The upcoming presidential election campaign between the U.S. capitalists’ twin stooges, Barack Obama and Mitt Romeny, marks a critical period for the candidates’ imperialist handlers. Facing large rivals (China, Russia) and smaller ones (Iran, North Korea, al Qaeda), the bosses’ solution requires ever-widening wars led by the U.S. in the Middle East and Asia, especially over energy resources. To wage them, they need to win millions of workers to back the U.S. rulers’ policies, now personified by Obama.
It’s a difficult proposition for the bosses, since these policies are directly opposed to workers’ class interests. Romney’s election could make it even more difficult, since he’s a more transparent enemy of workers and youth.
The trillion-dollar funding for war requires savage cuts in wages, pensions, healthcare, schools and other social services. As a result, Obama’s ruling-class publicists must lie to workers about his intent to end wars, while reassuring U.S. capitalists of his resolve to expand them.
On May 20, the New York Times, U.S. imperialism’s leading popular mouthpiece, informed readers of Obama’s “peaceful” Afghan intentions. In 2009, he “had reluctantly (our emphasis, ed.) decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops.” The Times then elaborated on Obama’s fake anti-militarism: “A year later, when the president...began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely....And when Mr. Obama joins the leaders of other NATO nations in Chicago...he will announce what he has already told the leaders in private: All combat operations led by American forces will cease in summer 2013.”
Just a month earlier, however, the Times headlined a fawning op-ed article, “Warrior in Chief.” It boasted that the “president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” Obama’s use of deadly force — in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia — stood to his everlasting credit, the Times said.
Bosses’ Think Tanks Pave Way For War Policies
These seemingly contradictory articles, excerpted from books aimed at pushing Obama’s re-election, flow from the same imperialist sector of U.S. capitalism. Peter Bergen, who wrote the Obama-as-warrior piece, directs the New America Foundation (NAF) and is the author of the forthcoming book Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad (the city in Pakistan where Bin Laden was killed).
The Obama-as-pacifist piece was by David Sanger, a top Times Washington correspondent and the author of the soon-to-be-published Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. He belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which — like the NAF — is bankrolled by the dominant Rockefeller wing of U.S. bosses. A large number of Obama’s foreign policy advisers hail from these two think tanks.
Political and economic reality gives the lie to Obama’s Afghan peace charade. The U.S. needs to dominate the vast Turkmenistan gas supplies that flow through Afghanistan, shaky ally Pakistan, and hesitant ally India. This was a primary motive for the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Afghanistan, but it continues to elude Obama & Co. As the Times editorialized on the eve of Obama’s NATO summit, Afghanistan’s Kandahar and Helmand Provinces are still a base for the Taliban and “remain heavily contested” (5/19/12).
So don’t expect U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan anytime soon. In fact, Obama signed a pact with the corrupt Afghan regime to provide enough military force and finances to fight the Taliban until 2024. But all is not well between the U.S. bosses and their junior partners in Kabul, who now want the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan India (TAPI) pipeline all for themselves. Meanwhile, the U.S. invaders’ racism has provoked rank-and-file Afghan soldiers to kill their NATO mentors in a wave of escalating attacks. Neither Sanger nor Bergen mention this development.
Paid Mercenaries Fill In For Troop-Short Army
Even if most uniformed GIs leave Afghanistan someday, what will most likely follow is a bloody, Iraq-style occupation by Pentagon-paid U.S. contractors and mercenaries. These hired guns, brought in to supplement a troop-short U.S. Army, are already guarding Exxon Mobil’s oil wells. They’re being entrusted with the prize that has led a quartet of U.S. presidents to promote mass murder in and around Iraq: George H.W. Bush, with the first Gulf War; Bill Clinton’s murderous bombings and sanctions; George W. Bush’s reinvasion and racist occupation; Obama’s continued slaughter. Meanwhile, a deadly civil war seethes in the beleaguered country.
Imperialist tool Sanger, boosting Obama’s Afghan “pacifism,” suggests a bigger-fish-to-fry scenario for world war. According to a press release for Confront and Conceal, “Sanger describes how Obama’s early idealism about fighting ‘a war of necessity’ in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue and frustration...and how an effort to re-establish American power in the Pacific set the stage for a new era of tensions with the world’s great rising power, China.”
These plans for past, present and future U.S. imperialist wars have killed millions of workers and youth in the Middle East and South Asia, and will inevitably kill millions more. They have sent tens of thousands of U.S. GIs to their graves or to lives damaged by war wounds, physical and mental.
Obama’s Warmongering A Racist Body Blow to U.S. Workers
To pay for the U.S. war machine, Obama’s policies — which a President Mitt Romney would no doubt follow — are heaping misery on the U.S. working class. Social services have been slashed, and Social Security may follow. Wages have been halved at General Motors under Obama’s bailout plan, swelling the company’s profits. Criminal bankers reap bonuses while tens of millions endure joblessness. Undocumented workers are terrorized under threat of deportation. All of these crimes against the working class stem from the rulers’ need for its military machine to dominate its imperialist rivals.
The repercussions of the capitalists’ crisis falls most heavily on black, Latino and immigrant workers. They suffer twice as much unemployment, far lower wages, and even more pathetic social services. Daycare has been wiped out for millions of minimum-wage workers. A rotting educational system is failing millions of youth. These racist cutbacks create hundreds of billions in super-profits for U.S. bosses to maintain their decadent capitalist system.
It is the task of communists in the Progressive Labor Party, in every country and organization where we are present, to win masses to understand how the profit system is the source of all our class’s problems. They are needed to join and build PLP as the one force that can destroy this exploitative system and usher in a communist world. Then workers’ power will run society to serve the needs of the international working class, which produces everything of value.
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