The intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry between U.S. rulers and those of China, Russia, Japan and the European Union confronts the U.S. with a crisis both domestically and internationally. Ever fiercer global competition for markets, resources and trade routes is driving down U.S. profit rates. To protect and defend those profits, the capitalists’ lifeblood, they will inevitably wage a broader war.
Obama’s value to U.S. capitalists lies in his readiness to expand U.S.-run military operations toward this goal. Equally important is his ability to mislead and pacify workers by posing as a lesser evil than the Republicans.
Obama deployed an additional 30,000 GIs in Afghanistan. He has launched death-raining drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He invaded Libya behind a NATO smokescreen. He maintains thousands of mercenaries in Iraq. His Army Special Forces assassinate U.S. enemies, including Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s leadership, all of whom the CIA trained in its 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. On the high seas, the U.S. Navy stalks and kills teenage pirates who were driven there by imperialists dumping toxic waste in their fishing waters, ruining their livelihood.
Obama has based U.S. Marines in Australia as a warning to China’s bosses over a pending contest for oil beneath the South China Sea. And his $60 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia fuel the U.S.’s proxy war with Iran being played out over Syria as the Pentagon arms its junior allies in the Middle East.
Mass-Murdering Mouthpieces Front for Obama
Accordingly, Obama’s ruling-class handlers are making war the cornerstone of his reelection bid. “Obama is preparing to emphasize an issue that few Democratic candidates have embraced in the past: national security” (New York Times, 4/7/12). Obama’s gang has recruited mass murderers from the Bill Clinton era as its ministers of propaganda: “In the coming weeks, Obama advisers plan to release a list of national security ‘surrogates’ — high-profile Democrats like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Wesley Clark, a retired general — who will write newspaper op-ed articles, give speeches and take Mr. Romney to task every time he opens his mouth about foreign policy” (NYT, 4/7/12).
Albright was challenged on “Sixty Minutes” over her boss Clinton’s eight-year sanction policy denying food and medicine and destroying water purification facilities that killed a half-million Iraqi children. She replied, “We think the price is worth it.” NATO chief Clark, meanwhile, headed Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo blitzkrieg that wiped out thousands of civilians.
The capitalists’ wars by definition perpetrate mass murder. The Pentagon trains GIs in racist demonization of Arabs and Muslim workers to be better able to win them to become indiscriminate killers. A thousand U.S. military bases encircle the globe, the bosses’ springboard for raining racist terror on the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America. The imperialists’ slaughter of workers around the world is inextricably linked to racist murders within the U.S. It gave a blank check to George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin; to the shooters who mowed down three people in the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma; to the KKKops in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major U.S. cities.
Obama v. Romney: How Best to Serve U.S. Imperialism?
The shouting match between two sets of war criminals, the ones advising Obama and those behind Republican challenger Mitt Romney, has already begun. In late March, Obama was overheard promising Russian president Medvedev “more flexibility” after the November elections in talks on nuclear weapons. Romney & Co. pounced on the chance to question Obama’s militarism in National Interest magazine. Calling Obama’s Iraqi and Afghan military drawdowns “premature,” they criticized Obama for betraying weakness not only to Russia but to Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
The president’s brain trust fired back in a letter in Foreign Policy magazine to re-establish Obama’s credentials as warmaker-in-chief. They declared that he was indeed prepared to use “military action, to prevent the Iranian regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
The Obama bunch then took Romney to task for calling Russia “our number one geopolitical foe.” They lectured him like a schoolchild for forgetting growing archrival China: “Do you believe there are other entities that pose greater challenges to American economic and strategic interests in the 21st century?” Even more tellingly, they likened Romney to the ineffectual George W. Bush and his go-it-alone approach to intensifying worldwide conflict without seeking allies and rubber stamps from the United Nations.
Regardless of Romney’s misstep in ranking the U.S. rulers’ lengthening list of geopolitical foes, he is clearly calling for a major U.S. naval buildup in the Pacific. But even though Romney’s camp consists of diehard imperialists who serve top contributors like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, it nevertheless disagrees with Obama on two big points on war mobilization: allies and taxes. A closer look at the signers of the two camps’ position papers suggests a replay of the policy divide between the two very different U.S.-led wars in Iraq: the on-the-cheap, go-it-alone invasion model of 2003, favored by tax-cutting Romney, versus the spare-no-expense force advanced by Chief of Staff Colin Powell under George H.W. Bush in the 1991 ouster of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
Highlighting Romney’s list of signatories are alumni of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century: Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Dov Zakheim. They belong to the U.S. capitalist faction that cooked up the 2003 invasion under George W. Bush. That war’s occupation force numbered less than 200,000 and represented only four nations — 148,000 from the U.S.; 45,000 from the United Kingdom; 2,000 from Australia; and 194 from Poland. As neo-con War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the time, “You fight with the army you have.” Today these on-the-cheap hawks favor letting Israel bomb Iran.
Obama’s endorsers, on the other hand, embrace Powell’s “broad coalition, wielding overwhelming force” a strategy that required higher taxes for the first Gulf War genocide. The Pentagon coordinated 750,000 troops from 34 nations to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, though it could not get the green light — or the financing — to unleash this force to invade and occupy Iraq.
The present pro-Obama supporters hail mainly from the ultra-militarist Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which is advised by serving officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. Obama’s defense undersecretary and CNAS founder, Michele Flournoy, was the first to sign the letter to Foreign Policy. Virtually, all the rest have ties to the CNAS. The group’s biggest current project is to enlist India’s billion-plus population in a pro-U.S. military alliance against China.
In order to mount the widespread wars contemplated by U.S. imperialists to protect their worldwide interests in energy and minerals, they will need higher taxes to be drawn from both the super-rich and the working class. That’s the reason for the recent massive cuts in budgets for schools, health care, social services and wages — federal, state and local.
Turn Obama’s War Against Workers into A War Against Capitalism
Obama’s high-priced militarization requires a war on U.S. workers. It’s the primary reason for the job cuts and wage freezes against hundreds of thousands of government employees and teachers, and the looming cuts of Medicare and Medicaid. The ruling imperialists’ war plans leave next to no funding to help tens of millions of unemployed, plunging them into poverty. And there’s a direct link between the Obama camp’s bloody international ambitions and the enforcement of racist terror against black, Latino and immigrant workers. By intimidating and super-exploiting these groups, the capitalists can force white workers to accept lower wages and health benefits. And by dividing groups of workers, the rulers also forestall rebellions against their rising fascism.
So the path is clear for communists in the Progressive Labor Party, our friends in the shops and unions, in the schools and on the campuses, in the churches and the communities, and especially among the soldiers, and among all militant anti-racist workers and youth: Organize and lead class struggle in all areas where our class is under attack, in every city and country where PLP has a base.
Our participation in these struggles will enable us to carry out our most crucial task: to win masses of workers and youth to understand that our only way out of the hellish profit system is a communist revolution. Our aim is a society run by and for the working class, the producers of all value. Building our Party is therefore the order of the day.
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