Iraq & Syria: U.S. imperialism prepares for next Middle East war

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12 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2014 A new coalition of the not-too-willing nations is in preparation as U.S. imperial­ ism prepares for yet another war in the Middle East, its sixth or seventh in the past half decade. These include wars of conquest, resource exploitation, and co­ vert bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Egypt— where the U.S., behind the scenes, backed the military coup that removed the elect­ ed president of that country.

This time around, the imperial focus is on the forces, appropriately demonized beforehand by the jingoistic corporate media, of the Islamic State, often known by the acronym “ISIS” (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), a group essentially un­ known to the world before 2014. All current “coalition partners”—feigning allegiance to the dictates or entreaties of President Barack Obama and his interna­ tional road warrior/diplomat, Secretary of State John Kerry—are delivering little or nothing on the Iraqi battlefield, which U.S. warplanes now bomb daily.

The British, French, and German mili­ taries make the record with a few bomb­ ing runs aimed at the “enemy” and deliver token supplies to the new Iraqi govern­ ment of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, essentially installed by Washington. But none dare enter this U.S.-created quag­ mire with any illusions that the Islamic State can be routed anytime in the near future, if at all.

Virtually all of the major imperialist “partners,” it should be stressed, have de­ clined to bomb Syria or otherwise com­ mit serious forces to the covert (and now overt) U.S.-sponsored war to remove the Bashar al-Assad government of Syria. Like Assad himself, whose foreign miister gave the “okay” to U.S. bombing of ISIS in Syria, they believe that defeating ISIS is inseparable from aiding Assad. The Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia in particular, on paper agree to use their territory to al­ low U.S. training of anti-ISIS Syrian “reb­ el” forces, but only the naïve believe that the Saudis and Qataris, who have to date been ISIS’s main backers in their effort to remove Assad, will do more.

Given the U.S.-created catastrophic disarray in the region, no one seriously believes that any coalition can bring sta­ bility or a “solution” to the present crisis. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, states that it will take 15,000 U.S. troops on the ground to “destroy ISIS.” While President Obama has already sent initial detachments of some 1400 troops and “advisors,” U.S. warplanes conduct daily bombing raids on suspected targets in Iraq and Syria, including in heavily populated civilian areas. Meanwhile, almost all military ex­ perts note that it will take six to seven years or longer to defeat ISIS—that is, almost another decade of perpetual war, once again in Iraq and now, likely in Syria as well.

To date, Obama’s insoluble dilemma re­ volves around how to defeat ISIS, which now occupies one-third of Northern Iraq and significant portions of Northern Syria, while defending the already dis­ credited and newly U.S.-installed Abadi government, without aiding the Syr­ ian government of Bashar al-Assad. U.S. policy is confounded by the fact that its most hated opponents, the governments of Syria and Iran, are engaged in combat against the same ISIS forces that the U.S. is now seeks to destroy.

“We made a mistake in Syria,” said Obama in late September 2014 as the U.S. military began its bombing there. “We underestimated the power of ISIS.” The alleged “mistake,” despite the deploy­ ment of the world’s most sophisticated military and intelligence apparatus, was to underestimate the very force that the U.S. government created and helped to arm and finance, directly or indirectly, when they believed it would be a reliable ally to depose the Assad government of Syria.

ISIS, with the full knowledge of U.S. of­ ficials, got its arms and sophisticated equipment from the Saudi and Qatar monarchies or their homegrown billion­ aire patrons, who preferred to overthrow Assad by al-Qaida Sunni forces rather then the “moderate” Free Syrian Army, which is directly backed by the United States.

(Above) Children play in rubble of wartorn Homs, Syria, in 2012. Now the U.S. is directly bombing Syrian cities, with increasing incidents of civilian casualties.

The Saudi monarchy—one of the most repressive governments in the world— gets its weapons from the U.S. The “civi­ lized” Saudis routinely behead oppo­ nents, prisoners, and dissidents without allowing them a trial or any other “demo­ cratic” recourse. (For lesser crimes, they merely sever an arm or leg of offenders.) Some 15 Saudi beheadings have been conducted in the last few months—per­ haps 100 over the past year, according to several sources—including some when President Obama was a visitor in that wondrous nation.

Saudi Arabia’s routine executions mer­ it zero mention in the corporate media, but beheadings were front-page news in virtually every U.S. newspaper when two American journalists and a British aid worker fell victim to that “barbaric” practice. I am compelled to use quota­ tion remarks around the word “barbar­ ic,” a term daily repeated by scores of bloodthirsty U.S. politicians who decline to use the same term to the qualitative­ ly more monstrous deeds of the U.S. in all nations of the Middle East. Need we mention the 1.5 million Iraqis murdered over the past decade and longer by U.S. bombings of civilian neighborhoods across Iraq, or the thousands slaugh­ tered in Pakistan by the “civilized” device of drone war, or the tens of thousands slaughtered in Egypt and more recently in Gaza by “civilized” U.S. allies? Or need we cite the “civilized” torture conducted by U.S. soldiers and interrogators at Abu (continued on page 11, in “India’s Modi picketed in NY”)