http://themilitant.com/2017/8116/811602.html
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Vol. 81/No. 16 April 24, 2017
(front page, Socialist Workers Party statement)
Socialist Workers Party: Get US out of Syria, Iraq!
Stop Washington’s bombs! All US troops out now!
Inset, Militant/Steve Warshell; above, U.S. Navy
Cynthia Jaquith, SWP candidate for Miami mayor, at Ft. Lauderdale
protest against U.S. bombing of Syria. Above, Tomahawk missile launch
from U.S. Navy ship, same type as the 59 used in U.S. attack on Syria
April 6.
The following statement was issued April 7 by Socialist Workers Party
candidate for mayor of New York Osborne Hart.
The 59 deadly Tomahawk missiles that U.S. military warships rained down
on a Syrian government airfield April 6 will further escalate
Washington’s decadeslong wars in the region. I demand stop the bombing!
Get Washington’s troops out of the Middle East now!
Washington’s wars against Iraq and the war in Afghanistan — the longest
in U.S. history — both continue today. The administration of Donald
Trump has been building on the course of the Barack Obama administration
before him, increasing the number of troops in both countries, as well
as in Syria.
The course is bipartisan. Washington’s missile attack yesterday won
applause from Democrats, including New York Sen. Charles Schumer and
Hillary Clinton, as well as the Washington Post.
Washington’s attack has escalated the war and will lead to further
slaughter of the toilers in Syria and the Middle East. The capitalist
rulers who determine U.S. imperialist moves at home and abroad hold
their economic and political interests paramount. Washington’s access to
resources, markets and investment — and the prevention of any
revolutionary action by workers and farmers in the region — guides their
actions.
Announcing the attack, Trump called on “all civilized nations to join us
to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria,” cynically ignoring the
deaths of more than 1,000 civilians and others in U.S. bombing raids
there over the past year. It is Washington’s wars that have provoked and
prolonged the combat across the region, including creating the vacuum
that led to the rise of the reactionary Islamic State.
President Trump claims the missile strike is a response to a murderous
chemical weapons attack on civilians days earlier. There is substantial
evidence, including the direct testimony of survivors of the gas bombs,
that the dictatorial Bashar al-Assad regime was responsible. The
chemical attack presented Washington an opportunity on a silver platter
to escalate their intervention.
Washington’s claims to moral authority are an affront to working people
everywhere. The U.S. ruling class is the only power to ever target
civilians with nuclear bombs. It has used napalm and all kinds of
weapons of mass slaughter, enforced its stifling and destructive
economic embargo against Cuba for decades to make Cuba’s workers and
farmers pay for their socialist revolution, and on and on.
Working people in the Middle East suffer from the carnage of the ongoing
wars. The toilers in Syria organized massive popular mobilizations for
political rights and against the regime in 2011, but were put down in
blood. Since then, over 400,000 have died and 11 million people, more
than half the population, have been driven from their homes.
Working people in Syria need to find a road forward, but foreign
imperialist intervention is a deadly obstacle to the fight for liberation.
Worldwide solidarity and political space are what is needed for Syrian
toilers to construct the revolutionary working-class party needed to
take power.
Workers in the U.S. are facing carnage as well. A “new normal” of
permanently lower employment, attacks on health care, pensions, safety
on the job, political and social rights, and from the rulers’ cops and
criminal “justice” system marks life under today’s capitalist crisis.
The employers and their government are seeking to boost their profit
rates on our backs.
Among the hardest hit are workers who are drawn into service in the
imperialist military, maimed and scarred and left to their own devices
when they return.
Washington’s attack on Syria is also intended as a warning to North
Korea. U.S. government spokespeople have made it clear Washington is
ready to use military might to move unilaterally to inflict pain and
suffering on the people there if they see the opportunity.
The capitalist rulers — and their Democratic and Republican parties
alike — have their foreign policy, to defend their dog-eat-dog
capitalist private profit system by all means.
Working people need our own internationalist policy of solidarity with
workers struggling worldwide. We need our own political party. That is
what the Socialist Workers Party is fighting to build.
Join us to condemn Washington’s assault on Syria. Join protests against
their wars. And demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and
military from Syria and the Middle East.
Related articles:
US uses horror at Assad gas attack to step up Syria war
Trump garners bipartisan backing for escalation of war in Syria, Iraq
Kurds’ national struggle looms over Mideast wars
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