Down With The War in the Middle East of the U.S. and Australian Ruling Class!

OBAMA, ABBOTT AND SHORTEN’S MILITARY INTERVENTION IS BAD FOR WORKING CLASS PEOPLE

OPPOSE THE U.S. & AUSTRALIAN RULING CLASS
AND DOWN WITH THEIR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

DEFEND SYRIA AGAINST WESTERN IMPERIALISM AND ITS “REBELS”!

RALLY 2PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29TH
Outside Ashfield Civic Centre, 260 Liverpool Rd, Ashfield

Initial List of Speakers:
L. Waster, Secretary Sydney District Committee, Communist Party of Australia
Behrooz, Supporters of The Iranian People’s Fadaee Guerrillas
Yuri Gromov, Editor of Trotskyist Platform

In their 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation, the U.S., British and Australian ruling classes all but destroyed Iraq. Now they are again directly intervening in Iraq and in neighbouring Syria. The last time their excuse was to “destroy weapons of mass destruction.” Weapons which were proven to be non-existent! This time their excuse is “fighting terrorism.” That was the same excuse that the NATO and Australian rulers used for invading Afghanistan. At the height of that occupation of Afghanistan, these forces were killing over 1,000 Afghan civilians per year. Their current intervention in the Middle East will be little different – at best. In their very first air strike alone on Syria, the U.S.-led forces killed eight civilians, including three children. By the end of October, there had been over 600 such airstrikes.

This intervention is also bad for working class people living in countries that are party to these attacks. The state institutions in Australia, just like in the U.S.A, serve the interests not of their whole populations but of a small class of wealthy corporate exploiters. If these regimes succeed in imposing their will in Syria and Iraq it will, inevitably, embolden them at home too. They will even more viciously attack our trade unions, sell off public housing and drive young people who lose their jobs into starvation. It will encourage them to still more arrogantly subjugate Aboriginal people and persecute Muslims and refugees. Meanwhile, the war fever and the “terrorism” hysteria associated with it has helped Abbott to churn up a rabid nationalist and racist climate that has helped him to divert mass frustrations away from his government’s anti-working class budget. The terror threat hype has also helped the government – with the ALP’s backing – to push through vicious “anti-terror” laws. The ultimate target of these “anti-terror” laws is the workers movement, the Left and Aboriginal and other anti-racist movements. In particular, as the ruling class gears up for union-busting attacks against the CFMEU construction workers’ union, the new laws will be used to further persecute CFMEU activists in the manner of existing anti-union, building industry laws.
Abbott and Shorten’s claim that this war is all about stopping ISIS is disproven by the fact that ISIS was one of the Syrian “Rebel” groups trained by Washington – both in covert camps in Jordan and via its Turkish allies – for the sake of its proxy war against Syria. How little this war has to do with stopping extreme religious terror is highlighted by the fact that one of the close U.S. allies supposedly trying to stop the so-called “Islamic State” is itself the most savage, fundamentalist “Islamic State” already in existence today: Saudi Arabia where women are forbidden from driving cars and where hundreds have been publicly beheaded in the last few years.
For Washington, the pretext of stopping ISIS allows them another chance to hammer the strategic Middle East into total subordination. They want U.S. companies to have an exclusive grip on the oil valves. The Western imperialists also unleash this latest aggression in order to accomplish a longstanding push to depose the Syrian government which, although itself capitalist, is not nearly compliant enough for them to accept. Thus, as part of its war, the U.S.A has supplemented its covert backing for anti-government Syrian “Rebels” by instituting a massive plan to openly arm these proxies. Indeed, it is likely that the U.S. will eventually slide over from hitting ISIS to attacking Syrian government forces.
The greater the chunks of the Middle East that the Western powers seize between their jaws, the more that it will feed their appetite to openly devour other parts of the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, every bomb landed by the U.S. and Australia in the Middle East will reverberate at home - making it harder for unionists, Aboriginal people, embattled “ethnic” communities and women’s rights activists to stand up for our rights. We must urgently mobilise against this intervention! As the November 29 rally is the first action called in all of Australia to clearly oppose the entire U.S. and Australian intervention in both Syria and Iraq - including their arming of their Syrian "Rebel" proxies - it is crucial that all those who understand the need to oppose this latest imperialist war work hard to build and participate in this action.

Obama, Abbott and Shorten claim that this war is solely against ISIS. But ISIS only became strong because they were one of the Syrian “Rebel” groups trained and built up by Washington in its proxy war against the Syrian government. U.S. support for ISIS had been so blatant that prominent U.S. senator, John McCain, expressed support to ISIS leaders in a meeting with the Syrian “Rebels” as recently as May last year. At the time the meeting was shown on CNN (see Above) where McCain is featured talking to none other than ISIS leader – “The Caliph” – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (see encircled)!