No War with Iran! Defeat the U.S. War Machine!

Defeat the U.S. War Machine! 

Victory to the Iraqi Revolution, Victory to Palestinian Revolution, Victory to the Syrian Revolution! 

US out of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan! Stop arming Saudi Arabia and Israel!

For International Labor Actions to Stop Trump Now!

The assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani by Trump may stumble the U.S. into WWIII and garner condemnation from the Democratic opposition and especially from some Democratic presidential candidates. But make no mistake, their objections are tactical and political, not strategic or irreparable. The Democrats are as committed to propping up the declining US imperialism as the Republicans. Their votes in both houses including those of 188 Democrats  granted Trump the unfathomable sum of $738bn for war spending.

Trumpsters may play attorney and claim the assasination was nothing other presidents have not  done, reaching all the way back to Yamamoto. The truths excluded from this reasoning are the experience of Trump lived by anyone who is not among his base, plus the who and the what he is. Trump has inflicted great misery on the victims of international reaction, principally abroad, but also upon the poor and working poor at home. He is credibly a rapist, demonstrably a racist enemy of Latin Americans  and a Muslim-banning Islamophobe, as evidenced today by his target list of Iranian cultural sites. 

What he is is a Bonapartist with fascistic ambitions and values. He hopes to inspire his followers to make him President-for-life and make his programmatic wishes operative. His followers seek to make the war danger his free pass from impeachment on “patriotic” emergency grounds. Others, like John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu, seek the total war itself, and have since the early ‘90s, at least. We have never seen the Democratic Party resist any war, so far as their majority voting record shows. Their first definition is as partners with the Republicans in maintenance of the superstructural parliamentary excrescence atop the dictatorship of Capital. Their objection to killing Soleimani boils down to timing.

President Obama regularly worked from “secret kill lists”  and conducted assassinations with no audible objection from any significant wing of the Democratic Party. Rather they heaped applause and adulation upon him for his ‘wise surgical methods’ of assassination despite the ‘occassional’ incidents of collateral damage where civilians die by the thousands as victims of the Great Game,  under the guise of counter-terrorism.

As comrades wrote  in Redrave in July, 2018:

“There is a lot of confusion about Trump’s behavior in Helsinki. Is he crazy, a traitor, or dupe of Putin? Nah. It’s not that hard. It’s still about the Great Game for Eurasia. Trump is picking a fight with China which is the main economic threat to US imperialism. China has said it will ignore the sanctions on Iran. Trump wants to test the loyalty of Putin to Xi in the hope of weakening the China/Russia bloc. He wants a new deal.”

Today these Democratic wanna-be campaigners trip all over each other mustering their moral and legal indignation when Trump applies the very same  methods Obama honed and which they just weeks ago funded. And like Clinton before him, Trump attempts to get impeachment off the public’s mind with a missile strike. A leading Republican Senator says China is a far greater threat to the U.S. than Iran, and Democrat criticism can’t be heard over the crickets. Perspective is important here; the policy of proxy war with Iran, now on-again, now off-again, was not supposed to lead to inter-imperialist war with the China/Russia bloc, with Iran’s allies. Trump has sought to break Russia from its bloc with China (and not incidentally, personally profit from the deal.)

We say you will not smash Trumpism with Democrats! We are told to judge a person not by their words but by their actions and this  applies equally to political parties. The anti-war rhetoric from the Democrats today is totally disingenuous; their hypocrisy is exposed from every angle. They are impeaching Trump because he threatened to abandon the western imperialist bloc’s strategic project, the post-Maidan Ukraine regime.

Trump, just weeks ago, was impeached by the House for abuse of power and  obstruction of congress. He was not  impeached for his many crimes against the workers, the poor, and the oppressed at home and abroad. He wasn’t  impeached for gutting of the EPA, OSHA, and social programs such as food stamps, nor for bullying and incitements to violence, nor for his embrace of rabid racists, nationalists and fascists at home and authoritarian thugs abroad. No, the Democratic Party could only find unity around impeachment when their leading candidate and imperialist planner Joe Biden (author of the Biden Plan to redraw the map of the Middle East) became a target of Trump’s mafia-style arm twisting of the Ukranian President, who the bipartisan congress had allocated  funding for the purchase of U.S. military hardware. Hardware to be used against the Donbass insurgency that has been ongoing since 2014, following the rightward trajectory of the Ukranian Maidan.

The Independent recognises, five years on, that although the Maidan’s initiators were Europhiles seeking entrance to the EU as liberal democrats, the far right gained leadership on the streets and…,

“…In the months that followed, as a shell-shocked nation came to terms with its revolution, these nationalist groups claimed a chunk of the political vacuum. To this day, they continue to occupy key positions in and around government, and without clear popular legitimacy. The interior ministry’s links with the far right continue to be one of Maidan’s most troubling legacies.”

The liberal humanitarians who form a large piece of the base of the Democrats are well known supporters of international human rights and provide shade and cover for imperialism trying to smooth its ‘excesses’ but not challenge its power. As regards Ukraine their hypocrisy is again brought into focus by far right attacks on Romany people as reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ,

“…That these far-right extremist groups have been awarded grants from the Ukrainian government is likely to be of great concern to Kyiv’s Western backers and leading international human rights organizations, four of which published an open letter to authorities on June 14 (2018) decrying what they called a sharp spike in political violence from these groups, who they say pose a great danger to Ukrainian democracy.”

From 2014, while the bi-partisan courtship of the ultra-right Ukraine regime was being led by the late war hawk, war criminal and imperialist darling Senator John McCain, Trump was just launching his presidential campaign and sorting out (or not) his business prospects and ongoing relations with Russian oligarchs, Russian mafiosi and Putin. Can we smell conflict of interests?  Consider a March Washington Post article:

“…for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. … the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.”

The Financial Times, loyal as it is to its own ruling class, is not shy about applying journalistic scrutiny to the Russian money sustaining the Trump empire.

“The Financial Times has been investigating the money behind Trump Toronto for 10 months. Legal documents, signed statements and two dozen interviews with people with knowledge of the project and the money that flowed through it reveal that the venture connects the US president with a shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.”

Clearly there is a split in the ruling class here, and the Supreme Court is obscuring it, burying the Deutsche Bank loans/money laundering case until spring, i.e., after the impeachment embarrassment. Republicans, in the main believe their party can repair the split in the future and are content to hold onto power now. But U.S. allies can see this rift and that Trump would risk wrecking  NATO if it benefits himself and his Moscow bankers, VEB and VTB, i.e., Putin.

Does the tail wag the Dog ? 

Russia has made noise declaring the illegality and immorality of the Soleimani offing. And the number of psychiatrists who say Trump is unhinged is mushrooming. But we see things differently, and so will you when you pull up to the gas pump.

Why Trump appears to be so irrational is his amateurish attempts to hide the decline of U.S. imperialism relative to its emerging rivals. This decline forces Trump to engage in risky military adventures and destruction of the ecosphere that will ultimately blowback at home not only for the ruling class but for his populist base when U.S. troops get killed in such adventures. So his need for such adventures shows his Bonapartism is well on the road to fascism.

Trump has been in regular communication with Foreign Minister Lavrov and with Putin. There is little likelihood that the Soleimani killing surprised them. Trump needs to change his image at home, and hopes you won’t notice that he drove the anti-government protesters from Iranian streets, proving his claim that he does not seek Iranian regime change. Killing Soleimani has mobilized the pro-government “patriots” to rally around commemorations of their martyr. Trump hopes you won’t be too sore about the gas price he just drove up and you will rally round the flag as Iran threatens retaliation, which can be immediate, long delayed or any time!. As he sends another brigade to Iraq, his message to you is, he is bringing U.S. troops home! He is wagging the dog to preserve the Khamenei theocracy against the revolutionary uprising of the Persian masses. Khamenei has had to kill over 1500 and jail tens of thousands recently, but Trump solved his problem and Capital’s with one missile. Solved, that is, for the moment.

Ruling class thinking about whether this move was sage or “unhinged” is mixed, however. They cannot be too happy when one result is a vote of the Iraqi Parliament demanding the expulsion of U.S. troops. And while Pompeo declares that Iraq is a safer place without Soleimani, NATO allies have suspended their military training missions and are withdrawing them now.

No foreign leaders are sleeping through and not seeing what this means: The U.S. rulers have NOT solved the world crisis of capitalism signalled by the crash of 2008, and the demand for U.S. expulsion from Iraq is just the latest index of how far the powers of U.S. imperialism have diminished. The big boss appetites for increasing their world market shares are thus whetted in every imperialist country. And meanwhile U.S. capitalism has to worry how unpopular a new Middle Eastern war could be and become! Allies, already wary of Trump’s attitude towards alliances, NATO in particular, are not rushing to support such a war. Watching and worrying also are the sections of the U.S.A. where the military is the biggest employer. These are also the most usually jingoistic, and are also the bulk of Trump’s base, something the latest polls of the troops show they are not a part of now, if they ever were. Our ruling class and all their class internationally know that Trump’s base of support can turn against him should too many neighbors die for his glory.

In a  NY Times Jan. 4th opinion piece, Jon Stevenson, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies explains how the Soleimani killing is a strategic blunder that shows how the U.S. foreign policy is broken, and that broken is the process of oversight and review provided by informed strategic planners. Serious foresight, he argues, would have considered the possibility that this would trigger a new round of terrorism and the potential for  Hezbollah, “the A Team to Al Qaeda’s B Team” to venture out of the Middle East. The ruling class is concerned because, “…Mr. Trump’s move looks like either an impetuous act of self-indulgence or, somewhat more probable, a calculated attempt to bury his domestic political troubles.”

Newsweek speaks for most liberal quarters expressing the fears of the mental health community,

“…Following the attack that killed Soleimani in Baghdad, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Bandy X. Lee, told Salon: “This is exactly the kind of dangerous event we foresaw as Donald Trump’s response to the impeachment proceedings, just as his pulling troops from northern Syria was a direct response to the announcement of an impeachment inquiry.”

 Spotlight Center Stage, Inter-imperialist Conflict

The U.S. ruling class, since the middle of the Obama presidency, has been turning the focus of the military ship of state away from counter-terrorism and toward the emerging imperialisms of Russia and China. The Pacific pivot and support of Ukraine’s absorption into the EU was their strategic orientation. Crushing the Syrian Revolution and the spread of the Arab national revolution could be left to the Russians assisting Assad and the Iranians whose forces did the yeoman’s piece in crushing ISIS. The U.S. ruling class now needs to re-exert U.S. imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. It is a necessity given the strategic importance of the region, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions and the growing strength and dominance of Russian/Chinese imperialism. But there is a “rational” imperialist policy and then there is the loose cannon that runs counter to strategic U.S. interests.

The Democrats feigned outrage over the killing of Soleimani (losing no sleep over Obama’s drone strikes) and really were upset that Trump kept them out of the loop and did not seek Congressional approval for assassinations. They have a “better” means of killing and maiming abroad. They see him losing a trade war with China and taking Russia’s side against Ukraine and attempting to get reluctant allies to take more defense spending out of the wages of their workers. To make a flip side of his cover-up “hoax” song, his obstruction of Congress, the Democrats now spin Trump in power should be made to appear as the masses’ major problem, and that before his “incompetent” (says Biden) amateur act they had a  deal with Iran.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the darling of Jacobin and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), did not oppose imperialist war on principle in his statement against the Iran war funding, but instead stood for war as a “last recourse.” Protecting his dovish credentials he safely voted against the massive $738 billion military budget, complained about lack of Congressional authorization and that a war could cost “countless lives and trillions more dollars”. Of course Sanders means American lives, not the lives of the working people of the Middle East.  He also has few qualms about the projected $1.5 trillion F-35, so much of which is built in Vermont. He also has supported military actions and funded the military in the past, including Clinton’s bombing of Kosovo. Bernie has sheep-dogged many youth into the Democratic Party in 2016 and continues to do so today and he took the Democratic National Committee leadership’s loyalty pledge. He is no socialist at all, only proposing to bandage capitalism’s bruises and is supporting imperialism wherever it is challenged.

He is the right’s last barricade against workers’ class-political independence. We call for a fighting workers’ labor party, based in the unions and the champion of all the oppressed! Bernie will fight our party to his last gasp, and should there come to be a class-independent party of the workers and the oppressed, he will try to lead those who want a reformist and pro-imperialist program and policy. In practical terms this means today, while he camouflages his real support for Middle East wars, we support the AFL-CIO’s campaign for a Protect the Right to Organize law (PRO ACT), but take the further logical step to call for Enlisted Service Members Unions and a “Let’s Go Home” movement among our sisters and brothers, the workers in uniform  overseas.

On principle, the CWG says Not one man or woman, not one penny for the imperialist U.S. military! No War with Iran! Down with the sanctions against Iran! No sanctions against Iraq!

For Permanent Revolution

The working class has the power to stop the imperialist wars. In an exemplary action we should repeat, on May 1, 2008, 10,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), one of the strongest and most militant unions in the United States, walked off the docks at all 29 West Coast ports, completely shutting down the U.S. Pacific trading network. When the ILWU conducted this laudatory action it showed how the working class can directly challenge the military might of imperialism. To make such actions indefinite, instead of one day and exemplary, and to spread such actions to every sector of the economy is the way the working class at home can stop the wars and unite in solidarity with the workers of the world.

We don’t expect the class enemy to take such strikes in stride, like a cost of doing business. With U.S. imperialism in decline there is nothing so precious to them as their profits! Bush showed this when he sought to victimize the ILWU, but much more general strikes will be much harder to repress, perhaps impossible without fascistic measures rejected by all except the rightmost and Ku Kluxers. Sympathy strikes and sit down strikes are called for, exactly the strikes called political and banned by the Taft-Hartley “slave labor law.” The PRO Act would re-legalize the “secondary boycott,” i.e. the sympathy strike. However we see the Trumka leadership going about this cynically and otherwise all wrong, expecting Democrats in Congress to push the measure into law. This was how we DID NOT WIN the Employee Free Choice Act!

It was Leon Trotsky who developed the theory of Permanent Revolution, that in the colonial/semi-colonial countries and those with combined and uneven development, the tasks of the bourgeois revolutions such as land reform, securing democratic rights and national independence could not be carried through by the native capitalist ruling class that was tightly tied to and dependent upon  world imperialism. Those tasks fall to the working class, which after achieving power, would not relinquish power but carry forward the socialist revolution.

It is the task of the Middle Eastern working class and peasantry to overthrow the reactionary bourgeois regimes of the region. This liberation is not the job of the imperialist U.S.A.,  who did the most to create the satrap regimes, and we see imperialist interventions pretending to liberate the oppressed as crimes against humanity. The fates of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have returned as “the Great Game” because of the terminal crisis of capitalism that drives all the imperialist powers to try to solve their crisis at the expense of their rivals and the working people of the world!

Defeat for the U.S. military, driving them from the Middle East, would provide a strong impetus to all the struggles of the masses against their own ruling classes, who are tied to world imperialism and exploit and oppress their own people. In every conflict between semi-colonies and imperialism, internationalist workers oppose the imperialists with the fight for permanent revolution in the semi-colonies and class war against the workers’ own ruling classes in the imperialist states.

The International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), of which the CWG-USA is part, fights for revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist working class parties, as part of a new revolutionary workers International, to provide leadership in the fight for socialist revolution and a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. The only way to break Iran, Iraq, Syria and all the semi-colonies from world imperialist exploitation is through workers revolution that establishes workers states and spreads the revolution internationally to the imperialist centers. 

Workers in the imperialist countries must overthrow their “own” warmongering ruling classes. Workers in uniform in the U.S. and  troops of other imperialist countries must unite with their class sisters and brothers across the trenches, organize military strikes and mutinies and appeal to workers at home to wage political general strikes against war. Troops should be organized to come home and arm and especially train workers’ armed pickets, Labor Black and Brown Defense Guards and Workers’ Militias to replace all the armed bodies of the capitalist class dictatorships.We are not Anarchists. The champions of the working class, and in the first place our International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency proclaim and promise that any body of armed men and women must be strictly overseen and accountable to the political organs of the masses. 

This means the factory and shop committees, the neighborhood committees, the wages and price committees, and the city and regional workers councils, the soviets that gather the representatives of all these direct democracy organs. These councils will take all political power away from the capitalist ruling class operatives and create a workers government that will end imperialist wars and begin building a just and humane socialist world. We will save the planet, save as many species as remain, feed the hungry better than the “virtuous” and “charitable” ever did in the age of the military beasts, and we will expand civilization to liberate all of today’s oppressed peoples, first by spreading the available work and in time eliminating most of human want, so that work’s enduring social incentive can become the engine of healthy personality development in a democratically planned world economy devoted to human needs.

Statement of Communist Workers Group (USA) January 8, 2020.  

Member of the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT).