Having spread death and destruction across much of the Middle East, U.S. imperialists now seek to expand their horror show to the Far East. Barack Obama is methodically preparing for eventual war on China. In December he initiated the deployment of 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia. In January he issued a Pentagon decree entitled, “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.” It states: “While the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region [emphasis added].”
Host of Problems = Hard Time for Rulers to Re-elect Obama
But U.S. rulers face two major problems in gearing up for a clash with China. First, they have a growing need to wage wider Middle East oil wars, especially as tensions with Iran heighten. It’s a task made more difficult by a shortage of combat troops, which could necessitate a wildly unpopular military draft.
Second, while the ruling class sorely needs a war president, it may have a hard time retaining their invader-in-chief Obama’s services after November’s election. Millions of voters could be turned off by mass racist unemployment, continuing economic depression, millions of home foreclosures, deportation of nearly two million immigrants, a wage freeze on federal workers, and an administration run by bailed-out bankers who have reaped profit bonanzas during a Depression they helped create.
War Clouds Darken over Iran
Iran threatens more each day to become the next U.S. front for open warfare. Covert action, like CIA-Mossad [Israeli secret police] rubouts of Iranian nuclear scientists, has been raging for years. On January 13, two days after the latest assassination, Iran sentenced an ex-U.S. Marine to death for spying. And while Washington ramps up oil sanctions to discourage the building of nuclear bombs, Iran threatens to attack U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf.
The only question is whether the first air strikes on Iran will come from the U.S. or Israel. Obama is deceitfully trying to deflect blame onto the supposedly more belligerent Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu: “Inside the Israeli security establishment, a sort of good cop, bad cop routine, in which Israeli officials rattle sabers amid a U.S. scramble to restrain them, has assumed its own name: ‘Hold Me Back’” (Wall Street Journal, 1/14/12). The lie is that Israeli bosses, armed to the teeth with U.S. weapons, always act without influence from the White House. Sometimes they do, but there appears to be strategic unity regarding Iran. Says the Journal’s article:
The U.S. military is preparing for a number of possible responses to an Israeli strike, including assaults by pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to U.S. officials. In large measure to deter Iran, the U.S. has 15,000 troops in Kuwait, and has moved a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf area. It has also been pre-positioning aircraft and other military equipment, officials say. Arms transfers to key allies in the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have been fast-tracked.
This context lends added significance to Obama’s recent announcement to send 9,000 troops to Israel in a joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise, a move alleged to be “temporarily withdrawn.”
As for Iraq, al Qaeda bombs killed 73 people there in the second week in January. The country still lacks the stability required to boost oil production to the original U.S. target of six million barrels a day (mbd), much less the Maliki regime’s pie-in-the-sky promise of 12 mbd. In reality, Exxon Mobil and other oil giants — hoping to cash in on the U.S.-led genocide — are now pumping at a rate below three mbd. This shortfall is enough to prompt U.S. rulers to consider a re-invasion.
Nor will U.S. imperialists be able to stop the shooting in Afghanistan any time soon, not after pictures surfaced of U.S. snipers urinating on their Taliban “kills.” For a time, U.S. bosses had hinted at pointing toward some sort of negotiated settlement with the Taliban. In addition to Afghan mineral wealth and the proposed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) natural gas pipeline, the U.S. needs Afghanistan for permanent bases in a land that borders Iran, China and a resurgent Russian-dominated bloc.
Taliban cooperation with the U.S. would get them a cut of the mine and pipeline profits. Bill Clinton had worked on a similar pipeline deal between the Taliban and the Unocal oil company in the 1990s, but it fell through when the Taliban switched to a rival Argentine energy firm, Bridas. From that point on, the Taliban became the enemy in U.S. rulers’ eyes. Today, it is the suddenly “viral” release of the year-old corpse desecration video that derails talks.
War Agenda to be Forced on Opportunist Romney and Fragmented Republicans
Obama has succeeded in broadening the U.S war machine’s active theaters of operation from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Bahrain. Looking ahead, Iran, Syria and China are now stated U.S. adversaries. And who better to lead these racist attacks on Asian workers, the rulers figure, than the first black president of the U.S.? But Obama might not be around to lead the charge. Barring unlikely economic improvement or an “October Surprise” (a ruling-class-concocted provocation to whip up popular support for Obama), Republican Mitt Romney has a strong chance to enter the White House next year. An avowed supporter of U.S. imperialism, Romney vows to reverse Obama’s Pentagon cuts and increase Navy shipbuilding by 50 percent.
But as leader of a Republican party deeply divided in both its capitalist donor base and its working-class voter base, Romney caters to a host of contradictory interests. Gary Hart, a major imperialist strategist, laments the GOP’s grab bag of “conservative Protestant evangelicals, neoconservative foreign policy and national security hawks, the Tea Party, much but not all of Wall Street, many of Main Street’s small business owners, libertarians and cultural conservatives, among others” (NY Times, 12/16/11). Some of these factions oppose the war plans of the dominant Rockefeller wing of the ruling class.
Anti-tax, Anti-regulation Forces Hamper Rulers’ War Drive
The liberal imperialists’ New York Times, in its Boston Globe subsidiary, accused Romney of “trying to appease enough constituencies to get himself the nomination” (1/6/12). The Globe was referring to the anti-tax, anti-regulation forces that could hamper the money-raising and centralization needed for the global war foreseen by Obama’s backers. The Globe endorsed the more consistent imperialist Jon Huntsman, who had been Obama’s ambassador to China. The newspaper warned that “the religious right, represented by Rick Santorum, and Tea Party activists represented by Ron Paul, have pushed Romney in unwanted directions.”
Huntsman, the Globe said, would have been “a better president.” But now that he’s out of the race, the Globe believes that Huntsman “could still make Romney a better candidate” by pushing the main Rockefeller’s force’s imperialist aims.
Political events are driven not by candidates’ pandering, but by the sharpening imperialist competition to carve up the world’s resources, labor and markets through war. Elections hold significance for our class and Party only in revealing the tactical fights within the ruling class. This enables us to more accurately expose and attack the various capitalist forces that shape the politicians’ programs and disputes. At the same time, we point out that elections represent only the interests of various sections of the ruling class. Under capitalism, every vote diverts workers away from class war against the bosses.
As revealed in reports on class struggle in CHALLENGE, our task is to win workers and youth in the various ruling-class-led organizations that PLP’ers are active in: unions and shops, schools and colleges, churches and community groups. Our aim is to help them see that the problems faced by our class stem directly from the profit system: racism, sexism, mass unemployment, poverty and war. As long as this system exists, its miseries will continue to enrich the rulers through the labor of the workers, the class that produces all value but gets back only the part of that value necessary to survive.
Capitalism cannot be reformed. It has always been based on exploitation, depressions and wars. We strive to create a society — communism — run by and for our class, without bosses and profits and the nightmares for workers to which they inevitably lead. Only by building a revolutionary communist party, the Progressive Labor Party, composed of tens of millions of workers, can we achieve the ultimate goal of destroying the murderous profit system in communist revolution.