------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the March 6, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
EDITORIAL: SECRET TREATIES The open haggling over terms for Turkey's participation in U.S. aggression against Iraq has opened another beam of light on the dirty business behind Washington's war plans. U.S. imperialism has a death grip on the failing Turkish economy. Its power to block Ankara's access to loans puts the Turkish capitalist regime in Washington's power. Still, 95 percent of the Turkish people oppose the war. The military- backed Turkish regime knew it needed to bring home some sort of plunder before allowing the Pentagon to station 60,000 troops there and launch a second invasion of Iraq, this one from the north. So Ankara held out for a better price. Or maybe, as Paul Krugman writes in the Feb. 25 New York Times, the Turkish rulers didn't trust the Bush gang to pay up later and wanted the cash up front. The haggling raised new questions. Besides cash payments, are there secret treaties regarding future control of northern Iraq? This area is sensitive for Turkey, both because it contains rich oil reserves and because it is populated by Kurds, an oppressed nation spread across three countries. Kurds make up 20 percent of the population in Turkey. In considering this question, it is useful to bring up an historical precedent. British and French imperialism, though allied with that tyrant the Russian Czar, claimed they were fighting in World War I for democracy. German imperialism said it was fighting for "civilization." But these claims were exposed as mere covers for dirty economic interests by what turned out to be the best-organized and most combative anti-war movement in history. On Nov. 7, 1917, the workers and peasants seized power in Russia. Their government, led then by the revolutionary communist Lenin, got Russia out of the war and declared an end to secret diplomacy. They renounced all the goals of the czarist regime to seize territory and annex oppressed nations. And they proceeded to publish in their press and in pamphlet form for world distribution all the secret treaties and memoranda devised by the Russian, British and French governments from 1914 to 1917. These secret agreements had been made while European workers were dying by the millions in the trenches. The treaties were nothing but robbers' pacts to divide up the territories and resources of Central Asia, Europe and the Far East. One of them, the Sykes-Picot treaty, carved out Kuwait and Iraq. The Bush administration--a gang of robbers with their hands on the greatest killing machine in human history-- is back to the same old colonial game. Using threats, bribes and who knows what secret treaties, it is trying to line up a coalition of unpopular regimes to defy their people and give Washington a green light for another war of plunder. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
