From Ukraine to Iraq...Imperialists Plot for War

Millions of workers worldwide celebrated May Day 2014, the international working-class holiday rooted in the earliest fights for communism more than a century ago. The Progressive Labor Party is carrying forward this tradition in more than twenty countries on five continents. Despite the bosses’ efforts to bury this tradition in a wave of nationalism and imperialism, millions of 2014 May Day marchers advanced their anti-capitalist demands. They showed the potential of the working class to organize for communist revolution.
War Is ‘Good’ — For the Bosses
Meanwhile, the bosses are urgently proclaiming that war is good. On April 25, the ultra-imperialist Washington Post printed an op-ed piece headlined, “In the Long Run, Wars Make Us Safer and Richer.” Through ten thousand years of conflict, the piece read, “humanity has created larger, more organized societies that have greatly reduced the risk that their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for higher living standards and economic growth. War has not only made us safer, but richer, too.”
But who is “us”? The group enriching itself through war is the tiny, profiteering capitalist class, not the billions now struggling to survive on one to two dollars a day. And who is safer? Not the tens of millions who died in World War I. Not the more than 100 million who died in World War II. Not the tens of millions more slaughtered in the imperialists’ proxy wars since 1945.
Rulers Go Nuclear?
The ruling class’s war mongering is most apparent in the spiking tension between Washington and Moscow in Ukraine and beyond. Pro-Russian forces are widening the combat zone against the U.S.-backed government in Kiev. U.S. troops are positioned to defend what may be Putin’s next targets in the Baltic region — and to set a “trip wire” for a potential nuclear war, Barack Obama’s high-stakes revival of NATO’s mid-20th-century Cold War doctrine (see CHALLENGE, 4/7).
During the Cold War (1947-1991), the U.S. stationed hundreds of thousands of troops at the edge of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Europe. Any conflict could have been used to justify massive U.S. retaliation. Today Obama is taking a similar tack against the Russian imperialists among the U.S. rulers’ leading rivals for profits. On April 26, Lithuania President Dalia Grybauskaite rehearsed the trip-wire scenario by greeting 150 U.S. paratroopers: “The numbers are not important. If just one of our guests is harmed, this would mean an open confrontation, not with Lithuania but with the United States of America” (Reuters, 4/26/14).
On May 2, according to the New York Times, “46 people died as a result of street battles between pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine groups....in Odessa, far west of the country’s restive eastern region.” As the leading mouthpiece for the U.S. ruling class, the Times worried that this violence was “a measure of how far events have spiraled out of the authorities’ control.” CNN (5/4/14) chimed in, “This unrest raises the prospect of Russia becoming even more involved, whether that involves taking over all or parts of the region peacefully as it did with Crimea or as part of a full-scale military conflict.”
Losing influence in the Ukraine — a conduit for Russia’s oil and gas pipeline to the west — terrifies U.S. bosses. So does Putin’s threat to “liberate” ethnic Russians by taking over other former Soviet bloc countries. Unlike Ukraine, these nations now belong to U.S.-led NATO, making the stakes even higher (For the origin and role of NATO, see CHALLENGE, 4/7.)
Oil War Heating Up
U.S. and Russian capitalists are also squaring off in the Middle East. According to a May 1 article published by the BBC, “Iraq: A Proxy Battleground in a Regional War,”  “sectarian” killings have tripled over the past year. The BBC attributed this escalation to a struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for supremacy in the Gulf: “Shia officials openly accuse Saudi Arabia of financing Sunni extremists in the region, whereas Iraqi Sunnis often accuse the government of Nouri al-Maliki of power-grabbing to help Iran advance its regional agenda.”
But this is only the surface of the story. Behind Saudi royals and Iranian ayatollahs is the competition between
ExxonMobil and Russia’s Lukoil to dominate Iraqi oil supplies. Exxon’s transactions with Saudi Arabia represent the biggest deals in the history of capitalism. So it is no surprise that the all-time biggest arms sale, now under way, links Washington and the Saudi rulers. On the other hand, “Iran’s current leaders are feeling increasingly comfortable with President Vladimir V. Putin’s anti-American and anti-Western stances,” as reflected in a recent Russia-Iran $10-billion energy deal (NYT, 4/29/14).
Iraq’s warring sect leaders, bankrolled by Saudis and Iranians, have their own oil-fueled agendas, from jobs patronage to revenue sharing. But the imperialist forces backing them are locked in a larger fight for a much bigger prize.
In mid-March, Russian oil giant Lukoil celebrated the start up of the West Qurna-2. The Iraqi oilfield...was quite likely the world’s biggest untapped field, with recoverable oil reserves believed to be in the neighborhood of 20 billion barrels” (Forbes, 5/3/14).
The Victims: Five Million Iraqis
Russia’s oil barons have made this critical inroad without firing a shot in either U.S.-led war on Iraq. But Maliki’s coziness with Iran and Russia is driving Exxon — for whose benefit four U.S. presidents displaced or killed five million Iraqis — to destabilize his regime. To the consternation of both Maliki and Putin, Exxon is defying Baghdad’s dictates by drilling and exporting crude from Iraq’s renegade Kurdish region.
As U.S. rulers seek continued control of Middle East oil to keep rival imperialists in check, they are also accelerating their campaign to guarantee domestic energy supplies against the growing probability of trans-oceanic wars. The imperialist Brookings Institution think tank praises the U.S. energy industry’s foresight “as it consumes more home-produced oil and turns to sources of supply from its own backyards, notably from Canada, Venezuela and Mexico. Brazilian supplies, which are estimated to be among the world’s largest, could dramatically reinforce this trend” (“Fueling a New Disorder? The New Geopolitical and Security Consequences of Energy,” Brookings, March 2014).
In addition, “the federal government will build its first gasoline storage reserves in the New York Harbor area and in New England. Together, the reserves will hold about a million barrels of gasoline.... the fuel is intended to be held back in case another disaster cripples regional fuel supplies.” This is code for the contingency of a global inter-imperialist conflict.
Workers’ Trump Card: Fight for Communism
The bosses’ crucial obstacle is the refusal of the international working class to serve as cannon fodder in the rulers’ next bloodbath. Today, workers in Ukraine and Russia are of central importance. But our resistance must include workers on every continent, workers who are already fighting back against the ravages of capitalism. Class struggle is raging worldwide, from workers in China striking against their Nike exploiters, to garment workers in Bangladesh fighting the bosses’ deathtraps, to workers in France, Spain and Greece opposing international capitalism’s imposition of austerity programs, to students and workers in Haiti refusing to accept the fascism inflicted on them by U.S. rulers and their local lackeys, to the slum dwellers in Brazil defending their homes in battles with the cops, to students, teachers and workers in U.S. cities standing up to the racist attacks in their schools and workplaces — all this indicates the working class will not accept the ruling class’s assault lying down and will continue to rebel against the latter’s onslaught.
The inter-imperialist conflict must be transformed into a class war against the bosses’ system. Capitalism must be overthrown and replaced with a communist society — of, by and for the working class.
Indispensable to that goal is the leadership and growth of the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. As communists, we must dedicate ourselves to lead the world’s workers to bury the profit system, the cause of all the problems suffered by our class. Join us!