Three trends in the Middle East are accelerating toward a broader global conflict:
A sharpening imperialist rivalry that is driving Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar revitalization of the U.S. nuclear war machine (New York Times, 9/22/14).
A growing disagreement among U.S. rulers as to how to handle the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) amid a two-front war in Syria, the potential overrunning of a fractured Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s expanding ties with Iran.
The pressing need by the U.S. ruling class for more intense fascism, including profit-driven wage cuts, heightened racism to protect super-profits, and a militarized response to crush working-class rebellions.
But the rulers have a problem. As recent polls on the question of U.S. ground troops in the Middle East have shown, workers have not signed on to the bosses’ war plans. This opens the door for an organized working class, led by the Progressive Labor Party, to wage class war and communist revolution for workers’ power and to destroy the imperialist profit system. Only a society run by and for workers — communism — can end the problems caused by capitalism: depressions and mass unemployment, racism, sexism, poverty, environmental degradation, and unending wars.
Obama’s extended air bombardment of Iraq and now Syria — a close ally of Iran, Russia and China — brings the prospect of global conflict ever nearer. As they blast ISIS from the air, some U.S. strategists are also seeking to arm rebels to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which may or may not prove feasible. Even were they to succeed, the response would be harsh from Tehran, Moscow and Beijing.
Meanwhile, the main, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists is facing the sudden need to prevent ISIS from seizing major oilfields in Iraq and, even more important, Saudi Arabia. These fields are the linchpin of U.S rulers’ status as the world’s leading imperialist power. The U.S. uses 25 percent of the world’s oil (Politifact.com). Its military depends on it. Even as the bosses find alternative domestic energy sources, they still need to control the distribution and pricing of Middle East oil. They need to protect the profits of core ruling-class enterprises like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Equally important, they cannot afford to cede these strategic riches to their imperialist rivals.
Fierce Debate Among U.S. Imperialists
At the same time, the U.S. bosses have long recognized the need to prepare for an inevitable military confrontation with China and/or Russia. The difficulty of managing these two necessities is fueling a fierce debate among U.S. imperialists over Syria-Iraq policy.
One camp calls shelling Syria a mistake that bolsters a U.S. enemy in Assad and does nothing to build public support for greater war goals. Another camp sees the shelling as a needed first step toward the march of U.S. troops into Damascus, the Syrian capital — a probability acknowledged on September 28 by House Speaker John Boehner.
On consecutive days, the New York Times, U.S. finance capital’s leading mouthpiece, published two editorials: “Wrong Turn On Syria: Helping Assad?” (9/24/14) and “Wrong Turn On Syria: No Convincing Plan” (9/25/14). The first said, “In the short term, Mr. Assad stands to benefit most from America’s military incursion” and the suppression of ISIS. It also warned that ISIS leaders view American intervention “as a recruitment tool.”
The second editorial faults Obama’s failure to win the public or Congress to the new militarism that his capitalist handlers require: “In the absence of public understanding or discussion and a coherent plan, the strikes in Syria were a bad decision.”
But Kenneth Pollack, a national security official under President Bill Clinton who later pushed hard for President George W. Bush’s Iraq war, thinks that ISIS could be a useful pretext for Obama to mount a U.S.-backed civil war in Syria and rid itself of Assad. Writing in the journal of the ultra-imperialist Council on Foreign Relations, Pollack proposed that the U.S. could achieve its goals without U.S. ground forces “by building a new Syrian opposition army capable of defeating both President Bashar al-Assad and the more militant Islamists” (Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2014).
Another Foreign Affairs article, “The Retrenchment War,” follows U.S. imperialists’ thinking that there are bigger fish to fry than ISIS — namely, the task of mobilizing the U.S. for a potential World War III.
On September 24, the Times countered that with a skeptical assessment that the build-up of an effective “moderate” Syrian rebel force “could take years, assuming the strategy works.” These differences reflect the disarray and indecision from the White House on down.
Bosses Need to Mobilize U.S. for Potential World War
The advance of ISIS is not altogether a negative development for U.S. rulers. They can point to the group as another “weapon of mass destruction” (a la Iraq), an excuse to bolster a failing NATO and their own war industries at the expense of decent wages and social services for U.S. workers.
Retrenchment was recently promoted by CFR chairman Richard Haass in his brief for militarization, “Foreign Policy Begins at Home.” This ruling-class manifesto spells out the need to rebuild infrastructure to world-war capacity, forge wartime political consensus within a fragmented U.S. capitalist class, and win working-class youth to kill their overseas brothers and sisters.
Forced to defer a highly unpopular military draft, the bosses are pushing patriotism through “national service.” This strategy would use immigrant Latin workers and youth both to fill the gap in military recruitment and to supply the millions of low-paid laborers needed to rebuild domestic infrastructure. In sum, it is a plan to put the country on a war footing.
Rulers’ Dilemma, Communists’ Opportunity
Once again, however, the rulers face a dilemma. The jobless black and Latin youth the bosses need as cannon fodder are the same youth their racist cops are tormenting and killing on the streets of cities large and small, from Chicago and Los Angeles to Ferguson, Missouri. In New York, under liberal Mayor Bill De Blasio and recycled police chief Bill “Broken Windows” Bratton, the NYPD made more than 137,000 misdemeanor arrests in the first seven months of this year. According to an editor at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, “More than 86 percent of those arrested were minorities. Those numbers are nearly identical to arrest data from the same period last year” under the previous mayor, the more openly racist Michael Bloomberg (NYT, 9/26/14).
Oppression inevitably generates rebellion. While the bosses need racism to sustain capitalist profits, it also undermines their promotion of war fever and mass enlistment in the military.
Meanwhile, the U.S. capitalists have to be unnerved by a development involving its main imperialist rival and its leading regional threat. As the Times reports (9/21/14):

Two Chinese warships have docked at Iran’s principal naval port for the first time in history.... The visit to the port of Bandar Abbas is an example of the growing ties between China and Iran. China is already the principal buyer of Iranian oil.... Iran’s main competitor in the Persian Gulf is the United States Navy, which has a base in Bahrain and stations at least one aircraft carrier in the region. On several occasions, Iran has threatened to choke off the strategic Hormuz Strait, a narrow waterway between Iran and the United Arab Emirates that is a gateway for 40 percent of the world’s oil and gas shipments.

U.S. rulers suffer from a depressed economy, decaying industry and infrastructure, a divided capitalist class, and an alienated, war-weary working class. The bosses are expanding their stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons and a proven readiness to use them, at the risk of hundreds of millions of workers’ lives. All the more reason to build a revolutionary communist party and to destroy this barbarous system.