No NZ troops in Iraq and Syria!

Member of New Zealand Special Air Services deployed in Afghanistan

The US and its lackeys including New Zealand are going to war again in the Middle East to replace the regimes that no longer serve US imperialist interests in suppressing the Arab Revolution. Bashar al-Assad was tolerated by the US and Israel despite being allied to Iran and Russia, because his dictatorship was a bastion against a popular revolution in Syria joining forces with the Palestine revolution and threatening its ally, Israel. The US refused to arm the Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles hoping that al-Assad and the rebels would fight to a standstill and a new moderate pro-US regime would emerge.

This strategy failed as the Syrian revolution continued to fight on for 3 years despite lacking heavy weapons. To break the stalemate al-Assad released Jihadists from his jails to build ISIS as an ally against the revolution. But this led to the rise of a new threat to US control of the Middle East – a new Islamic bourgeoisie that was hostile to the US.

ISIS broke from al Qaeda in Syria and moved into Iraq where it threatened to overthrow the US puppet Nouri al-Maliki and take over the US protectorate created as a bulwark against Iran. The US stepped in to prop the regime up, bombed ISIS in the north and armed the Kurds, while it worked to replace al-Maliki with a regime more efficient in managing Sunni, Shia and Kurds to oversee the production of oil.

The rise of ISIS (now Islamic State) is therefore not in the interests of the US plans to continue control of the Middle East. Its response was to create a huge panic about ISIS terrorists returning to their ‘homelands’ to justify bombing it and militarising police ‘terror’ against workers at home.

But ISIS is much less a threat to US domination of the region, not to mention the homelands, than it is to the popular resistance in Syria and Iraq. ISIS is the product of imperialist invasion, wars and occupation of the Middle East since WW1. It is a reactionary social movement that has grown up around warlords like Osama bin Laden only because imperialism, in cahoots with the Arab leaders and Stalinist parties, destroyed the Arab national revolution. ISIS wants to become an Islamic State bourgeoisie and negotiate deals with imperialism for a share of the oil and the exploitation of the workers.

Nevertheless in this war the two sides are not equal. We are for the defeat of the imperialist US and all its servile client states like Australia and NZ who are part of the ‘war on terror’. NZ Prime Minister Key has signed up to the US coalition supporting the US war on ISIS. He is considering the deployment of SAS troops to Iraq playing a similar role to the one it played in Afghanistan.

We call on NZ workers to oppose the deployment of SAS troops to the Middle East and support those popular forces that are fighting for the defeat of the US and its allies in the war in Syria and Iraq!

However, because ISIS is fighting the popular revolution and the Kurdish state to create its Islamic State, we do not call for a military alliance with ISIS against imperialism. Only the workers revolution can defeat imperialism and the reactionary bourgeois Islamic State. We are for the armed, independent, non-sectarian fighters in Syria and Iraq defeating ISIS and taking the lead in the struggle against imperialism and its national dictators, thereby opening the road to the socialist revolution in MENA!