Worker-Soldier Unity Needed to Fight for Communist Revolution
Los Angeles (USA)
January 8—Since the US assassinated Iranian General Qassim Soleimani and Iraqi Commander Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, the world is much more dangerous. The possibilities for revolutionary change are also much more real.
As Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei and US President Trump trade threats, millions in Iran and thousands in the US and elsewhere are in the streets. Will they be won to fight for their rulers, or for a communist world that can end racism, exploitation, and wars for profit? The answer depends on us: readers of Red Flag and millions more workers everywhere.
On December 27, Iraqi Popular Mobilization Unit rockets attacked a US base in northern Iraq (see box). The US retaliated, leading to an attack on the US embassy in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad on December 31. Trump surprised his own advisors by escalating the conflict sharply. He ordered the drone assassination, at the Baghdad airport, of the Iran’s top military commander and the head of the PMU militias.
Trump’s dangerous incompetence reflects the decline of the US as the dominant world power and is a cause of further decline. But the deepening crisis of world capitalism has increased competition worldwide and is the cause of more and more dangerous conflicts on every continent.
US Isolation Accelerates the March to World War
Many anti-imperialists think the US is still the world’s pre-eminent imperialist power. Their justifiable hatred of US imperialism can blind them to new realities. US power has been in decline for over a decade. Clearly, China is an ascending economic and military imperialist power and Russia is the key imperialist actor in the Middle East.
Iran, Russia and China completed another joint naval training exercise in the Gulf of Oman on December 31. This illustrates the new reality. It shows that the US cannot isolate Iran and that Russia and China are ascendant in the region. So, too, does Iran’s January 5 announcement that it will renew its development of nuclear capacity.
US isolation is also demonstrated dramatically by the open criticism of the Soleimani assassination by key US allies Britain, France and Germany and the UN Secretary General.
Richard Haass, head of the US ruling-class think-tank Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted, “One sure result of the U.S. strike is that …US diplomatic and military presence will end in Iraq… The result will be greater Iranian influence, terrorism and Iraqi infighting.”
It’s not hard to see that a global confrontation between the declining US and its ascending rivals Russia and China is dangerously near. “This could be World War III,” said a friend at the Los Angeles protest against the US assassination of Soleimani.
Meanwhile the class struggle has intensified both in Iran and in Iraq
US-imposed sanctions have sharpened contradictions between Iranian workers and their rulers. Mass protests swept the country in November, sparked by a 50% increase in government-controlled gas prices. Angry masses torched hundreds of banks, gas stations and businesses. They attacked fifty military bases.
Protests were sharpest in working-class communities and in the Arab-majority region where Iran’s largest industrial petrochemical complex is located. In an unsuccessful attempt to stop the protests, the government shut down the internet. When that failed, government security forces attacked the protestors, killing hundreds. The US attack has apparently united most Iranians in patriotic protest, but the contradictions between the masses and the rulers remain.
In Iraq, demonstrations that started in 2019 continue. Youth and workers, both Sunni and Shi’a, protested unemployment and inadequate public services. They have created a spontaneous movement that has spread across central and southern Iraq.
In Baghdad, these protests have centered in Tahrir Square. They have developed into a critique of government corruption and the governmental structure imposed by US occupation forces in 2003. In this system, political representation is based on religious, ethnic or sectarian identities. The protestors, like the 20th century Iraqi Communist Party, call for national unity against domination by the US and Iran rather than international working class unity. This anti-government movement has also faced internet blackouts and fierce repression. Government and paramilitary groups have killed more than 500 since October.
Will workers and soldiers fight for the bosses, or for our class?
Some young friends and relatives are posting memes of themselves going off to fight in World War III. So many people worry that US youth will be conscripted that the US Selective Service website crashed.
The ruling class does not fight its own wars. And outside of Trump’s fascist base, working-class US youth are not enthusiastic about another Middle East war. They see the devastation of war every day in the thousands of homeless veterans on the streets and the tens of thousands in prison.
It remains to be seen if the Iranian bosses and their Shi’a allies in Iraq will be able to use patriotism and religion to win the masses to war.
But Trump has already ordered 3500 more US troops to Kuwait. And Iran has responded with missile attacks on Iraqi bases housing US troops—with no fatalities. War will surely come. And just as surely, many working-class soldiers, sailors and marines on both sides can be won to side with their class siblings instead of their own bosses.
During the Vietnam-US war, many US soldiers refused to follow orders. Some killed their own officers. Their rebellions finally made it impossible for the US bosses to continue their genocidal war against the Vietnamese masses.
During World War I, soldiers in the Russian Army, organized by the communists, joined together with workers and peasants to overthrow the Czar and build the world’s first socialist state.
If you see the need for communist revolution, join ICWP. Help us organize in the capitalist and imperialist armies and among industrial workers. We must win these two key sectors to give communist leadership to the angry and militant masses in Iran, Iraq, India, the US, and everywhere around the world. Let’s fight for a communist world without borders, capitalists, money, exploitation and imperialist wars. There is no time to waste.
US Imperialism’s Murderous History in Iran and Iraq
1953—US CIA coup in Iran overthrew moderate nationalist President Mosaddegh and put in Mohammed Reza Shah—a puppet for US oil companies
1963—US CIA supported Baathist coup in Iraq that murdered thousands of communists: Kurds and Arabs, Christians and Jews, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims
1979—Shi’a movement in Iran overthrew Mohammed Reza Shah, held US Embassy employees hostage for a year; installed theocratic government of Ayatollah Khomeini that killed and exiled Iranian leftists
1980—US supported Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in Iran-Iraq war while secretly selling arms to Iran.
1990-91—US President Bush, Sr. invaded Iraq; tens of thousands of Iraqis died
1996-2000— US President Clinton imposed sanctions on Iraq; half a million children, among many others, died from lack of medical care
2003-2011—US war and occupation of Iraq and Iraqi counterinsurgency. Half a million Iraqis and 5,000 US troops dead; entire cities leveled; prisoners tortured; depleted uranium caused epidemic of cancer and deformities.
2011-2014— Instability in Iraq encouraged growth of jihadi fascist ISIS (Sunni militants also known as the Islamic State and DAESH).
2014-2017— US joined with Iraqi government and semi-independent, Iran-backed, Shi’a militias to defeat ISIS in Iraq
2017-present— US military maintains huge base in Iraq, but limited role in combating ISIS remnants; under increasing attack by Shi’a militia groups loosely organized as Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units and formally a part of the Iraqi Armed Forces
One of dozens of underground anti-war newspapers put out by US soldiers during the Vietnam War
Read our pamphlet:
SOLDIERS, SAILORS, MARINES, CRUCIAL TO A COMMUNIST WORKERS’REVOLUTION
http://icwpredflag.org/MIL/mpe.pdf
Front page of this issue
