The U.S. war machine kills workers openly to control Iraqi oil fields and a projected Afghanistan pipeline. While Obama’s brass claims to be aiming at Islamic extremists and drug traffickers, their main objective is guarding U.S. imperialism, especially its control of global energy supplies. Under liberal “peace candidate” Obama, secret assassinations, torture, and intimidation by terror surpass atrocities ordered by avowed warmonger Bush. “Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed ‘things that the previous administration did not.’” (Washington Post, 6/4)
But Obama is also promoting less obvious forms of murder for profit. “[T]he Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other ‘radical’ groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces...are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.” (WP article)
To win U.S. workers to back this war operation, Obama & Co. are using various prosecutions of alleged terrorist “bombers” to foment mass racist terror against Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. They also propagandize U.S. troops with anti-Arab/Muslim racism to demonize the “enemy” as less than human.
Their purpose is to divert workers’ anger over racist unemployment, foreclosures and racist budget cuts which affect the entire working class while falling heaviest on black and Latino workers. The money saved from these cuts and mass layoffs can then be used to fund their imperialist wars. Given the ruling class’s many-sided operation, it behooves PLP’ers to go on a war footing ourselves to meet these attacks.
Major Oil Sources and Routes
Focus of U.S. ‘Anti-Terror’
Clandestine Violence
Somalia’s Horn of Africa — second only to the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz as a strategic chokepoint for exports of Mid-East crude — draws special attention from the Pentagon’s clandestine wing. “Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa.” (WP article)
To help sway public opinion against a Somali “terrorist menace,” on June 5 the FBI and NYPD arrested two men they said were headed to a “jihadist” training camp in Somalia. Yemen lies across from Somalia on the eastern side of the shipping lane. U.S. rulers justify intervention there by alleging ties between a fundamentalist Yemeni cleric and the incompetent “Christmas underwear” and Times Square bombers as well as the deadly, deranged Ft. Hood shooter.
“Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.” (WP article) Widespread hatred of U.S. imperialism, largely misguided into Islamic sects, gives Obama & Co. plausible, secret targets, aimed at protecting oil and gas supplies and pipelines.
An earlier leak to the NY Times (5/24) revealed that top U.S. general Petraeus “has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region.” Saudi royalty control the world’s greatest oil reserves and make a huge part of them available to Exxon Mobil in a sweetheart deal. Since Bin Laden and other non-royal Saudis were shut out of the scheme, it motivated these competing capitalists to organize al Qaeda and the resulting 9/11 attacks. U.S. enemy Iran also has both oil and nuclear dreams of dominating the Mid-East.
Obama/Gates Attack on Military Industrial Profiteers Aims at More Lethal Conventional Forces
U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are striving for greater killing power under the guise of saving taxpayers’ money. A key feature of the Pentagon’s Base Realignment and Closing Program, which is supposed to save billions, is building a new 8,000-strong Navy/Marine base on the Pacific island of Guam. U.S. strategists hope expanding the outpost, which will have a pier for aircraft carriers, will give them an extra edge in confronting the challenge of China’s growing blue-water fleet which can patrol the world’s oceans to secure its own energy supplies.
The NY Times (6/3) reported that, “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ordered the military and the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy to find tens of billions of dollars in annual savings to pay for war-fighting operations....The goal is...3 percent real growth each year, beyond inflation, in the accounts that pay for combat operations.” Gates wants to rein in costly, dubiously useful, weapons programs to shift expenditures to projects expanding deadly U.S. force. This deadliness-enhancing, “more-bang-for-the-buck” program also involves basing forces where they are most likely to fight.
The purpose of the coming U.S. offensive for Kandahar is to ensure U.S. presence in that city, a strategic point along the projected TAPI pipeline to run from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean.
Finally, the U.S. military is, in fact, prolonging the occupation it pretends to be winding down in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. (see page 8) As U.S. ground troops leave, the USS Iwo Jima is scheduled to arrive. The Iwo Jima is not a hospital ship but an amphibious assault vessel with 2,000 heavily-armed Marines aboard.
Their continued military presence encircling Haiti aims at exploiting the vast oil and gas reserves under the Caribbean Sea which Russia and China are already eyeing. Both countries sent their presidents to Cuba to negotiate financing of projects whereby they could beat U.S. Big Oil to the punch here.
Yet despite their seeming ability to kill anywhere at any time with vastly superior weapons, U.S. rulers face a perilous future militarily. Shaky “ally” Israel, unstable foe North Korea and/or strategic adversaries Iran, China and Russia could in a flash provoke a global conflict causing more casualties — on all sides — than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
We, as revolutionary communists, should expose the bosses’ aggressive militarizing, like Obama’s burgeoning death squads, and put ourselves on a wartime footing.