EDITORIAL
Middle East:
The Threat of Wider War

Aug 5, 2024

The U.S. government has sent more warships and fighter jets into the Middle East. These military forces just added to what already was a massive U.S. military presence in the area.

The new deployment of U.S. forces came after the Israeli government conducted two assassinations—killing a Hezbollah leader who was in a civilian area of Beirut, Lebanon and killing a Hamas leader while he was in Iran.

Joe Biden said that the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader in a sovereign country “wasn’t helpful” toward bringing about peace in the region. What peace? U.S. actions in the Middle East have only increased the threat of a bigger war. Israel would only conduct such a bold attack in Iran because they knew the U.S. would be ready to step in to defend Israel from a retaliatory attack by Iran. It is not clear what Iran will do, or how the U.S. and Israel will respond. The U.S. government may not want a wider war. But it seems ready to risk an escalation of the current war.

With the war in Gaza, the Middle East is already a tinderbox that could explode into an even bigger war at any time. The U.S. supplies the bombs and missiles that allow the Zionist regime to conduct genocide against the people of Gaza. Last October, Hamas forces came across the border and killed over 1,000 Israelis. Since then, Israeli forces have killed a reported 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children who have nothing to do with Hamas. More lay buried under the rubble in Gaza. The Israeli government continues to kill Palestinians on the West Bank, either with its own military forces or by giving right-wing Israeli vigilantes a free hand to murder.

Occasionally, the U.S. administration has been publicly critical of the Israeli government, trying to take some distance from its most murderous actions. The interests of the U.S. government don’t always align with the Netanyahu government, which is trying to hold on to power in Israel. Sometimes the Zionist state takes actions the U.S. government would prefer that it didn’t. But as U.S. imperialism’s closest ally and surrogate, it is granted wide latitude to operate in its own immediate interests.

The Israeli regime exists as the strongest military state in the Middle East due to the money and weapons supplied by the U.S. government. It receives more military aid from the U.S. than any country in the world. If the U.S. cut off that supply of money and weapons to Israel, it could end the current massacre of Gazans immediately. But to allow Israel to weaken or perish would mean losing its policeman in the Middle East, one which protects the interests of U.S. corporations and banks, and their access to the oil and trade routes of the region.

The U.S. presence in the Middle East has been a disaster for the people of that region, leading to extreme impoverishment, to anger and the possibility of a popular uprising. U.S. imperialism not only uses Israel as its cop, but also props up Middle East dictators against their own populations and sometimes sets one regime against another in a war, all in the interest of controlling the Middle East for the profit of U.S. capitalists.

U.S. imperialism enforces its economic domination in the world by any means, including military force. The U.S. uses the threat of using its own forces, and has, again and again, used its own forces around the world—Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. The U.S. government may not be seeking a bigger war right now in the Middle East. But its actions backing the Israeli regime increase the threat of a wider war. If that war does spread, it is likely that the war will not be limited only to the Middle East. No people in any country will be safe. The working class here and in every country will be the people to pay for the war and die in the war.

The working class here and in every country has no interest in any war. The international working class has the power to take on the capitalist class, which is powering this insane move toward war.