ILPS Commission One calls for global actions against US bombing of Syria

www.ilps.info
04/09/2017


The Commission One of the International League of People’s Struggle condemns the Trump regime’s April 6 sneak attack on the Syrian Arab Republic. We call on all our chapters and member organizations in 43 countries to stand with the people of Syria against this deadly escalation of what has been a six-year proxy war by the US and its client states Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies,Turkey, Jordan and Israel against their country. We demand the immediate withdrawal of all US troops. planes, ships, weapons, contractors, mercenaries and spies from the soil, waters and air of Syria and from the all of West Asia and North Africa.

On the morning of Thursday, April 7, US missile warships launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian air base, killing at least nine people, including six children. Twenty-three of the missiles landed in nearby villages. This escalation comes on the heels of the Trump regime’s dispatch of more US troops to Syria. It raises the prospect of direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, which has been assisting the elected Syrian government against US-Saudi-funded terrorist armies. The so-called Islamic State (Daesh) followed up the US air attack with an offensive against Syrian troops in the area.

The Trump regime claims it attacked Syria in “retaliation” for the gassing death of 69 civilians, including children, in the terrorist-occupied town of Khan Sheikoun. The gassing, which the US claims was done by the Syrian Air Force, allegedly horrified President Trump. The US air attack was praised by the vilest criminals and murderers on the face of the earth. This includes US Senators and congressmen who have voted for countless war crimes around the world in return for payoffs from the oil industry and the military-industrial complex. It includes Israel’s bloody-handed Prime Minister Netanyahu, the imperialist leaders of Britain and France, and the reactionary monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

So-called US government outrage over the deaths of civilians due to chemical weapons is hypocritical. Let us remember that the US is supplying the Saudi government with white phosphorous and other horror weapons it is raining down on the children of Yemen. US ships are helping the Saudi kingdom, the US war industry’s top paying customer, blockade and starve the people of Yemen. The US supplies the weapons of mass destruction the racist Israeli state has used to slaughter the children, women and men of Gaza again and again. It arms the Israeli soldiers who shoot down Palestinians young and old on an almost daily basis. Let us remember that on March 25 a US air strike killed nearly 300 civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The US military and CIA has armed, trained and funded terrorist groups that have carried out horrendous atrocities in Syria, including rapes, beheadings and torture on a mass scale.
Humanitarian motives do not and have never had anything to do with the actions of the US imperialist war machines.

We must also view with deep skepticism the claim that the Syrian military carried out the chemical attack in Khan Sheikoun. That claim, without any independent investigation, has been endlessly parroted by the US corporate media. The US state apparatus has a long history of lies and fabricated or manufactured “incidents” to justify wars for corporate profit. We remember the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify US mass murder in Vietnam and the Bush regime’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Even during the most desperate hours of the war, when it was overwhelmed on many fronts and running low on munitions, the Syrian army refrained from using chemical weapons. Allegations that it did so, such as by the Obama administration in 2013, have been discredited. The Syrian military disposed of its chemical weapons, under UN supervision at that time. But there is considerable evidence, including a 2104 report by journalist Seymour Hersh, that US-backed terrorist groups in Syria have been supplied with sarin gas captured in Libya. Those groups include Al Nusra and ISIS.

Russia has said that the recent civilian deaths resulted from the explosion of a terrorist chemical weapon depot that was hit by an airstrike by the Syrian Army.

The US attack on Syria belies the myth that the Trump regime represents some mythical isolationist wing of “national capital” that is opposed to wars abroad. In fact, the Trump regime represents the direct rule of oil and military interests. The Trump campaign was funded from the start by fracking multibillionaires who grew immensely rich off the Iraq war. Oil interests were being hurt by the Obama regime’s strategy of using low oil prices to hurt Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Ecuador economically. These were the forces behind the Trump’s phony populist campaign They are the most war-hungry sector of capital.

The US has been at war in Southwest Asia and North Africa for over a quarter century. By bombing and sanctions, proxy war and direct invasion the US war machine has killed millions in Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. This war has been not only a bonanza but a necessity for the US corporate ruing class. The biggest beneficiaries are US oil corporations, the military-industrial complex and the banks that finance them. Syria is not a major oil producer, but it is the planned route of a pipeline to bring Iranian and Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean, giving Iran access to Western markets. The US doesn’t own that oil.

The US attacked Iraq in the wake of the collapse of global oil prices that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. The Bush regime’s destruction of Iraq’s national oil industry created an asset-price bubble that gave US oil monopolies like ExxonMobil their most profitable years ever.

Trump Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is former CEO of Exxon. The war against Iraq made the US fracking industry possible. It made the US the world’s No. 1 energy producer. The collapse of that bubble has put over a trillion dollars in investment at risk. The defense sequester voted on by Congress two years ago has put the profits of US arms corporations in general. Trump regime’s desperation for a broader confrontation with Syria, Iran and Russia must be seen in that context. War and oil stocks shot up after the US attack.

The danger of wider war its very real. The US ruling class remembers the world wars of the 20th century as the best thing that ever happened. The massive destruction of World War II put Wall Street banks at the center of the global capitalist economy. The ever-growing US military-state apparatus has been trying to maintain that position by force and violence ever since.

It is urgent that the people of the world unite to stop the US-NATO imperialist war machine and allies agents!

Stop the imperialist war against Syria! Stop the imperialist war against the people of the world.