the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 29, 2014
On the night of September 22nd, the U.S. Air Force bombed the positions of the “Islamic State” (IS) in Syria for the first time, Up until this, all U.S. air strikes since they were first initiated on August 8th, had only targeted IS in Iraq.
The U.S. got the approval of imperialist countries and quite a few Arab states: Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. U.S. imperialism has thus dragged its “allies” into another intervention in this part of the world, following those in 1991 and 2003, which created the current chaos.
The advance of the militias of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIS), now “Islamic State” (IS), has been going on for months. The consequences have been devastating for the people in these conquered territories. 130,000 Syrians under attack, mostly Kurds, have fled the town of Kobane (Ayn al-Arab in Arabic) in Kurdistan, to that of Suruç, on the Turkish border, where they have been confronted by the Turkish army. In Iraq, the offensive of IS in the North West region has made hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people flee and find refuge only in precarious camps where water, food and drugs are lacking.
Chaos is threatening to spread to other countries in the area. IS imposes a medieval dictatorship on its population, beheading people, cutting off hands, enslaving women. It’s understandable that the people who are undergoing such barbarism see U.S. intervention as a relief, should it be temporary. But nothing good is to be expected from it.
Imperialist leaders are not concerned with the fate of civilian populations, but with the business of capitalist corporations that may be threatened by instability. One should remember that all imperialist interventions have worsened the situation, from the dividing up and sharing of the Middle East between France and Britain in 1916 up to now. Each time, imperialism tried to divide and rule, consciously relying on the most reactionary forces to preserve its political and economic domination. Nothing will come out of this latest intervention but new divisions, new contradictions opposing maybe even more barbarous forces. Afghanistan, which U.S. imperialism was supposed to save from fundamentalists, is today a testimony to this.
Imperialism, which presents itself as the savior of people who are the victims of barbarism, is the most responsible for it. Down with imperialism!