US hands off Syria! US troops out of Mideast!

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, 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 cynically 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.

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:
Washington escalates war in Syria, Mideast

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