As they celebrated last week’s drone strike that killed al Qaeda big shot Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, Obama & Co. continued to lie about the dangers workers face from this escalating campaign. U.S. bosses claim that “surgical” drone strikes, using unpiloted aircraft, avoid civilians. They say that drones offer a low-cost, politically low-risk means of prosecuting their “war on terror” without engaging U.S. troops. Finally, White House hypocrites preach that they apply the strictest “moral” and “legal” standards in deploying the drones.
But history tells us that wars cannot be won by remote control. The drones represent an early stage of a bloody, high-risk strategy that could soon have “allied” U.S. and Pakistani armies shooting at each other. They cannot possibly replace the ground troops the U.S. bosses will need in their war to control the areas with huge reserves of oil and natural gas and the pipelines that transport them. (It’s for this reason that the U.S. “withdrawal” from Iraq moves at a snail’s pace; there are 30 U.S. bases that need to be secured there.)
Moreover, the drones won’t help the hundreds of thousands of workers in Pakistan on strike against poverty pay, unpaid wages and brutal working conditions (see CHALLENGE, 10/5). They won’t benefit those who suffer from the capitalists’ austerity policies across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. And they certainly won’t relieve the racist unemployment, home foreclosures and worsening healthcare faced by tens of millions of U.S. workers. The trillions spent on war only exacerbate these problems for workers everywhere.
In fact, the Pentagon uses drones both to pinpoint high-level targets and to spread terror through indiscriminate slaughter. John Brennan, Obama’s top advisor on terrorism, finds his boss’s robot assassins faultless: “There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency [and] precision…that we’ve been able to develop” (Los Angeles Times, 6/29/11).
Brennan lied. Two years earlier, after Obama latched onto the drones as a regional cure-all for U.S. imperialism, insider Daniel Byman (a Brookings fellow and former analyst for the CIA and Congress) exposed their probable rate of civilian murders, warning of a backlash:
U.S. drone activity in Pakistan has killed dozens of lower-ranking and at least 10 mid- and high-ranking leaders from al Qaeda and the Taliban. Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks [as of two years ago]. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died....U.S. strikes that take a civilian toll are a further blow to its legitimacy — and to U.S. efforts to build goodwill there (Foreign Policy, 7/14/09).
Of the untold hundreds of innocents killed so far by drones, nearly half are children, according to a recent study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Contrary to plan, these attacks actually help to build jihadist groups by turning slain leaders into martyrs and bereaved relatives of civilians into sworn U.S. enemies.
The Next 9/11 — and the Rockefeller Wing’s Planned Counterattack
If and when drone-fired hatred fuels a terror attack in the U.S., its rulers are cynically seeking to use it to expand the Afghanistan war into Pakistan. In August, their leading foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), issued “Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 13: A Pakistan-Based Terrorist Attack on the U.S. Homeland.” Acknowledging the “generous support” of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, it read in part:
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is the most likely Pakistani outfit to attempt a unilateral strike against the United States or to cooperate with al-Qaeda. The TTP has threatened attacks against the U.S. homeland, considers itself at war with Pakistan, has been a regular target for U.S. drones, and already attempted one attack against the United States when it trained and deployed Faizal Shahzad to trigger a car bomb in Times Square in 2010....An operation involving conventional explosives is most likely. The casualty count likely would be among the largest determining factors in terms of how Washington responds, and it is difficult as well as unrealistic to affix a precise number. This contingency presumes an attack claiming at least fifty people and as many as five hundred, assessing possible responses along this range.
On September 22, departing Joint Chiefs of Staff boss Mike Mullen significantly upped the likelihood of U.S. action against Pakistan by telling Congress that the terrorist Haqqani Network “has long enjoyed the support and protection of the Pakistani government and is, in many ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.”
Four days later, speaking on National Public Radio, CFR mouthpiece Daniel Markey interpreted Mullen’s remarks as a green light for the Pentagon death machine:
You could see conventional forces in Afghanistan moved up to the Pakistan border to support cross-border attacks that would probably start out small but could expand. And you could see a variety of other combined efforts that could even include a more extensive bombing campaign that went beyond the use of drones.
Capitalists’ Laws Serve Their Own Class; Communist Revolution Needed for Pro-Worker Rules
The farcical but widely accepted concept of capitalist “justice under law” aids the war-maker Obama, who has enlisted his alma mater: Harvard Law School (HLS). Just before Awlaki’s demise by drone, John Brennan advised an HLS forum (AP, 9/16/11), “We reserve the right to take unilateral action if or when other governments are unwilling or unable to take the necessary actions themselves….”
Just after the al-Awlaki killing, HLS Professor Jack Goldsmith reminded New York Times readers (9/30/11), “In a lawsuit brought last year that sought to prevent the government from targeting Mr. Awlaki, a federal judge ruled that in wartime the Constitution left it to the president and Congress, not the courts, to decide military targeting issues.”
In other words, laws are what the bosses say they are. In any time or place, the ruling class, in its own interests, determines what is “legal” and what is not. Slavery enjoyed the U.S. Constitution’s legal blessing for 78 years. The U.S. bosses’ legal scholars today find drone attacks and full-scale, undeclared, unilateral invasions perfectly legitimate.
The working class worldwide suffers from U.S. imperialism’s march to wider wars. Our class’s answer remains to intensify class struggle against these murderous rulers and their poisonous profit system. We can see this happening in Pakistan’s mass strikes, and in workers’ mass protests in Greece, France, and Italy. We see renewed struggle beginning to emerge in the U.S., with the fight-backs by West Coast longshoremen, New York City hospital workers and anti-Wall Street demonstrators in cities across the country.
The needed and essential ingredient in these struggles is to divert them from the dead-end impossibility of reforming capitalism and into schools for communist-led revolution. We must win workers and youth to see that only a worker-run society that destroys the bosses and their profit system can put an end to their atrocities. The greater good of the working class will then be the ultimate law.
