U.S. imperialists have a big problem in the Middle East: too many enemies, too few reliable friends.
As the bosses struggle to contain the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, they find their war plans disrupted by a deepening rift with Turkey, on paper a U.S. ally. Looming in the background is the escalating rivalry between the two major imperialist blocs: the U.S. and the European Union on one side, and China and Russia on the other. At stake is the grand prize of the murderous profit system, the vast oil and natural gas reserves of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Only Solution: Communist Revolution
The working class has no stake in any conflicts among these terrorist bosses. Today’s regional wars are financed by workers’ exploitation. The workers that the ruling class needs as cannon fodder are the same black and Latin unemployed youth being killed and imprisoned by the racist injustice system. It’s the same impoverished workers in the Middle East. It’s the workers who stand to be brutalized and exploited in the future, no matter which bloc prevails.
The only side is the one led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, the one that fights to overthrow this hellish capitalist system. We organize against all bosses. We stand for a society run by and for workers, who will share the value they produce. Communism is the one and only road to end mass unemployment, racism, sexism and imperialist war.
Turkish Bosses’ Agenda
As a civil war rages in Syria and ISIS gobbles cities and refineries by the day, a growing split has emerged between the U.S. and Turkey, a linchpin for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The U.S. is fuming at Turkey’s refusal to drive ISIS forces from the Syrian town of Kobani, just over the Turkish border. The imperialists’ concern is not the massacre facing thousands of working-class Kurds. Rather, it’s the Islamic State’s growing threat to U.S. control of super-profitable Iraqi oil, notably in the autonomous northern province of Kurdistan.
Turkish bosses have refused to send ground troops to aid Kurdish forces in Kobani, where Obama’s airstrikes on ISIS have proven inadequate. As of October 14, Turkish rulers had yet to bow to U.S. pressure to use their air bases for joint operations. Most ominously for U.S. war planners, Turkey’s current inaction reveals its unreliability for the broader global conflict to come.
In May, Turkish exporters began shipping huge amounts of crude pumped by ExxonMobil and other oil companies in Kurdistan through the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. At the time, Turkish President Recep Erdogan blessed this deal between his country’s state oil company and Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The arrangement dates to 2012 and the formation of the United States-Kurdistan Business Council, backed by Exxon and headed by General James Jones, the former U.S. National Security Advisor and supreme commander of NATO.
Jones urged “the U.S. government to get behind ExxonMobil and other American oil companies in their quest to partner with the KRG to build an oil sector in northern Iraq” (Iraq Oil Report, 12/26/14). The overarching idea was to consolidate Turkey within a strategic coalition against Russia. But that isn’t an easy sell. Turkey relies on Russia for 58 percent of its natural gas imports (Congressional Research Service).
ISIS’s Rise Threatens Exxon’s Oil
As ISIS’s bloody rise threatens U.S. oil holdings in Kurdistan, Exxon has pulled its employees from the fields, cutting off Turkey’s tanker loadings. With that profit spigot plugged, Erdogan has refocused on smashing the Kurds’ historic goal of a greater, independent Kurdistan in Syria, Iraq and Turkey itself. In addition to halting his army short of Kobani, Erdogan has stopped KRG troops in Iraq from crossing into Turkey to reach the besieged city. On October 14, he undercut a two-year peace process with airstrikes against Kurdish insurgents in southeastern Turkey.
Which side are the Turkish bosses on? Some Turkish energy interests appear to favor ISIS. “A victory for ISIS [in Kobani]...would secure the terror organization’s flow of oil to a lucrative market — its link to the outside world via Turkey” (Oil Price, 10/8/14).
Erdogan sees the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as the main danger. Syria is Iran’s closest ally. Turkey and Iran, nearly equal in population, have long vied for regional dominance in the Middle East. “Turkey says it will only join a military campaign against Islamic State if the coalition also confronts pro-Iranian Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Washington...has made clear it has no intention of widening the campaign to join a war against Assad” (Reuters, 10/13/14).
Meanwhile, ISIS’s advances in Iraq are forcing the hand of U.S. oil interests and their lackeys in Washington. From George H.W. Bush to Obama, four U.S. presidents have used wars and sanctions in a desperate struggle to secure Iraq’s oil wealth. Along the way, they have killed more than three million Iraqis. Now they are seeing profit-hungry ISIS bosses on the verge of seizing Kurdistan. A two-decade U.S. imperialist campaign could be undone in a matter of months.
The Islamic State is closing in on Baghdad, where a rash of bombings on the capital’s outskirts killed more than 50 people on October 11. Even more alarming for U.S. bosses, an Iraqi oil worker was among four people kidnapped by ISIS a few days earlier in Basra (Iraq Oil Report, 10/9/14). Far south of the main war zone, Basra is the heart of Iraq’s richest oil region and operational headquarters for some of the world’s largest fields. Industry insider Oil Price (10/8/14) says of ISIS, “Their fight is not for control of the mosques, but [of] oil fields.”
Forget Obama’s Promises — Generals Champion Ground War
With or without Turkey, U.S. rulers may soon be forced into a third land war in Iraq. Obama’s promises not to field ground troops mean nothing. As General Martin Dempsey, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, acknowledged, “Mosul will likely be the decisive battle in the ground campaign at some point in the future” (New York Times, 10/13/14). Mosul, held by ISIS since June, is Iraq’s second biggest city. It lies in the north, near key oil tracts and pipelines.
As the war in Iraq and Syria spreads, the U.S. urgently needs Turkey to fall into line. In August, the government’s Congressional Research Service (CRS) warned that U.S. and Turkish rulers “periodically differ regarding how ...third-party actors — Israel, the Assad regime, Iraq’s government, Kurdish groups, Al Qaeda affiliates [ISIS], Palestinian factions, Iran, Russia, and China — should be tolerated, involved, bolstered, or opposed.”
CRS however reminded its Congressional readers of “Turkey’s importance to U.S. interests … as a ‘global swing state’ with the ability to have a sizeable impact on international order….” Like Brazil, India, and Indonesia, Turkey’s value in a potential world war rests on the strength of its armed forces and support for U.S.-style “democracy,” a mix of class oppression and capitalist-run elections. All the more reason, as CRS noted, for U.S. bosses to worry about “a possible deal between Turkey and a Chinese government-owned company to co-produce a Turkish air and missile defense system, which could have implications for U.S.-Turkey defense cooperation and for Turkey’s political and military profile within NATO.”
Workers’ Answer: Class War
While the world’s bosses are powerful, they are not omnipotent. Workers have always rebelled against oppression. From garment workers in Bangladesh to expropriated peasants in China to anti-racists in the streets of Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri, they continue to do so today. The capitalists need to put down these workers’ outbreaks while confronting splits in their own ranks and fighting off their imperialist competition. The profit system’s problems are insoluble. Led by a mass revolutionary communist party, the international working class has a great opportunity to organize these rebellions into class war against our capitalist oppressors.
That is the goal of Progressive Labor Party. Join us!