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	Workers Vanguard No. 924	7 November 2008

U.S. Strikes Pakistan, Syria

U.S. War Criminals: Hands Off the World!

Out of Iraq, Afghanistan!

In the past weeks, U.S. imperialist forces have attacked sites in Pakistan and Syria, threatening to spread the carnage of the bloody occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq into these neighboring countries. On October 26, the U.S. military staged an attack on the Syrian village of Sukkariyah, with soldiers emerging from helicopters to gun down eight people, including four children. Meanwhile, the U.S. is now routinely launching Predator drone missile strikes into Pakistan’s western tribal regions. Two recent attacks last Friday claimed an additional 27 lives.

The offensive into the Pakistani tribal region bordering Afghanistan includes at least one ground raid. On September 3, helicopter-borne U.S. commandos carried out an assault in Pakistan, killing some 20 people. In line with secret orders issued by President Bush in July authorizing such raids, this attack took place without prior approval from the U.S.’s nominal ally in Islamabad. With these orders, Bush is following the course recommended by Barack Obama, who since the beginning of his campaign has expressed a willingness to make military incursions into Pakistan in pursuit of “terrorists.”

These U.S. military incursions have touched off a firestorm of protest, including a rally of thousands in Damascus. While the new Pakistani regime has previously acquiesced to the airstrikes, including by allowing the CIA to fly the drones from a secret military base within its borders, popular outrage at the September 3 assault prompted the Islamabad regime to threaten to cut off the supply routes of its imperialist patron in the event of any future ground raids. Recently, in response to the raging discontent, the Pakistani government issued statements protesting the bombings in the tribal regions.

Many Pakistanis trace the origins of the uprising in the Bajaur tribal area to a U.S. missile strike on an Islamic seminary there in November 2006. Under heavy pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military is now waging a brutal offensive in Bajaur to suppress the uprising, forcing some 300,000 people to flee the area. The disintegration of Pakistan, a highly fragile and nuclear-armed country, could well ignite the kind of communalist slaughter that has attended the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The resulting death and destruction from a conflagration on the Asian subcontinent would eclipse that of the brutal occupation of Iraq.

In advance of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the White House announced what came to be known as the “Bush doctrine” of unilateral “pre-emptive” war against any perceived adversary. The 2002 “Nuclear Posture Review” listed seven countries, including the deformed workers states of China and North Korea, for nuclear first strike. Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates expanded the “Bush doctrine,” arrogating to the U.S. the “right” to nuke any “enemy” country it wants at any time. With its A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War, the U.S. demonstrated its willingness to inflict such destruction in the service of its appetites to control the world. Nevertheless it is no accident that this policy has been reasserted at this time. The burgeoning economic crisis in the U.S and its militarily weakened state make U.S. imperialism an even greater danger to the world’s working and oppressed peoples.

This will not change, whoever wins the U.S. elections. John McCain is promising an Iraq-style “surge” in Afghanistan while Obama is pledging at least 10,000 more troops. Both support further U.S. military action inside Pakistan. Meanwhile, U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, whether at current levels or as a “residual force” deemed necessary by Obama and described by his advisers as totaling up to 50,000 troops. As for Iran, Obama has joined McCain in issuing threats over its nuclear program, declaring that “we must never take the military option off the table.”

Obama, who was seen by many as the “antiwar” candidate, has surrounded himself with the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright. As a part of the Carter administration, Brzezinski was godfather to the reactionary Afghan mujahedin cutthroats financed by the CIA against the Soviet Army, which intervened in Afghanistan in late 1979 in defense of the USSR’s southern flank and on the side of elementary human progress. Albright was Clinton’s Secretary of State, who extolled the UN starvation blockade of Iraq and was a key player in the U.S./NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.

In Berlin this summer, Obama gave a speech designed to reinvigorate “Western allies” behind U.S. imperialist aims abroad, denouncing “the Soviet shadow [that] had swept across Eastern Europe” after World War II, while leaving unmentioned the fact that the Red Army had defeated the scourge of Nazi terror in Europe. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, Obama’s anti-Communism today serves a real purpose in targeting the deformed workers states of Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and especially China, the largest and most powerful of the countries where capitalist rule has been overthrown.

The only way to put an end to imperialist war is to tear up the whole capitalist system by its roots through workers revolution and to establish a socialist society. As revolutionary Marxists in the belly of the imperialist beast, the Spartacist League/U.S., section of the International Communist League, demands the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, the Near East and Central Asia. U.S. hands off the world!

In the lead-up to and during the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, we stressed that it was in the class interest of the international proletariat to defend those countries against imperialist attack without extending any political support to the Taliban cutthroats or Saddam Hussein’s bloody capitalist regime. Every victory for the imperialists in their military adventures encourages more predatory wars; every setback serves to assist the struggles of working people and the oppressed.

The U.S. imperialists have repeatedly engaged in saber rattling against Iran, as they seek to stamp out any regime that does not bow to their dictates. Iran in particular has been singled out for its uranium enrichment program. In support of the perspective of effectively disarming Iran, the reformist International Socialist Organization and its Campus Antiwar Network and the Revolutionary Communist Party (through its World Can’t Wait outfit) signed a petition begging the war criminals Bush and Cheney not to “aggressively” attack Iran, while advising the imperialist chiefs to “lead the way to peace”! The petition argues that “the most effective way to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons would be to closely monitor its nuclear energy program” (see “ISO, RCP to Bush: Disarm Iran, ‘Lead the Way to Peace’,” WV No. 870, 12 May 2006).

The reformists operate within the framework of the capitalist system, a system that can’t be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed, much less inaugurate world peace. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is nothing other than the competition among the industrial powers for profits and spheres of influence, which ignites wars of conquest and gives rise to neocolonial pillage. We say that Iran needs nuclear weapons and adequate delivery systems to defend itself and to deter an imperialist attack. In the event of military attack against it by the U.S. imperialists or Israel acting as a proxy for the U.S., we would call for military defense of Iran while giving no political support to its theocratic regime.

Under the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, age-old ethnic and religious antagonisms—which were stoked by the imperialists’ divide-and-rule carve-up of the Near East and exacerbated by decades of bourgeois-nationalist rule—have erupted in an all-sided orgy of bloodletting. We call for the military defense of Iraqi and Afghan forces insofar as they aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers and their lackeys. At the same time, we stand in intransigent political opposition to the Islamic fundamentalists and nationalists who have also engaged in communalist slaughter.

The vaunted “surge” has merely resulted in a decline in U.S. casualties. Meanwhile, the various Sunni and Shi’ite forces continue to bomb their rivals’ mosques, neighborhoods and marketplaces throughout Iraq. In Mosul, tensions between Kurds and the Shi’ite-led central government for control of the city have reached a boiling point. One consequence of the sectarian violence is shown in the fate of the Iraqi Christians, whose numbers were cut in half over the last five years through forced expulsions and murder. Christians have lived in the area for nearly two millennia, surviving countless invasions and occupations only to have their existence threatened by the Christian fundamentalist regime in Washington.

It was the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, a world-historic defeat for the international proletariat, that emboldened U.S. imperialism to wield its military might far and wide, especially in the strategically important and oil-rich Near East. The Soviet Union was the homeland of the October Revolution of 1917, the world’s first and, to date, only victorious workers revolution. While the reformist “socialists” joined in cheering the demise of the USSR, we Trotskyists fought to the end in defense of the Soviet workers state and its collectivized property forms. With the U.S. imperialists today intent on overturning the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution that resulted in the smashing of capitalist rule, the international proletariat must stand for the unconditional military defense of China and the other deformed workers states against imperialism and counterrevolution. We call for workers political revolution in these states to oust the Stalinist bureaucratic misrulers and replace them with regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

Imperialist war abroad goes hand in hand with increasing immiseration, repression and racist oppression at home. What is necessary is class-struggle opposition to U.S. imperialism by the multiracial proletariat in this country. The primary obstacle to this course is the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which subordinates the proletariat to its capitalist class enemy, particularly by promoting Democratic Party “lesser evilism.” The fight for revolutionary leadership is key. Our purpose is to forge the multiracial workers party that will lead the proletariat in sweeping away the bloody capitalist system that breeds war and put the wealth of this country into the hands of the workers who create it.