A fierce tactical debate is heating up within the U.S. imperialist camp. Confronting Iran’s nuclear-arming ayatollahs is becoming increasingly urgent for those bosses Obama is struggling to serve. An Iranian A-bomb, closer by the day, could effectively erase 60 years of a major cornerstone of U.S. imperialism: its domination of the oil-rich Mid-East. The stakes are high. It boils down to: U.S. (or Israeli) air strikes right now or a major invasion (with more allies) as soon as possible.
Imperialists Split on Iran Tactics: Strike Alone Today or With Allies Tomorrow
The dominant imperialists had leaned towards the latter course until recently. Their top think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), published an article entitled “After Iran Gets the Bomb” in its Foreign Affairs journal (March-April 2010). It said Iran’s nuclearizing was unavoidable but would give the U.S. an excuse to spread its own nuclear umbrella over the region while it gathered allies for a massive invasion of Iran. Now, however, the CFR, led by David Rockefeller who personifies its imperialist Exxon Mobil-JP Morgan Chase backing, entertains a shorter timetable.
On September 28, the CFR hosted Joseph Lieberman, a party-straddling, liberal Senate war-hawk at its New York mansion. Lieberman told the journalists and corporate decision-makers the CFR had assembled:
“It’s time to retire our ambiguous mantra about all options remaining on the table. It’s time for our message to our friends and enemies in the region to become clearer: Namely, that we will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability period — by peaceful means if we possibly can, but with military force if we absolutely must. A military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities entails risks and costs — I know that — but I am convinced that the risks and costs of allowing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapons capability are far greater.”
Liberal Lackey Lieberman Pushes Immediate Attack on Iran
Lieberman pointedly swatted down the CFR’s previous more gradual (but just as lethal) approach:
“Some have suggested that we should simply learn to live with a nuclear Iran and pledge to contain it. In my judgment, that would be a grave mistake. As one Arab leader I recently spoke with pointed out, how could anyone count on the United States to go to war to defend them against a nuclear-armed Iran, if we were unwilling to go to war to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran in the first place?”(CFR website, 9/29)
Lieberman’s nameless “Arab leader” probably hails from Saudi Arabia’s royal family but could be any of the pro-U.S. Gulf state regimes who received Washington’s recent record-setting $137-billion arms sales. The oil-soaked potentates want assurance that the weapons deals mean “the U.S. is with you” rather than “you’re on your own.”
Liberal Bosses, Unable to Get Workers or Elites to Fight, Must Rely on Potentially Disloyal Rightist Troops and Officer Corps
Either form of wider Mid-East war requires increased forces. Thus it presents serious problems for U.S. rulers locked in the Vietnam Syndrome puzzle which provoked mass working-class opposition to a draft, limiting the rulers’ source of military recruits. Their blatantly imperialist, racist genocide in Vietnam forced an end to both the draft and to officer training programs (ROTC) on many elite campuses.
Today the Pentagon gets its ground troops mainly from among desperately poor workers, with black and Latino recruits opting out of combat as much as possible. In a September 28 speech at Duke University, Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that officers and foot soldiers come increasingly from red states: “Currently, the percentage of the force from the Northeast, the West Coast and major cities continues to decline.”
Gates said that the military’s own decisions on where to locate bases have reinforced the trend, with a significant percentage of Army posts moved in recent years to just five states: Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. This trend, Gates said, also affects the recruiting and educating of new officers.
“The state of Alabama, with a population of less than five million, has 10 Army ROTC host programs,” he lamented. “The Los Angeles metro area, population over 12 million, hosts four ROTC programs. And the Chicago metro area, population nine million, has three.” There is a risk, over time, Gates declared, of developing a cadre of military leaders that — politically, culturally and geographically — have less and less in common with the people they have sworn to defend.
War-Making Rulers Need Anti-Worker Draft which PLP Helped Bury
Any Election Day success for Tea Party anti-tax candidates is another near-term crisis looming over the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists. Tea Partiers are funded by the likes of the billionaire Koch brothers and media mogul Murdoch whose fortunes gain little profit from the spending on imperialist wars (which require higher taxes).
War-bent U.S. imperialists, with Obama as commander-in-chief, dread anti-Washington, anti-tax Tea Partiers running and manning their military, given their strong influence among the very regions where the Pentagon has concentrated its bases. The rulers’ liberal wing’s only hope in avoiding that nightmare lies in bringing ROTC back to Ivy League colleges and restoring the draft of working-class GIs.
They have made modest progress on ROTC, with a handful of recent commissionings in Harvard Yard. But our class can draw on the anti-draft sentiment engendered by the militant, anti-imperialist struggle of millions in the 1960s and 1970s — a struggle in which our Party played a leading role, in factories and neighborhoods, on campuses and in the military itself. The rulers have not yet won working-class parents to willingly allow a draft that would send their children to fight and die in imperialist wars.
However, the ruling class holds state power. It can and must seek to reverse its predicament by restoring the worker-destroying draft. Taking on relatively puny Iran may or may not require full mobilization. Inevitable clashes with burgeoning U.S. rivals China and Russia surely will.
Our Party must lead our class in regaining the war footing we had decades ago. We need to militantly expose and attack the imperialists’ assaults on us where we work, live and go to school. Walkouts, strikes, mass demonstrations, accompanied by leaflets, forums and widespread distribution of CHALLENGE — and, most importantly, building solid PLP ties in, and recruiting from, the working class — can serve as training for the communist revolution that will eventually obliterate the war-making billionaires. J