U.S. imperialism out of Mideast!

Today’s refugee crisis — the displacement by war of millions in Syria and Iraq as well as working people fleeing depression conditions wreaking havoc in North Africa — is a symptom of the world crisis of capitalism and the result of years of imperialist military assaults in the Mideast.

In their quest to impose a new imperialist order — as the one put together by the victors of two World Wars unravels — the U.S. rulers have forged an alliance with Moscow and Tehran that has resulted in shoring up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Washington, which invaded Iraq twice in the last quarter-century and has troops in Afghanistan, is stepping up bombing of areas in Iraq and Syria where Islamic State took advantage of the coming apart of those countries to establish its repressive, anti-working-class rule.

The road forward in that region, as in the imperialist countries, is to unite workers and farmers regardless of nationality or religious belief, and gain the confidence and experience to be able to replace the capitalist rulers, including forces like Islamic State. This can only be done by forging communist parties rooted in the working class that draw on the continuity of the international revolutionary movement since the time of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Workers in the U.S. and around the world need to demand that Washington and its allies get their troops and warplanes out of the Mideast. They are an obstacle to working people in the region building the leadership they need to fight against the Syrian regime, Islamic State and other oppressors and exploiters.

There is no easy road forward there or here, but there is no other road. The example set by workers and farmers in Cuba shows it is possible. With a proletarian leadership of the highest caliber, they made a socialist revolution nearly 60 years ago and have defended it ever since, while giving solidarity to workers from Algeria and Angola to Vietnam and Venezuela.

The labor movement in the U.S. and other imperialist centers needs to reject attempts by the bosses and their political parties to pit us against each other based on where we were born, our religion or the color of our skin. We need to see each other as fellow workers — not refugees, immigrants, native born — and fight together to organize unions, demand public works jobs programs, fight government scapegoating attacks on Muslims and mosques and oppose imperialist war. It is on this path that we can build the kind of internationalist proletarian movement of new men and women capable of replacing dog-eat-dog capitalism with a society based on values of human solidarity.

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