Michael Roberts: Sweden – No Longer a ‘Social Democracy’

Sweden – no longer a ‘social democracy’

by Michael Roberts

Sweden goes to the polls today in an extremely close general election that could see the far right enter government for the first time if the country’s rightwing parties can form a majority.  However, opinion polls show the centre-left opposition alliance ahead, with Magdalena ⁠Andersson of the Social Democrats the favourite to become prime minister again after four years in opposition. But her bloc’s lead has narrowed considerably in the final days of the campaign.

In 2022, the current prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the centre-right Moderates, broke a longstanding taboo to make a deal with the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD), so that his minority coalition could form a government. That agreement gave the SD outsized influence over government policy, especially on crime and immigration, and Kristersson has now gone further, promising ministerial posts for the SD if he is returned to power. In an attempt to win back voters, Andersson’s Social Democrats have also moved to the right on crime, immigration and integration, meaning that a win for the left was unlikely to mean a reform of current hardline policies. In effect, as in Denmark, the Social Democrats have adopted the immigration policies of the right. 

And they have supported the ending of Sweden’s longstanding ‘neutral’ policy in foreign affairs and have enthusiatically supported Sweden’s membership of NATO, becoming one of the most belligerent in supporting the continuation of the war in Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Indeed, the perceived ‘Russia threat’ of invading Europe is a theme of nearly all the Swedish political parties. Andersson told the FT that her top priorities in government were Ukraine and “intensifying co-operation” with European countries – apparently not the cost of living or economic issues.

It was always an illusion anyway about Sweden being the ‘third way’ between untrammelled free market capitalism and command economy autocratic Communism.  The great gains of the Swedish labour movement in the early 20th century have steadily been reversed. Just as in other capitalist economies, the polices of neoliberalism – a reversion to free markets, low taxation for the rich and corporations, cuts in the welfare state and in real wages, rising inequality etc – have been operating in Sweden since the mid-1990s.

Sweden may still have a more ‘equal’ income distribution than the US and the UK, but it is still very unequal – and inequality has been rising the fastest since the 1990s of all advanced capitalist economies. The top 10% of Swedish income earners take home (after tax), 33% of all personal income while the bottom 50% share just 20%.

Wealth inequality is even worse.  In 1980, the top 1% of personal wealth owners took 17.7% of all personal wealth; now they have 22.5%.  The top 10% had 54.4% in 1980; now they have 68.2%.  The bottom 50% of Swedes had just 13.4% of total personal wealth in 1980; now they have more debt than wealth at -10.9%!, such has been the rise in borrowing (mortgages etc)! – WID figures. In Sweden, like in most other Nordic countries, tax reforms over the 1990s have decreased the tax burden for wealthier households, e.g. by decreasing capital taxation and lowering or abandoning wealth taxation. At the same time, there have been cuts in welfare benefits for the poor.

Sweden is no longer an epitome of state provision. The country is one of the world leaders in having public services supplied by the private sector, paid for by the government. About one-third of all Swedish secondary schools are so-called ‘free schools’, with the majority of them run by for-profit companies, while about 40% of primary healthcare providers are privately owned. Their shares are even sold on the stock market.  Public provision has been outsourced to the detriment of quality.  Sweden’s schools have slipped from being one of the world’s best in international ratings to “one of the most mediocre”. The Social Democrats have long been against independent schools being able to make a profit and pay out dividends. But they have never been able to muster a majority to end this.

And then there is immigration. Over 600,000 immigrants from the Middle East have entered the country since the Syrian/Iraq disaster.  Many immigrants are young single men and they have helped capitalist enterprises and the state sector overcome an acute labour shortage for low skilled work.  But the amount of immigrants per head of population is way more than in any other European economy and it has increased pressure on those public services, already suffering from neo-liberal measures. The small towns in Sweden have experienced low wages, poorer services and then were faced with an influx of new immigrants. This was the breeding ground for the Democrats’ racist and nationalist message of ‘Sweden for Swedes’. 

The rise of the Swedish Democrats follows the pattern of so-called populism that we have seen in Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and other EU countries, as well as with Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US.  It is the product of the failure of capitalism to deliver after the end of the Golden Age in the mid-1960s, but particularly after the global financial crash, the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression. Swedish capitalism, somewhat like Germany (only as a much smaller economy), has experienced a slowdown in economic growth in the last few decades and particularly since 2008.

Whichever political bloc – left or right – wins a majority in a new parliament, it will change little. 

Opinion: Why did the Saudi backed forces in Yemen collapse?!

Why did the Saudi backed forces in Yemen collapse?

Susan Nevens

Here is a brief analysis of Yemen, a nation that has been bombed for the past 26 years, since the days of the George W. Bush administration. You might say, 'Well, Susan, this is not a brief analysis,' but there are some things that cannot be explained in a meme to fit within the mold of the American culture of a short attention span. There is no SparkNote to explain the political history of a nation, so I am afraid you need to read on if you want to learn something!"

 

Why did the Saudi backed forces in Yemen collapse?!

 

The entire citizen population of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman combined is smaller than the population of Yemen.

 

The combined number of citizens, not foreigners, in these Gulf states is approximately 26–27 million, while the population of Yemen is about 42 million.

 

There has long been a Gulf view that a unified Yemen represents a strategic threat to the demographically small, geographically limited Gulf states.

 

After the fall of Abdullah Saleh, Yemen entered a period of political turmoil. Islah gained considerable influence during the post-Saleh transition.

 

Saudi Arabia and the UAE later turned against Islah as part of their broader war against the Arab Spring. Islah eventually lost to the Houthis, who took control of Sanaa in 2014.

 

The Houthis received some Iranian support.

 

After getting rid of Islah's control of the capital Sanaa, Saudi Arabia and the UAE created and sponsored many factions in Yemen to fight the Houthis.

 

The factions in southern Yemen, like the Giants Brigades, received Emirati support, while most of the rest, like the Nation's Shield, Yemen Emergency Forces in Saada and al-Jawf, and Hadrami tribal forces, received Saudi funding.

 

Saudi and Emirati support was divided into two main parts:

 

Buying the loyalty of tribal leaders with money, and paying salaries to Yemenis fighting in their factions against the Houthis.

 

It is widely circulated in Yemen that Saudi backed Yemeni fighters are paid around 1000 Saudi riyals per month.

 

Because of the war, blockade and economic collapse, these salaries became a source of income for many Yemenis who joined these factions.

 

Unlike Iran, which provided decisive military aid to its Houthi allies in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened directly and wanted their Yemeni "allies" to follow their instructions, instead of following the Iranian model of providing similar military aid to Yemenis who don't agree with the Houthis and letting Yemenis decide for themselves.

 

The UAE interests later clashed with those of its ally, Saudi Arabia. 

 

The UAE, as a tiny state with a citizen population, excluding foreigners, of 1.1 million, sought to revive the North-South conflict Via The STC as perhaps the most achievable goal, so that instead of 1 Yemen, there would be 2 Yemens, North and South. 

 

This is not only an Emirati objective, but also an Israeli objective, as similar attempts were seen in Syria through attempts to establish a state for the Kurds and another for the Druze, so that Israel could fight smaller entities if necessary, and so that the UAE could overcome its demographic inferiority complex.

 

However, this objective is not limited to Yemen. Saudi Arabia may be the next target for partition after Yemen, because compared with the other Gulf states and Israel, Saudi Arabia has a larger population and a much larger territory.

 

This accelerated the Saudi-Emirati conflict, which ended with the UAE expelled from Yemen.

 

Below are 5 reasons for the military failure of the Saudi backed camp in Yemen:

 

1- Centralized command: The Houthi-led Sanaa government has 1 centralized leadership, while the Saudi backed forces are a mixture of several factions, each with its own loyalties and objectives.

 

2- The Houthis succeeded in neutralizing Saudi airpower by responding to airstrikes on areas under their control with attacks deep inside Saudi Arabia.

 

3- Military ideology: Fighters in the Houthi forces have a religious military ideology hostile to Israel and the US, and their fighters fight for this, compared with the salaries that fighters in the Saudi backed camp fight for.

 

4- Media propaganda: Houthi forces strictly prohibit their fighters from using phones, and all the information their fighters receive comes from their leadership.

This is the complete opposite of the Saudi backed camp, which greatly exaggerated its media propaganda.

 

5- The failure of Saudi religious mobilization:

 

When a Yemeni fighting in the Saudi backed camp reads that there are 200 American officers directing them from Saudi Arabia, while he knows about US involvement against his brothers in Gaza, and sees how Saudi media covers Gaza, its hostility toward it, and its complete adoption of the Israeli narrative, this alone is enough to deal a fatal blow to Saudi religious propaganda. 

 

China to the Rescue? Why Only Beijing may be able to the End the Iran war

China to the Rescue? Why Only Beijing may be able to the End the Iran war

Trita Parsi on Substack

China proved crucial to get the Saudi-Iran normalization over the finish line. Xi now says he’s willing to help end the Iran war.

TRITA PARSI SEP 12

REUTERS/Evan Vucci

If you’ve followed my interviews, you know I’ve been warning about the high likelihood of a third round of the war—one that would almost certainly be far more intense than the previous two. I’ve also argued that, given Trump’s erroneous reading of the current balance, perhaps the only diplomatic wildcard that could pull us back from this looming disaster is Beijing deciding to step in and force a settlement. I discussed precisely this with Glenn Diesen on his show just yesterday.

Hours later, President Xi Jinping declared China’s willingness to use its diplomatic clout to help end the war. “China is willing to work with fellow BRICS members to play a role in achieving peace and stability in the Middle East and the Gulf region,” Xi said at the BRICS meeting in New Delhi.

China traditionally avoids entangling itself in other countries’ conflicts—including by using its diplomatic heft to resolve them, even when its own interest in stability might justify mediation. Beijing wants to avoid both the embarrassment of a failed diplomatic initiative and the risk of inadvertently taking ownership of a conflict for which it otherwise bears no responsibility.

But Beijing may now sense that the trajectory of this war is moving in a direction where the costs can no longer be contained. In the previous rounds, Donald Trump stopped short of carrying out threats against Iran’s critical infrastructure and oil industry, knowing that Iran would retaliate against similar targets in Israel and the GCC states. In that scenario, an energy production crisis would emerge rather than just a bottleneck problem.

Such a scenario would make it much harder—perhaps impossible—for China to keep oil prices below $100 a barrel and thereby help avert a global recession. China’s decision to sharply reduce its oil demand was, after all, a key reason the previous two rounds of war did not send oil prices toward $150 a barrel.

Despite these challenges, China managed to largely insulate itself from the war’s energy shock while preventing a much deeper crisis for the rest of the world.

But in the third round, much indicates that Trump will escalate the war dramatically, leaving China exposed in a manner that may have shifted Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis in favor of intervening diplomatically.

And as I explained on Glenn Diesen’s show, China can make a difference. The current mediators—primarily Oman, Qatar, and Pakistan—deserve enormous credit for their ingenuity, creativity, and persistence. Mediation is often risky and almost always thankless. Just look at how Qatar and Oman have been treated in Washington despite the significant contributions their mediation has made to U.S. national security.

But for all their diplomatic finesse and impressive political endurance, none of these mediators possesses significant leverage over the two warring parties—the United States and Iran.

China does. And it was precisely that leverage that helped Beijing get the Saudi-Iranian normalization agreement across the finish line. Iraq and Oman had done much of the painstaking mediation, but the depth of distrust between Tehran and Riyadh ultimately required a power with enough leverage over both sides to hold them to their commitments. That was the crucial ingredient China brought to the table.

Both Tehran and Riyadh calculated that neither could easily violate a deal guaranteed by China without jeopardizing their relationship with Beijing. And because China is simply too important for either to risk such a rupture, Beijing’s role as guarantor proved crucial not only to reaching the agreement, but perhaps more importantly, to sustaining it.

China’s relationship with the United States is, of course, very different. Neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia views China as a rival or peer competitor. Washington does.

Still, China’s leverage over both sides may prove to be the missing ingredient that has made an enduring settlement so elusive. The current mediators may well broker another MOU, but there is little reason to believe it will prove any more durable than the last one.

To make a deal stick, China may prove indispensable.

PS. Here’s my interview with Glenn: 

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribed

Ken Klippenstein: Fuck 9/11

 Fuck 9/11

What happened to the flowers?

Ken Klippenstein Sept 11, 2026.

Union Square memorial to those killed on 9/11, on September 18, 2001 | Getty

Subscribed

Twenty-five years later, 9/11 anniversaries have devolved into a grotesque fundraising orgy for the security state.

The families commemorate their loved ones while the very people and institutions that failed to prevent the attack in the first place tell triumphant war stories and warn that if we (the American people) let down our guard — by which they mean close our wallets to them — it will happen again.

“The 9/11 attack took place without warning,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio writes to his employees today, per a memo leaked to me. After opening with chest-beating (“We have hunted down the architects of the attack…”), practically all he can say is: don’t let your guard down.

	Rubio memo 1.7MB ∙ PDF file
Download

When it comes to the 9/11 anniversary, fundraising has become more and more dominant. But it used to have a heart as well. In the days after the attacks, Union Square in New York disappeared under candles and handwritten notes. Flowers piled up outside firehouses that had lost entire crews. People waited in line for hours to give blood, even though, as it turned out, there would be almost no one to give it to. 

The outpouring of sympathy was international, too. In Paris, Le Monde ran a front page declaring “Nous sommes tous Américains.” At Buckingham Palace, the band played the Star-Spangled Banner at the changing of the guard.

Now it’s just a naked cash grab by the national security world, who congratulate themselves for a job well done while angling for more money.

actual headlines from news orgs and think tanks on or near 9/11 anniversaries

If this is all 9/11 remembrance is going to be, then I say: fuck 9/11. 

Having no anniversary would be less offensive than what they’ve turned this day into.

The whole thing reminds me of those money booths on game shows, where a contestant stands inside a glass box while cash blows around them, grabbing at as many bills as they can before time runs out.

Then there’s the total lack of accountability from the security elite for what was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

“Whether you like Dick Cheney or not, he was incredible on that day,” Matthew Waxman, a Bush National Security Council official at the time, saidat a discussion panel about 9/11 at Columbia University this week.

Let’s assume that’s true. His job is to prevent attacks like these from happening in the first place!

“I think there were some things that we got wrong, but many things that we actually got quite right,” Waxman added.

Notice something about all these panels, interviews and anniversary addresses: The story always starts after the first plane hit. Never before. Nobody wants to talk about the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Or the FBI agent in Phoenix who warned about extremists training at American flight schools. Or the CIA knowing two of the future hijackers were in the country and not telling the FBI. 

At that Columbia panel, Hillary Clinton recalled going to the Oval Office with Chuck Schumer two days after the attacks.

“I looked at President Bush, and I thought, you know, my gosh, my heart went out to him. I mean, just looking at his face, looking at his eyes, I thought, you know, he is now at a totally different level of responsibility for this country.”

Our political elites have turned 9/11 into an episode of The West Wing, starring themselves: the protagonists up on Mount Olympus, hitting their big cinematic moment. The families never figure into these stories. The nation, which has paid the greatest price in lost liberties, is never thanked or addressed much at all.

Then she got to the money. By her account, she told Bush the first bill his team sent up had no money for New York. He asked what they needed. She said $20 billion. Bush’s answer: “You got it.”

What happened next is the part she seems to relish. 

“As I was getting up to leave the Oval Office, John Warner, one of my absolutely favorite colleagues, a long-serving Republican senator who had chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, he touched me on the shoulder, and he goes, ‘Hillary, get him to say that in front of everybody again.’”

Here’s what didn’t make it into her story: Bush’s promise kicked off a fight in Washington, because the White House’s original $20 billion request was supposed to cover the entire federal response. Congress settled it by doubling the emergency package to $40 billion, with half set aside for recovery — and much of the rest flowing to the national security apparatus.

In other words, within days of the attacks, 9/11 was already a fundraising event.

These days, 9/11 anniversaries have about as much to do with the nearly 3,000 people who died as Christmas has to do with Jesus.

Consider an anecdote from retired Navy Capt. Brian Cullen, who had just been posted to U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, when the planes hit.

As U.S. bases across Europe went into lockdown, Germany rallied behind America in a way that’s hard to imagine today. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pledged “unlimited solidarity.” Huge crowds filled the streets of Berlin. NATO invoked Article 5, its mutual-defense clause, for the first time in its history.

But what stuck with Cullen was closer to home: German neighbors, kids included, holding candlelight vigils outside the base gates — the same gates that usually drew anti-nuclear and anti-base protesters.

Then Washington pivoted to “you’re either with us or against us,” and the goodwill evaporated. The candles disappeared. The base walled itself off from the community around it. The alliance started to crack as the U.S. went it alone.

“Our base became a reflection of our nation: security at any cost,” Cullen writes.

That’s the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of the national security state’s soft coup over American politics, as my editor Bill Arkin laid out in his profound book American Coup.

We’ll know that coup has ended when we see flowers again.

🚨 Fundraising fell off a cliff this summer. Not accepting a dime in corporate ad money allows me to be genuinely independent; but it also means I’m ENTIRELY dependent on readers like you to survive. Please become a paid subscriber (or chip in via my GoFundMe here) to keep this newsletter going — Ken

I Don't Know What to Title This.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

9-11-26

 

It's nothing I haven't stated before. I was just thinking about childcare and the stress this imposes on young married couples. It's expensive, it's a business like health care in general. But the state could provide creche's every few blocks. The state can provide communal laundries communal kitchens whatever, organized and run by working people in those communities. Control of the state means real power, that is why the Chinese are out competing and undermining US hegemony on the global stage. 

 

This does not mean I support the Chinese misnamed Communist Party of the bureaucracy there. It's important to understand the role of the state though. I personally believe that there will be some major battles ahead as the Chinese working class is forced to control the bureaucracy. 

 

We live in a bourgeois democracy. A capitalist democracy in other words. But we need to remind ourselves that in Athenian Democracy that the western world claims is its origins, the slaves had no right to vote. In a capitalist democracy we get to vote for one of the candidates of the class that rules (capitalists) every four years. They didn't want to give us that right, we took it. I think the indigenous people in the US never won that right until the 1940's. 

 

In a workers' democracy, the class that rules would be the formerly oppressed class in the old system, the working class would be the ruling class, we would have the access to all that social power that a state has. I understand the anarchists disagree with this view but I am not an anarchist, I accept Marx's view of the state as clarified by Lenin after the 1917 revolution. I am not a Leninist either. I am a worker first and foremost; this is a good start for any would be revolutionary. 

 

Marx, like the anarchists saw a future society where there was no oppressive organ like the state. But the state cannot be ignored in the struggle for this future and it has to be conquered by the working class and used to build a genuine communist society in which there is no class antagonism. In that effort working class people will be forced to battle with the remnants of the oppressive system from which we freed ourselves and we cannot do that without organising ourselves as the class with state power. 

 

I am going to end it there because I don't intend to continue in the debate between the withering away of the state under workers' control according to Marx and the anarchist view (correct me if I'm wrong my anarchist comrades) that the state itself is at the root of the problem no matter which class controls it. See why I couldn't decide on a title. I think it’s the beer.

Reprinted from the UK Socialist Website Left Horizons.

The road to 9/11: out of a clear blue sky?

11 September 2026Posted by Editor

By Cain O’Mahony

To mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this two-part article looks at the growth of Jihadist fundamentalism, and how it was cynically used by US imperialism to launch a ‘war for oil’. 

Twenty five years on, it is still not a cliché to say ‘you knew exactly where you were and what you were doing’ on that fateful day. We all do. Everyone around the world was glued to television sets watching the jaw-dropping scenes coming out of New York.

It was not just the horrific, almost surreal images of destruction of everyday New Yorkers, running for their lives and chased by a tsunami of dust and rubble. It was the sudden icy feeling of ‘what now?’. Was this the start of a World War? And who is the enemy? And then the eventual near disbelief that just 13 members of Al Qaeda could kill 3,000 people, destroy large parts of one of the world’s most famous cities, put the US President in lock-down, attack the Pentagon, put the White House under threat, and change the course of world politics, armed only with plastic knives and a rudimentary knowledge of flying jet aircraft.

A key phrase repeatedly used by the Western media in its coverage of 9/11 was that it came “out of a clear blue sky”. It was as though the attacks had just inexplicably  dropped from the heavens.

Meddling in the Middle East

Rather, the events were intrinsically linked to Western imperialism’s meddling in the Middle East. The road to 9/11 resulted from the failure, firstly of Arab nationalism, but then mainly from the cynical manipulation of the resultant Islamic fundamentalism that filled the vacuum, by a blinkered, short-sighted US and Western imperialism.

The post-war hopes of pan-Arab nationalism, led by Nasser in Egypt, were dealt a hammer blow by the disaster of the Six Day War in 1967, when to everyone’s astonishment, the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were smashed by Israel in a lighting war, mainly because they had been supplied by US and Western imperialism with the latest US and French jet fighters.

It was a disaster for the ideals of pan-Arabism, with Israel occupying Sinai, Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank in Jordan, and Jerusalem, there to remain.

Conventional war had failed, and the failure pushed the liberation movements to the left. But rather than look to the revolutionary socialist method, basing itself on mass movements, and policies that offered the idea of a socialist federation in the Middle East, which still could have appealed to Israeli workers, especially the youth on the kibbutzim, in the heady days of 1968, the movements instead looked to the dead end of ultra-leftism and guerillaism.

Movements, in particular the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Christian based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, looked to the work of the likes of Regis Debray.

A strategy that ignored mass struggle

Debray, a French radical who had spent time with Che Guevara, argued for what he called  a ‘Focus Strategy’, saying the working masses had let the revolutionaries down, so they should use terrorism and ideological persuasion to act as a ‘catalyst’. It was a strategy was adopted by the PFLP in its struggle against Israel, and to an extent by the PLO.

As Jason Burke commented: “This so-called ‘Focus’ strategy went against decades of traditional Marxist orthodoxy, which maintained that successful revolutions depended on the right ‘objective conditions’ and the importance of patient work by activists over decades to raise the consciousness of the masses.

  “Instead, ‘Foco-ists’ argued, revolutionary violence created its own conditions for success and anyone could overturn the established order with little more than authentic revolutionary commitment, courage and modern automatic weapons” (The Revolutionists, Jason Burke, 2025).

This ‘strategy’ of course failed – small groups, no matter how ‘spectacular’ their terrorist attacks, were never going to outgun the Israeli military machine, armed to the teeth as it was by  US and Western imperialism.

As the Arab masses became disillusioned with the ideas of this supposed ‘left’, Islamic fundamentalists filled the vacuum. The turning point came in 1979 with the Iranian revolution against the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran. The weary populace did not look either left or right but adopted a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude and turned to the Islamic fundamentalism of the Shia clerics.

Tragically, this disillusionment was compounded by the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, aiding and abetting the new Islamic regime. They went into alliance with the Shia clerics grouped around Ayatollah Khomeini, when they should have been drawing clear political demarcation lines between themselves and the clerics.

Instead, they gave the clerics a ‘revolutionary veneer’ and helped propel them to power. Indeed, they supported the regime right up until 1982, when Khomeini turned on them, closing down their papers and offices, and imprisoning 10,000 Tudeh members.

A reactionary, misogynistic force

The fundamentalists are a reactionary, misogynist force that wants to drag society back to the Middle Ages. They are the ‘black hundreds’ [antisemitic pogromists of the old Russian Czarist empire] of the Islamic world. The victory of the Shia fundamentalists in Iran inspired their Sunni counterparts in the rest of the Middle East, equally embittered by the failure of a Palestinian leadership veering between terrorism and patronising Arab sheikhs and presidents. Added to which, there was no let-up in the continuing oppression by Israel and Western imperialism.

Osama Bin Laden (from Wikimedia Commons)

And now they had a new enemy to fight. The Soviet Union was becoming equally embroiled. As their puppet regime in Kabul look set to fall, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. What focussed the Soviet Union’s mind was fear of the new fundamentalist contagion spreading into its southern Muslim states from Iran.

For the Sunni fundamentalists, the conflicts in Lebanon, Palestine and now Afghanistan was confirmation in their minds that all the powers of the world were out to crush Islam. Their war became global.

A key architect was Shaykh Abdullah ‘Azzam. A Palestinian university lecturer, active in the fight for Palestinian liberation, he saw that a victory in Afghanistan as a means to “… mobilise Muslims to action in other conflict zones.”

 ‘Azzam declared: “I am certain that working in Afghanistan constitutes a revival of the spirit of jihad…We have been deprived from waging jihad in Palestine because of the borders, restraints and prisons… We must prepare for jihad in any spot of the earth we can.” ‘He led the call for Arab volunteers to join the fray against the Soviet-supported Afghan state. (The Arabs – a history, Eugene Roberts, 2011)

While ‘Azzam organised the new Arab volunteers, the money man was Osama bin Laden. The son of a billionaire, he used his personal inherited fortune of $30 million to set up what was called ‘the Base’ (Al Queda) in Afghanistan to co-ordinate the fight against the Red Army.

USA supported mujahidin fighting in Afghanistan

US and Western imperialism were enthusiastic supporters of their new proxy  ‘Holy Warriors’ or Mujahidin, in the fight against the Soviet Union. They poured in money – to the tune of $250 million every year –  and dispatched military special forces to train them, particularly in the use of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. Incredibly, throughout the 1980s, future members of Al Queda were flown to Scotland to be trained in the use of the ‘Blowpipe’ missile by the SAS (‘We taught terrorists’, Sunday Mirror, 16.02.03).

US and Western imperialism were indifferent to the reactionary sectarianism of the Mujahidin, turning a blind eye when, at the behest of the Pakistani military,  Bin Laden undertook an edict from them to suppress a Shia uprising in the Gilgit-Balistan region of Pakistan. Leading a force of Afghan Sunni tribesmen in May 1988, they massacred and raped several hundred Shia civilians in the town of Gilgit.

After over 60,000 casualties from the fighting in Afghanistan, the Red Army eventually retreated from the bloody quagmire, as at home it was clear the Soviet economy was grinding to a halt, leading to the final collapse of the Soviet model throughout Eastern Europe.

In the isolated, delusional mind of the jihadists, they thought that they and they alone had been responsible – and if their forces could topple the ‘Communist Empire’, why not the US capitalist one too? On February 23, 1998, bin Laden announced the creation of the ‘International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders’. The US and the West had created a Frankenstein which was now coming back to bite them, culminating in 9/11.

In part II, Cain O’Mahony charts how US imperialism cynically used the 9/11 attack for its ‘forever war’ on Iraq.