United States Withdraws From Afghanistan? Not Really ~~ NOAM CHOMSKY – VIJAY PRASHAD

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/07/united-states-withdraws-from-afghanistan-not-really/

Photograph Source: Captain Brian Harris, U.S. Army – Public Domain

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was criminal. It was criminal because of the immense force used to demolish Afghanistan’s physical infrastructure and to break open its social bonds.

On October 11, 2001, journalist Anatol Lieven interviewed the Afghan leader Abdul Haq in Peshawar, Pakistan. Haq, who led part of the resistance against the Taliban, was getting ready to return to Afghanistan under the cover of the U.S. aerial bombardments. He was, however, not pleased with the way the United States had decided to prosecute the war. “Military action by itself in the present circumstances is only making things more difficult—especially if this war goes on a long time and many civilians are killed,” Abdul Haq told Lieven. The war would go on for 20 years, and at least 71,344 civilians would lose their lives during this period.

Abdul Haq told Lieven that “the best thing would be for the U.S. to work for a united political solution involving all the Afghan groups. Otherwise, there will be an encouragement of deep divisions between different groups, backed by different countries and badly affecting the whole region.” These are prescient words, but Haq knew no one was listening to him. “Probably,” he told Lieven, “the U.S. has already made up its mind what to do, and any recommendations by me will be too late.”

After 20 years of the incredible destruction caused by this war, and after inflaming animosity between “all the Afghan groups,” the United States has returned to the exact policy prescription of Abdul Haq: political dialogue.

Abdul Haq returned to Afghanistan and was killed by the Taliban on October 26, 2001. His advice is now out-of-date. In September 2001, the various protagonists in Afghanistan—including the Taliban—were ready to talk. They did so partly because they feared that the looming U.S. warplanes would open the doors to hell for Afghanistan. Now, 20 years later, the gulf between the Taliban and the others has widened. Appetite for negotiations simply does not exist any longer.

Civil War

On April 14, 2021, the speaker of Afghanistan’s parliament—Mir Rahman Rahmani—warned that his country is on the brink of a “civil war.” Kabul’s political circles have been bristling with conversations about a civil war when the United States withdraws by September 11. This is why on April 15, during a press conference held in the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Sharif Amiry of TOLOnews asked U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the possibility of a civil war. Blinken answered, “I don’t think that it is in anyone’s interest, to say the least, for Afghanistan to descend into a civil war, into a long war. And even the Taliban, as we hear it, has said it has no interest in that.”

In fact, Afghanistan has been in a civil war for half a century, at least since the creation of the mujahideen—including Abdul Haq—to battle the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government (1978-1992). This civil war was intensified by the U.S. support of Afghanistan’s most conservative and extreme right-wing elements, groups that would become part of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamist factions. Never once has the United States offered a path to peace during this period; instead, it has always shown an eagerness at each turn to use the immensity of the U.S. force to control the outcome in Kabul.

Withdrawal?

Even this withdrawal, which was announced in late April 2021 and began on May 1, is not as clear-cut as it seems. “It’s time for American troops to come home,” announced U.S. President Joe Biden on April 14, 2021. On the same day, the U.S. Department of Defense clarified that 2,500 troops would leave Afghanistan by September 11. In a March 14 article, meanwhile, the New York Times had noted that the U.S. has 3,500 troops in Afghanistan even though “[p]ublicly, 2,500 U.S. troops are said to be in the country.” The undercount by the Pentagon is obscurantism. A report by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment, furthermore, noted that the United States has about 16,000 contractors on the ground in Afghanistan. They provide a variety of services, which most likely include military support. None of these contractors—or the additional undisclosed 1,000 U.S. troops—are slated for withdrawal, nor will aerial bombardment—including drone strikes—end, and there will be no end to special forces missions either.

On April 21, Blinken said that the United States would provide nearly $300 million to the Afghanistan government of Ashraf Ghani. Ghani, who—like his predecessor Hamid Karzai—often appears to be more of a mayor of Kabul than the president of Afghanistan, is being outflanked by his rivals. Kabul is buzzing with talk of post-withdrawal governments, including a proposal by Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to form a government that he would lead and that would not include the Taliban. The U.S., meanwhile, has consented to the idea that the Taliban should have a role in the government; it is now being said openly that the Biden administration believes the Taliban would “govern less harshly” than it did from 1996 to 2001.

The United States, it appears, is willing to allow the Taliban to return to power with two caveats: first, that the U.S. presence remains, and second, that the main rivals of the United States—namely China and Russia—have no role in Kabul. In 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in Chennai, India, where she proposed the creation of a New Silk Road Initiative that linked Central Asia through Afghanistan and via the ports of India; the purpose of this initiative was to cut off Russia from its links in Central Asia and to prevent the establishment of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which now runs all the way to Turkey.

Stability is not in the cards for Afghanistan. In January, Vladimir Norov, former foreign minister of Uzbekistan and the current secretary-general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), addressed a webinar organized by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute. Norov said that Daesh or ISIS has been shifting its fighters from Syria to northern Afghanistan. This movement of extremist fighters is of concern not only to Afghanistan but also to Central Asia and to China. In 2020, the Washington Post revealed that the U.S. military had been providing aerial support for the Taliban as it made gains against ISIS fighters. Even if there is a peace deal with the Taliban, ISIS will destabilize it.

Forgotten Possibilities

Forgotten are the words of concern for Afghan women, words that provided legitimacy for the U.S. invasion in October 2001. Rasil Basu, a United Nations official, served as a senior adviser on women’s development to the Afghan government from 1986 to 1988. The Afghan Constitution of 1987 provided women with equal rights, which allowed women’s groups to struggle against patriarchal norms and fight for equality at work and at home. Because large numbers of men had died in the war, Basu told us, women went into several occupations. There were substantial gains for women’s rights, including a rise in literacy rates. All this has been largely erased during the U.S. war over these past two decades.

Even before the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988-89, men who are now jockeying for power—such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—said that they would undo these gains. Basu remembered the shabanamas, notices that circulated to women and warned them to obey patriarchal norms (she submitted an opinion piece warning of this catastrophe to the New York Times, to the Washington Post, and to Ms. Magazine, all of whom rejected it).

Afghanistan’s last communist head of government—Mohammed Najibullah (1987-1992)—submitted a National Reconciliation Policy, in which he put women’s rights at the top of the agenda. It was rejected by the U.S.-backed Islamists, many of whom remain in positions of authority today.

No lessons have been learned from this history. The U.S. will “withdraw,” but will also leave behind its assets to checkmate China and Russia. These geopolitical considerations eclipse any concern for the Afghan people.

Freedom Rider: Gun violence starts at the top ~~ by Margaret Kimberley

https://mronline.org/2021/04/30/freedom-rider-gun-violence-starts-at-the-top/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

If the state reserves the right to commit mass murder no one should be surprised that the people follow suit.

Mass shootings happen with appalling regularity in the United States. It is bad enough that recent shootings took place in Atlanta, Boulder, and Indianapolis, but the horror is always followed by the same useless faux debates. Half the population wants to limit gun ownership, the other half doesn’t and continues a gun buying spree to prove their point. Politicians pretend to take action, victims are mourned, thoughts and prayers are uttered, and the cycle repeats itself with the next awful event.

What very few people dare to discuss is how these acts are connected with U.S. history and with the state in its current form. This country exists as a result of genocides and terrorism. The indigenous inhabitants were attacked with wars and disease and the survivors were driven from their ancestral lands. Africans were enslaved and treated like chattel, all Black people were deprived of their legal rights, and Jim Crow lasted for 100 years. Lynch law prevailed and the torture and killing of black people was a spectator sport across the land. The fits and starts of anything resembling justice have been far outweighed by institutional resistance which maintains the status quo.

The police continue to kill three people every day, more than 1,000 people every year. While George Floyd’s police murderer was on trial, young Daunte Wright was killed in a nearby community. Video footage revealed that 13-year old Adam Toledo was unarmed with his hands raised when he was shot and killed by Chicago police. Lest anyone forget, Chicago is the city which holds hundreds of people at Homan Square, a city jail that operates like a CIA black-ops site. Chicago should forever be known as the city where black men were tortured by police for years.

When this nation wasn’t practicing state sanctioned terror within its boundaries, it committed atrocities internationally. Wars, interventions and coups have been committed from Chile to Haiti to Guatemala to Iraq to Ukraine. There are U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 800 bases under U.S. or other NATO nation control around the world.

Joe Biden has undone the Trump administration agreement to leave Afghanistan by May 1. He cynically uses the date of September 11 to forestall what should have happened years ago. The occupation of Afghanistan has gone on so long that people born after it began are now old enough to join the military themselves. But no one should be fooled. Biden is privatizing war with contractors and intelligence operatives and moving troops to create havoc elsewhere in the world.

If the state reserves the right to commit mass murder no one should be surprised that the people follow suit. They are taught that their violent country is exceptionally good, fair, benevolent and democratic. The U.S. leads the world in military spending and brings wars home by militarizing local police. Of course the bloodletting doesn’t end. It would be shocking if it did.

The phony concern must come to an end. Foolish and false platitudes such as, “This is not who we are,” should disappear from discourse and be replaced with honesty. Biden has proposed increasing defense spending to $753 billion and after the rhetorical dust settles, there will be a bipartisan congressional consensus to approve what he wants. Military spending takes up 60% of the discretionary budget and is the reason why people in this country cannot have nice things.

State violence is like background music that seeps into the collective consciousness. The same people who express shock when an individual goes on a killing spree in this country are silent when their government is responsible for killings around the world. They may support the mass incarceration state, which makes the U.S. the world’s number one jailer.

It is all connected. State sanctioned violence tells the people that individual violence is just fine. The hand wringing over the latest shooting doesn’t mean anything if the wars and law enforcement brutality continue. The hypocrisy is obvious and no one should be surprised when a well-armed population makes use of their personal arsenals.

The United States of America is and will remain violent without some revolutionary change. The carnage is both official and personal. If this country is honest the next mass shooting should be ignored by the media, politicians, and by the people too. Any consternation is temporary because it is dishonest. For now the most that can be expected is that Americans will finally end the pretense of concern and treat the inevitable results of their history and politics with nonchalance. It is the only honest thing they can do.

To Win Significant, Long-Term Change in America, We Need Class Struggle ~~ NICK FRENCH

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/biden-stimulus-american-rescue-plan-welfare-class-struggle/?fbclid=IwAR2NONMCj1BS7YxWgIrJdodddM4HjoJaOf1DO9uGJeCfi8z3kmuCfJiI9ZA

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Analysis of Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) has been all over the map. Some commentators have hailed it as a sea change in American welfare and fiscal policy, or even the end of neoliberal orthodoxy. Others have emphasized the relief package’s shortcomings. The Left seems uncertain, wrestling with how to relate to the Biden administration and the (narrowly) Democratic-controlled Congress.

We are in uncharted territory, at least in light of the Democratic Party’s recent history of embracing austerity with open arms. But the Left should neither overestimate our strength nor the extent to which Democrats are championing a social-democratic agenda. The ARP is a temporary stimulus, the best workers can expect if they aren’t organized and fighting. We shouldn’t expect these limited relief measures to last, since the macroeconomic conditions which have persuaded capitalists to allow them can change like the wind.

If we’re to see more policies that materially benefit and structurally empower working people, the working class needs to be organized and militant.

The Stimulus Bill Reflects the Balance of Class Forces

Recent working-class movements and left electoral struggles — including the teachers’ strike wave, the Black Lives Matter protests, and Bernie Sanders’s two presidential runs — have helped shift public opinion in favor of progressive and social-democratic ideas, a shift that likely impacted the size and shape of the COVID relief package.

Knowing exactly how big of an effect these developments had on the passage of the ARP would require rigorous, empirical analysis. Still, we can make some educated guesses. The New York Times reported in July 2020 that last summer’s anti-racist uprising was the largest protest wave in US history, as judged by the number of participants. Bernie’s two campaigns activated millions of Americans around an ambitious and popular social-democratic agenda. Bernie’s campaigns also directly inspired workplace organizing efforts that helped lead to the 2018 teacher strikes and fights for worker safety at the beginning of the pandemic.

It’s difficult to believe that these developments and others in the past few years (like the rise of AOC and the Squad, DSA, and the Sunrise Movement) didn’t influence Biden and other Democrats to push through a more generous relief package.

But it is also hard to deny that the ruling class’s lowered fears of inflation, due to still historically low levels of working-class organization and militancy, made it easy for Democrats to pass a relatively generous stimulus. That is because Wall Street and significant sections of capital did not only not oppose the bill but actively supported it.As others have recognized, the ARP falls far short of structural reforms that upset the balance of power between labor and capital, let alone the more modest goal of higher taxes on the rich. The bill includes generous (if temporary) welfare measures but excludes a $15 minimum wage and further entrenches our country’s egregious for-profit health care system.

The ARP’s limits can largely be explained by the fact that it was passed with the blessing of much of the ruling class in the absence of mass working-class organization or pressure. Union density is still at a historic low: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that 10.8 percent of US workers were in unions in 2020, the second-lowest level reported since 1983. (That reflects a slight uptick since 2019, but that’s a product of greater job losses in nonunion jobs rather than more people in unions — the overall number of union members declined by 321,000).

Workers are also striking in historically low numbers. BLS reports that in 2020, there were eight major work stoppages (defined as stoppages involving at least one thousand workers, lasting at least one shift during the workweek) — the third lowest number since 1947, when BLS began collecting the data.

Twenty-seven thousand workers took part in major work stoppages that began in 2020. That’s a huge drop from the upsurge of 2018 and 2019, when about 485,000 and 425,000 workers went on strike, respectively. But even those numbers — driven largely, but not only, by the teachers’ strikes — pale in comparison to what was typical before the 1980s. From 1947 to 1979, there were only seven years where fewer than 1 million workers went on strike, with the number often surpassing 1.5 or 2 million.

 The Left’s real gains over the past few years should not lead us to overlook the fact that the working class is still extremely weak and disorganized. Without a significant upsurge of class struggle, there is little reason to expect deeper, more lasting pro-worker policies from Biden or Congress.

The great progressive legislative achievements of the United States in the 20th century — from the New Deal to civil rights legislation and the Great Society — were made possible by mass struggles. These struggles involved huge waves of workplace militancy, massive street demonstrations, and leftists organizing in and outside the workplace. Threats to profits, corporate control, and social stability compelled sections of the capitalist class and elected officials to enact reforms that institutionalized collective bargaining rights, expanded democracy, and established the rudiments of a welfare state.

Of course, democratic socialists have our sights set higher than a new New Deal or another Great Society. We want to go beyond capitalism entirely, by democratizing ownership, governance of firms, and the economy as a whole.

To achieve socialist transformation, workers need to organize and empower themselves to wrest control of their workplaces from capital, to socialize finance, and to institute public ownership of health care, energy, transportation, and other major economic sectors. In the meantime, we can fight for reforms, like Medicare for All and a jobs guarantee, that make it easier for workers to organize and fight back. But winning even these reforms will require increased pressure from below. 

As policy, there is plenty to like in the ARP. But debate about policy pros and cons threatens to obscure more fundamental questions about the balance of class forces in society and what the bill does — or doesn’t do — to change that balance. In other words, the real problem with the bill is about power: Who has it and who’s using it to demand or give relief?

Right now, it’s the capitalists. And nothing they’re doing is significantly giving workers more power. To change that, we need more class struggle.

Ruling Class Joe and the Essence of American Politics ~~ PAUL STREET

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/03/ruling-class-joe-and-the-essence-of-american-politics/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Photograph Source: Maryland GovPics – CC BY 2.0

It’s a damn good thing that the demented pandemo-fascist oligarch Donald Trump no longer sits in the White House and that his Republifascist Party no longer holds the majority in the U.S. Senate. But make no mistake: Americans continue to live under an unelected dictatorship of money and empire. Just because that class dictatorship isn’t quite ready for Door #1, open fascist rule, don’t look for Door #2, neo-New Deal reformist social democracy, anytime soon. No, we are still getting slammed in the face with Door #3, a neoliberal corporate-imperial authoritarianism that cancels #2 while setting us up for a harsher version of #1 in the not-so-distant future.

Status Quo Joe

Biden is showing us that he is what many of us who paid attention knew and warned he was: the Weimarian Third Way/Door. Biden has the full legal authority to cancel all federal student debt. He pledged to use that power if he became president. Now he is refusing to honor the promise. As leading student debt abolitionist Astra Taylor notes:

“At his recent town hall, Joe Biden made a series of convoluted and condescending comments about American student debt…Biden’s rambling justification of the status quo was peppered with straw men, invocations of false scarcity and non-solutions. He pitted working-class Americans against each other, implying that people who attend private schools aren’t worthy of relief, as though poor students don’t also attend such schools. He said that money would be better spent on early childhood education instead of debt cancellation, as if educators aren’t themselves drowning in student debt, and as if we can’t address both concerns at once. He suggested relying on parents or selling a home at a profit to settle your debt, a luxury those without intergenerational wealth or property cannot afford. And he touted various programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), that have totally failed borrowers: over 95% of PSLF applicants have been denied…As he rambled on, Biden gave the distinct impression that he preferred not to have the power to do so. That way he could blame Congress should his campaign promises go unkept.”

Then there’s the pathetically low federal minimum wage. Labor and civil rights activists have long called for the national wage floor to be raised to $15 an hour, which translates (assuming 40 hours a week for 50 weeks) to $30,000 a year, equivalent to less than a quarter of the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) no-frills Basic Family Budget for a family of two parents and two children in the New York City borough (and New York State county) of Queens.

Candidate Biden promised to honor this demand. He’s doing no such thing as president. Biden and his fellow multi-millionaire Democrats in his old dollar-drenched stomping ground, the now majority Democrat U.S. Senate, cannot bring themselves to include the $15 minimum wage (phased in by 2025) in their coming COVID-relief stimulus bill. “Oh,” they say, “we tried, but the rules won’t let us” – a reference to the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling last week that the proposed minimum wage hike is not immune from Republican filibuster because “it doesn’t meet the budgetary requirements of reconciliation.”

This is an excuse. If these corporate Democrats were serious, they’d fire the parliamentarian, as Rep. Ilhan Omar recommends. In 2001, when Senate Republicans didn’t get the reconciliation rulings they liked, they replaced him.

But nobody in Congress to the right of the Squad (who reside in the House, not the Senate) and the progressive Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders backs this obvious solution.

Biden could also direct the Senate Democrats to overrule the parliamentarian, as Reps Japyal (D-WA) and Khana (D-CA) advocate. This too has been rejected by the White House, which says that it “respects the parliamentarian’s decision and the Senate’s process.”

Translation: Biden will not use his power to force an overdue significant if woefully inadequate rise in the federal minimum wage in a savagely unequal, poverty-ridden -nation where millions of people, including full-time workers, rely on food pantries while the top tenth of the upper One percent possessed nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent even before the upwardly distributive corona recession.

Meanwhile, in other news, mass deportations continue under Biden, contrary to his campaign promises.

Why Study History Reason 102

Progressives can whine all they want about these betrayals, but they have no business being surprised.

It’s important that Biden isn’t a maniacal fascist pig and that he is being considerably more competent and decent than Trump on COVID-19. It’s nice if elementarily civilized that Biden extended the CDC on evictions and foreclosures to March 31^st. It’s good if elementarily decent that Biden will let migrant families separated under Trump re-unite in the U.S., Who is against that? (Well, who besides your friendly online 50- to 70-something white male Trumpenleft dunce-cap donner who thinks that being glad to see changes like this is a sign that one is a Dem-loving liberal practitioner of bourgeois identity politics who thinks that electing Democrats is the answer to all our problems).

Still, anyone who has expected much more in a seriously progressive way from corporate Joe hasn’t been paying much attention to his long wealth- and power-serving career. It pays to know a president’s pre-presidential history before getting all hopey-dopey about his supposed eagerness to do progressive things. You might learn that you must join others in organizing for something more militant and revolutionary than trying to “push” a deeply conservative ruling class functionary “to the left.” That was the essential lesson of my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, which examined Obama’s biography and career to successfully predict the corporate and imperial trajectory of Obama’s arch-neoliberal presidency and that presidency’s Weimar role in hatching a neofascist successor.

“No Empathy” Joe: “No One’s Standing of Living Will Change”

Do progressives not recall the anti-Bernie Biden telling a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 2018 that he had “no empathy, give me a break” for the plight of Millennials in the savagely unequal and eco-cidal world he’d helped create over decades of Congressional service to corporate and financial America?

Are progressives unaware of his long corporatist and slavishly pro-Wall Street record in Congress? This record includes:

+ votes to rollback bankruptcy protections for college graduates (1978) and vocational school graduates (1984) with federal student loans.

+ Working  with Republicans to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which put “clean slate” Chapter-7 bankruptcy out of reach for millions of ordinary Americans (2005)

+ Voting against a bill that would have compelled credit card companies to warn customers of the costs of only making minimum payments.

+ Honoring campaign cash from Coca Cola by cosponsoring a bill that permitted soft-drink producers to skirt antitrust laws (1979).

+ Joining just one other Congressional Democrat to vote against a Judiciary Committee measure to increase consumers’ rights to sue corporations for price-fixing (1979).

+ Strongly backing the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which permitted the re-merging of investment and commercial banking by repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act. (This helped create the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent recession, which led to a massive taxpayer bailout of the rich combined with little for the rest of the population – a policy that Biden backed as vice presidential candidate and as Vice President).

+ Supporting the globalist investor rights North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which cost millions of US manufacturing workers their jobs.

Adding neoliberal insult to neoliberal injury, the Obama-, Citigroup-, New York Times-, Washington Post-, MSNBC-, CNN- and James Clyburn-appointed presidential candidate Biden criticized those who advocated a universal basic income (a fundamental need, in the wake of the Covid-19 crash and the broader and ongoing specters of runaway automation) of “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work.

(*Here it is worth bearing in mind that fast food and other low-wage employers would likely respond to a significant increase in the minimum wage with increased labor-displacing automaton. We are dealing with capitalism, the profit-addicted commodification of everything and everyone, a system that is actively ending life on Earth, for what that’s worth.)

He opposed calls for supposedly “too expensive” universal Single Payer health insurance, going so far as to suggest he would veto a Medicare for All bill as president.

The anti-Bernie Biden defended Big Business and the rich from popular criticism, mocking those who “want to single out big corporations for all the blame” and proclaiming “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” He did not speak one critical word about Trump and Congress’s taxpayer-funded bailout for the American capitalist “elite” and its top corporations and financial institutions in the wake of Covid-19 – a massive and largely unaccountable giveaway that puts no caps on executive compensation and elite profits while offering little more than a pittance to the nation’s working-class majority.

“No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change” when he became president. That’s what Biden told elite donors in Manhattan in 2019. It was a revolting thing to be caught saying in a nation where the top thousandth had as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent even before the upwardly distributive Covid-19 recession.

The financial elite, conscious of his Wall Street-friendly record, believed him. His massive campaign finance take from the financial and securities and investment industries in the 2020 election cycle was $196,794,532, nearly four times what the Republifascist incumbent received from those industries.

And Empire Too

We should be no more surprised about Biden betraying progressive- and populist-sounding domestic policy promises and filling key posts with Wall Street operatives and allies than we should about his decision to spend millions of taxpayer dollars menacing Russia with B-1 bombers and launching a criminal, mass-murderous (at least 22 killed) air assault on Syria in “self-defense” and “retaliation” for alleged Iranian attacks on American military forces and a civilian contractor in Iraq (as if the U.S. has any right to maintain military forces in Iraq in the first place). Senator Biden didn’t just “go along” with George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003; he helped lead the charge on the Democratic side.

Biden’s a cold-blooded Empire man. That’s why he’s making make nice with Saudi Arabia, refusing to impose any serious sanctions on that deeply reactionary absolutist state even after his Director of National Intelligence released a report finding officially what every already knew: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin-Salman (MBS) ordered the 2018 murder-vivisection of a Washington Post journalist who was critical of the Riyadh regime. MBS himself will suffer no U.S. punishment of any kind. (“Biden Vowed to Hold MBC Accountable,” screams a CNN headline, “Now He’s Accused of Letting Him Get Away with Murder.” The network should have dropped “Accused of” but didn’t because Biden isn’t Trump.)

It’s called imperial realpolitik.

Comrades, Start Your Engines

Maybe Bernie and the Squad will call for millions of workers and students to take to the streets and public squares and undertake large-scale strikes and other direct mass actions to fight back against capitalist economic terrorism and related military imperialism in the U.S.

Probably not. Don’t hold your breath.

Maybe we should form a Left, the kind of popular movement that doesn’t wait for signals from members of the political class to undertake mass resistance to capitalism-imperialism.

In the meantime, the Biden Dems may well re-demobilize the Democrats’ majority progressive base (ala Rubin-Obama-Hillary 2009-2016) in ways likely to yield Republifascist wins in 2022 and 2024, opening the way for the white- nationalist revenge triple-impeachment of Biden in 2023 and a new and improved version of something closer to Door #1 in 2025. That’s something to look forward to in a nation where nearly two-thirds (63%) of young adults are unaware that Hitler’s Third Reich killed 6 million Jews, where nearly a quarter (23%) of young adults think the Nazi Holocaust is or may be a myth or exaggerated, here more than one in ten young adults think Jews caused the Nazi Holocaust, and where just 8 percent of high school seniors know that slavery was a central cause of the Civil War.

Rosa had it right: it’s socialism – Door #4 – or barbarism/fascism, though we must add the critical ecological and eco- communist postscript for the age of what the radical Green political scientist Craig Collins rightly calls “catabolic capitalism”: mere barbarism, fascism, and tribalism if we’re lucky.

The barbarism is winning, but Biden’s win may give up some breathing space to try to turn the tide the other way.

It’s no small task. There’s one helluva lot of organization and educational work required – we might start with a mass historical literacy campaign – if we’re going to be “lucky” enough to avert fascism and ecocide in coming years.

Gentlepersons of the Left, start your engines: we need to blow the doors off of fascism, reformism, and neoliberalism before it’s too late.

Biden Continues in His Predecessors Time Honored Tradition of Imperialist War Mongering

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/26/unconstitutional-us-airstrikes-on-syria-draw-strong-criticism

First US military action under Biden draws criticism

Biden’s approval of US air raids in Syria targeting facilities used by Iranian-backed militias criticised in the Middle East.

The Pentagon said the US military conducted the air raids against Iran-backed militias at US President Biden’s direction [File: US Navy/Matthew Freeman/EPA]

26 Feb 2021

US President Joe Biden’s authorisation of military air raids in eastern Syria on Thursday has drawn criticism in the Middle East.

The United States military said it carried out measured attacks on facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran-backed militias, in response to rocket attacks against US targets in Iraq.

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The air raids were “deliberate” and aimed to “de-escalate the overall situation in both eastern Syria and Iraq”, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

‘Same as Trump’

Some commentators said there was a clear effort to draw a distinction between Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump, who in response to attacks on coalition forces in Iraq used “the most disproportionate force by killing the Iranian general (Qassem) Soleimani”, said Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi in Washington, DC.

Seyyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English literature and orientalism at the University of Tehran said the move showed how Biden and Trump are the same.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke to his Syrian counterpart on Friday hours after US air raids.

“The two sides stressed the need of the West to adhere to UN Security Council resolutions regarding Syria,” the Iranian government website Dolat.ir said.

US journalist Ayman Moyeldin drew a timeline to show similarities between Biden’s move and several former US presidents.

The US has long been criticised for military intervention in several Muslim-majority countries such as Iraq and Libya and imposing regime change leading to political chaos and instability.

‘Not de-escalatory’

In the US, the move was also met with condemnation.

Hillary Mann Leverett, CEO of the political risk consultancy Stratega, said while the air raids sent a message about the Biden administration’s loyalties in the region, they would not diffuse the situation in the Middle East.

“The Biden administration is trying to portray this first military attack as measured in consultation with allies. But this won’t de-escalate anything.

“In fact, it signals very strongly a message to Iran that … the Biden administration is in fact trying to increase its pressure and leverage against Iran.”

The rocket attacks on US positions in Iraq were carried out as Washington and Tehran are looking for a way to return to the 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by former US President Trump.

It was not clear how, or whether, the raid might affect US efforts to coax Iran back into a negotiation about both sides resuming compliance with the agreement.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, criticised the US attack as a violation of international law.

“The United Nations Charter makes absolutely clear that the use of military force on the territory of a foreign sovereign state is lawful only in response to an armed attack on the defending state for which the target state is responsible,” she said. “None of those elements is met in the Syria strike.”

Justin Amash, a US lawyer who formerly served as the representative for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district said the move was unconstitutional.

 

‘Necessary deterrent’

Still, some observers showed support for the air raids.

Representative Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the attacks were the right move.

“Responses like this are a necessary deterrent and remind Iran, its proxies, and our adversaries around the world that attacks on US interests will not be tolerated,” McCaul said.

Suzanne Maloney, of the Brookings Institution think-tank, said the attacks showed the Biden administration could negotiate with Iran on the nuclear deal while pushing back against the militias it backed.

“Good move by… Biden (administration) demonstrating US can walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said on Twitter.

In the February 15 attack, rockets hit the US military base housed at Erbil International Airport in the Kurdish-run region, killing a non-American contractor and injuring a number of American contractors and a US service member.

Another salvo struck a base hosting US forces north of Baghdad days later, hurting at least one contractor.

Rockets hit Baghdad’s Green Zone on Monday, which houses the US embassy and other diplomatic missions.

Earlier this week, the Kata’ib Hezbollah group, one of the main Iran-aligned Iraqi militia groups, denied any role in the rocket attacks.

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