U.S. Imperialism: Yemen, Iraq, Israel

Here in Norfolk, Virginia, home port of the USS Cole, great efforts
are being made to keep people from seeing that the seventeen dead and
three dozen serious injured working class sailors were not victims of
"Arab terrorism" but victims of U.S. imperialism.

To reach this conclusion we need to answer three basic questions.

QUESTION 1: What is the United States doing in Yemen?  That question
was posed and answered on October 13 by Stratfor, the Online Global
Intelligence Service.  Here are brief excerpts from their article
"Yemen's Deadly Appeal."  

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"The American military appears interested in much more than fuel.
Yemen is a strategic pawn in a game with other major powers. And a
small island 550 miles east of Yemen is a valuable military asset.  
Yemen is the center of a vigorous competition between some of the
world's major powers. Nations such as China, Russia and the United
States are all competing for influence over the chokepoints of the
world's waterways.  

More than its harbor, Yemen also provides an important military base
from which naval forces can quickly reach the Red Sea, the Persian
Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The island of Socotra, with a population
of 70,000, is perfectly placed for monitoring shipping routes in all
three seas.  Near Socotra, much of the world's oil floats by on tankers.  

Over the past two years, reports have surfaced that Yemen's
administration had agreed to allow the U.S. military access to both a
port and an airport on Socotra.  A new civilian airport built on
Socotra to promote tourism had conveniently been constructed in
accordance with U.S. military specifications.  And there is clearly
a backlash in Yemen against the global competition for use of its
facilities. The attack on USS Cole was a simple, yet effective
message: the ambitious goals of the U.S. military are not welcome."

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The entire article can be accessed at:

http://www.stratfor.com/MEAF/commentary/0010130120.htm

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QUESTION 2:  Where was the USS Cole headed after refueling?

This one is easy.  It was headed to the Persian Gulf to reinforce the 
US/UN blockade and sanctions against Iraq.  Ten years of sanctions 
have killed over a million Iraqi civilians, more than 5% of the 
population.  If the suicide bombers who attacked the USS Cole are 
"terrorists," they are small timers, compared to Bush, Clinton, Gore, 
Lieberman, Dubya, and Cheney, all of whom have supported "Desert 
Massacre" and "Desert Genocide" since 1990.

The U.S. went to war against Iraq and maintains the sanctions for the 
same reasons it is hoping to use the port of Aden and the island of 
Socotra.  It wants to control Middle East oil, which is two-thirds of 
all known oil reserves on earth, and to control the tanker routes 
by which it is distributed.  It wants to prevent its major 
competitors from controlling the oil and the tanker routes.

Similar reasons motivated the U.S./NATO assault on Serbia last year:  
Extending U.S./NATO influence into Eastern and Southeastern Europe, 
which previously were areas of Russian/Soviet influence, controlling 
land and sea oil pipeline routes from the Caspian region.  The 
professed humanitarian concern for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar 
Albanians was the cover story.

QUESTION 3: Why has the "peace process" begun in Oslo in 1994 broken 
down?

The Oslo deal was supposed to end Israeli occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza by 1999.  Even if this goal had been achieved, it
would have put Palestinians in an apartheid-style Bantustan, and
millions of Palestinian refugees would not have even been allowed to
return to this reservation.  The U.S. has bribed Arafat and trained
and armed his Palestinian police forces, which has made Arafat
increasingly unpopular among Palestinians who rightly see themselves
being sold out by this "peace process."

This "peace process" is often compared with the deal that brought
about "black majority rule" in South Africa.  But the U.S. and
Israel were obviously not offering Arafat the presidency of Israel
or Palestinian capitalists a junior partnership in Israeli capitalism, in
return for selling out the working class.  That was the deal
Mandela, Mbeki, and the ANC got in South Africa.  Instead, Arafat has 
been offered something more like the presidency of KwaZulu in a 
pre-1994 apartheid South Africa.  Mandela couldn't have pulled that 
off, either.

Even though the Oslo deal offered the vast majority of Palestinians 
very little, significant sections of the Israeli ruling class have 
opposed the Oslo deal.  They don't want to make even the small 
concessions, and they fear the deal won't pacify the Palestinians.

U.S. imperialism would have liked to pull off this deal, in order to 
stabilize the western flank of the Middle East, so that they could 
concentrate their attention on regainaing control of Iraq and its oil 
fields.  But it doesn't look like the U.S. will be able to square the 
circle.  And it looks like the U.S. will be sending more military 
forces to the region for a long time to come, endangering the lives 
of many more people.

Nationalism and religion keep workers in the Middle East divided and 
controlled by competing imperialist forces.  Jewish zionism and 
Palestinian and Arab nationalism keep workers tied to capitalist 
rulers, who will never bring peace and a decent life to the working 
class.

It is right to condemn Israeli rulers and their U.S. supporters for 
their oppression of Palestinians, for having killed nearly 100 
people during the past two weeks, and for seeking to impose a 
terrible "peace" settlement.  It is right to condemn Arafat, his 
cronies, and the Arab "client" regimes that have played games with 
the imperialists for half a century.  But the solution lies not in a 
better formula for partition sought by more "authentic" nationalists. 
It lies in the emergence of a new internationalist movement among the 
workers.

Steve Rosenthal