15/04/2017
Workers Socialist League – USA
Tendência Militante Bolchevique – Argentina
Communist Revolutionary Action – Greece
Frente Comunista dos Trabalhadores – Brazil
CEDS – Centro de Estudos e Debates Socialistas – Brazil
Ady Mutero, Revolutionary Internationalist League – Zimbabwe
Mohammad Basir Ul Haq Sinha, President, Inter Press Network, Dhaka – Bangladesh
Akhar Bandyopadhyay, Bhagat Singh’s Socialist India
Frank Fitzmaurice, Liverpool – Britain
Michael O’Rourke, Irish Republican Socialist, Leitrim, Ireland, “I look forward to the defeat of imperialism in Syria, N. Korea and worldwide”.
Annette Maloney, London, “as a lifetime Irish republican activist I fully endorse the statement”.
Eugene Potter, London, student, “I fully agree with the statement”.
Bruno Kretzschmar, London, Revolutionary Socialist
Alonso Quijano, France, Chilean Revolutionary Socialist
In less than three months after taking office, Trump had his presidential mandate threatened. He had no support from the CIA, the FBI, the media, the Industrial Military Complex, the Congress, or even the Republican party. Imperialism was in an internal stalemate, with the Democratic opposition accusing imperialism’s main political representative of being an undercover agent of its main enemy, Russia. The thought that they needed to get rid of the “outsider”, of a ruler who disrupted their strategies of world domination, grew amongst Democrats and Republicans alike. Although the deep state and the CIA seem to have imposed their agenda on the Trump administration to a large extent, it is not easy to predict the exact outcome of the conflict within the American ruling class. Our task, however, is not to make predictions; it is to prevent the further escalation of imperialist intervention, which dramatically raises the stakes of violence in the region, threatening to become the spark that will turn the war in Syria into a world war between the biggest nuclear powers.
Clearly this bomb was dropped to demonstrate to all its rivals, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China, that the USA was in war mode and ready to commit the most extreme crimes against humanity. The bomb is the equivalent of 20,000 pounds of high explosives and wipes out everything within a radius of 1,000 yards, killing people up to 1.7 miles away.
As of April 7, with the Tomahawk missile attacks on Syria, Trump seems to have dramatically escaped the fate they had planned for him. He has become a typical leader of imperialism in practice, dispatching the Third Fleet to threaten the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). The intention of the Trump administration is that these two threatening acts of war will stop his enemies portraying him as Putin’s puppet. This is the strategy to raise the administration’s popularity, to gain breathing space and to readjust his image as an ably functioning leader of the empire. On 13th April, the US dropped on Afghanistan the biggest bomb since the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945. The Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb was considered too destructive in all its wars since WWII because of the outcry over destruction of the Japanese cities. Clearly this bomb was dropped to demonstrate to all its rivals, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China, that the USA was in war mode and ready to commit the most extreme crimes against humanity. The bomb is the equivalent of 20,000 pounds of high explosives and wipes out everything within a radius of 1,000 yards, killing people up to 1.7 miles away.
The last time: Saturday, August 24, 2013, The Destruction of Damascus Draws Nigh: U.S. War Ships En-Route for Possible Cruise Missile Attack on Syria Following False Flag Event and What It Means
The criminal US Cruise missile strikes against Syria on April 7, the second direct attack by US forces against the Syrian army after the bombing in Deir ez-Zor in September, marks a sharp escalation of violence in the six-year-long proxy war that was orchestrated by imperialism for the purposes of regime change in Damascus and to reassert imperialist hegemony over the Middle East and worldwide. We do not consider that Russia, China, and even less Iran, are imperialists. If the main characteristic of imperialism is the export of capital (Lenin) and the expansionist policy of financial capital (Trotsky), these three countries are not imperialist because commodities predominate in their export trade and production is geared enhancing the rate of profit of finance capital. Not to mention the fact that their military expansionism is almost zero. They are economically dependent capitalist powers (like Portugal and Argentina were in 1919 as Lenin pointed out) in the capitalist state systems of the 21st
The pretext for the strikes was an alleged chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikun, for which the US blamed the Syrian government without any evidence. There is no reason to believe that this story is anything but a provocation of imperialism and / or its proxy Salafi-Jihadi armies to justify its intervention. The Syrian government (which categorically denied the accusations) had absolutely no interest to carry out such an attack – unlike the opposition, which has no future unless its imperialist bosses rush to its rescue. Note that we are talking about the very same opposition that has repeatedly used chemical weapons in the past, something that has even been admitted by UN officials [1] and that the incident took place on the second the day of the international Conference in Brussels on supporting the future of Syria and the region – a conference chaired by EU foreign affairs chief, Italian woman Federica Mogherini with the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the participation of more than 70 countries and international organisations.
US imperialism has a long record of staging similar incidents to justify its interventions (remember the Iraqi maternity unit in which babies that were allegedly thrown out of their incubators in Kuwait in 1990, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, Gaddafi’s “black mercenaries” in 2011 etc.). Specifically in Syria, where the imperialist war has been accompanied by a massive war of propaganda, one can recall that similar story from 2013: the Eastern Ghouta incident [2] that it was technically impossible for the Syrian army to have conducted such a strike, while Seymour Hersh of the London Review of Books (LRB) would interview [3] several US intelligence officials who denied that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack, denouncing the ‘deliberate manipulation of intelligence’. Note that the attack took place on the day that UN inspectors were arriving in Syria, again like this chemical attack, strongly suggestion both were ‘false flags’. It should also be noted that in January 2013 the Mail Online had published an article [4] (which would soon be deleted) that talked about a “US-backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime”.
The US have now returned to their previous objective and threaten Syria with further military attacks. The strategy of Western imperialism for the Middle East has become the subject of explosive confrontations within the ruling elite of Washington because it was seriously battered by the resistance of the Syrian people and their allies. The liberation of Aleppo from the clutches of the reactionary opposition and the subsequent stream of victories of the Syrian Arab Army and its allies forced the US government to put its tail between its legs and temporarily accept the reality on the ground: the defeat of its proxy armies and, along with them, the defeat of an important part of its strategy on Syria and the Middle East. Just a few days before the US strikes, the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated that Assad’s fate was to “be decided by the Syrian people”, which was a major concession to the US objective of regime change in Damascus. actions.
The last time around: Inchon Invasion Flotilla Route, 11 September 1950. Courtesy of Paul Noll US Army 581st Signal Radio Relay Company. The Chinese bureaucracy are playing a dangerous game here, overthrowing the North Korean government could result in US troops and missiles on their border, the very thing they went to war against the USA and UN-sponsored invasion in 1950 to prevent.
It is not only Syria. The redeployment of a US navy strike group off the waters off the Korean Peninsula together with the barrage of threats about putting American nukes in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), decapitation strikes against Kim Jong-un and regime change in the DPRK marks a sharp escalation of the US war threats in Asia. According to the New Yorker on 6 March 2017:
“For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.” The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that NATO’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.” [5]
Of course, the truth is the exact opposition of what the General says. It is the USA and NATO who have been constantly organizing to surround, effect regime change and break-up the Russian Federation and China, especially since the fall of their puppet Boris Yeltsin in 1999. Trump is now back in line with overall imperialist policy. It is clear from this extract that the warmongering General Shirreff spoke for the entire military and US imperialism in general. Trump would have been impeached and removed if he had not fallen into line with the second Cold War strategy moving inexorably towards WWIII. The very attack on Syria was already a threatening shot across the bows of North Korea. Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida on 6th and 7th April. Trump boasted he had developed an “outstanding relationship” with him. The missile barrage occurred on the night of the 6th but China made no real objections. “Its U.N. ambassador, Liu Jieyi, never mentioned the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, or the U.S. airstrikes, at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday. Liu focused instead on the need for a political solution to the six-year Syrian conflict” The Tampa Tribune reported on 7th April. “The only other foreign leader to be hosted at Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s presidency so far is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a close U.S. ally (on 10th February) The Tampa Tribune commented in the same article. [6] The Chinese bureaucracy are playing a dangerous game here, overthrowing the North Korean government could result in US troops and missiles on their border, the very thing they went to war against the USA and UN-sponsored invasion in 1950 to prevent.
8 Those of us who happened to be born in the countries of the imperialist West have especially increased obligations: to contribute to the development of an anti-war / anti-imperialist movement that will not tolerate even the slightest amount of violence by ‘our’ bourgeois classes against the oppressed countries as an integral part of the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. “The nation that oppresses another nation forges its own chains” as Karl Marx wrote in 1870. Without giving political support to the Syrian or the DPRK government, we unconditionally defend the self-determination of Syria and the DPRK against imperialism (and, in the case of Syria, its proxy armies). In Syria, we seek the victory of the Syrian Arab Army and its allies on all fronts of the war, the expulsion of Western imperialism from the Middle East and the overthrow of its client regimes in the region. Without giving political support to the governments of Syria or the DPRK, we unconditionally defended the self-determination of Syria and the DPRK against imperialism. We are for the socialist revolution in all countries, combining both anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism whilst always identifying the main enemy of all humanity as the global hegemonic imperialist power, the USA, in support of its Wall Street great finance houses, its allied transnational corporations and its subordinate imperialist powers and their corporations in Europe, Japan etc.
Notes
[1] BBC News, UN’s Del Ponte says evidence Syria rebels ‘used sarin’, 6 May 2013,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22424188
[2] Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group January 14, 2014, Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013. https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1006045/possible-implications-of-bad-intelligence.pdf
[3] Seymour M. Hersh, London Review of Books, Vol. 35 No. 24 · 19 December 2013, pages 9-12 | 5515 words, Whose sarin? https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
[4] Louise Boyle, The Mail Online deleted article: U.S. ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime’. Leaked emails from defense contractor refers to chemical weapons saying ‘the idea is approved by Washington’ Obama issued warning to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month that use of chemical warfare was ‘totally unacceptable’, 29 January 2013,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130129213824/http:/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270219/U-S-planned-launch-chemical-weapon-attack-Syria-blame-Assad.html
[5] Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker, Annals of Diplomacy, March 6, 2017, Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War, what lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—and what lies ahead? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
[6] The Tampa Tribune VIVIAN SALAMA and JULIE PACE, Associated Press, President Trump lauds ‘outstanding’ relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Friday, April 7, http://events.tbo.com/news/politics/national/president-trump-lauds-outstanding-relationship-with-chinese-leader-xi/2319564
The last time: Saturday, August 24, 2013, The Destruction of Damascus Draws Nigh: U.S. War Ships En-Route for Possible Cruise Missile Attack on Syria Following False Flag Event and What It Means
The criminal US Cruise missile strikes against Syria on April 7, the second direct attack by US forces against the Syrian army after the bombing in Deir ez-Zor in September, marks a sharp escalation of violence in the six-year-long proxy war that was orchestrated by imperialism for the purposes of regime change in Damascus and to reassert imperialist hegemony over the Middle East and worldwide. We do not consider that Russia, China, and even less Iran, are imperialists. If the main characteristic of imperialism is the export of capital (Lenin) and the expansionist policy of financial capital (Trotsky), these three countries are not imperialist because commodities predominate in their export trade and production is geared enhancing the rate of profit of finance capital. Not to mention the fact that their military expansionism is almost zero. They are economically dependent capitalist powers (like Portugal and Argentina were in 1919 as Lenin pointed out) in the capitalist state systems of the 21st
The pretext for the strikes was an alleged chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikun, for which the US blamed the Syrian government without any evidence. There is no reason to believe that this story is anything but a provocation of imperialism and / or its proxy Salafi-Jihadi armies to justify its intervention. The Syrian government (which categorically denied the accusations) had absolutely no interest to carry out such an attack – unlike the opposition, which has no future unless its imperialist bosses rush to its rescue. Note that we are talking about the very same opposition that has repeatedly used chemical weapons in the past, something that has even been admitted by UN officials [1] and that the incident took place on the second the day of the international Conference in Brussels on supporting the future of Syria and the region – a conference chaired by EU foreign affairs chief, Italian woman Federica Mogherini with the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the participation of more than 70 countries and international organisations.
US imperialism has a long record of staging similar incidents to justify its interventions (remember the Iraqi maternity unit in which babies that were allegedly thrown out of their incubators in Kuwait in 1990, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, Gaddafi’s “black mercenaries” in 2011 etc.). Specifically in Syria, where the imperialist war has been accompanied by a massive war of propaganda, one can recall that similar story from 2013: the Eastern Ghouta incident [2] that it was technically impossible for the Syrian army to have conducted such a strike, while Seymour Hersh of the London Review of Books (LRB) would interview [3] several US intelligence officials who denied that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack, denouncing the ‘deliberate manipulation of intelligence’. Note that the attack took place on the day that UN inspectors were arriving in Syria, again like this chemical attack, strongly suggestion both were ‘false flags’. It should also be noted that in January 2013 the Mail Online had published an article [4] (which would soon be deleted) that talked about a “US-backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime”.
The US have now returned to their previous objective and threaten Syria with further military attacks. The strategy of Western imperialism for the Middle East has become the subject of explosive confrontations within the ruling elite of Washington because it was seriously battered by the resistance of the Syrian people and their allies. The liberation of Aleppo from the clutches of the reactionary opposition and the subsequent stream of victories of the Syrian Arab Army and its allies forced the US government to put its tail between its legs and temporarily accept the reality on the ground: the defeat of its proxy armies and, along with them, the defeat of an important part of its strategy on Syria and the Middle East. Just a few days before the US strikes, the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated that Assad’s fate was to “be decided by the Syrian people”, which was a major concession to the US objective of regime change in Damascus. actions.
The last time around: Inchon Invasion Flotilla Route, 11 September 1950. Courtesy of Paul Noll US Army 581st Signal Radio Relay Company. The Chinese bureaucracy are playing a dangerous game here, overthrowing the North Korean government could result in US troops and missiles on their border, the very thing they went to war against the USA and UN-sponsored invasion in 1950 to prevent.
It is not only Syria. The redeployment of a US navy strike group off the waters off the Korean Peninsula together with the barrage of threats about putting American nukes in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), decapitation strikes against Kim Jong-un and regime change in the DPRK marks a sharp escalation of the US war threats in Asia. According to the New Yorker on 6 March 2017:
“For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.” The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that NATO’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.” [5]
Of course, the truth is the exact opposition of what the General says. It is the USA and NATO who have been constantly organizing to surround, effect regime change and break-up the Russian Federation and China, especially since the fall of their puppet Boris Yeltsin in 1999. Trump is now back in line with overall imperialist policy. It is clear from this extract that the warmongering General Shirreff spoke for the entire military and US imperialism in general. Trump would have been impeached and removed if he had not fallen into line with the second Cold War strategy moving inexorably towards WWIII. The very attack on Syria was already a threatening shot across the bows of North Korea. Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida on 6th and 7th April. Trump boasted he had developed an “outstanding relationship” with him. The missile barrage occurred on the night of the 6th but China made no real objections. “Its U.N. ambassador, Liu Jieyi, never mentioned the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, or the U.S. airstrikes, at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Friday. Liu focused instead on the need for a political solution to the six-year Syrian conflict” The Tampa Tribune reported on 7th April. “The only other foreign leader to be hosted at Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s presidency so far is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a close U.S. ally (on 10th February) The Tampa Tribune commented in the same article. [6] The Chinese bureaucracy are playing a dangerous game here, overthrowing the North Korean government could result in US troops and missiles on their border, the very thing they went to war against the USA and UN-sponsored invasion in 1950 to prevent.
8 Those of us who happened to be born in the countries of the imperialist West have especially increased obligations: to contribute to the development of an anti-war / anti-imperialist movement that will not tolerate even the slightest amount of violence by ‘our’ bourgeois classes against the oppressed countries as an integral part of the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. “The nation that oppresses another nation forges its own chains” as Karl Marx wrote in 1870. Without giving political support to the Syrian or the DPRK government, we unconditionally defend the self-determination of Syria and the DPRK against imperialism (and, in the case of Syria, its proxy armies). In Syria, we seek the victory of the Syrian Arab Army and its allies on all fronts of the war, the expulsion of Western imperialism from the Middle East and the overthrow of its client regimes in the region. Without giving political support to the governments of Syria or the DPRK, we unconditionally defended the self-determination of Syria and the DPRK against imperialism. We are for the socialist revolution in all countries, combining both anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism whilst always identifying the main enemy of all humanity as the global hegemonic imperialist power, the USA, in support of its Wall Street great finance houses, its allied transnational corporations and its subordinate imperialist powers and their corporations in Europe, Japan etc.
Notes
[1] BBC News, UN’s Del Ponte says evidence Syria rebels ‘used sarin’, 6 May 2013,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22424188
[2] Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group January 14, 2014, Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013. https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1006045/possible-implications-of-bad-intelligence.pdf
[3] Seymour M. Hersh, London Review of Books, Vol. 35 No. 24 · 19 December 2013, pages 9-12 | 5515 words, Whose sarin? https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
[4] Louise Boyle, The Mail Online deleted article: U.S. ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria and blame it on Assad’s regime’. Leaked emails from defense contractor refers to chemical weapons saying ‘the idea is approved by Washington’ Obama issued warning to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month that use of chemical warfare was ‘totally unacceptable’, 29 January 2013,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130129213824/http:/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270219/U-S-planned-launch-chemical-weapon-attack-Syria-blame-Assad.html
[5] Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker, Annals of Diplomacy, March 6, 2017, Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War, what lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—and what lies ahead? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
[6] The Tampa Tribune VIVIAN SALAMA and JULIE PACE, Associated Press, President Trump lauds ‘outstanding’ relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Friday, April 7, http://events.tbo.com/news/politics/national/president-trump-lauds-outstanding-relationship-with-chinese-leader-xi/2319564
