Imperialist Warmongers Strike Again

Down With Bombing of Syria!

U.S. Out of the Near East!

On September 23, President Obama initiated air strikes supposedly designed to surgically excise the cancer of ISIS from the areas it occupies in Syria. In a shift of opinion spurred by the filmed beheadings of American newsmen by ISIS, a majority in this country now supports such strikes, although widespread opposition to a boots-on-the-ground military intervention still exists. As projected by Obama, the “surgery” will take several years, and with 1,600 or so U.S. troops now in Iraq it is all but assured that many more will follow.

Many have pointed out that Obama’s war rationale mimics George W. Bush’s invocation of the evil Saddam Hussein as the justification for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. U.S. wars fought in the name of combating terror have had as their result hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani corpses and the proliferation of torture centers like Abu Ghraib. The Obama White House has expanded the field of murderous U.S. forays through drone and missile strikes from Somalia and Yemen to Pakistan, promising many more victims with the intervention into Syria.

U.S. interventions have shredded the social fabric of much of the Near East, thus providing a petri dish for the growth of myriad Islamic terrorist outfits throughout the area. Two such groups, the toothpaste terrorists of the (conveniently unearthed) Khorasan group and the Nusra Front, targeted for drive-by attacks during the initial air raids, are more or less direct links to Al Qaeda, which spun off ISIS itself. Forerunners of Al Qaeda were trained and funded by the CIA as it assembled a reactionary horde to oppose the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Obama—with some assistance from the British and French imperialists, who maintain interests in the Near East—projects weaving together the “good” terrorists opposed to ISIS with the forces of friendly Arab states, many of which have been/are backers of ISIS, to exterminate the threat du jour. The only criterion for membership in this club seems to be that its participants have conflicting interests in the region. A measure of the unintended consequences of this operation is that it is backed by today’s (or is it yesterday’s?) enemy, President Assad of Syria. But as we noted in “U.S. Out of Iraq! No Intervention in Syria!” (WV No. 1051, 5 September), Assad’s approval may backfire on him given that the U.S. maintains its opposition to his rule. It is the duty of the American working people to oppose any and all U.S. imperialist intervention in Syria, and everywhere else.

Despite the absence of non-delusional policy objectives in the U.S. military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, its purpose, like all the wars of U.S. imperialism, is to enforce and perpetuate its domination of the planet. This was nicely captured by the New York Times (24 September) report that Obama’s sermon to the UN left “little doubt that the United States would act as the ultimate guarantor of an international order.”

In addition to the millions of those slaughtered by U.S. imperialism in its wars are the other victims of the decaying capitalist order, both abroad and in this country. Working people in the U.S. have seen their wages slashed and/or their benefits gutted with no prospects of any real economic revival to reverse the bloodletting of the deep and prolonged recession. Black people continue to be gunned down by the killer cops, with the events in Ferguson revealing the real face of racist capitalist America. Dissatisfaction with those who govern is rampant, matched only by the despair of those who are governed. What is needed is a surge of class struggle and social protests, which will provide the basis for building a revolutionary internationalist working-class party with the purpose of overturning the profit-gorged U.S. imperialist order.