PLP has warned for decades that U.S. rulers must conduct ever wider wars to shore up their slipping status as the world’s top imperialists. Now, in addition to their Afghan and Iraqi bloodbaths, the NY Times reports (8/15) that Obama & Co. are running secret and not-so-secret military operations (using Hellfire and cruise missiles, drone attacks and cluster bombs) in Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Algeria,
Morocco, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan.

The Times, a major mouthpiece for U.S. bosses, claims Obama’s objective is “combating terrorists.” But what’s really driving the covert U.S. death squads is intensifying competition with rival imperialists — especially China, Russia and junior partner Iran — for sources of profit. This overriding, inter-imperialist aspect to U.S. war-making also explains why the Obama regime is extending promised deadlines for withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan back into infinity.

China, Russia, Iran Main Foes of U.S. Rulers

The Times “exposé” omits the geo-strategically critical energy wealth and transit routes that lie in or near the 11 targeted countries. Though the words “oil” and “gas” do not appear, it gives the game away by making Saudi Arabia the bulls-eye on an accompanying map of the covert war zone (see map, page 5). The kingdom holds the world’s most important oil reserves. Thus, the Times’ piece deals mainly with clandestine U.S. raids in Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia and commands strategic
export lanes from it.

For decades after World War II, control of Saudi, Iranian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti (and, of course, North American) oil immensely aided U.S. and allied (mainly British) rulers’ domination of the non-Soviet world. For the benefit of their ruling-class owners, the ancestors of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell dictated the price and terms of supply of capitalism’s lifeblood to three quarters of the planet.

That was then. The U.S. lost Iran to pro-Russian and pro-Chinese ayatollahs in 1979. And today, rising imperialist China, a major buyer of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil, is building a “blue-water” navy to end its need for brokers like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell. That navy includes warships to guard tankers delivering oil to China’s burgeoning manufacturing economy.

China and Russia hold contracts on huge oil fields in Iraq, which seven years of U.S. occupation have failed to pacify sufficiently to get that huge potential reserve out of the ground for exploitation. Moscow and Beijing may be tempted to initiate their own “regime change” in Baghdad by bolstering already significant Iranian influence there.

Gas supplies also motivate Obama’s semi-secret wars. Iran — whose nuclear arms program Russia is assisting — and Algeria, both on the Pentagon/CIA hit list, belong to the Moscow-led Gas Exporting Countries Forum. The Putin gang wants to formalize it into an anti-U.S. OPEC of natural gas.

Iran and Russia might have become competitors as gas exporters. Instead, opposition to the U.S. makes them staunch partners in the gas trade and on potential battlefields. Russia’s “support” of UN sanctions on Iran is a farce. And their military alliance is expanding.

“The Hindu” reports (7/26) that “Russia’s Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said last week that he saw ‘practically no limits’ to cooperation with Iran in the energy field. ‘No sanctions will hinder our cooperation in hydrocarbons’.…Russia is Iran’s main source for arms and technology. In the past 15 years, Russia has supplied Iran with combat aircraft, helicopters, diesel submarines, tanks and air defence systems.”

The Kremlin also backs an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline to challenge the U.S.-led Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project, now bogged down in Bush-Obama’s botched Afghan war.

Assassinations Can’t Win Oil
Fields for U.S. Bosses

So why did the Times, which speaks for the U.S. imperialist establishment, disclose Obama’s “cloak and dagger” campaign? Because it’s not working. Citing the ultimate authority of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. rulers’ leading foreign policy think-tank, the Times concluded, “Micah Zenko, a fellow at the CFR, examines in a forthcoming book what he has labeled ‘discrete military operations’ from the Balkans to Pakistan since the end of the cold war in 1991. He found that these operations seldom achieve either their military or political objectives.”

The Times has another CFR-Establishment lifer, Edmund Hull, weigh in: “To be successful in the long run, we have to take a far broader approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces.” This means massive invasions and occupations, which Hull thinks serves the rulers better than assassinations (see box). Hull was Clinton’s deputy coordinator for counter-terrorism.

U.S. Bosses, Like All Imperialists, Need Mass Invasions
and Long-term Occupations

The Times piece sends a message to Obama: “War on the cheap” won’t fulfill U.S. imperialists’ needs. They want him to mobilize society for broader, inevitably, global conflict. They call for “shared sacrifice” to finance a more expensive war. U.S. bosses will intensify attacks on the working class — more budget cuts in social services, teacher layoffs, lowering wages, more healthcare cuts, raising the Social Security retirement age and whatever else they can get away with.

The needs of weakening U.S. rulers means they must go on an even more intensive war footing, forcibly seizing back slices of the world they’ve lost or risk losing their riches. This ups the ante both for Obama’s administration and for our class. We must get on a full war footing ourselves. Our Party’s plan is to build a base in workplaces, campuses, neighborhoods and in the Army to militantly expose and oppose the war-makers. Such actions will ultimately prove schools for communist revolution. J

As our previous editorial indicated (CHALLENGE, 8/18), these varying ruling-class strategies reflect two main options that thus far they are at a loss to decide on:

• Counter-insurgency, which amounts to full-scale, vastly expensive colonial occupation that subjugates the entire population, largely through the deadly seizure of cities; or,

• Counter-terrorism, less costly and perhaps less effective for U.S. invaders, which targets suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and allies for assassination in the hope that the rank and file will see the light.