[D66] Why the United States is waging war against Syria

[Nord]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/28/pers-a28.html

Why the United States is waging war against Syria
28 August 2013

In the wake of the alleged chemical weapons attack last week, the US and 
it European allies are moving rapidly to launch a war against Syria. 
Missile strikes to bombard the country into submission could begin 
within days. The propaganda campaign coming from the media, aimed at 
packaging another unpopular war for the public, has shifted into high gear.

The official reasons given for the imminent attack are a pack of 
unsubstantiated lies, a collection of pretexts aimed at justifying a 
policy that was planned long in advance.

The real reasons for this latest war can be understood only within the 
context of the geopolitical, economic and social crisis of American and 
European capitalism, and the world imperialist system as a whole.

First: From a geopolitical standpoint, the long-planned war against 
Syria is yet another step in Washington’s campaign, since the 
dissolution of the USSR in 1991, to secure its global dominance through 
military force. Confronted with the protracted decay in its 
once-dominant position in the world economy, the United States sees in 
its military power the means of establishing a hegemonic position. As 
early as 1992, the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance stated that US 
policy aimed to prevent the emergence of any power that could become a 
peer competitor of the United States. In 2002, the US National Security 
Strategy stated that the United States would use pre-emptive war to 
achieve this.

A central feature of the global explosion of US militarism is 
Washington’s drive to secure a dominant position not only in the Middle 
East, but on the entire Eurasian land mass. In recent years, the 
writings of the late 19th and early 20th century imperialist strategist 
Sir Halford Mackinder have once again become essential texts for the 
policymakers in the State Department, Pentagon and CIA. There are 
numerous books and countless articles published in academic journals in 
which what Mackinder called the “world-island”—stretching from the 
eastern borders of Germany to the western border of China—is deemed to 
be of decisive strategic importance to the United States and its West 
European allies.

As one recent study asserts, “The Eurasian landmass ought to be the 
focal point of the West’s strategic exertions… If the nascent process of 
Western decline is to be arrested and reversed, a better understanding 
of the geopolitical relevance of Eurasia, and the struggle therein, and 
a concerted effort there, is crucial.” [ The World Island: Eurasian 
Geopolitics and the Fate of the West, by Alexandros Petersen] As with 
all imperialist strategies for world domination, this entails a struggle 
against powers that are seen as obstacles to its realization. The drive 
to dominate Eurasia leads inevitably to escalating conflict with Russia 
and China.

The series of aggressive wars conducted by the United States since the 
1990s—in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia—is part of an 
agenda that envisions the unchallengeable global dominance of the United 
States. The fact that world domination cannot be achieved without wars 
that will cost hundreds of millions of lives, and, very possibly, the 
destruction of the planet will not deter Washington from plunging ahead.

This strategy of imperialist conquest may be insane, but so was that of 
Adolf Hitler—whose geopolitical objectives appear almost provincial in 
scope when compared to the ambitions of US imperialism. As Trotsky, 
foreseeing the evolution of American imperialism, wrote nearly 80 years 
ago: “For Germany, it was a question of ‘organizing Europe.’ The United 
States must ‘organize’ the world.”

As for the European powers, for now they see their own imperialist 
ambitions as best served by tying their fortunes to the Pentagon. They 
hope they can share in the plunder of US wars and, in the process, 
legitimize their own looting operations, such as France’s wars in Africa.

Second: Economically, world capitalism is in the fifth year of its 
deepest crisis since the Great Depression, producing economic 
stagnation, mass unemployment, and a relentless collapse of living 
standards. The ever more desperate economic situation—with deepening 
debts, debased currencies, and intensifying international 
competition—drives ever more reckless and violent foreign policies.

The Great Depression of the 1930s led to World War II, as the 
imperialist powers sought to find in war a solution to the maladies of 
capitalism. The Great Recession that began in 2008, which shows no signs 
of abating, is leading to World War III. The forms of economic 
parasitism associated with the processes of global financialization—in 
which the enrichment of a small stratum of society is achieved through 
swindling on a massive scale—finds its natural complement in a foreign 
policy that realizes its objectives through criminal violence.

Significantly, the United States is sweeping aside the United Nations 
and proceeding to war without the approval of the UN Security Council, 
where Russia and China have veto power, much as the League of Nations 
collapsed after fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.

Third: All the imperialist countries confront an ever-worsening social 
crisis produced by rising social inequality and class tensions. In the 
United States—where the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owns 
nearly three quarters of the wealth, and the top 1 percent monopolizes 
half of that—cities are being forced into bankruptcy amid a relentless 
assault on wages and living standards.

In Europe, the European Union is disintegrating amid rising tensions 
between the European powers and an assault on jobs and living standards 
symbolized by the social devastation of Greece. The more bitter and 
intractable the conflicts between the major European powers, the more 
they turn to external aggression as the only policy upon which they can 
all agree.

The imperialist powers increasingly see war as a means to distract 
attention from the exposure of their criminal operations directed 
against the people. The timing of the current war is clearly related to 
the political crisis provoked by Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass, 
illegal spying by intelligence agencies against the populations of the 
United States and the major European powers. Imperialist militarism is 
seen by the ruling elite as an essential means of directing social 
tensions outward, along the useless and destructive channels of war.

But the twentieth century teaches that the ruling classes which hoped to 
extricate themselves from the bankruptcy of capitalism by winning big at 
the roulette table of militarism eventually discovered that the odds of 
history were against them and they had made some very bad bets.

The Syrian war, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will produce 
death and suffering on a massive scale, intensify the world economic and 
political crisis, and bring mankind as a whole closer to catastrophe.

The launching of war against yet another small country testifies not 
only to the brutality, but also the bankruptcy of American and European 
capitalism and the entire world system based on exploitation and 
plunder. The only way out of the bloody dead end of capitalism and 
imperialism is through the united struggle of the international working 
class for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.

David North and Alex Lantier