Tens of thousands of workers and youth are waging a political battle to overthrow U.S.-backed corrupt fascist dictators, cutting a wide swath throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many have taken up arms and risked their lives fighting brutal attacks by the rulers’ cops and armies, whose tanks, guns and tear gas are marked “Made in USA.”

The rebels are also going on strike against the ravages of capitalism — skyrocketing food prices and massive unemployment — demanding jobs.

Unfortunately these courageous workers and youth will wind up with the same capitalist system that has produced this mass poverty and fascist conditions. What leadership that does exist is not fighting for workers’ power — communism — which would destroy the profit system and its ruling bosses. This only highlights the necessity to build the Progressive Labor Party to develop the kind of leadership that would make a fundamental change, a real revolution that tossing out the old ruling class and put the working class in power.

However, the U.S. is trying to play both sides. While the rebellions oppose dictators backed by the U.S., their replacements might be U.S.-backed also. Some student rebels have been trained by CIA front groups (see CHALLENGE article [2/19/11] at a 2008 organizing conference at Columbia University in NYC) as well as a union movement trained by the AFL-CIA.

Significantly these struggles are raging in and near the heart of U.S. rulers’ energy-based global empire, raising big questions: Will pro- or anti-U.S. bosses gain long-term advantage from the conflicts? And now that many Arab lands are, or could be, under shaky new management, how can Exxon Mobil and its Big Oil buddies hang on to critical oil fields and shipping routes?

Iran’s ayatollahs made their opportunistic aims clear by sending a pair of warships through embroiled Egypt’s Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, long controlled by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. Meanwhile, Obama & Co.’s response involves expanding the scope of liberal President Jimmy Carter’s oil “Doctrine”:

“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. (Carter’s 1980 State of the Union Address)

Today’s revolts could spread to Carter’s obvious focus, Saudi Arabia, U.S. imperialism’s most vital energy interest. So Obama’s actual and possible combat theater protecting U.S. bosses’ “vital interests” now stretches from the mountains of Pakistan across the Gulf to the North African coast. And now the U.S. military has admitted its Afghan strategy is failing, and is withdrawing from strategic areas in that country. (NY Times, 2/25)

Liberal Bosses Want 20,000 Troops for Libyan Bloodbath

Libya, where dictator Qaddafi’s thugs have killed hundreds, and Exxon and U.S. ally BP have had to suspend drilling for crude oil, is especially worrisome to U.S. rulers. The NY Times (2/27) summed up these risks: “The worst-case scenario, should the rebellion topple him,...is...a failed state where Al Qaeda or other radical groups could exploit the chaos and operate with impunity.”

Michael O’Hanlon, military expert at the liberal Brookings Institution, urged the Pentagon to prepare a ground force, contrasting Libya with U.S. inaction in the 1994 crisis in Rwanda: “It would have taken closer to 20,000 troops, or more, to do the job right. There could well be a similar requirement here.” (Brookings website, 2/25) Obama booster O’Hanlon even provides the outlines of a body count: “We could lose one of our soldiers or Marines for every 10 enemy fighters we had to take down. If Qadhafi loyalists numbered in the thousands...we could lose hundreds of U.S. troops.” O’Hanlon would no doubt recommend the same treatment for al Qaeda sympathizers in Libya.

But Saudi Arabia, as the world’s greatest petroleum source and ExxonMobil’s biggest supplier, poses far graver concerns for U.S. bosses — so grave, in fact, that they resort to code to speak about it publicly. Michael Levi, a fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), funded by Rockefeller, Exxon and J.P. Morgan Chase, wrote: “If unrest actually migrated to the desert kingdom...Riyadh [Saudi’s capital] would probably impress on the world that it needed support if they didn’t want to see prices get out of control. That would be a credible threat, and could result in a very concrete set of responses”(CFR website, 2/25/11).

“Concrete response” means “invasion.” Two main groups seek to benefit from Saudi regime change: swelling ranks of unemployed youth and those capitalists not part of Saudi’s royal family, shut out of the fabulously lucrative oil racket. Osama bin Laden, a member of the latter, has united elements of both into the anti-U.S. al Qaeda.

Interestingly, Saudi’s ruling king, fearing an uprising, and to calm oil interests, just allotted $36 billion for reforms in his kingdom. But rather than “calming” the situation, those oil interests see his concerns as evidence of a further threat to the region and can very well provoke even more oil price hikes.

Top U.S. Warlord Visits Big Oil States and U.S. Bases

To hammer home the U.S. invasion vow, Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S.’s top military chief, recently visited Kuwait on the pretense of commemorating the 20th anniversary of Desert Storm. In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition of 750,000 soldiers ousted Iraqi invaders from Kuwait. But the display of U.S. and allied firepower demonstrates Obama’s promise of a repeat performance to defend Saudi Arabia.

Covering the February 26 celebration, Stars and Stripes, the U.S. brass’s mouthpiece for GIs gushed:

“Tanks, troops, armored vehicles, helicopters and barrel-rolling [combat maneuver to elude adversaries] fighter jets...passed in formation before Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and other dignitaries including Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1991, and Spain’s King Juan Carlos. It was a spectacle rarely seen in the world today. Saudi, Kuwaiti, French, British, and other troops joined the relatively small contingent of roughly 175 Americans thundering down the road.”

Saudi Arabia’s participation indicated it maybe next in line for potential U.S. invasion.

Powell’s presence signaled the future use of his “overwhelming force Doctrine.”  The Spanish, French and British presence demonstrates that Obama, more like Bush, Sr. than Bush, Jr., understands the U.S. need for broad military coalitions.

Mullen landed in Kuwait after a five-day Gulf tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Djibouti and Bahrain. These seven states either produce vast amounts of oil or house major U.S. military bases that defend the U.S. strategic stranglehold on its distribution. A Mullen spokesman reassured Saudi king Abdullah that Obama intends to keep him on his throne:  “The aim of the 1991 Gulf War was not to democratize Kuwait.” (Agencie French Press, 2/25)

But where would U.S. rulers find the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of troops needed for a Saudi invasion that might very well draw in Iran? Restoring the draft in present circumstances remains unthinkable. Gary Hart, a leading imperialist strategist, thinks the solution for U.S. imperialists lies in tying the liberal bosses’ side of the fight over workers’ rights now centered in Wisconsin to a patriotic movement that would back U.S. rulers’ war plans. (see box page 2)

Hart was co-chairman of Clinton’s 1999 Hart-Rudman Commission that drew up blueprints for a centralized U.S. police state. However, this presents them with a contradiction: on the one hand, they fear the consequences of a terrorist attack, but also would hope, as Hart figures, to use it to galvanize mass U.S. support for a Saudi invasion, just as it did for the eventual invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter war is now the longest in U.S. history.

Opportunities to Build the PLP

The uprisings and U.S. rulers’ reactions to them offer many valuable political lessons, about which we will write in coming issues. But for now we point to the first and foremost: Don’t trust the liberal bosses.

Meanwhile, PLP members and friends must back solidarity with — participate in — any rising working-class struggles, to be in position to guide them towards the goal of workers’ power and away from the liberals’ dead-end war aims. Recent anti-government working-class resistance to ruling-class attacks, both in the U.S. and abroad, show that politics are increasingly motivating workers. This can be advanced to demonstrate the need for a communist party, the PLP to play a central role in the immediate period.J

Liberal Gary Hart Seeks to Turn Wisconsin Protests to U.S. War Aims

Writing about Tea Partiers whose policies are running counter to U.S. imperialist aims from Madison to Tripoli, imperialist strategist Hart says, “There are lessons to be learned meanwhile about the limits of ...American power. The struggle here is whether we will return to a pre-New Deal America with many fewer ladders of opportunity, safety nets for the poor and elderly, and regulatory protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.” (Hart’s weblog, 2/21) Hart wants a new New Deal, with even more ladders and nets. He understands U.S. rulers’ need to somehow recreate Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal whose purpose was to save the capitalist system. FDR ran an alphabet soup of social programs, from the militaristic CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) to the job-creating (though slave wage) WPA (Works Progress Administration). It was these, along with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that helped overcome Tea Party-style 1930s isolationism by luring workers into the arms of a war-making government.

Al-ARAKIB, ISRAEL February 14 — A massive police force, armed to the teeth and dressed for battle, savagely attacked the residents of the unrecognized Bedouin-Arab village of Al-Arakib. The villagers’ homes have been brutally demolished no less than 16 (!) times since July 2010. They have once again been stranded without shelter in the middle of the desert as their improvised shanties were demolished.

Many of the village’s men were detained, but the women and children kept fighting and tried to block the bulldozers’ way. The barbaric cops then assaulted them with tear-gas, batons and rubber bullets, wounding at least two women and one child. The police refused to allow the wounded kid to be evacuated for hours.

The goal of this fascist police brutality is to force the villagers to surrender their land to the Israeli state, despite the fact that it is the villagers’ ancestral land and that they hold title over it. As a first stage, the Zionist JNF (Jewish National Fund) intends to plant trees over the village’s ruins in order to prevent the villagers’ return to them. As a second stage, however, they plan to build a new town — called Hiran — over Al-Arakib’s ruins. Residence in Hiran would be restricted to well-off religious Jews only.

But there is more than just the fascist Israeli government and the ultra-nationalist JNF behind this racist land-grab. Ronald Lauder, a NYC-based billionaire, the heir to the Estee Lauder financial empire, and a major donor to the JNF, is the real-estate tycoon who intends to reap a fortune out of Hiran’s construction.

This is not an isolated incident; big U.S. capital is behind some of the worst brutalities of the Israeli apartheid regime. For example, the Miami-based mogul Irving Moskowitz has used his influence to have Israeli cops sent to throw Palestinian-Arab families out of their homes so that he could build fancy apartment buildings on the ruins. This has occurred in Issawiye, Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan (all neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.) Local Israeli bosses profit greatly from Israeli fascism as well, reaping a fortune from landgrabs, colonial settlement construction and the “security” industry.

The only answer we, the international working class, must have is to unite and fight back. The Israeli cops might have guns, clubs, tear gas and rubber bullets; Irving Moscowitz and Ronald Lauder might have billions of dollars; but we have the masses.

The working class produces all value. If we fight back as a united force, we will be able to defeat the capitalists and their fascist servants in all countries. But as long as capitalism exists, racism and fascism will exist as well. Therefore, the only way to get rid of them is to overthrow the rotten capitalist system with a communist revolution. This will give power to the working class – in other words, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat! 

BEIRUT, LEBANON, February 15 — Most of the bourgeois parties representing various religious sects and nationalities here now agree to establishing a Hezbollah-led government that would cause a substantial change in the inter-imperialist relations and balance of power in the region. The pro-U.S. factions in the Lebanese ruling class are weakening, partially because of Hezbollah’s armed guerilla defeat of Israel in the 2006 war.

Hezbollah’s reconstruction project in Lebanon after that war made it popular among wide sections of the working class, mostly Shiites. The workers view this project as a “pro-people” initiative, contrary to the previous government’s policy of cuts, privatizations and rising prices for basic goods.

After the 2006 war, Hezbollah staged mass street demonstrations but refrained from taking power because it was not organized well enough to do so. Playing the “Hard-Line Opposition” role served it better politically. It’s likely that Hezbollah’s leaders were influenced by their bosses in Iran and Syria, and their rising imperialist masters in Beijing and Moscow, not to upset the inter-imperialist balance of power in the region, but rather to preserve the geo-political status quo.

The Iranian and Syrian regimes would like stable trade relations with the U.S.  Hezbollah’s “anti-imperialist” politics maintain a “peaceful co-existence” policy towards U.S. bosses while leaning on the rising imperialist powers.

The victory of the pro-U.S. camp in the Lebanese ruling class in the recent elections was largely due to U.S. intervention in the elections, as well as the presence of European military forces (especially Italian and French) in Lebanon after the cease-fire at the end of the 2006 war.

Western imperialists in general, and particularly the U.S., have less resources to support their servants in the local ruling class, allowing rival imperialists to increase their influence in the region through the Iranian and Syrian regimes. Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, to a lesser degree, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, represent Chinese and Russian imperialism. Similarly, the Israeli Zionist capitalists, engaged in colonial robbery in the region, serve U.S. imperialism which funds and arms them. All these bosses are united in their oppression of Middle Eastern workers.

Lebanon is entering a crisis similar to that which preceded the civil war of the late 1970s as its ruling class seems more divided than ever. The U.S. and the other Western powers are finding it difficult to stabilize Lebanon’s bourgeois regime and capitalist economy due to the weak U.S. economy, as well as to the failure in 2006 by Israel to land a “finishing blow” on Hezbollah. This has further weakened the U.S. bosses’ grip on the region.

There is now more freedom of action for political forces that lean on the parts of the national bourgeoisie connected to the Iran-Syria bloc, and, by proxy, to the Chinese and Russian bosses. Hezbollah’s military might serves this imperialist bloc as a whip to discipline the Lebanese bourgeoisie.

This is why the capitalist Najib Mikati has been nominated to become Lebanon’s prime minister. Mekati has huge investments in regions under the influence of China and Russia (including several African countries, notably South Africa), but also owns stock in western multi-national corporations in such countries as France. His role is to mediate between the imperialist interests, suppress and weaken the active resistance by Lebanon’s working class, trying to block any potential revolutionary situation.

Without communist leadership, Lebanon’s working class often is split along religious and ethnic lines, serving various bourgeois camps. The workers, already active on the streets, must expand their struggle and transcend the national and sectarian divisions while building a conscious communist leadership to lead their class to take the future into its own hands. 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 26 — Five student militants from GREPS (Group for Reflection on Social Problems) went on a hunger strike for ten days after administrators at the Faculty of Ethnology of the State University of Haiti continued to ignore their demands for a functioning campus with a full program of courses, a library, and a cafeteria. The administration still made no response to these basic demands.  The hunger strikers were hospitalized for observation, and two are still there. “I have to tell you that so far nothing has been done. For more than a year there have effectively been no courses...It seems there is no future for Haitian youth any more,” wrote a GREPS leader.

But the students, who are also demanding the return of expelled  militant comrades, are holding firm.  They are organizing a general popular assembly of students, teachers, and workers on March 10, and marches and other protests after that date. They drew this lesson from the non-response to their hunger strike: “It has clearly shown how these vampires care not a whit for human life but rather only for capital and power.”

That comment was from a fierce message of international solidarity which the students in Haiti  wrote to the university Teaching Assistants and other workers occupying the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, linking the two struggles. (See Box, page 4) 

U.S supporters, including PLP’ers organized a support campaign.  They were able to send fifty-three online signatures and twenty-five individual letters to the university Rectorate before the hunger strike ended. Readers should collect more signatures on the petition at www.ipetitions.com/petition/haiti-university-student-hunger-strike/.  It is still being circulated at several schools and campuses and on many lists.

Sometimes the effect of international solidarity is cumulative, rather than immediate. A petition like this, brought to campuses and schools like Bronx Community College, where 100 students attended a forum called “Youth Movement Rising,” shows that students in Haiti are not the passive victims the media portrays but are an integral part of that rising movement, which has much to contribute to a workers’ revolution.