The civil war in Syria has U.S. rulers in a quandry. They are targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad in line with their perpetual need to secure Middle East oil and gas. Only by limiting arch rival China’s access to energy for its growing economy and military can the U.S. bosses maintain their imperialist advantage.
At the same time, U.S. capitalists are concerned that a Syrian invasion could repeat their fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan — especially in light of U.S. workers’ skepticism and lack of support for the next war for profit. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and other U.S. presidents, told Bloomberg Television that military involvement in Syria would risk “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”
Last August Obama warned Syria it would be crossing “a red line” and inviting U.S. intervention if it used chemical weapons. Amid recent reports that both Assad and his Syrian opposition may have used poison gas (New York Times, 5/6/13), Obama must choose between unpopular military force and a loss of credibility. A lead front-page Times article (5/5/13) said Obama was “reluctant to become entangled in another war in the Middle East, and, well aware that most Americans oppose military action, the president has deliberately not explained what his ‘red line’ actually is.”
Israeli rulers, acting as front men for the U.S., have twice launched air strikes on Syria’s Iranian-supplied missiles, setting their own red line to stop shipments to Israeli enemy Hezbollah, as well as exposing Syria’s weak air defense.
Obama’s promised intervention has his defenders in the liberal media and think tanks claiming that his worries stem from a rare diplomatic mistake on his part. “Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria,” reads the Times’ May 5 top headline. An op-ed article in the same issue by Brookings Institution director Daniel Byman blames Obama’s lack of planning: “In the Syrian case, the red line on chemical weapons appears to have been issued without a decision as to how we might respond to a Syrian breach.”
Obama’s ‘Blunder’ Or
Service to Finance Capitalists?
But Obama didn’t blunder into his Syrian dilemma. He is boxed in by his subservience to U.S. finance capital. In particular, Obama must protect the interests of ExxonMobil and other energy companies in competition with Chinese and Russian capitalists, who regard Syria as a toehold for their own imperialist interests.
ExxonMobil has hired James Jeffrey, formerly U.S. ambassador to occupied Iraq, to help negotiate huge oil deals with Baghdad (Reuters, 2/8/13). Without acknowledging his Exxon paymasters, Jeffrey wrote an April 27 article for the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy entitled “Intervention Escalation.” In it, he identified U.S. imperialism’s main global foes in Syria: “Iran, Russia, and China have deep stakes in the preservation of the Assad regime.” Then he highlighted U.S. bosses’ temporary opportunity: “The power balance in Syria’s immediate neighborhood is so tipped in favor of the United States and its friends that there is little China and Russia (or Iran) could do to counter the United States directly.”
In short, the diminished “potential for a Russian, Chinese, or Iranian backlash should not deter Washington from taking necessary military action in Syria,” Jeffrey asserted. Alluding to his Exxon bosses’ hold on Iraqi and Saudi oil fields, he said, “Middle Eastern stability is a key U.S. interest...as is living up to our red line threat on chemical weapons use.”
According to the Exxon mouthpiece, the U.S. war machine is very capable of cashing obama’s check for Syria. He referred to an April 17 report in the Los Angeles Times:
The Pentagon is sending about 200 troops to Jordan, the vanguard of a potential U.S. military force of 20,000 or more that could be deployed if the Obama administration decides to intervene in Syria to secure chemical weapons arsenals or to prevent the 2-year-old civil war from spilling into neighboring nations.
Limits of Military Power
Obama may strike Syria soon. If he doesn’t, it will mean that the U.S. bosses’ longer-term strategists have prevailed. Strategic Forecasting, Inc., an influential policy analysis firm that counts the Pentagon and much of the Fortune 500 as clients, warns on Syria:
Many things are beyond the military power of the United States....You cannot stop a civil war by adding another faction to the war unless that faction brings overwhelming power to bear. The United States has a great deal of power, but not overwhelming power, and overwhelming power’s use means overwhelming casualties. And you cannot transform the political culture of a country from the outside unless you are prepared to devastate it as was done with Germany and Japan.
Regardless of the bosses’ timetable for an attack on Syria, the international working class must prepare for more Middle East oil wars — and potential world wars — as imperialist rivals fight it out for the maximum profits they need to survive. To that end, we must build an international communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. PLP’s sole aim is to organize the destruction of capitalism — with its profits, racism, sexism, mass poverty and unemployment — and to establish a communist society run by and for the working class. This means winning millions of workers, youth and soldiers to communist revolution.