President Barack Obama is facing a liberal backlash over his hardline national security policy, which critics say is more extreme and conservative than that pursued by George W. Bush (London Observer, 2/9/13).
Obama was supposed to be the people’s savior but now is outdoing Bush. Why? Because the profit-driven U.S. ruling class needs to maintain its dominance over the world’s resources, especially oil and gas. Wider war is essential to their goal, “by any means necessary.” Enter drones and assassinations.
Obama is stirring public opposition by openly claiming the right to assassinate some White House enemies and to imprison others indefinitely, anywhere in the world, based on secret information. Many were alarmed by the recently leaked InJustice Department memo that approved drone strikes on U.S. citizens linked to al Qaeda. Equally frightening was Obama’s choice of John Brennan to head the CIA. As homeland security advisor, Brennan has handed his boss a weekly drone “kill list.” There is also a growing movement against Obama’s 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows indefinite detention of suspects.
But the liberal backlash led by Democratic politicians, imperialist think tanks and media millionaires won’t help our class or end Obama’s reign of terror. In reality, the uproar is aimed at improving the effectiveness of the murderous U.S. war machine. It also seeks to steer mass opinion down the dead end of following the bosses’ laws, as judged by the bosses’ courts.
Legitimizing Mass Murder
The liberals’ “solution” is for Congress to “create a special court to handle this sort of sensitive discussion” [on drones] (New York Times editorial, 2/6/13). To legitimize assassinations, the liberal Times demands a kangaroo court similar to the one that rubberstamps government wiretaps. That tribunal has yet to deny a single request by the FBI, the Pentagon or the CIA.
Obama’s critics include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign policy think tank bankrolled by the likes of Exxon Mobil, JP Morgan Chase and the Rockefellers. Drones, as currently deployed, could actually harm this faction’s effort to stabilize a tottering global empire based on control of oil. Last month the CFR published a report, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies.” It warned:
Drone strikes may be indirectly increasing the number of militants. [K]illing suspected militants or civilians leads to the marked radicalization of local populations….In Yemen, for example, in 2010 the Obama administration described al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as encompassing ‘several hundred al-Qaeda members’…. By 2012, AQAP had ‘a few thousand members.’
The CFR couldn’t care less about the 1,128 civilians incinerated so far by U.S. drones (Bureau of Investigative Journalism, London). But bad press may curtail the use of a “central component of U.S. counterterrorism operations for at least another decade.” As the organization noted:
U.S. drone strikes are also widely opposed by the citizens of important allies, emerging powers, and the local populations in states where strikes occur. States polled reveal overwhelming opposition to U.S. drone strikes: Greece (90 percent), Egypt (89 percent), Turkey (81 percent), Spain (76 percent), Brazil (76 percent), Japan (75 percent), and Pakistan (83 percent).
Drones’ Rain of Terror
In addition to the outright murder of civilians, the drones rain down terror with their 24-hour-a-day reconnaissance flights. Inhabitants who see and hear these killers overhead live in constant dread of the next wave of “collateral” deaths. Adults fear to leave their houses. Children are scared to go to school. Families are too frightened to attend weddings or funerals.
….the United States cannot conduct drone strikes in the most critical corners of the world by itself. Drone strikes require the tacit or overt support of host states or neighbors (CFR).
Needing allies for the bigger wars to come, Rockefeller, Exxon Mobil & Co. urge Obama to shoot straighter and embrace “humanitarian” transparency for the inevitable “collateral damage.”
The president of the United States should limit targeted killings to the leadership of al-Qaeda and affiliated forces and…provide information to the public, Congress, and UN special rapporteurs…on what procedures exist to prevent harm to civilians (CFR).
By the time the Justice Department’s “okay-to-assassinate-citizens” memo broke, Democratic politicians had already digested the CFR’s prescriptions. “It has to be in the agenda of this Congress to reconsider the scope of action of drones and use of deadly force by the United States around the world,” said Delaware senator Chris Coons (Associated Press, 2/6/13).
To mislead well-meaning people opposed to Obama’s throw-away-the-key detention policy, the imperialists’ liberal front people propose futile lawsuits. On February 6, filmmaker Michael Moore, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and former NYT foreign correspondent Chris Hedges held a well-publicized forum in New York. It focused on building support for Hedges’ lawsuit against Obama’s NDAA 2012.
The Government Accountability Project (GAP) was a main organizer of the gathering. GAP cashes checks from both the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the next-generation Rockefeller Family Fund. The latter’s website says it supports GAP “because their mission fits perfectly with our understanding of the connections between transparency, accountability, and a well-functioning democracy.” This family and its allies reap trillions from U.S. Middle East oil wars, which have murdered millions. They hope to channel mass anger at the slaughter into a lawsuit.
Liberal Rulers Still Main Danger
Despite the backlash against Obama from the liberal ruling class who back him, these forces remain more dangerous than the more openly fascist conservatives or neo-con rulers. Liberal bosses hide behind a “democratic” mask and use it to develop a more populist appeal. They don’t oppose drones; they want to govern their use to make them more palatable to the working class. Meanwhile, they’re re-tooling their war machine to confront their imperialist rivals in China and Russia. Capitalist-run courts to supervise assassinations won’t slow U.S. war-making any more than lawsuits against rulers in the legal system they control.
Nor should the racist aspect of this butchery be overlooked. Drones drop their lethal bombs on Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, not on Europe or North America. Racist attacks are business as usual for U.S. rulers. Consider the routine police tactics, from stop-and-frisk assaults to murder, that single out the overwhelmingly black and Latino workers and youth in every big city in the U.S. As a direct result, these groups compose 70 percent of the country’s 2.4 million prison population.
But neither drones nor Special Forces will solve the U.S. bosses’ military problems. Only larger standing armies can fill their needs in the wider wars they’re planning and the next world war to come. (See CHALLENGE editorial, 2/13, on women in combat.)
Only Communist Leadership Can Kill KKKapitalism
History shows that a robust anti-war movement depends solely on the working class, which suffers the most and has nothing to gain in the bosses’ endless conflicts. During the U.S. Vietnam Genocide, the Progressive Labor Party built a base in factories, on campuses, in the military and in neighborhoods. We exposed and militantly attacked the local bosses’ ties to the war-making capitalists. Hundreds of thousands joined the rallies, marches and strikes we helped to lead.
We put fear into U.S. capitalists, but not enough. Wars persist because the profit system survives. Only a society free of bosses and profits — and therefore of racism, sexism and war — can enable our class to lead a decent existence. To truly succeed, anti-war workers must be organized in a mass Party with a long-term, revolutionary communist outlook to destroy capitalism. They must be organized within PLP.
This is the message we must bring to our activities in the shops and unions, the schools and campuses, the barracks and communities. The life of the working class is at stake.