Our Party has issued a plentiful elaboration on the international issue and, within its scope, on the crisis of capitalism and its results in the international relations. The most recent referential marks of our elaboration on the issue can be found in the resolutions of our 10th Congress, held in 2001, and in the works presented in the seminar organized by the Central Committee in September last year. We are bound to address once again the whole of the international situation with the same rigor and depth soon, when the preparations for the next Congress start. In that context, I present here a brief update on the evolving situation with a view to pinpoint the Party’s immediate tasks in the international field and shed light on the background where we develop our daily labor for the creation of a democratic and popular government in Brazil and to foresee the dangers that threat our sovereignty and independence. Intending to make advances in the changes being performed in Brazil without due consideration to the global environment would be vain, as well as it would be inappropriate to face international problems as if they were abstractions with no relations to the immediate struggles and tasks of our people.

Comrades, three months ago the last pillar of a surprisingly fragile Iraqi resistance ruined before the United States’ aggression troops and Saddam Hussein’s regime fell apart. The grotesque image of the “people”—that counted but a few even in such a small-scale scene—bringing down the statue of the dethroned president was broadcast as a symbol of “national liberation” in Iraq. Months later Saddam Hussein’s arrest, which took place in a pit and repeatedly displayed by the media, was celebrated as the supreme consolidation of the American triumph, the warranty seal of President Bush’s reelection and the peak of his sanitizing operation in Iraq. The last step would be democratizing the country by means of elections, “giving the power” to Iraqis and constituting a local “government”. Four months later, in response to a harsh criticism presented by the Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy, to whom Iraq has become the United States’ new Vietnam, Secretary of State Colin Powell called him anti-patriotic since, as he said, “we are at war”. Unwillingly, President Bush’s Secretary confessed one of many deliberate lies that have served to disguise the political behavior of the present administration, the lie that their troops were received as liberation forces, that with the fall of the regime and then with Saddam Hussein’s capture Iraq was being pacified and following the course of democratization.

That was what the imperialist administration’s bigshots were forced to confess one year after the proclaimed victory: “we are at war”.

We, the ones who have always opposed that criminal and dirty war, go beyond that mere truism to affirm that they are not only at war, a war against the people, a war for plundering oil, a war for strategic positions with a view to the whole of Middle East and Central and Eastern Asia, a war for ruling the world, a war to face the problems resulting from their slow agony as an imperialist power, an attempt to escape from its ineluctable structural fragilities, a war on which they are being defeated.

And that is the greatest news in that situation and the point I would like to submit to the appreciation of my comrades—not a hasty one, not as something that deserves passive agreement, but also not as something to be refuted right away.

It is necessary to grasp that sign as the key that opens a new stage in the existence of imperialism, since the perception of defeat inevitably makes it more aggressive, infinitely more aggressive. If that is true, it must result in relevant repercussions in the strategy and tactics of the anti-imperialist struggle.

From any point of view it is impossible to deny—the United States’ imperialist strategy in Iraq failed as it has failed up till now in Afghanistan, something few have noticed. The colossal concentration of troops, the massive use of the most modern aircrafts and weaponry were only sufficient to fulfill the first stage of the battle—dethroning Saddam Hussein. Lured by victory, those who advocate imperialism then derided the ones who compared the seize of Baghdad with the battle of Stalingrad and expected a different conclusion.

Seen in perspective and with serenity, now we know that another Stalingrad would be an impossible metaphor in the case of that battle. However the situation one year after the aggression is different.

Not only the resistance occurred–it imposed itself. The Pentagon counts over one thousand dead and thousands of wounded among its troops. It is almost nothing before the tens of thousands Iraqis, including civilians, that the United States’ army have killed, but they constitute a heavy loss for a “victor” army if we take into account that during the war in March and April in 2003 only one hundred American troops died. Since April 9 2003, when Saddam’s last fortress was seized, the United States’ commandos and troops were attacked every single day and their collaborators are paying the price for betraying their people. The so-called Governing Council, a bunch of puppets carefully chosen by the colonial Administration, is hated by the patriots and ignored by the population. Its institutions simply do not work and they are targets to attacks, especially the police. The effects of the Resistance on the United States’ troops and the so-called coalition are devastating. More than one thousand soldiers and officers have received psychiatric treatment, the number of suicides reached over 30 and dozens of soldiers sent back home have killed their women and children. The Pentagon is taking measures to substitute in its entirety the 110 thousand soldiers that constituted the army by the time Saddam Hussein’s regime was defeated by the end of May.

All those facts are taking place while the invading army commits crimes and all sorts of violations of human rights and war conventions, attacking civilian populations and torturing prisoners. The occupation Army bombed with missiles several Iraqi cities–Sadr, Adamiya, Fallujah, Shula, Najaf, among others. The fact is that an unthinkable resistance is installed in those cities, as well as all over Iraq. The scene of the two previous weeks was one of generalized popular insurrection, a strong and broad one that revealed the heroism of the fighting popular masses, as commonly occurs in such situations.

It is not a matter of terrorism, as put by the media at service of the White House. No matter how disgusting the images of the occupation Army’s scorched officers and soldiers are to a human being, it is necessary to have the courage and coldness to say, as Pakistani writer Tariq Ali, author of Bush in Babylon: the Recolonization of Iraq, have said, one cannot expect a beautiful resistance to an ugly occupation, unless one intends to live in the scenery of a Hollywood movie or an Italian comedy.

The scene in Iraq is one of a struggle against the occupation, the trend among several strata of the population that aspire to restoring the country’s sovereignty by means of the most diverse agents and the use of multiple forms of struggle that range from passive resistance and mass demonstrations to daring urban and rural guerilla actions and the uprising of whole cities and regions as we see now. As long as the resistance forces are concerned, French journalist Patrick Theuret, editor of the International Correspondences magazine, pinpoints 15 groups of different kinds and orientations, including religious and laic organizations, the Baath Party, several nationalist forces and communist trends that oppose the collaborative position adopted by the communist party. Such a diversified resistance will even include retrograde and anti-communist forces, such as some trends of Sunism and Shiism. But we cannot mistakenly analyze the Iraqi resistance according to predetermined standards or with the intent to repeat historical experiences that occurred in other moments and places. It is the same case in Afghanistan, where the anti-imperialist resistance gathers forces that range from the Taleban to communists. One should also not expect the creation a platform of national unity with well designed points and clearly defined strategic objectives as beautiful as the Athena that Zeus created. By now, we should expect the Iraqi resistance to be only what it is: a legitimate reaction to occupation. And we should salute the advances made in terms of unity of action, as well as its successes in the battle field. Our fundamental duty is to support it as a revolutionary communist party, as a developing left-wing political front and as a progressive coalition government constituted by democratic and national forces. The necessary good relations that our country needs to cultivate with all countries of the world, including the United States, are not incompatible with our diplomacy’s serene and firm position in international organizations against that shameful occupation imposed by an imperialist country. And we shall be prepared as analysts of the international situation and militants of the anti-imperialist cause to inscribe the fight against the occupation in Iraq for a long period of time in our agenda. It may take decades. Martyred Palestine has been struggling under the murderous fist of Zionist Israel for 50 years. Despite countless “peace plans” and reiterated UN resolutions determining that Israel should return to its original borders, the Palestine issue continually aggravates and today its people is threatened by extermination. It took 15 years to Vietnam finally win the war of national liberation against the United States’ imperialism. We do not know how long Iraq will take. But it is clear to us that in the world of today it is impossible for an aggressive power to exert an occupation regime and escape unscathed, no matter how strong it is.

The Bush administration is busy organizing the puppet local administration. It desperately needs to stop resistance and remove the Iraqi issue from the electoral agenda. There are numerous institutional arrangements and machinations to simulate the participation of the “international community” in the Iraqi “transition”—and that participation surely will not be disinterested. Many helpful collaborators have appeared and now cynically claim a “new role to the UN”. But there are some essential issues on which we cannot be allowed to make mistakes. The Iraqi Constitution is nothing but counterfeit, the local government will be a puppet administration, its sovereignty will be fictitious since it will be carried out under the United States’ tutorship and under a military occupation. It will be undeserving of international acknowledgement. The United States would not wage that war for nothing. It was not simply to dethrone a dictator, as it proclaimed with a deliberate lie, nor to destroy an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. If there were an International Community, the United States would have to be sanctioned, since official organizations of the UN’s system attested the inexistence of such weapons in Iraq. Bush waged his war with the strategic objective of reinforcing the United States’ military presence in the Persian-Arabian Gulf and in the Middle East, where two thirds of the world’s oil reserves can be found, struggling to make advances in his fight to control the whole of the planet. It was not with the intent to pacify, democratize or grant sovereignty that the United States destined the colossal amount of 500 billion dollars to military expenses in the years 2003 and 2004—more than the Brazilian GDP, or the same amount expended by the rest of the world with weapons and troops.

The expectations that the Gulf war would bring peace and safety to the world were false. One year later, the world is a less safe place and, far from fighting or neutralizing terrorism, the war only stimulated it. It was another lie of President Bush.

Those facts are related to White House’s decision to place the war at the center of its international activity, practically eliminating diplomacy. Our analysis must take that question as something essential to understand the whole of the situation. It is a trend that has evolved since the called Reagan era, in the 80’s, taking a different form in the 90’s (the first Gulf War, the wars in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo), and assuming its definitive form as the ultra-conservative group formed by Bush, Cheney and Wolfovitz reached power. It is important to defeat them in the elections this year, since Bush’s reelection will give him credit to take new steps in fulfilling his strategy. The background of that trend is the appearance of a single-sided world, the so-called new new world order, that follows the post World War II order, which was characterized by the Cold War and the division of the world between the USSR and the USA. However, those phenomena are also connected to what may be called the paradox of our time. In a moment where the exercise of the United States’ diplomacy reaches its peak, the time when the feeling of absolute power seems natural, since the United States are actually ruling the world all by itself and its strength is colossal, the country also show signs structural fragility and of its historical decline. I will not be as optimistic as the British philosopher and historian Eric Hobsbawn, one of the greatest of his time, to whom our generation will not see the fall of that empire, but the next one will. But I will emphatically stress the evidences of such decline. The current White House’s doctrine and the aggressiveness with which imperialism behaves are results from the urgency of finding an answer to its structural decline. The colossal deficits in the United States’ accounts, the continuous and accented fall of the dollar, the relative loss of the United States’ economy before its competitors and the currently accepted impossibility of the world financing the United States’ deficit and the maintenance of the dollar’s supremacy (without self-criticism by those who defended a different point of view not long ago) are clear manifestations of a phenomenon we must study with a thoughtful and acute spirit, since only with the precise understanding of that phenomenon it will be possible to extract the adequate political conclusions and illuminate our strategy.

That unstable environment, of which the Middle East is the epicenter, was aggravated by the violent trend that characterizes the action of Ariel Sharon’s Israeli government. The core of his strategy, which is explicitly supported by Washington, is the extermination of the Palestinian people, an objective that demands completing the stage of annihilating the Palestinian National Authority, led by Arafat, and the main political, military and religious leaders of the Palestinian resistance.

Of all that has been said here, we conclude that the struggle against the imperialist occupation of the Middle East is inscribed in the agenda of our Party’s international policy and of the Brazilian progressive movement, encompassing Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, each one with its own characteristics. And it is not a matter of extending our solidarity (which is already a great gesture), but of designing a long-term strategic struggle. I would say that the struggle for peace and against the war policy and the imperialist occupation will be at the core of our activity for decades. That struggle is inseparable from the struggle for a new international order, a new international system based on multilateralism, on redesigning and changing the character and form of international bodies.

We must highlight the isolation of the United States’ positions and the defeat of the policy of those who promote and defend war as an important fact of the present juncture. The United States’ imperialism has never been as politically and diplomatically isolated as it is now. The relations among the powers were deeply harmed by the refusal of Germany, Russia, France and China to support the United States’ decision of waging that war. The defeat suffered by the right-wing Spanish government of José Maria Aznar, one of the most well-known supporters of imperialism in Europe, will also leave its scars. The decision made by the present Spanish President, José Luis Zapatero to withdraw his troops from Iraq is an achievement of the anti-war movement and of the democratic struggle of the Spanish people and the whole of Europe. The desertions of the aggression coalition that happened after the decision made by the new Spanish government also attest the United States’ defeat.

It is still too early to detect the appearance of a new political trend in Europe, but the defeat of the right in Spain may hopefully be the beginning of a new process of inversion in the correlation of forces in the Continent that will overcome the pro-American governments of Blair, Berlusconi, Durão Barroso and others. After Spain, but for different reasons, strong signs of strengthening democratic positions were shown in France’s regional elections, as the right-of-center forces were heavily punished by the ballots as a result of an anti-social and anti-labor policy constituted by neoliberal reforms in the social security and labor legal systems, what shows that, despite the still incipient support received by Chirac in his struggle against the extreme right, voters will not forgive conservative governments as long as economic and social matters are concerned. At least that is the case of Europe as the rights of workers are attacked by neoliberalism. The same is happening in Latin America, where the fall of Fernando de La Rua still resonates.

The developing countries’ struggle against the protectionism of rich countries and for a new economic world order is another relevant aspect of the international situation that was emphatically expressed in the WTO’s meeting in Cancun and in the endeavors conducted by Brazil, with the participation of China and India, resulting in the creation of the G-20. In an economic juncture marked by generalized adversities and by the failure of neoliberalism, that struggle tends to characterize the situation for a long time. It will have many high and low results. We must keep our eyes on the meetings of the UNCTAD and the G-77, to be held in São Paulo next July.

Let us approach briefly the evolving situation in Latin America, where the failure of the neoliberal model was the most evident, especially in the cases of Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. The insistence on orthodox policies may ruin countries that adopted such policy, so it is worrisome that our country, under a politically progressive government, persists on the same orientation that sunk Argentina.

As a result of that situation that caused an unprecedented social crisis, Latin America has been the stage to great struggles in the first years of that century, while important changes are expected. Here, pacific mass struggles, electoral battles, spontaneous uprisings, insurrections and even a civil war (in Colombia), all lead to the same path. Progressive administrations have resulted from that environment, such as Lula’s, Chavez’s and the new Argentinean administration led by Nestor Kirchner, who, despite being from the dominant political and party system, is somewhat against neoliberal orientations.

With its attention and forces concentrated in the occupation wars in Middle East and Central Asia, the United States’ imperialism has not paid attention to the Latin American subcontinent as it used to do before. At least that was what Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he affirmed that Latin America is not a priority in the country’s foreign policy. But there is no way to hide the fact that Latin America is part of the permanent strategic plans of the United States’ imperialism for obvious reasons. By now, it is concentrated in fighting the Cuban Revolution, the destabilization by means of takeover interferences (which have failed until now) in the Bolivarian government of Hugo Chavez, the annihilation of the guerillas in Colombia, the imposition of the FTAA as a neocolonialist instrument and the neutralization of Brazil and Argentina as potential poles of political and economic resistance to neoliberal policies. The presence of troops in Haiti indicates that the United States are attentive to Latin America.

Our tasks regarding Latin America consist in maintaining solidarity to Cuba and Venezuela, supporting the efforts of the Brazilian diplomacy to consolidate Mercosur and integrate the Latin American subcontinent, and decidedly fighting the neocolonialist plan of the FTAA. The supposition that it is necessary to sign the FTAA to have access to the United States’ Market is a sophism. Brazil must not sign the agreement. We understand our government’s position and we support all delaying and restraining maneuvers that our diplomacy has taken, but we insist: Brazil must not sign the FTAA. That is the expectation and the position of the patriotic and progressive movements in all Latin America, as it is in the case of the nationalist, popular and left-wing forces in Brazil. The true effort for the integration of Latin America, to which President Lula’s administration has greatly contributed, is incompatible with the FTAA.