[Marxism] SWP-US Militant newspaper: "All out to build January 27 march!"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I saw this item on the web, and since the core idea -- getting out to
January 27 -- is one I strongly agree with, I decided to send it in.  It is
high time for the non-rich to place their weight in the scales on this
issue.

Fred Feldman


The Militant
Vol. 71/No. 3           January 22, 2007  
 
 
All out to build January 27 march! 
(editorial)
 
All out to build the January 27 march in Washington demanding: U.S. and all
"coalition" troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other countries
where they are carrying out brutal military operations! Not one penny, not
one man or woman, for the U.S. armed forces! 
The mobilization in Washington, and actions in San Francisco and other
cities the same day, are a needed response to the major escalation of the
murderous U.S. war in Iraq announced on nationwide TV by President George
Bush as the Militant went to press. 



The billionaire families that rule the United States have no intention of
walking away from their strategic economic, political, and military
interests in winning the war in Iraq. That's not how empires survive and
expand. The U.S. rulers have no alternative to a long-term increase in troop
levels and broadening of their military aims. 

They are directly taking on armed Shiite and Sunni squads standing in the
way of Washington's goal: stabilization of a bourgeois Iraqi regime
subservient to its interests. And this time, as Bush stressed, "Iraqi and
American forces will have a green light" to hunt down militias like those of
Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. 

This is not a "surge" but the biggest escalation of the Iraq war since the
U.S. invasion in March 2003. It is coupled with a substantial naval buildup
in the Arab-Persian Gulf-what Bush described as "the deployment of an
additional carrier strike group to the region." 

The only serious alternative would be immediate withdrawal, which no
influential voice from either party in the U.S. ruling class proposes. 

Plans by the Democratic majority in Congress for a "symbolic vote" to oppose
the new deployment is a charade, as is the bluster by some Democrats about
"capping" troop levels or limiting funds for added troops. As Sen. Joseph
Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, since
Congress voted for the invasion, it must leave the conduct of war to the
Commander-in-Chief. Any other course, said Biden, would be unconstitutional!


Sen. Edward Kennedy's talk of cutting off money for more U.S. troops is
bombast too. Neither Democrats nor Republicans in Congress have ever cut
funds for the U.S. military in the middle of a war. To the contrary, the
Democrats have backed the Iraq war at every juncture since voting to back
the invasion in 2003. In the Democrats' televised "response" to Bush's
January 10 address, Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin even had the imperial gall
to boast that "America" has "given the Iraqis so much.. We Americans have
protected Iraq [!] when no one else would." 

The escalation of the conflict in Iraq, like the ongoing occupation of
Afghanistan and recent assault by U.S. Special Forces in Somalia, is part of
Washington's "long war" against "terrorism." Under that banner, the U.S.
rulers are leading their imperialist allies in a decades-long conflict
targeting working people and any government that doesn't bow to their
dictates. 

The underlying crisis is not conjunctural. It does not lie in specific
policies of this or that president or Congress. It did not begin with 9/11.
It is rooted in the downward tendency of the bosses' profit rates-renewed in
the late 1960s and early '70s with the exhaustion of the post-World War II
capitalist boom-and the sharpening economic competition and political
conflicts among imperialist powers over redivision of world markets. What is
unfolding is the accelerating crisis of the capitalist world order. 

The stepped-up imperialist war has the same source as the U.S. rulers'
assaults on workers at home-from immigration raids, to cop brutality, to the
"productivity drive" that has resulted in 48 workers killed over the past
year in coal mines alone. Working people resisting these attacks by the
employers and their government have a big stake opposing the bosses' wars
abroad as well. 

Now is the time to mobilize support among students, workers, farmers, and
others whose interests are diametrically opposed to the rulers' war against
working people at home and abroad. Let's fill as many buses, trains, vans,
and cars as possible and maximize the turnout for the January 27 marches to
demand: 

Bring the troops home now! 






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