In the coming school year thousands of high school students will be debating the pros and cons of removing U.S. troops from bases in South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

But don’t be fooled: nobody in the ruling class is debating troop withdrawals. They’re debating
re-deployments. There’s a long-lasting and broad consensus among political and military elites that U.S. imperialism must remain dominant in the Middle East. This consensus, persisting since World War II, was boldly and publicly expressed in president Jimmy Carter’s warning to the USSR when the latter entered Afghanistan in 1979:

The U.S. Case for Control of Oil

“The region…now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil.…Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and…will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

This is the Carter Doctrine. No president since Carter has renounced it, and none ever will. Those U.S. troops who’ve departed Iraq have headed to Afghanistan. Air strikes have killed untold numbers in Pakistan and Yemen, both of which (along with Somalia) are repeatedly announced as the “next” targets in an ongoing “long war” against “terror.”

There are no withdrawals, only shifts from one target to the next and back again in a treadmill of invasion, occupation and escalation. This is the general trend of inter-imperialist rivalry in the Middle East.

“Terrorism” constantly emerges in high school debates but, as in the general U.S. population, is poorly understood and riddled with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. U.S. imperialism is the world’s greatest terrorist threat. The British medical journal Lancet placed invasion-caused Iraqi casualties at a conservative 600,000. Remote-controlled drone missile strikes and commando Special Forces raids have slaughtered thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is terrorism.

However, the so-called “insurgents” who resist U.S. invasion are hardly better than the invaders. Local bosses, cloaked in the guise of radical Islam, simply want Arab control of Arab oil profits, wrenched from the exploitation of “their” workers.

Turn the Guns on the Exploiters

The young men (and increasingly young women) pointing weapons at each other in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond have much more in common with each other than with the bosses and generals who send them off to die. From the Middle East to the U.S., unemployment forces the youth into the military. These young people need to turn their guns on their exploiters as revolutionary soldiers did in Russia and then in China, in a communist seizure of power.

Currently, imperialists, whether U.S., European, Russian or Chinese, tend to pick on smaller powers. But rivalry between the imperialists will intensify and sooner or later will erupt in open conflict, leading to world war. Only communist revolution can chase the imperialists from power. Workers’ power abolishes capitalist competition for profits which lies behind inter-imperialist rivalry and war.

This coming school year thousands of student debaters will join tens of millions of their peers in facing the most vicious budget cuts public schools have suffered in our time. Unemployment continues at sky-high levels for tens of millions of workers. Meanwhile, profits climb; corporations sit on over a trillion dollars, waiting for the most profitable time to invest. They refuse to rehire the workers they discarded like so much trash in recent years.

The money from corporate profiteering and imperialist war expenses could restore every single budget cut to every school, send everyone to college and provide everybody with a job and a home. But that’s not how capitalism operates. The “National Priorities Project” website, totally lacking in class analysis, can provide a sense of the dollar amounts involved.

Connect the Dots

The challenge now for all students, teachers and parents is to organize fight-back, not merely to restore school funding (though a start) but must connect the cuts to the wars. After all, even fully-funded schools will still only lie to us about the wars. U.S. capitalism, partly to help pay the trillions of dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is moving to squeeze ever more profits out of the working class.

But awareness alone, while important, is insufficient. We need to build a movement to smash the system that makes these cuts and these wars increasingly intense. We must smash racist notions that place more value on the lives of U.S. soldiers than on our working-class brothers and sisters overseas. CHALLENGE will continue as a resource of timely, accurate and class-conscious news about world events and class struggles against the bosses and their system. Student debaters should use CHALLENGE articles for discussion in team practices.  Building a stronger communist movement is winning the “insurgency” to capitalism’s endless chamber of horrors. Join PLP!