The U.S. bosses’ widening campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as ISIL or IS, represents their latest move to control Middle East oil and dominate their imperialist rivals in the heart of their global empire. Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism. The loss of the world’s most profitable reserves would devastate energy giants like ExxonMobil and send the U.S. into its worst depression in history (see box, page 2). The bosses will continue to defend their interests at all costs. Twenty-three years of invasions, bombings and sanctions have killed more than three million working-class Iraqis and tens of thousands more in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. For U.S. rulers, the most violent terrorists in the history of the world, eliminating ISIS terrorists would represent a drop in the bucket.
When Barack Obama said, “We don’t have a strategy yet” in the face of ISIS’s grab of oilfields and refineries in Iraq and Syria, he was lying. His capitalist handlers have had an explicit, petroleum-based, Middle East war strategy for decades. In his 1980 inaugural address, two months after profit-hungry Iranian rulers seized the vast assets of Exxon and other Western firms, President Jimmy Carter said: “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 such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
When U.S. presidents cite “vital American interests,” they hide the fact that these are the bosses’ interests, directly antagonistic to the needs of the international working class. Workers gain nothing from Exxon’s business. To the contrary, we are the ones who die in imperialist wars to protect the oil companies’ profits. This vicious cycle will end only when the bosses’ capitalist system is smashed by communist revolution and replaced with a society run by and for workers, who create everything of value. That’s the goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
Obama Wedded to Oil War Doctrine
Obama’s anti-ISIS policy, outlined in his speech on September 10, is an extension of the Carter Doctrine and the pledge by President Franklin Roosevelt to Saudi Arabia during World War II: that the U.S. would defend the region’s oilfields at all costs. The same strategy triggered the Gulf War in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush. It drove the sanctions under President Bill Clinton that strangled Iraq from 1993 to 2001. It set off President George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” invasion of 2003 and the eight-year Iraq War that followed. Obama is as tightly tied to this strategy as the Republicans and Democrats before him.
The president’s plan for now is to attack ISIS through air strikes and major ground deployments by regional allies. But since this approach will inevitably fail, the U.S. rulers’ growing hydrocarbon rivalry with China promises a deeper, wider and deadlier Middle East conflict (“NATO Foresees Three Years of War in Iraq,” Le Canard Enchaine, 9/10/14). On September 16, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said he might recommend “the use of U.S. military ground forces” in Iraq.
It’s not just Iraqi oil that’s at stake. Given ISIS’s expansionist program, the U.S. bosses have to worry about the longtime linchpin to their Big Oil world order: Saudi Arabia.
Racism: U.S. Bosses’ Dilemma
ExxonMobil and the finance capitalists who own it are openly steering U.S. policy on ISIS. Their problem is that Obama, hindered by a fractured Congress and a war-weary public, can’t provide the billionaires all the firepower they want. Meanwhile, the rulers’ racist attacks on black and Latin youth — a key part of their effort to divide and pacify the working class — pose a dilemma for them. The same young people murdered by cops in U.S. cities and apartheid towns like Ferguson, Missouri, the same ones who are imprisoned by the millions by the racist criminal justice system, are also the bosses’ leading source of cannon fodder for their perpetual imperialist wars. By alienating these youth, the capitalists undermine their case for their needed military draft. Alienated workers also contribute to the unreliability of the present U.S. military, which will once again be counted on to shore up U.S. control of the Middle East.
Obama Gets His Marching Orders
Two days before his ISIS speech, Obama hosted a White House dinner for a handful of former top-level war planners to hear “their views on a range of national security and foreign policy issues” (New York Times, 9/9/14).
The mass-murdering guest list united Democrats and Republicans. All had tight connections to Exxon itself or its founding Rockefeller family, which bankrolls hundreds of “philanthropies” to advance U.S. imperialism. In sum, the group represented U.S. capitalists’ “central committee,” the tight circle that gives Obama his orders. They included:
• Stephen Hadley, national security advisor for George W. Bush. He helped lead the deadly 2007 troop surge in Iraq and now works directly for Exxon;
• Condoleezza Rice, another Bush national security advisor, also hired by Exxon. According to Iraq Oil Report (2/8/13): “Rice and Hadley have been consulting Exxon on Iraq and on the broader region as well since at least 2011”;  
• Richard Haass, the Director of Policy Planning under the Bush State Department, helped prepare the 2003 Iraq invasion. Haass currently heads the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the finance capital think tank that counts Exxon as a “founding member”;
• Samuel R. Berger, who advised Clinton to bomb Bosnia and Kosovo and sits on the boards of imperialist foundations like the Rockefeller- and Soros-funded International Crisis Group;
• Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution policy factory, which lists the ExxonMobil Foundation as a top donor;
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and the author of the Carter Doctrine. Together, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission, which seeks to unite pro-U.S. forces from North America, Europe, and Asia in a potential World War III alliance.
Obama’s ISIS manifesto, in which he compared the new fight to U.S. air campaigns in Yemen and Somalia, failed to satisfy this oil-driven oligarchy. Kenneth Pollack, a Brookings scholar, suggested that Obama “should have reminded the American people that this is ultimately about oil and our economy....we need to acknowledge that that is where our ultimate interest in the Arab states lies” (Brookings website, 9/11/14).
Haass, meanwhile, wrote that the capitalist bosses “need to set a scale of effort on our part far larger than anything that is being undertaken or contemplated in Yemen or Somalia.” As Haass lamented, “What air power cannot do is take and hold territory. You need a ground component, and we are not in a position to provide that” (CFR, 9/11/14).
Building PLP Under Rising Fascism
Aggravating the bosses’ problems is the need for more military funding for their relentless oil wars. This can come only from intensified exploitation of the U.S. working class, from higher taxes to cutbacks in wages and social services. Workers will suffer greatly from these attacks. From Ferguson to France to Palestine,  workers will also respond as they always have in the face of capitalist oppression: with greater opposition and fightback (see pages 4, 5, 6).
Despite Obama’s caution and their reluctant and inept regional allies, U.S. capitalists cannot walk away from the Middle East. They will do what they feel they must to sustain their brutal system of exploitation. Expect more workers’ blood to be spent for bosses’ oil. But as Karl Marx declared, capitalism generates the seeds of its own destruction by creating a working class. The job of Progressive Labor Party is to lead that class to communist revolution and to end imperialist war for all time.