Letters of September 14

No Way Around Boots on the Ground
“Russian Imperialism Strikes Back” (CHALLENGE, 8/31) leads with a quote from a Russian official regarding modern warfare that minimizes the use of ground forces. Opening the editorial with this quote created the impression that the major imperialists can avoid having to put large numbers of troops on the ground. It reinforces the misleading idea that technology is more important than politics.
Warfare is continually changing—long-range missiles, cyber attacks, and drones are all ways the major capitalists have of killing people from long distances. The thing that hasn’t changed is the need for boots on the ground to hold and consolidate power.
The last major war the U.S. won was World War II. When I was in West Germany as an Army private in the early 1980s, there were approximately 500,000 U.S. troops in a country the size of Oregon, nearly 40 years after the war. We would go on maneuvers with columns of armored personnel carriers, tanks and artillery pieces across the German countryside. We’d set up in farmers’ fields and along country roads, basically wherever the U.S. wanted. We drove freely through thousand-year-old towns without fear of being shot, as the Army would “compensate” property owners for damage caused by our vehicles that plowed through. That is what winning a war looks like.
Since WWII, the inability of the U.S. military to win the fight on the ground has defined the U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—every major war the U.S. has fought in the last 60 years. Losing a lost ground war means giving up half the country (Korea) or being forced out (Vietnam). Same for Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. was mainly contained within its compounds, venturing out on fewer and fewer missions because of the inability to win working-class soldiers and Marines to willingly die in the numbers it would take for the U.S. bosses to prevail.
Winning ground wars requires an army with a relatively high level of political commitment, at least higher than the other side. As the CHALLENGE editorial points out, the Russian chief’s hope that they can succeed with asymmetrical warfare reflects wishful thinking in the face of the Russian rulers’ political and strategic problems, a fact the U.S. bosses are also struggling with. The editorial would have been better if that point had been made clearly.
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Big Terrorists Fund Little Terrorists
In “Capitalism in Crisis,” (7/27) CHALLENGE said, Hillary Clinton is “leading the charge for a more aggressive U.S. intervention in Syria.” Whenever the proxy war in Syria is mentioned, let’s be clear that all the Turkish and U.S. backed rebels that were vetted are aligned with terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al Nusra, the Turkistan Islamic Party, or Jaish al Islam. The Civil War in Syria basically boils down to four sides:  The Kurd’s and their allies to the north, the Syrian government, Islamic State (ISIS), and a hodge podge of group the Western press dubs “the rebels”.
These rebels either tactically coordinate with, organize attacks with, strategically plan with, share weapons with, fight side by side with, and all around depend upon organizations considered terrorists by the big terrorists like the U.S.’s NATO and Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Cooperation Council. These groups are responsible for crimes as horrible as filming and uploading themselves beheading a ten-year-old Palestinian boy who they accused of being a spy or soldier. They attempt to impose their fascistic religious rule wherever they conquer land and are vehemently anti-working class. One carefully vetted group gave a high tech Russian T-90 tank that they had captured to Jabhat al Nusra,  because their religious court legally ordered them to do so!
The U.S. relies upon the myth of a moderate opposition when they discuss regime change in Syria because they don’t want their working class knowing that they same organization that killed thousands in the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 are now being directly and indirectly supported by their imperialist ambitions. Al Zinki, the group responsible for beheading the child, was a carefully vetted group that left the umbrella of the U.S. with all the weapons they were covertly provided with and have fully aligned with the jihadis fighting the Syrian Government. These groups routinely shell the Kurds with their artillery and have killed hundreds of Kurdish civilians since they hate the Kurds as much, or possibly more than, they hate the government. They have wiped out whole villages in northern Syria and transplanted various other Sunni groups to take them over in a new form of colonialization.
There are no good sides in the proxy war that is the Syrian Civil War. Whoever wins, the working class there will still lose. The Kurds espouse left ideas, and still make deals to buy oil from ISIS and have never discussed the need to abolish capitalism. Whenever we discuss Syria, we need to hit home the point that the U.S. is so hypocritical that they are actually arming, funding, and helping al Qaeda because it is geostrategically opportunistic to do so now. Hillary wants regime change there which means that she wants these Jihadi groups to take over and murder countless Yazidi, Christian, and Alawite workers. We need to expose these imperialists for what they are, murderers for the highest bidder.
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Shaming Capitalists Out of Profiteering? Not!
Under the headline, “Advocates hope that shaming drugmakers will stop price hikes,” major news corporations like PBS recently reported that a law is being considered in California to require drug companies to announce planned price hikes in advance. As though drug companies have a sense of shame that will inhibit their tremendous profit grabbing if they are forced to make them public.
Corporations claim that they are people in order to obtain legal protections that people theoretically enjoy. But companies are not people, even though people run them. If they were, they would have not only the “rights” that people are supposedly entitled to, but they would also acquire the responsibilities and obligations that are forced on people. As it is, corporations do enjoy the rights and privileges that people actually rarely do, but have none of the responsibilities and obligations that are said to go with them. For example, corporations are not required to pay to rescue banks from failures or clean up rivers they pollute with toxic chemicals. It is the working class who is forced to pay with our taxes and bear the health effects.
The drug companies, naturally, oppose the “shaming” bill, and declare, “It would lead to dangerous drug shortages.” That is, the drug companies will hold for ransom medicines that many people need if the legislature requires them to publicize their outrageous price hikes.
And that is the way capitalism works. Either the capitalist government is allowed the drug companies to make unconscionable profits, or they can try to force them to make smaller profits and, as a result, cause patients to suffer who need the medicines to stay alive.
A system built on the foundation of profits, along with the myth that everything good for the working class will follow from that, is a system that cannot do anything but protect profits. Even if there were legislators who really did try to represent the interests of the working-class public, they would be completely helpless in the face of the way the system works every day.
On the other hand, if drugs were created and distributed by a workers’ government made by and for the working class that’s based on meeting our needs, then and only then could this problem be solved. That system is communism. This is but one example of the way the profit system kills and that communism would provide life and health.
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