In office just over a year, Obama has achieved mixed results for his beleaguered U.S. ruling-class masters. On the home front, Obama still struggles to pass heath care “reforms” which they need both for cost-cutting as well as for putting the system under tighter government control to deal with all the competing capitalists in this industry. Globally, however, he works wonders for the billionaire owners of J.P. Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, and allied U.S. imperialists.

For their benefit, liberal Obama has extended the deadly reach of the U.S. war machine in ways right-winger Bush, Jr., could never achieve. He’s added Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Haiti to the ruling class’s ever-expanding theaters of operation. Israel may soon contain U.S. combat units joining forces with its military to deal forcefully with the Middle-East tinderbox (see below). Obama’s Afghan surge is brutally “securing” towns along the route of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.

As for Iraq, Obama has shattered his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. troops, who will remain indefinitely to safeguard the oilfields they seized, and to threaten neighboring Iran. A February 24 NY Times op-ed piece by Thomas Ricks, an “expert” from the Rockefeller-funded Center for a New American Security, urged Obama to “find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come.”

Mounting Massacres in Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan Surge

Although many who voted for Obama now express disenchantment, his liberal cover still enables him to get away with murder, literally. If Bush, Jr., had ordered Navy Seals to shoot teen-aged Somali pirates or send CIA/Special Operations death squads and Predator drones into Pakistan and Yemen, the anti-war outcry would be deafening. But Obama pulled off these atrocities plus a U.S. military takeover in Haiti, with appalling, racist neglect of the stricken, while posing as a “humanitarian.” (See CHALLENGE editorial, 3/3) U.S. rulers’ motives in Haiti, are in fact drenched in potential oil reserves, as usual. (See article, page 4)

Obama’s Afghan surge force seems to commit a massacre a week, with impunity. “The Afghan human rights commission reported Wednesday that 28 civilians had been killed so far in NATO’s offensive on the Taliban stronghold of Marja.” (NY Times, 2/24)

Noncombatant deaths are sure to mount even higher as Obama targets more densely populated areas: “[T]he United States military is looking ahead toward taking the fight to Kandahar...a much bigger prize than Marja. The city is the second largest in Afghanistan” (NYT, 2/26). The Times forgot to mention what makes Kandahar such a prize — it straddles the TAPI gas pipeline route.

But the free hand in relatively small wars that Obama’s liberal credentials — and the Pentagon’s unchallenged killing power — gives U.S. rulers has limits. Their rivalry with China and Russia, powers which are far stronger than the Taliban or al-Qaeda, is intensifying. U.S. generals’ boasts of success in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot hide the fact that Chinese- and Russian-proxy Iran is relentlessly pursuing nuclear weapons.

Imperialist Dogfight over Mid-East Oil Intensifies; Is It Nuke Time?

U.S. bosses are considering three basic counterstrategies, one ineffective and the other two incredibly dangerous:

• Plan A, already in place, involves negotiations and sanctions. Teheran’s oil-soaked ayatollahs, backed by Beijing and Moscow, mock them.

• In Plan B, which U.S. rulers seem to favor, or at least are resigned to, Iran supposedly gets the bomb. Then the U.S. initiates a Mid-East version of the Cold War — with ally Israel (already possessing nuclear bombs) and the oil-rich, pro-U.S. parts of the region like Saudi Arabia — under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. But actual U.S. nuclear response would have a shorter fuse than during the U.S.-Soviet standoff.

The journal “Foreign Affairs,” the U.S. imperialist establishment’s leading public mouthpiece, laid out the ground rules in its March/April 2010 issue: “When Washington publicly presents its policy on how to contain a nuclear Iran, it should be explicit: no [Iranian] initiation of conventional wars against other countries; no use or transfer of its nuclear weapons; and no stepped-up support for terrorist or subversive activities....[T]he price of Iran’s violating these three prohibitions could be U.S. retaliation by any and all means necessary, up to and including nuclear weapons.” Nuclear-armed China and Russia would hardly stay on the sidelines.

The article continues:  “Washington should also be prepared to deploy U.S. troops on Israeli soil as a tripwire.”

• Plan C has the U.S. (or more likely, Israel) pre-emptively wiping out Iran’s nascent nukes in air strikes. Such an attack would increase tension in U.S.-vs.-Chinese and Russian flashpoints from the Koreas to Taiwan to Georgia to Poland. Iran would unleash its monster “weapon”: closing the Strait of Hormuz, though which most of Iraq’s and much of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports flow.

Our Party has long held that inter-imperialist rivalry inevitably ends in world war (see World Wars I and II). For workers to back imperialist servant Obama is thus a dead-end. But so is supporting any new politician the rulers put in the White House to mislead us. The only sane course is to reject the electoral circus altogether and build a party — the PLP — that can eventually eliminate the billionaire class and their endless profit-driven wars through communist revolution. J