the world raised by the US-led war against Iraq and the 2004 presidential elections. The keynote speaker will be David North, chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board (IEB) and national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the US. Also speaking will be Nick Beams, a member of the WSWS IEB and national secretary of the Australian SEP.

This will be the first meeting sponsored by the WSWS in New Zealand and we warmly invite all WSWS readers and supporters throughout the country to attend.

The illegal war of colonial plunder being conducted by the Bush administration against Iraq marks a turning point in world history. It is now indisputable that it had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, or with liberating the Iraqi people. It was aimed at securing, for America’s corporate elite, access to Iraq’s oil and establishing US hegemony over the entire Middle East under conditions of an unprecedented economic, political and social crisis of US capitalism.

While millions of Americans oppose the war, the two major parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—are working to block them from expressing their opposition in the forthcoming US elections. Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has explicitly declared that “even knowing what we know now”—i.e., that all the so-called justifications were lies and Iraq posed no threat whatsoever to the US—he would still have voted to authorise Bush to invade Iraq. In other words, the Democratic Party has not only fully endorsed the war and the continuing occupation of Iraq. It has also embraced the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war, which cedes to the US the right to use military force against any nation regarded as a potential threat to its interests.

The conception that the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration can be overturned by voting for “anybody but Bush” is both dangerous and false. The struggle to end the war on Iraq and defend the rights and conditions of ordinary Americans at home can only be conducted on the basis of a political break with the Democratic Party and the entire two-party system.

The US Socialist Equality Party is running in the 2004 election to advance an independent socialist alternative to war and social reaction. Its campaign is aimed at establishing the political and programmatic foundations for a genuinely global mass movement against imperialism and for the revolutionary transformation of American society. At the very centre of this perspective is the fight for the international unity of the working class, in opposition to all forms of nationalism, whether based on religious, ethnic or national identity.

We urge all those who recognise the need for a genuine and progressive alternative to capitalism to make plans to attend the Sydney and Wellington meetings.

Wellington
Sunday August 29
Commencing 2.00 p.m.
City Gallery Cinema, Civic Square
For further information E-mail: sep-nz@sep.org.au

Sydney
Sunday September 5
Commencing 2.00 p.m.
Tom Mann Theatre
136 Chalmers Street, Surry Hills
For further information E-mail: sep@sep.org.au

Tickets: $3 & $2 for students, pensioners and unemployed

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Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

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