The New Year opens with the U.S. ruling class contemplating expanded wars for profit on many fronts, especially the Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq campaigns — all inherently crimes against the international working class. By drones and other means, U.S. rulers are committing racist atrocities in order to secure Central Asian oil and gas supplies and energy transit routes, as well as positioning themselves strategically against future clashes with China and Russia.
Obama Steps Up Nazi-Style Drone Terror in Pakistan, Targets Civilians
U.S. imperialists “celebrated” New Year’s Day by slaughtering 18 “suspected militants” with CIA-guided drone missiles in Pakistan. Assassin-in-chief Obama okayed the hits from his Hawaiian vacation resort. The killings follow a “record number of 124 attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2010, more than double the number of Predator strikes conducted in 2009, killing 1,184 people, compared with 2009’s death toll of 760 in 53 such attacks.” (The News, Pakistan, 1/1/2011)
Terrorism from the air, recalling the World War II Nazi’s V-2 rocket blitz on London, has joined massacre and torture as part of U.S. rulers’ standard operating procedure. Many of the dead are civilians. According to Britain’s Channel 4 News (12/22/10), “Women and children...have also perished while the sheer number of drone flights has caused panic and terror among ordinary tribespeople. It is clear that a changing strategy has often put villages rather than remote hideouts in the firing line.”
Obama’s escalation of remote-controlled murder reflects several harsh realities. First and foremost, war-making U.S. capitalists have utter, racist disregard for working-class lives.  Second, U.S.-led warfare is rapidly expanding beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, with global ramifications. And third, despite its lethal technological superiority, the Pentagon can’t yet deploy massive ground forces.
This becomes a problem for Obama & Co. when considering potentially necessary invasions of Iran and North Korea, not to mention future war with China. The ruling-class mouthpiece, the NY Times editorialized (1/2/11): “China seems increasingly intent on challenging United States naval supremacy in the Western Pacific….China could soon deploy a ballistic missile capable of threatening American aircraft carriers in the region….Dealing with a rising China could be Washington’s biggest challenge in the decades ahead.”
All of the above would require ground armies which U.S. commanders do not yet possess.
U.S. Rulers’ Afghan-Pakistan Strategy Underlies Road to World War III
Controlling the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route and vast Afghan mineral resources motivates the immediate Obama Afghan-Pakistan killing surge. But defeating, or at least limiting, the Taliban in both countries is essential for U.S. planners focused on a future World War. Robert Blackwill, a senior fellow at the influential Rockefeller-run Council on Foreign Relations think-tank and a national security adviser to Bush, Jr., urged Obama to abandon his fake Afghan pullout rhetoric (Foreign Affairs, January-February/2011):
““[Withdrawal] would lead to the rapid resumption of an all-out Afghan civil war and then to a probable conquest of the entire country by the Taliban. It would draw Afghanistan’s neighbors into the fighting, destabilizing the region and further souring relations between New Delhi [India] and Islamabad [Pakistan]. It would raise the odds of the Islamic radicalization of Pakistan, which would in turn call into question the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It would weaken, if not rupture, the budding U.S.-Indian strategic partnership [against China], undermine NATO’s [anti-Russian] future, and trigger a global outpouring of support for [anti-Saudi, al Qaeda-style] jihadist ideology.”
Without full U.S. mobilization, though, Blackwill can propose only partition, maintaining 35,000-50,000 U.S. troops in key parts of Afghanistan and yielding the outlying mountainous areas to the Taliban, though on a very short leash. If the U.S. caught Afghan Taliban aiding al Qaeda, “The sky over [Taliban-controlled] Pashtun, Afghanistan would be filled with Predators targeting not only terrorist activities but also, if necessary, the new Afghan Taliban government in all its dimensions.”
Air Power Alone Won’t Cut It; Bosses Must Double Army, Marines for Occupying Force
Ex-CIA boss General Michael Hayden said in Bob Woodward’s book, “Obama’s Wars”: “The great lesson of World War II and Vietnam was that attack from the air, even massive bombings, can’t win a war.” U.S. rulers need armies of occupation far larger than their present strength. At a December 22 forum held by the Brookings Institution, another imperialist policy factory, Michael O’Hanlon, military advisor to Hillary Clinton, observed:
 “We do have the capability...to overthrow the Iranian regime. We...would have to have a Marine Corps and Army that would be probably twice their current size to really do an occupation of Iran with its 75 million population correctly over a period of years.” (Brookings website) The Brookings forum also discussed “occupation of North Korea” and “conflict with China.”
Dream Act + Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ = Militarization
How the U.S. war machine can at least double its needed ground troops weighs heavily on Obama and the imperialists he serves. Obama strove mightily, but failed, to get the Dream Act through December’s lame-duck Congress. The Act had the potential of enlisting (back-door drafting) millions of immigrant youth into the military in exchange for the promise of U.S. citizenship. “Passage of the Dream Act is one of its [the Pentagon’s] official goals for helping to maintain ‘a mission-ready, all-volunteer force.’” (NY Times editorial, 9/2010) (The college “option” is a fraud since more and more low-income youth can’t afford the rising tuitions.)
Meanwhile, domestically-focused Tea Party forces are asserting greater control over immigration policy by driving to duplicate the racist Arizona anti-immigrant law in other states, aimed at undocumented workers, but with even harsher penalties. This conflicts with Obama’s imperialist faction which seeks a war-bent policy centralized in Washington.
The Obama camp, however, did succeed in repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” This reopened the door to officer training (ROTC) on Ivy League campuses which had previously restricted ROTC because the Pentagon policy discriminated against gays and lesbians. The Pentagon needs a fresh supply of ROTC-trained officers. The policy had also discharged thousands whom Obama hoped would re-enlist following the repeal.
The horrors of imperialist war are also leading to tens of thousands of GI’s developing post-traumatic stress disorder, limiting their fighting potential and resulting in ever-rising numbers committing suicide after constant re-deployments, still another brake on an expanding military.
The embattled capitalists Obama serves want to raise their killing capacity from merely dozens of drones to invading armies in the millions. PLP must expose the rulers’ renewed efforts to expand their worker-killing war machine through a Dream Act, enhancement of its officer corps through ROTC or any other end-run at militarization that the troop-starved war-makers cook up.
Rulers Bleed Workers to Finance Wars and Create Economic Draft
PLP’ers and militant workers and youth must step up actions we’ve already launched against the ruling class’s massive budget cuts that they’re using to finance their imperialist wars: their raising of fares and job and wage-cuts in mass transit in NYC and California; their increasing tuitions in city and state universities and racist destruction of public education; their attacks on healthcare affecting hospital workers and patients; their cuts in pensions and coming cuts in Social Security; and our fights against racist unemployment.
We can fight to win these battles, but the bosses will eventually reverse them. It is out of these struggles that we can win workers to understand that only communist revolution can end these murderous cuts and the bosses’ imperialist wars once and for all. Such class struggles are truly “schools for communism” which can “graduate” into building PLP to lead the working class towards a worker-run society.