EDITORIAL
U.S. Wars Spread through Middle East

Mar 30, 2015

The U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan continue. Any official reassurances and promises by U.S. officials about these wars ending are outright lies.

In Iraq, U.S. warplanes have been bombing the city of Tikrit. Despite U.S. official claims that there are no U.S. combat troops on the ground, you can bet there are plenty of U.S. “advisors,” along with mercenaries and CIA agents, even as they try to use Iranian troops, militias and selected Iraqi army units to do their dirty work. This battle for Tikrit is only the opening act in a new of phase of an ongoing war for control of the country. Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq and a center of the oil industry, could very well be the next much, much bigger target.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is also raging. That’s what Obama admitted when he announced that he was keeping 10,000 U.S. troops there for the entire year. Officials say those troops are necessary for combat during the “spring fighting season.” No, the fighting is not only for the spring. And don’t buy the line that there are “only” 10,000 U.S. troops–not when you count the CIA, State Department officials and U.S. contractors.

When the U.S. military invaded and toppled the regimes of those two countries more than a decade ago, it lit the match to a region that was already a powder keg. Historically the peoples had been divided up and used against each other by the different imperialist powers. Today, it’s U.S. imperialism that seeks to tighten its grip over the whole region.

The U.S. installed dictatorships in both countries, that were so hated and corrupt, only sowed disorder. To prop up their puppets, the U.S. tried to drown insurgencies and resistance in blood and fire. When that didn’t work, the U.S. government tried dividing peoples against each other, setting those countries ablaze in civil wars. The U.S. supported and armed militias and warlords, who justified their dictatorship over peoples by religious fundamentalism and superstition that came straight out of the Dark Ages. The CIA and Special Forces tried to buy influence by doling out enormous shrink-wrapped bricks of cash like candy.

Those militias, such as ISIS, that today oppose the U.S. in Iraq, had originally been tied to the U.S. Many of these fighters came out of the same Sunni forces that the U.S. had previously armed and used in order to try to consolidate the hold of the U.S. puppet government. After they were no longer useful to the U.S., the Iraqi government tried to imprison and execute them. When they turned against that government, as well as the U.S., they used the same brutal, oppressive methods as before, when they served their former U.S. sponsors.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have now spread. From Afghanistan, the war spread to Pakistan and it exacerbated the ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India, enormous countries with nuclear weapons. From Iraq, the war spread to Syria and down to Yemen.

These wars threaten to engulf large parts of the globe, creating increasingly barbaric conditions.

These wars are not accidents or mistakes. They come out of the drive of U.S. imperialism to impose its domination over the Middle East. They are the inevitable consequence of the move by giant U.S. oil companies to suck the region dry of its vast wealth. The U.S. state apparatus–governments, state department bureaucracy, armed forces–are little more than the servants of the oil companies and the banks that stand behind them.