It’s All About Oil, Profits: Widening Wars Prelude to Nuke Showdown

Wars over access to resources, markets and workers’ labor result inevitably from capitalism’s dog-eat-dog competition and kill workers by the millions. Attacking this mass murder for profit is essential to the long struggle towards communist revolution our Party marks on May Day. May Day 2010 finds U.S. capitalists, led by Obama, shedding workers’ blood openly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as they try to shore up a faltering worldwide empire largely based on control of energy. U.S. rulers, meanwhile, must soon confront Iran and have longer-term plans for facing off against China and Russia.

For Exxon’s Bottom Line, Obama
Keeps GIs in Iraq Despite
‘Withdrawal’ Pledge

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has slaughtered over one million civilians (Opinion Research Business poll, 2007) and 4,300 GIs in pursuit of a promised 12 million barrels of oil per day (mbd). Obama’s phony “withdrawal” plan (which helped elect him) has become a 50,000-soldier “residual” force that will continue the carnage. U.S. combat boots on Iraq’s soil, needed to protect Exxon Mobil’s, BP’s and Shell’s new oil stakes there, incite violence from local bosses seeking a piece of the elusive 12-mbd bonanza for themselves.

Masquerading as religious leaders, billionaire Osama Bin Laden (through al Qaeda in Iraq) and would-be pro-Iranian oil baron Muqtada al Sadr have been battling both the U.S. and each other to overturn the Exxon-led deals. Just after a U.S. raid wiped out two al Qaeda bigwigs, al Qaeda bombs killed 72 people near Sadr-affiliated mosques around Baghdad on April 23.

To Rulers, Mid-East Oil, Gas Mean Everything, Workers’ Lives Nothing

U.S. capitalists’ main goals for their murderous Afghan campaign are: securing the path of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline and establishing a military presence that physically separates U.S. foes Iran and China. “Shoot-first” orders from top U.S. brass cause a civilian massacre every week in Afghanistan.

NPR reported (4/23): “Earlier this week, NATO troops opened fire on a vehicle in Khost province, killing four unarmed civilians, including three teenagers. Last week, a military convoy shot up a large passenger bus in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least five civilians and wounding 18 others.”

The U.S. war machine is now gearing up for a June offensive to take Kandahar, which lies directly on TAPI’s route. But even if gas never flows, U.S. installations in Afghanistan, like the Bagram mega-base, will have driven a geographic wedge between U.S. rival China and its protégé Iran.

Obama has enlarged U.S. rulers’ Afghan effort into Pakistan, with similar disregard for working-class lives. An April 24 Predator drone strike directed from a bunker in Nevada incinerated seven people in northwest Pakistan. But the Pentagon-Pakistani death squad couldn’t care less who they were. “We don’t know yet if any high-value target was present in the area at the time of attack,” said a Pakistani official. (Agence France Presse, 4/24)

A nuclear-armed Iran — pro-Chinese and pro-Russian — presents an immediate threat to U.S. imperialism’s precarious leverage over oil-rich Iraq and even richer Saudi Arabia. In response, U.S. bosses plan two basic options, both loaded with danger for our class. One involves a U.S. (or U.S.-aided Israeli) attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If that happens, Teheran’s oil-soaked ayatollahs vow they will close the Straits of Hormuz, shutting off U.S.-controlled crude exports from Iraq, Kuwait and eastern Saudi Arabia. A massive U.S.-led invasion would soon follow.

The other option, now moving through Congress and seemingly “more peaceful,” is for sanctions, including an embargo on gasoline to Iran. The Christian Science Monitor (4/24) warned: “The only way to really enforce such a crippling sanction against the Iranian economy would be through an American-led naval blockade which, by international law, is an act of war....It was a U.S. ban on the export of oil to Imperial Japan for its invasion of China that triggered the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. And a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba in 1962 almost led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” [Despite some off-the-wall religious views, Christian Science is actually a Wall Street/Rockefeller Republican outfit. Goldman Sachs ex-CEO Henry Paulson belongs, as does Nelson Rockefeller ally and Jay Rockefeller father-in-law ex-senator Charles Percy.]

China’s Bosses’ Growing Navy
Challenging U.S. Rulers’ Control of Oil

China’s capitalists are the U.S.’s biggest rival for Mid-East energy. The NY Times (4/24) reported China’s “military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force.”

Meanwhile, neo-czar Putin is using Russia’s enormous gas supplies as both carrot and stick to create a vast anti-U.S. Eurasian bloc of nations dependent on, or loyal to, Moscow. With U.S. conventional forces tied up elsewhere, Obama’s response has been to flaunt Washington’s nuclear trump card. At his recent 47-nation “weapons reduction” summit, Obama in fact retained 1,500 strategic warheads and unlimited smaller, battlefield ones; maintained U.S. nukes based in Europe; and implicitly threatened Iran with a nuclear strike.

Conventional wars are widening and nuclear conflicts are looming, with dire consequences for workers. But on this working-class May Day holiday, while widespread anti-war sentiment exists, the rulers have managed to channel a great deal of it down the dead-end road of electoral politics that put their stooge Obama in the White House.

We must rebuild an anti-imperialist anti-war movement with a pro-worker, communist outlook. Stepping up our organizing efforts on the job, at school and in the neighborhood will help. So will the bosses’ intensifying war-making, which will lay bare capitalism’s wartime horrors to millions who still feel unaffected. Since the “economic draft,” which pushes jobless youth into the military, has proven insufficient to fill the war-makers’ military needs, U.S. rulers will someday soon have to draft the so-called middle class as well as the working class into its killing machine.

While it was the cauldron of capitalists’ global conflict that provided the conditions for the Soviet and Chinese workers’ revolutions, political errors brought capitalism back to both places. But an inevitable World War III, driven by the world’s competing capitalists, can result in the bosses’ digging their own graves, provided there is a mass revolutionary movement led by PLP to build a true communist world. What we do now surely will count greatly.