From A World To Win News Service

Stop the U.S.-Led Massive Terrorist Attacks in Iraq and Syria!

April 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On March 17, 2017, A World to Win News Service (AWTWNS) announced its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism. Read its “Editorial: Introducing a transformed AWTWNS” here.

 

March 27, 2017. A World to Win News Service. [Revolution editors’ note: This article has been shortened for length. For full version go here.] The U.S. and its coalition have been carrying out stepped-up terror attacks in Iraq and Syria, killing almost 1,000 civilians since the beginning of March, according to the United Kingdom-based monitoring group Airwars.org.

These children and adults are real individuals whose lives were cut short by murderers acting for political purposes—just like the four people killed in the attack in London’s Westminster district that British authorities are maliciously using to justify more terrorism by the UK as part of the U.S-.led coalition.

The American authorities justify these killings of Arab civilians on the grounds of the necessities of war. But they are the direct result of the coalition’s reactionary aims in this war, which are not to liberate the people but to thwart a reactionary threat to Western domination, including by punishing and slaughtering masses of people.

This most recent wave of mass murders first came to light in the Western media with a U.S. air attack on the village of al-Jina in Syria’s western Aleppo province on March 16. At least 46 people were killed when airstrikes hit a crowded mosque during religious classes. According to the Washington Post, two U.S. drones fired six Hellfire missiles and then dropped a 226-kilo [498-pound] bomb. Photos showed the clearly identifiable fragments of the U.S. missiles and the destroyed building. On March 22, airstrikes hit a bakery and an adjacent market in al-Thani in Raqqa province, killing dozens of bakery workers and other civilians.

Then in what has been described as the worst airstrike on civilians since the U.S. pounded Iraq during its 2003 invasion, U.S.-led coalition planes hit the Mosul neighbourhood of al-Jadida in Iraq, where U.S.-led forces had recently driven out the Islamic fundamentalist Daesh (ISIL). As of a week after the March 17 attack, more than 200 bodies have been pulled out from under the rubble, and the toll is expected to be much higher.

The unspoken and sometimes explicit rationalization for this loss of life on such a large scale is that Daesh cannot be defeated without it. On an immediate level, this is a sick argument whose implicit assumption is that Arab lives are worth less than those of people who look like “us”—people in the Western countries who are told that they must support their imperialist rulers who “keep them safe.” What this argument also conceals is that wars are defined and conducted according to their political aims—and the unacceptable massive civilian deaths in this war flow from the reactionary aims on both sides.

Daesh’s project for a religious dictatorship in the service of old and new exploiters who feel thwarted by the present Western-dominated status quo requires treating not only people in the Western countries but also in the Middle Eastern countries they seek to rule as nothing more than cattle to be slaughtered. Its project runs counter to the basic interests of the masses of people, and it cannot ultimately rely on their conscious, voluntary support for their cause.

This is no less true of the U.S.-led coalition fighting against Daesh. The U.S., above all, seeks to maintain its intolerable political and economic domination of the region, which created the conditions for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the first place. The lives of the people of Iraq and Syria mean nothing to the U.S. because the goals of the American project do not include the safety of these or any other peoples, let alone their well-being and emancipation from national humiliation and enforced backwardness.

Whatever the immediate military results achieved by the U.S. and its allies in Mosul and Raqqa, it is very likely that this situation will lead to more and not less jihadi Islamism.  In addition to the political consequences of the actions of the U.S. and its allies in Iraq and Syria, including the targeting of the West’s more secular opponents, these latest atrocities have also exposed the hypocrisy and real content of the Western values in whose name they were committed. Reactionary Islamists then seize on this to falsely claim that their ideology and social goals are the only alternative.

Under the Obama regime, the U.S. stepped up its war crimes from the air in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. What is happening now, under Trump, is what was to be expected from a man whose campaign promises included removing any restrictions on airstrikes and “killing their [‘terrorists’] families.”

What’s involved here is more than a single campaign or even one war. This is the dynamic Bob Avakian has called “the two outmodeds”: on “the one hand, imperialism, and on the other hand, reactionary Islamic fundamentalist Jihadism—and the way these two forces actually do reinforce each other, even while opposing each other, with the very negative effect this exerts in the world. This is a situation where the more the imperialists do what they do, the more they create fertile ground for Islamic fundamentalism.” (For more on this, see Bringing Forward Another Way by Bob Avakian.)

People in every country must oppose the terror campaign the U.S. is leading in Iraq and Syria to counter and defeat its rival exploiters and oppressors, and the crimes of all sides against the people. This needs to be linked to building struggle for revolution in both the imperialist countries and the countries they oppress, which is the only way this dynamic can be broken and humanity freed from this awful situation.

 

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