[FOLLOWING fierce fighting in Beirut since the beginning…]

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FOLLOWING fierce fighting in Beirut since the beginning of February, US marines in Lebanon are being moved out of the city to be relocated on ships off shore. British troops are also being withdrawn.

The transfer of US forces will not be immediate or simultaneous. According to Reagan, "US military will remain on the ground in Lebanon for retraining and equipping the Lebanese army and protecting our remaining personnel."

But the indications are that the US plans to pull its forces back to its offshore task force, and seek to guarantee the Lebanese state from the sea. Its fleet already has a record of military involvement in Lebanon - notably last September when it was responsible for the bombardment of Druze militias on the mainland.

French President Mitterrand has insisted that French troops will stay, although the Italian government is also withdrawing its contingent to the multinational force.

The crisis was precipitated by an uprising in Beirut, largely organised by the Druze militias of Walid Jumblatt and the Shia Muslim fundamentalist 'Amal (Hope) movement of Nabih Berri.

The government of Amin Gemayel, which was installed after the Israeli invasion of 1982, and has been backed by the US, has clearly collapsed. After the fighting broke out, members of the government defected, and then the whole Cabinet resigned.

The Lebanese army - restructured after 1982 so as to be dominated by Gemayel's Falange Party - fell apart during the conflict. According to some reports, 90% of the army surrendered their arms without protest.

The slaughter inflicted on Lebanon by the Israeli invasion, and imperialist intervention since then, were all justified as operations to secure "peace' civil war-torn Lebanon.

'Operation Peace in Galilee' as the Israeli invasion was called, led to tens of thousands of dead and wounded, and thousands of refugees. The Falangist government, which was designed to be a stable ally for Israel and imperialism, had to be backed by US military intervention and a war of attrition against the Druze and troops in Beirut other Muslim forces in Beirut the Shouf mountains.

As we go to press, the US fleet is once again bombarding Syrian positions in Lebanon.

Imperialist-Israeli "peace' has only worsened the day-to-day tragedy that the Lebanese people have lived through. Whoever they back to replace Gemayel. it will be a government favourable to their interests, not a government wanted by the mass of Lebanese.

The Lebanese civil war of 1975-6 began as a just war against the Christian-dominated sectarian nature of the Lebanese state, and over the right of the Palestinian Resistance to exist in Lebanon. It degenerated into communal slaughter, partly due to the POLITICAL banana-skins have dominated the Thatcher goverr ment's record in the months since it won the most stunning victory of any election since 1945.

And now the stench of financial scanda! , of petty personal money-grubbing corruption, creeps up on Margaret Thatcher herself.

First her son was exposed as using Thatcher's prime-ministerial position to help his busi ness activities.

Perhaps Mark Thatcher at 3( could be dismissed as 'a stupid boy' , Margaret Thatcher's version of President Jimmy Carter's redneck brother Billy. But now Dennis Thatcher, Queen Margaret's consort, is caught at the same financial game.

Like corrosive poison gas, the cloud of scandal and corruption edges closer to the prime minis ter herself. Mrs Thatcher is slowly being undercut and discredited.

Good _ but how ridiculous. Margaret Thatcher's government has made Britain a heaven for spivs and asset-strippers of all kinds, and a capitalist hell for millions of working class people.

The face of Thatcher's Britain is the brutal, ugly, nightmare face of corrupt, socially irresponsible capitalism. What even an Edward Heath denounced as the 'unacceptable face of capitalism' is held up to the British people by Margaret Thatcher as her vision of the beautiful society.

She proclaims it and she fights for it. She glories in the memory of red-in-tooth-andclaw 19th century capitalism an offers it to the British people as a blueprint of the desirable future.

And this Mrs Thatcher is being undermined and mired because of the petty knavery of a doltish son and a husband on the make!

But then, come to think of it, when they finally got the bigtime gangster Al Capone, it was for tax evasion.

And the Hitler-scale war criminal and mass murderer Richard Nixon was kicked out of the US presidency for inspiring a small burglary and telling a few lies.

In any case, the magical Falklands Factor' which fuelled Margaret Thatcher back to Downing St in June, despite her crimes against the British people, is