9/11 Commission: Democrats Seek to Out-Bush Bush

Lies, Repression and Imperialist War

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 825, 30 April 2004.

APRIL 25—Morning newspaper accounts of the September 11 Commission hearings revive the horror of the day thousands of innocent people lost their lives in the attacks on the World Trade Center, while nightly news broadcasts show the exploitation of that tragedy for more terror and destruction by U.S. imperialism in Iraq and repression at home. As we go to press, the U.S. military is moving in on Najaf and threatening to flatten Falluja. We have made clear from the beginning of the Iraq war that every blow struck against the imperialist occupiers is a blow struck against the enemy of workers and the oppressed all over the world. We take a side against the U.S. imperialist occupation without giving an ounce of political support to the reactionary clerics who appear to be leading much of the resistance. We fight for a perspective of militant class struggle on the home front against the imperialist rulers who oppress workers here and abroad.

The Bush administration has been dragged kicking and screaming to the September 11 Commission by families who are grief-stricken and demanding answers about why their loved ones died. But this commission has little to do with “revealing the truth” and everything to do with misdirecting anger with the U.S. ruling class into enhancing the repressive powers of the capitalist state. These hearings also reflect frictions within the U.S. ruling class, which are heightened now that the U.S. war in Iraq has become troublesome. The real purpose of the commission is to resolve differences within the ruling class in order to better manage domestic and foreign exploitation. How fitting that Democrat Bob Kerrey, a Navy SEAL, Vietnam veteran and certifiable war criminal responsible for the assassination of (at least) 21 Vietnamese civilians, takes center stage at the commission to thunder about “truth” and “justice.” The Democrats seek to exploit the hearings for their advantage in the upcoming presidential elections, but what the real story of September 11 and the Iraq war reveals is that the Democrats and Republicans are partner parties of capitalist rule.

Some secrets have come out, like the 6 August 2001 “Presidential Briefing Memo” titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” Condoleezza Rice claims this was “no silver bullet.” Right, they knew merely that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack with hijacked aircraft in New York City! But their attention was focused on their main obsessions: capitalist counterrevolution in China and “regime change” in Iraq. Moreover, Osama bin Laden had been America’s creature, armed and equipped along with the Taliban to fight U.S. imperialism’s “holy war,” launched under Democrat Jimmy Carter against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. Like Dr. Frankenstein, the U.S. rulers didn’t calculate that their monster, bin Laden, would get up and turn on his creator.

As we wrote in a prescient statement by the Political Bureau of the Spartacist League, just the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center:

“The ruling parties—Democrats and Republicans—are all too eager to be able to wield the bodies of those who were killed and wounded in order to reinforce capitalist class rule. It’s an opportunity for the exploiters to peddle ‘one nation indivisible’ patriotism to try to direct the burgeoning anger at the bottom of this society away from themselves and toward an indefinable foreign ‘enemy,’ as well as immigrants in the U.S., and to reinforce their arsenal of domestic state repression against all the working people....

“In the aftermath of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, the American imperialist rulers have sought to find a surrogate for the war against ‘godless Communism’ in the spectre of ‘Islamic terrorism.’ This is the new external enemy against which they have sought to rally the population, and they aim to use the attack on the World Trade Center for furthering public support for their imperialist terror abroad, fostering the lie that the working people of the U.S. have a common interest with their capitalist exploiters.”
— WV No. 764, 14 September 2001

Dual Parties of Evil at Home and Abroad

While the World Trade Center smoldered, Condoleezza Rice convened a high-level meeting of Bush aides to “think about how do you capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th” (Asia Times, 30 March 2003). Two damaging exposés by Washington insiders, Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke and Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, reveal the White House’s cynical and murderous opportunism. Clarke, the counterterrorism expert appointed by Clinton and kept on by Bush, managed the September 11 crisis for the White House. He sent Vice President Cheney and aides to a bunker in the East Wing, and then set off to join them. Fuming that his warnings about Al Qaeda had been ignored, he recounts: “I turned the corner and found a machine gun in my face. Cheney’s security detail had set up outside the vault doors, with body armor, shotguns, and MP5 machine guns. Although they knew me, they were not about to open the vault door.” Clarke pleaded, “Hey guys, it’s me!” In a September 11 meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Clarke claims surprise that they “were going to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.”

Woodward spells out that “regime change” in Iraq “was the standing policy inherited from the Clinton administration.... A 1998 law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton authorized up to $97 million in military assistance to Iraqi opposition forces ‘to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein’ and ‘promote the emergence of a democratic government’.” Clinton began the pipeline of money to the embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, now a prominent figure in the U.S.-installed Iraqi stooge “Governing Council.” (Chalabi also had a fan in “anarchist” professor Noam Chomsky [see WV No. 822, 19 March].) Secretary of State Colin Powell and his aide Richard Armitage told Woodward, “most Iraqis thought Chalabi was a knucklehead.” Per Woodward, animosities between the State Department and the Pentagon are such that “knucklehead” would be almost a term of endearment.

Pentagon neocons Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith “chicken-baited” Powell, the butcher of the first Gulf War, as representing the “Department of Nice” for his hesitations about invading Iraq this time. According to Woodward, Powell kept shaking his head and saying, “This is lunacy” and cursed the Pentagon brass as “Feith’s Gestapo office.” Yet it was Powell who held up the vial of imitation anthrax in a stage-managed moment at the United Nations to beat the drums for war, on the lying pretext that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” For all the differences in style, Powell and the neocons push the same policy, just as the Democrats and the Republicans do. The difference is the packaging. The Democrats would prefer to camouflage U.S. imperialist war with the backing of the UN, while the “Bush doctrine” is one of pre-emptive strike and allies be damned.

The Clinton administration waged a ruthless war against Iraq, including thousands of bombing sorties and the UN starvation blockade which killed one and a half million people, particularly children and the elderly. When Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about this monstrous crime, she serenely opined: “We think the price was worth it.” The UN weapons inspections and disarmament which took place during the Clinton administration ensured that Iraq would be defenseless when the time came for the Bush administration to launch an open war on Iraq. Bush went into Iraq because it was easy, but not North Korea because it has nukes. Now as the presidential race heats up, Democratic contender and U.S. Senator John Kerry is running as a more responsible war candidate than Bush, pledging to increase the number of troops and to stay the course in Iraq. Kerry immediately chastised Spain’s new prime minister Zapatero for vowing to pull Spanish troops from Iraq. So much for the Democratic Party “lesser evil!”

No to the Draft! U.S. Troops Out of Iraq!

Fear of lingering “Vietnam syndrome,” i.e., the unwillingness of the American population to shed blood in another losing venture for U.S. imperialism, has cynically prompted the rulers to bigger and bigger lies. Since the 1991 Gulf War, it has been Pentagon policy to limit photographs of body bags and coffins returning home for burial. A woman and her husband were fired by a Pentagon contractor for violating policy by snapping a picture of flag-draped coffins in a transport plane being loaded in Kuwait. With their racist disregard for Iraqi life, the American military occupiers destroy hospitals to treat the wounded and barely report the huge numbers of Iraqi dead. And Bush is so determined to “disappear” the American dead that he hasn’t turned up at one funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq.

With its pretensions to be the friend of the worker and the oppressed, the Democratic Party is the historic party of big war mobilizations. The Democrats have the popularity not to have to resort to privatized mercenaries, unlike the Republican gang in the White House. Black Democratic Party Congressmen Charles Rangel and John Conyers are pushing to reinstitute the draft. In remarks delivered to the Washington press club on April 15, Rangel motivated conscripting men and women, stating, “how proud all of them should be during the time of national emergency that they will be able to serve our great country.” Tell it to former soldier Nicole Goodwin, a black woman who returned from Iraq to a cot in a homeless shelter with her one-year-old baby! The real national emergency is brutal capitalist exploitation, union-busting, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, systematic racial oppression, murderous police violence and increased segregation. These are the issues that no Democrat or Republican will address except in empty electioneering speeches to be honored in the breach, because the solution requires a thoroughgoing socialist revolution to reorder the priorities according to the needs of working people, not the profits of the ruling class.

The race and class bias inherent in who dies for U.S. imperialism will not be redressed by reinstituting the draft. The sons and daughters of the ruling class, like George Bush, can always find a way to stay stateside while the sons and daughters of the working class are sent to die. The excruciating contradiction of being sent to fight for a country that promises you nothing but inequality, and a welcome mat nowhere but prison and the army, sparked black veterans to lead social struggles upon their return home from both world wars, Korea and Vietnam. Rangel and Conyers seek to dissipate the anger that already seethes in the ghettos and barrios of this country, where more black youth end up in prison than in college. Their push for the draft back in January 2003 merely paved the way for Republican Senator Hagel and Democratic Senator Biden, influential members of the Foreign Relations Committee, to float the question now, blathering about “shared sacrifice.” Legislation has been introduced in both chambers to revive the draft, although no action has been scheduled on either measure. We say, not a penny or a man (or a woman) for U.S. imperialism!

The Domestic Face of the “War on Terror”

Bloody imperialist war has been accompanied by a devastating assault on civil liberties. The USA-Patriot Act, adopted with overwhelming support of the Democrats (including John Kerry) has shredded the civil rights of labor, the left, immigrants, and everybody else. Bush and the Democrats are trying to outdo one another in the “war on terror” in the run-up to the elections. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, striking schoolteachers in New Jersey were pilloried as Taliban for breaking the reactionary “national unity” crusade. Tom Ridge of the Department of Homeland Security personally intervened to threaten longshoremen organized by the ILWU on the West Coast that any strike action by them would be against the interests of national security.

Bush wants an early renewal of the Patriot Act. The Democrats, mindful of protests by civil libertarians, now backpedal on their support for this, but they brag about other “get tough on terror” schemes they have instituted and more they will institute if they get the chance. The Homeland Security Act originated in concept as the “Lieberman bill,” introduced by the Democrats’ last vice presidential candidate. John Kerry and the Democrats support a version of legislation for a new sweeping domestic intelligence agency and the creation of a “national intelligence director.” As the ACLU’s executive director said in a press release, such an agency “could easily employ the same kind of dirty tricks the CIA uses overseas here in the United States against American citizens.”

These days citizenship is already no protection against the ravages of the U.S. government. U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago, was deemed by Ashcroft’s “Justice” Department an “enemy combatant” and dumped in a military brig in South Carolina. An amicus brief filed by the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee on behalf of Padilla states:

“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population. The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals, echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents. Like them, the Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.”

Indeed, America’s founding fathers would be jailed under the Patriot Act today for defending the right to resistance to oppression! Patrick Henry intoned, “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.” It doesn’t take a Marxist or even a civil libertarian to find the assaults on civil liberties today disturbing. But this anger is getting channeled into the “anybody but Bush” campaign.

The preceding eight years of the Democratic Clinton administration provided Bush more than fertile ground for the assault on civil liberties. After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, for example, the Clinton administration enacted the “Omnibus Counterterrorism Act,” under which immigrants and all “aliens” can be subjected to secret trials without any charges being presented. Habeas petitions were virtually eliminated for death row prisoners under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which vastly increased the number of crimes for which the state could apply the death penalty. Most of the immigrants who were rounded up by the Bush administration after September 11 as potential “terrorists” and held for months without any charges being presented were targeted not under Bush’s Patriot Act, but under Clinton’s 1996 Immigration Act. Besides vastly stepping up state repression, the other hallmark of the Clinton years was his fulfillment of his vow to “end welfare as we know it,” throwing poor, single black mothers into union-busting “workfare” jobs, or terminating welfare benefits.

Break with the Democrats, Build a Workers Party!

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and deformed workers states in East Europe in 1991-92, the workers and oppressed internationally suffered a world-historic defeat. The “death of communism” heralded by the U.S. imperialists was the basis on which U.S. imperialism has launched increasingly frequent, bloody and aggressive wars, beginning with the first Persian Gulf War under George Bush Sr.; continuing with wars and occupations in the Balkans, Haiti, Somalia and Iraq as well as the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan under Clinton; and culminating (so far) in George Bush Jr.’s “war without end.” These were preceded by the U.S. invasions of Panama and Grenada, which had a gratuitous quality, but set the pattern for imperialist invasions as allegedly bloodless operations. At the same time, the widely accepted belief that “communism is dead” has resulted in an international retrogression of consciousness so that workers in general do not identify their struggles with the liberating goals of Marxism. The forces most prominently seen as opposing U.S. imperialism are reactionary Islamic fundamentalists that were given birth by, particularly, the CIA—forces violently antithetical to Marxism and the genuine interests of the oppressed.

Today many people on the supposedly “socialist” left accept the ruling class’ assertion that “communism is dead” and that there is no longer any point in fighting to destroy capitalism and establish a socialist society that has no need of war or racism. In this they echo the ruling class which would have you believe that the interests of the working class are identical with those of the exploiters. These reformists would have you believe that the only task ahead for the working class and oppressed is to “dump Bush” in favor of bringing in whatever “lesser evil” the capitalists might offer in his place.

At the conclusion of his book, Bob Woodward cites a conversation he had with Bush in the Oval Office. “The upcoming presidential election would perhaps be the most immediate judgment on the war, but certainly not the last. How would history judge his Iraq War? I asked.” Woodward notes, “Bush smiled. ‘History,’ he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. ‘We won’t know. We’ll all be dead’.” As Chris Floyd commented in the Moscow Times (April 23-29), “No fine, faith-filled talk here about God and Jesus and the immortal soul responsible for its actions throughout all eternity—the kind of zealous patter Bush favors in public statements. This was just the cold, rotten, meaningless core of his grand vision—‘we’ll all be dead.’ So who cares? Après moi, le déluge.”

Today’s world confirms more acutely than ever the words of Rosa Luxemburg nearly one hundred years ago, that the choices ahead for humanity are socialism or barbarism. We aim to build a party that mobilizes the tremendous social power that exists in the proletariat, fighting in defense of the oppressed internationally to bring down U.S. and all imperialism through workers revolution.