Declaring “victory” against ISIS, U.S. President Donald Trump recently and suddenly announced the withdrawal of all 2,200 U.S. troops from Syria and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan. In reality, U.S. imperialism is losing ground to Russian imperialism in Syria, and also opening the door to regional enemy Iran and its client Shiite militias there (foreignaffairs.com, 1/8). Pronounced splits among the U.S. bosses are sharpening as their empire crumbles.
Meanwhile, the outraged opposition to Trump’s planned pullout among fake leftist and liberal Democratic Party politicians has exposed them as dedicated servants of finance capital, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, which is led by the likes of ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup.
This main capitalist wing’s commitment to perpetual—and genocidal—war in the Middle East and South Asia is strategically opposed by a more domestically oriented, “Fortress America” wing, led by the Koch, Mercer, and Adelson families. The main wing, with trillions of dollars and an empire at stake in the oil and gas fields of the Middle East, favors keeping a small military presence there while regrouping the U.S. military for the bigger war looming with China and Russia. The domestic wing would prefer to disinvest in land forces and rely on mass-murdering airstrikes to defend their narrower sphere of interest.
Finance capital still has the upper hand. Nearly three weeks after Trump’s “astonishing reversal of U.S. policy” (foreignaffairs.com, 1/8), John Bolton, the national security advisor, effectively overruled his boss by “laying out conditions for a pullout that could leave American forces there for months or even years” (New York Times, 1/6). Bolton got his start in the 1980s with the U.S. Agency for International Development, an acknowledged CIA front (NYT, 4/15/14). Though he has ties to right-wingers in the domestic wing, and like Trump distrusts Europe and multilateral alliances, he was a prominent interventionist in the two main-wing Bush administrations.
The international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is the only party that represents the interests of the international working class. PLP is the workers’ only hope to smash this rotten, criminal, capitalist system. As long as the profit system exists, oil will be indispensable to imperialist warfare. Oil will continue to make the Middle East a killing field. From the 12 million refugees driven from their homes in Syria, to the slaughterhouse of Yemen, where the U.S. has helped the Saudi royal thugs starve nearly a hundred thousand children to death (NYT, 11/21/18), the necessity of building this movement is more urgent than ever.
Middle East, South Asia still crucial to U.S. imperialists
Since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, U.S.-instigated wars have killed over a million people (NYT, 4/13/2018). This doesn’t include previous U.S. conflicts in the region, or the 500,000 children in Iraq murdered by Democrat Bill Clinton’s genocidal sanctions and bombings in the 1990s.
By 2008, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became bloody stalemates, the economic crisis in the U.S. constrained U.S. imperialism. The Russian bosses’ expanded naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean, anchored by their base at the Syrian port of  Tartus, prompted the U.S. under Democrat Barack Obama to ramp up covert funding of “pro-democracy” groups. In 2011, when the U.S. capitalist-financed Arab Spring led to mass demonstrations, the U.S. was ready to exploit the unrest. CIA-connected members of Syria’s military formed the so-called Free Syrian Army (International Business Times, 6/26/15).
Obama ordered the CIA directly into Syria in 2013, supported by U.S. bombs. Russian proxies Iran and Hezbollah entered in 2015, backed by Russian bombs (Al Jazeera, 4/14/18). Both imperialist powers have backed proxy wars for profit under the guise of “fighting terrorism” and ISIS. Yet as brutal and backwards as the ISIS terrorists are, they can’t hold a candle to the big terrorists U.S. and Russian imperialists.
Trump announced U.S. troop withdrawal would hand Russia’s rulers a big victory. Whether Trump follows through or not, it’s certain the U.S. bosses will continue slaughtering workers to maintain some level of control over the region’s vast oil fields and strategic location.
Fake left hypocrisy
The main-wing capitalists’ mouthpiece, the New York Times, has provided daily roll calls of outraged Democrats slamming Trump’s push to withdraw. Its editorial board has repeatedly voiced concern for “protecting the nation,” slamming Trump for “ceding a strategically vital country to Iran and Russia” and “a gift to Vladimir Putin” (NYT, 12/19/18 and 12/27/18).
The Democrats are at present the main wing’s most reliable servants and defenders of U.S. imperialism. From 2016 to 2018, as the minority party in the House of Representatives, they voted two-to-one to give the military even more money than Trump requested (Forbes, 6/20/18). Echoing the U.S. rulers’ talking points, the Democrats’ self-styled “resistance heroine,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attacked Trump’s withdrawal as “premature” and promised Congressional review of the decision “to ensure that the president’s decisions advance our national security interests” (Independent, 12/20/18).
Pro-Wall Street Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, has never seen a war she didn’t like. She has supported every U.S. military action since her election in 1987, and secretly supported torture after September 11, 2001 (NYT, 5/14/09; CNN, 11/25/09).
Meanwhile, the silence has been deafening from the newly-elected “democratic socialist” members of Congress, like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. All three kissed the ring of arch-imperialist Pelosi, voting for her return as House Speaker.
Many workers are hoping for working class leadership to emerge from some of these newly elected politicians. But betting on any of these misleaders as a “lesser evil” than the gutter racist, sexist Trump would be a lethal mistake.
U.S. imperialism needs more fascism
As erratic and undisciplined as Trump is, he has successfully consolidated a white supremacist base around the domestic capitalist wing. When his surprise withdrawal announcement was followed by more high-profile resignations, including that of main-wing stalwart Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, it signaled that the fighting between these two factions is intensifying on the road to fascism.
For workers in the U.S., fascism will mean even lower living standards and heightened racist, sexist, and nationalist attacks to pay for World War III. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main wing’s most prominent think tank, predicted that the next major U.S. war would begin in Iran: “Syria could see increased fighting…[possibly] Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey….Things, when they happen in the Middle East, have a way of spreading around the world” (MSNBC, 12/27/18).
Smash imperialism with communism
As the world’s bosses plot for war to protect their treasure, PLP offers another solution to the international working class: communism. Workers, students and soldiers around the world have no interest in choosing one set of capitalist misleaders and terrorists over another.
We have every interest in building an international Red Army of millions to smash this racist, genocidal profit system and the racist borders the imperialists draw to keep us divided. Capitalism can offer only the miseries of fascism and imperialist war for our class. Communism means abolishing capitalism. With nothing to lose, and a whole world to gain: Will you join us?