Washington’s quick and apparently easy military defeat of the Iraqi Baathist regime – instead of putting the US political and business elite’s drive for global domination on a more secure and longer-lasting footing – is threatening to turn into a political debacle, exacerbating the very problems the US rulers hoped it would decisively help to overcome.

The political context for our international work is the heightened crisis and rising stakes resulting from firstly, the real capitalist crisis arising from the failure of their neoliberal panacea, and secondly, the ruling class strategy of aggressive war and domination abroad coupled with domestic repression.

We are at a very interesting stage of building the socialist movement in Australia and internationally. It’s all too easy to get submerged in the immediate political tasks, so it’s worth reminding ourselves regularly of some of the main features of the objective and subjective reality we face, and relating these to steps towards greater understanding of our central task of building a revolutionary workers party that can lead the workers and oppressed in overthrowing capitalist rule.

For a year now, US President George W. Bush’s administration has had as its top foreign policy goal achieving violent “regime change” in Baghdad. Sometime between late January and mid-February next year, the US military will attempt to achieve that goal by launching a massive bombing assault and ground invasion of Iraq. On the basis of a leak from the White House, the October 22 New York Times reported that the goal of the bush administration is to install a US military proconsul in Baghdad – along the lines of General Douglas MacArthur’s six-and-half year rule in post-1945 Japan – before handing Iraq over to a puppet government.

The following letter was sent on November 11 by Democratic Socialist Party national secretary John Percy on behalf of the political committee of the Democratic Socialist Party to the national executive of the International Socialist Organisation.

The following letter was sent on November 7 on behalf of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) to the national executive of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO).

In your letter of November 3 you stated that the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) National Executive (NE) felt it had no choice but to recommend to your December National Conference that it terminate your affiliation to the Socialist Alliance (SA) if the DSP’s 20th Congress were to vote to implement our National Committee proposal to convert the DSP into a tendency within the SA.

We were extremely disappointed to receive your November 3 letter threatening to “terminate” the ISO’s affiliation to the Socialist Alliance (SA) if the DSP goes ahead with our proposal to stop building ourselves publicly and just become a tendency in the SA.

The following letter was sent on October 22 by Democratic Socialist Party national secretary John Percy on behalf of the DSP political committee to the national executive of the International Socialist Organisation. It was in response to the ISO NE’s letter of September 29 to the DSP NE, reprinted in GLW #513.

Thank you for your letter outlining some of your worries and the issues you think should be flagged following the DSP National Executive’s (NE) letter announcing the proposals we were presenting to our membership regarding the Socialist Alliance (SA), namely that next year the DSP cease to build itself publicly and instead put all its efforts into publicly building and strengthening the Socialist Alliance.