It is extremely unlikely that the reactionary fundamentalists of Al Queda selected the date for their attack on the United States to commemorate the overthrow of Allende, as they would have little sympathy for a secular socialist government, yet the two events still have a common element. That is, they both resulted from a US foreign policy which considers only the concerns of American capitalists' pursuit of profit, but ignores the genuine needs and concerns of the masses of the people in countries around the world.

While virtually every newspaper in America reported on the commercial aircraft used to topple the World Trade Center towers and damage the Pentagon, few had much to say about how the Chilean armed forces with US backing and assistance launched air and ground strikes against the presidential palace in Chile. While much was said of the almost 3,000 Americans who died in the attacks of September 2001, there was almost no mention of the hundreds of Chileans killed during the coup, the tens of thousands of Chileans who were tortured and killed afterwards, or the hundreds of thousands who were forced into exile.

As with Chavez in Venezuela today, the US media was quick to take up the US government's position that Allende had no popular mandate, despite the fact he was returned to the presidency with a larger margin of victory than for his first term and the undeniable reality that both Chavez and Allende were the recipients of larger majorities of their electorate's votes than was won by George W. Bush in the 2000 election. With similar irony, Bush claimed the September 2001 attacks stemmed from those responsible "hating us for our freedoms", while he has used those same attacks as the pretext for an unprecedented assault on those very freedoms and civil liberties.

US forces occupied Nicaragua and Haiti for some 20 years each in the early 20th century. Cuba was occupied in 1906-9, 1912 and 1917-22. Between 1900 and 1910, US troops invaded Colombia, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Panama. During the following decade, the US invaded Mexico on several occasions, landed expeditionary forces in Guatemala and Costa Rica, as well as sending troops to China in 1911, 1912 and 1920, Turkey in 1912 and invading the Soviet Union in 1918- 22. While a world-wide depression and a second World War kept America distracted briefly, the CIA helped to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and supported a coup in Brazil in 1964. Lest we forget, there was also Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, right on up through Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and the list sometimes seems endless.

On top of these direct military interventions, invasions, assistance, and so forth, there have been the persistent interventions through surrogates in the affairs of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Azania and Palestine, where apartheid regimes of color and of religious affiliation and ethnicity carry out such blatant theft, murder, and oppression they have become pariah nations to virtually every nation on earth, except the United States.

Still, one might say, that cannot justify the killing of over 2,500 American civilians in September 2001. And, that would be true it has long been said that two wrongs cannot make a right. Consider further, however, that the US fought tooth and nail to block the creation of a World Court to hear cases were international law has been violated and when it was unable to block it, withdrew its signature from the treaty which supported the court's creation and insisted that US military and political officials must be held immune from prosecution outside the US, thereby rendering non-violent means of seeking recourse and justice for violence unleashed by America impossible.

Beyond that, the maintaining of a military budget which exceeds that of most of the rest of the world combined ensures that conventional warfare with the US offers little realistic opportunity to press one's case. Witness the most recent attack on Iraq, where the US didn't dare to advance their infantry until they had first starved the country with twelve years of draconian economic embargo and then destroyed the nation's infrastructure with virtual carpet bombing, and still felt compelled to lob endless artillery assaults against their opponents, all the while whining that it was unfair that some Iraqis were fighting for the defense of their nation against a foreign invader without being dressed in military uniforms. When I was schooled in the public education institutions of America, they never tired of telling us about the great ingenuity of the American patriots who fought the British redcoats in their traditional military formations, while attired in buckskins and hiding behind trees and rocks and the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation were heros. Now, I suppose they must teach that the Minute Men and Green Mountain Boys were cowardly terrorists, or have they simply stopped teaching that America gained an independent republic by waging a revolution? And we know what they say about the French today.

When the attacks of 11 September 2001 occurred, the IRSCNA issued a statement condemning the killing of so many civilians, but challenging Americans to recognise that the foreign policy of their government had legitimately garnered the hatred of many people throughout the world and see that they could not hope to be secure, so long as their government left so many with unredressed grievances. Today we issue that same challenge and suggest that a simple beginning to that process would be a forthright statement of the US's responsibility in bringing about the nightmare of the Pinochet coup in Chile, coupled with an apology to the people of Chile for the death, torture, imprisonment, and exile that followed in its wake. After that, they might consider compelling their government to end the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and cease propping up the brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine by their Zionist allies.

Simply put, there can be no peace without justice, and for working people of every nation their interests can be won by no war but the class war.