Oppose new imperialist war in the Middle East!

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has committed an initial force of 400 air force personnel and 200 elite special forces troops to the service of US imperialism’s latest war of aggression in the Middle East.

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Oppose new imperialist war in the Middle East!

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Statement issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)

This comes days after President Obama’s September 10 address to the nation and continues the successive Australian governments’ naked function as puppets of US imperialism.

Ostensibly, US imperialism is on a humanitarian crusade to destroy the reactionary terrorist outfit variously known as ISIS, ISIL and IS (Islamic State).

IS atrocities have been given much publicity in recent months. Gut-churning images of beheadings, and mass slaughters of civilians and captured soldiers alike, have appalled people throughout the world.

IS is a disease nurtured by the US
But this is the same group that the Western media has described as “rebels” during the nearly four-year campaign to unseat President Assad of Syria.

When Assad spoke of fighting terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, the Al-Nusrah Front and IS he was either ignored or had his use of the word terrorist placed in quotation marks to show that he was lying.

For as long as it suited US imperialism, these terrorist organisations were cloaked in the respectability of being “freedom fighters”.

We likewise use quotation marks because they were not freedom fighters at all.

They were reactionary and sectarian religious fascists who sought to destroy Assad’s secular regime.
That was all that mattered to the US imperialists when CIA and Special Forces command began training them at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012. This has been confirmed by Jordanian officials.

Nor did it matter to the Sunni fiefdoms of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, close US allies all, when they provided the initial financial backing to IS.

The driving force behind the US imperialist wars of aggression in the region is the US and European economic imperialist domination and control of oil and economies of Middle Eastern countries.

The US and European imperialist wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and the murderous oppression of Palestinians spawned the strong anti-imperialist sentiment in the Middle East and around the world. The US backed vile ISIS is now seizing on this sentiment to recruit the marginalised and alienated to its own version of imperialist fascism.

US hesitation emboldens IS
When the anti-Assad forces proved to be incapable of toppling him, and following Syrian government victories in which lost territory was recaptured, US imperialism proposed direct aerial bombing campaigns inside Syria against the government.

Both Obama and British leader David Cameron were rebuffed by their own legislatures.

This emboldened IS to come out from under the wings of the US and to more vigorously pursue its own dream of a Syrian-Iraqi caliphate.

They quickly pushed into and took control of north-western Iraq, capturing, in the process, some of the country’s largest oilfields.

This gave them an additional source of income through illegal sales of oil to Turkey coming from the refineries of Deir al-Zor (800 million dollars annual trade!). This large volume of trade cannot occur without the approval of Turkey’s Erdogan government which has maintained close ties to IS through its captured region in Syria. Turkey’s reactionary government had sent hundreds of truckloads of supplies to IS-controlled territory in Syria. Breaking their close ties has been a special task of US Secretary of State John Kerry in the days following Obama’s speech.

Australia complicit in US crimes
No doubt many people will applaud action against IS. The sooner it is stopped the better. However, it would be a mistake to pin our hopes for this on US imperialism and its coalition forces.

Imperialism is by its very nature opposed to the interests of humanity. Capitalist media will never highlight the atrocities of US drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia where innocent civilians are torn apart by US bombs. Gut-wrenching images of a father holding his young daughter’s mangled body, desperately trying to stop her intestines from spilling from her wounds, would have the same effect as videos of IS beheadings. How does such an agonising death over several hours compare to a beheading? They are both grisly, vile acts carried out by terrorists.

Even before he had committed Australian forces to Obama’s war, Australia had been complicit in US crimes through the role of Pine Gap in defining targets for US drones.

The anti-Moslem terror campaign is ramped up to justify the new imperialist wars and escalate more widely attacks on democratic rights.

Internationalism, not imperialist war!
US imperialism is adept at interfering in other countries, promoting their destabilisation, and relying on reactionary criminal organisations to create a crisis requiring “humanitarian” intervention.

It is inevitable that this latest US military adventure will lead to an illegal invasion of Syria and provocations and attacks on Syrian government troops and allied forces such as units of the Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Kurdistan Workers Party who are all fighting against the IS terrorists. This will only further inflame the situation and add to the devastation and misery in Syria.

From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya and Syria, US imperialism has created one cesspool of violence and horror after another. In each of these cesspools of dismembered nations, groups like Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusrah and IS have outgrown their masters and turned on the hand that fed them.

Mao Zedong once said: “Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again . . . till their doom; that is the logic of the imperialists and all reactionaries the world over in dealing with the people’s cause, and they will never go against this logic… When we say “imperialism is ferocious”, we mean that its nature will never change, that the imperialists will never lay down their butcher knives, that they will never become Buddhas, till their doom.”

The key to the resolution of contradictions between the reactionary spawn of US imperialism and the peoples of the Middle East is the emergence of the working classes as the organised, conscious leaders of a fight for the independence of their nations and the liberation of their peoples.

This does not mean leaving victims of IS – or of US imperialism – to their fate.

The basis of assistance to those carrying out a just struggle is proletarian internationalism. That means, in the first place, building the secular, democratic and anti-imperialist revolutionary movement in one’s own country. It also means finding ways of providing support to the front lines of resistance.

Only the people can provide assistance to each other without interfering, bullying, subverting, terrorising and in other ways seeking to control – all of which characterise imperialist intervention.

In Australia, our contribution to the international people’s struggles against imperialist wars is to build an anti-imperialist independence movement that closes down US bases, sends US troops back home, withdraws Australia’s support for imperialist wars of aggression and pulls out of the US led imperialist military alliance.

September 21 2014

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