[D66] Obama’s war in Iraq and Syria

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/09/10/pers-s10.html

Obama’s war in Iraq and Syria
10 September 2014

President Barack Obama will use his nationally televised speech tonight
to officially announce what has already begun: a new US war in Iraq that
will soon be extended to Syria.

The man who ran for president in 2008 as an opponent of Bush’s war in
Iraq is, like his predecessor, seeking to justify American military
violence in that tortured land and its extension into Syria with deceit
and lies.

Just a month ago, announcing the initiation of US air strikes, Obama
presented them as a short-term, narrowly focused measure restricted to
providing “humanitarian relief” for Yazidi refugees threatened by
Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) militia and protecting US
personnel in the Kurdish capital of Erbil.

Those pretexts failed to generate public support for renewed war in the
Middle East and were quickly dropped. Then came the beheading of two
American journalists by ISIS. The media ran lurid accounts of Western
recruits to ISIS and an increased threat of terrorist attacks within the US.

The beheadings provided a new, made-to-order pretext, reviving “war on
terror” fear-mongering, for US military intervention in the Middle East.
It was handed to American imperialism by a Sunni jihadist group that
owes it existence to Washington.

ISIS is a creation of the United States. It arose out of the destruction
of Iraqi society by the US military between 2003 and 2011 and the
colonialist policy pursued by Washington of whipping up sectarian
warfare between Sunnis and Shiites.

In Syria, the organization was directly and indirectly armed and trained
by the CIA as the spearhead of the US drive to overthrow the pro-Russian
and pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad and replace it with a US
puppet government. Much of its leadership has ties to American
intelligence. (See: “American imperialism and the rise of Islamic
extremism in Syria and Iraq.”)

The war on ISIS is camouflage for an unstated agenda. The United States
is using military force to attempt once again to restructure Iraq in
line with the aims of its 1991 war and its 2003 invasion—complete
domination of the country’s vast oil resources.

Even more centrally, the new war is aimed at overthrowing Assad in
Syria. It is an attempt to reverse the setback Washington suffered a
year ago when it had to scuttle its plans to intervene in Syria on the
basis of fabricated claims of chemical weapons attacks by Assad. The
Obama administration was not able to generate any significant public
support for such an attack and found itself internally divided.

Now, the same agenda is disguised as a war against ISIS, with which the
US has been allied in the drive for regime-change in Syria.
Administration officials are making clear in advance of Obama’s speech
that he has adopted a policy of carrying out air strikes in Syria as
well as Iraq. It is reported that Obama will urge Congress to authorize
stepped up US military aid to so-called “rebels” in Syria.

The agenda of the new war is the basic agenda that lay behind
Washington’s first war against Iraq 23 years ago—total US control of the
energy resources of the Middle East.

It will continue to be pursued if Washington succeeds in toppling and
likely murdering Assad (as it murdered Saddam Hussein in Iraq and
Muammar Gaddafi in Libya). Washington will in short order openly resume
its war drive against Iran.

The pursuit of US hegemony in the Middle East is also bound up with
Washington’s war-mongering against Russia. Last year, Russia obstructed
the Obama administration’s plans to attack Syria, Moscow’s only ally in
the Arab world and the site of a major Russian naval base. The desire to
remove an obstacle to US domination of the Middle East was a significant
factor in the confrontation the US created with Moscow by conspiring to
overthrow a pro-Russian government in Ukraine and replace it with a
far-right, rabidly anti-Russian puppet regime.

This new war, like the ones that went before it, is being carried out
over the heads of the American people, without any explanation or public
discussion. The decisions are made by a cabal of military and
intelligence operatives in consultation with Washington think tanks and
Wall Street.

On Tuesday, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), published a commentary outlining the aims
of Obama’s Wednesday night speech. The CSIS is a key part of the nexus
of government and military officials and national security think tanks
that actually shapes the life-and-death decisions, including going to
war, that impact the American and world population.

On his web site, which is produced for the political elite, Cordesman
spelled out frankly what is being prepared. Noting that, “there are many
good reasons the president needs to be cautious about what he says and
not speak too openly about the details,” he made clear that Obama’s
promises of “no combat troops on the ground” were virtually meaningless,
and that what was being launched was a massive military escalation in
the Middle East.

“There is a critical difference between no ground troops and no major
ground combat units,” he wrote. “The United States already has some
1,100 military personnel in Iraq and counting. It will need more in the
future—plus civil intelligence personnel—for training, equipment
transfers, targeting and intelligence analysis, and various enabling
functions. Ideally, it will also need Special Forces or their equivalent
to work with Sunni areas that return to supporting the government or
become hostile to the Islamic State, work with the Kurds, and embed in
Iraq forces to help provide tactical guidance and air strike planning…

“Limited US airpower may be able to contain the Islamic State, but it
will take a far larger campaign to defeat it in Iraq and a campaign that
strikes targets in Syria to have any chance of reducing the Islamic
State back to a small extremist faction with only limited support. In
practice, air power must be extended well beyond targeting forward IS
combat elements and strike at the entire leadership, military forces,
key cadres, and key strategic political and economic centers of IS
operations.”

Under the heading “The Assad Problem: The Enemy of Our Enemy is Worse
than Our Enemy,” Cordesman made clear that military action in Syria
ostensibly targeting ISIS would be used to carry through the US policy
of regime-change against Assad.

None of the conspirators are held accountable for their endless wars
based on lies. On Tuesday, former Vice President Dick Cheney, a prime
architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, met with Republican members of
the House of Representatives to push for full-scale war in both Iraq and
Syria.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose résumé includes the
murder of millions in Vietnam and the fascist coup that brought Pinochet
to power in Chile, gave an interview to the Times of London in which he
urged Obama to “launch an all-out attack” on ISIS, saying that air
strikes should “not make any distinction between Syria and Iraq.”

The entire political establishment and corporate-controlled media are
lined up behind the new war. Congress functions as a rubber stamp of the
Pentagon and CIA.

These events underscore the fact that we live today in an age of
permanent war. This is what Bush meant, speaking for the American ruling
class, when he talked in 2001 of the “wars of the 21st Century.” One war
follows another, each one more violent and ominous than the last.

The only thing that can stop perpetual war, leading inevitably to a
nuclear World War III, is the independent movement of the working class
in the United States and internationally against the source of
imperialist war, the capitalist system.

Barry Grey