Donald Trump drove out one rival for the Republican presidential nomination and built on his commanding lead, while Hillary Clinton withstood a second surge by radical rival Bernie Sanders to become an even stronger favourite, in what may be remembered as the pivotal day of the 2016 presidential primaries.
In different ways, fear defines the campaigns of both frontrunners.
From the start of his campaign, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/12/10/why-does-anyone-support-this-racist">Trump has appealed directly to scaremongering and scapegoating</a>. More than anything else, he preys on despair and discontent among voters on the right, including with leaders of the Republican Party – and he directs the blame at the most vulnerable people in society.
Clinton’s manipulation of the fears of Democratic voters is more complicated. With a general election against Trump in mind, she is already trying to turn herself into a candidate of “hope” who can “make America whole again”, <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-quick-cuts/watch/clinton-let-s-make-america-whole-again-632828483536">as she claimed earlier this month</a>.
But first, Clinton has to overcome Sanders’ challenge by taming the enthusiasm he generated among millions of people who want to see a change in the Washington status quo. Despite her decades as <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/04/a-champion-for-the-other-side">a fixture in the leadership of Democratic Party as it galloped right</a>, Clinton now claims to be a “progressive” – but one “who likes to get things done.”
When Sanders threatened to make the Democratic primaries more than a coronation-in-advance by winning support for an agenda he unapologetically describes as socialist, Clinton and her supporters among party leaders stooped to smears and misrepresentations. <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/28/dont-vote-for-what-you-want-campaign">Their message was simple</a>: Don’t vote your hopes, but your fears – not for the candidate you agree with, but the one who claims she can stop the Republicans.
More protests against Trump are welcome but it’s important that the left recognise cynical attempts to whip up Trump-phobia in order to generate enthusiasm for Clinton that she is incapable of generating herself.
In the 15 March primaries, Trump drove out his Republican opponent who was seen as the strongest candidate against the Democrats in November – Marco Rubio suffered a humiliating defeat in his home state of Florida and suspended his campaign.
But the GOP race shouldn’t be considered over yet. Ted Cruz, the favourite of the Tea Partying Republican Right, kept pace with Trump in Missouri and North Carolina and is still within striking distance in the delegate count, while home-field advantage in Ohio came through for John Kasich. <a href="http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/">Trump is on target to win a bare majority of delegates to the Republican convention</a> in July, but it’s a long time between then and now, especially with much of the party leadership still hoping that he will fail.
By contrast, Clinton has returned to status of prohibitive favourite to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sanders’ upset victory in the previous week’s Michigan primary stopped the media from writing off the rest of the campaign, but even then, Clinton was padding her substantial lead in convention delegates – and that’s before counting <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/02/23/the-democrats-versus-democracy">the Democrats’ undemocratic “superdelegates”</a>.
On Tuesday, Sanders tied Clinton in Missouri and managed a narrow defeat in Illinois, but Clinton won by double-digit margins in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. As in Michigan, Sanders did better than previously among African American voters, but the youth vote that propelled his biggest successes wasn’t as big a factor this time around.
The calls will continue for Sanders to drop out and unite behind the presumptive nominee, and Sanders will almost certainly reject them, as will supporters in states like Wisconsin, who will want to have their say.
But another moment is coming, just as certainly: The moment when Sanders honours his repeated promise to support the eventual Democratic nominee for president, despite his increasingly strident criticisms of Hillary Clinton. That same moment will put a question to all the people who voted for Sanders as an alternative to politics as usual: Will they be content to see their hope for a “political revolution” reduced to a vote for another “lesser evil” in November, or will they seek something more.
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Back in October, MSNBC predicted that the Republican race for the presidential nomination <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/marco-rubio-vs-jeb-bush-the-inevitable-gop-showdown-arrives">would be decided by an “inevitable showdown”</a> between two well-connected Florida politicians.
“After a campaign dominated for months by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s various feuds, a new rivalry is taking centre stage that may ultimately have a far bigger impact on the GOP race: Jeb Bush versus Marco Rubio”.
Not so much.
Even by then, Bush was proving to be a human vacancy, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/politics/jeb-bush-sprints-to-escape-donald-trumps-low-energy-label.html">unable to stand up to Trump’s silly taunts</a> that he had “low energy” or – more to the point – prove that he had any solid answers to basic questions, like what he thought of <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/17/jeb_bushs_gigantic_iraq_fail_why_hes_handling_his_brothers_toxic_legacy_in_just_about_the_worst_way_possible/">his brother’s disastrous war in Iraq</a>.
When Bush wilted, Rubio became the candidate to beat according to convention wisdom, since Trump would surely fade away. A Latino who became a senator in the Tea Party wave election of 2010, Rubio was seen as an ideal candidate for a party looking to show that it could make its reactionary message appeal to a multiracial voting base.
Only the GOP dream candidate turned out to be useless. It began with the New Hampshire debate where Rubio did an excellent Saturday Night Live-style satire of himself, a <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/6/10929416/republican-debate-marco-rubio">computer-generated Republican candidate</a> capable only of repeating the same complaint about Barack Obama.
As his campaign began to tank over the coming weeks, Rubio tried to regain momentum by taunting Trump about his hair and the size of his … hands. Rubio’s idea of wit – “Donald Trump likes to sue people. He should sue whoever did that to his face” – actually made the billionaire reality TV star look presidential by comparison.
It’s doubtful that Rubio would have won even without these gaffes, and not only because he exudes phoniness from every pore. Rubio may well have cost himself a shot at the presidential nomination three years ago when he joined a bipartisan group of senators trying to pass “comprehensive immigration reform”, In a primary race where the GOP candidates competed at uttering the most offensive slurs against immigrants, Rubio was easily painted as a sell out.
The failed immigration legislation Rubio tried to sell was <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/15/a-comprehensive-lie-to-immigrants">incredibly draconian toward undocumented immigrants</a>. That it helped doom his presidential chances is another sign of just how far the one-time first party of American capitalism has been dragged to the right – though not without shifting the whole political spectrum along with it.
And now Donald Trump has crashed the party.
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The campaign among leading Republicans to derail Trump in recent weeks has been remarkable – in both its size and its utter ineffectiveness.
Among other luminaries, Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg warned of the dangers of Trump winning the presidential nomination, which seems only to have confirmed the confidence of Trump supporters that they must be doing the right thing. <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-attack-ads-are-finally-popping-up-but-they-might-be-too-late/">According to the FiveThirtyEight website</a>, more than 1,700 anti-Trump TV ads ran in Florida before the 15 March vote, yet Trump still won by almost 20 percentage points.
As Trump further cements his lead, it’s important to remember that he’s still only winning around 40 percent of the vote in each state. He hasn’t so much taken over the Republican Party as taken advantage – of the divide between the hard-core right wingers represented by the likes of Cruz, and the still-right-wing-but-slightly-less-fanatically-committed-to-obstructionism-at-all-costs wing of Rubio and Kasich.
Even now that Rubio has bowed out, the anti-Trump opposition will still be divided between Cruz and Kasich. So while it remains hard to imagine that the “Grand Old Party” would put forward a presidential candidate who considered <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/272822-trump-im-looking-into-paying-legal-fees-of-supporter-who">paying the legal expenses of a supporter who sucker-punched a protester</a>, it’s even harder to see how they will stop Trump.
In fact, the people who have been most effective at halting Trump’s momentum aren’t Republicans at all. They are the young Chicagoans who organised <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/14/how-chicago-dumped-trump">a protest of thousands that forced Trump to cancel his scheduled rally</a> earlier this month at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The Chicago protest was a classic case of a bully getting exposed, and it resonated across the country as an expression of disgust with Trump. It’s no coincidence that it took place in a city that was the site of the first of the immigrant rights mega-marches 10 years ago, the historic teachers strike in 2012 and the daily protests late last year against mayor (and close Clinton ally) Rahm Emanuel over the murderous actions of the Chicago police.
Liberal organisations behind both Clinton and Sanders are trying to use the momentum of Chicago to call on supporters to keep rallying against Trump – while simultaneously working to get out the vote against the Republicans in November.
More protests against Trump are welcome – <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/215738695442862/">including the rally planned for New York City this Saturday</a>. But it’s important that the left recognise cynical attempts to whip up Trump-phobia in order to generate enthusiasm for Clinton that she is incapable of generating herself.
Trump – who, after all, has no record of being passionate about any cause other than his own wealth and celebrity – might try to move to the centre if he is the Republican nominee in a general election.
But even if he doesn’t, the best way to combat the hatred he promotes is not to support a candidate like Hillary Clinton, whose defence of mass deportations and endless war in the Muslim world has helped make Trump more legitimate. The best way to fight back is to follow the lead of Chicago and organise our own resistance.
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So what about the Democratic side?
<a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/march-15-primaries-ohio-florida-results-presidential-election-2016/">According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight</a>, the 15 March Democratic primaries were “great night for … polls.” After the epic fail on Michigan a week before, Silver was heaving a sigh of relief that the pundit industry’s chief export wasn’t needing to be recalled for being completely defective.
But for Sanders supporters, 15 March was a lousy night. The final returns in Missouri apparently gave Clinton a razor-thin victory, giving her campaign a clean sweep of five contests. Illinois was closer than expected, perhaps because of the energy of the anti-Trump protest – but Sanders was beaten badly in Ohio, where supporters hoped to duplicate the Michigan upset.
Still, it’s worth remembering just how far Sanders has come. Just two months ago, it was only dawning on the media and political elite that “the Bern” evident in the huge turnouts at Sanders campaign events <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/02/02/iowas-radical-message">might translate into a vote that could shake Clinton’s iron grip on the nomination</a>.
And as the primaries have gone on, Sanders has shown a greater combativeness toward Hillary Clinton and the party establishment.
In Illinois, for example, Sanders came out in support of the 1 April day of action for education justice called by the Chicago Teachers Union. And he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/12/tough-words-from-bernie-sanders-on-rahm-emanuel">blasted Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel</a>, telling the New York Times: “Hillary Clinton proudly lists mayor Rahm Emanuel as one of her leading mayoral endorsers. Well, let me be as clear as I can be: based on his disastrous record as mayor of the city of Chicago, I do not want mayor Emanuel’s endorsement if I win the Democratic nomination”.
Sanders likewise <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/12/sanders-hatred-and-division-not-his-campaign-inspired-the-trump-protest-in-chicago/">refused to condemn the protesters at Trump’s Chicago rally</a>, putting the blame squarely on a campaign that “has promoted hatred and division against Latinos, Muslims, women and people with disabilities, and his birther attacks against the legitimacy of President Obama”.
That was a stark contrast to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/12/hillary-clinton-draws-criticism-for-her-response-to-violence-at-trumps-chicago-rally/">Clinton’s terrible statement</a> that basically conflated the pro- and anti-Trump sides at the rally.
In reality, Hillary Clinton isn’t a much better candidate than Marco Rubio once was. But as this primary season has demonstrated, Clinton’s overwhelming support from the Democratic Party apparatus, from top to bottom, gives her a huge advantage, despite the genuine enthusiasm that Sanders has generated.
Many Sanders supporters hope their candidate’s long-shot success can achieve more than kind words and a photo op at the Democratic convention in late July. As <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/bernie-hillary-and-the-new-democratic-party">Ryan Lizza wrote for the New Yorker</a>:
“If Sanders arrives at the Convention with a sufficient number of primary victories and between a third and half of the delegates, he will also be able to influence the Party’s platform. His advisers told me that Sanders will fight for more anti-free-trade measures, a commitment to campaign-finance reform, and breaking up big banks.”
The problem, though, is that convention platform planks mean nothing to Democratic leaders, whether elected to office or part of the party’s apparatus. Consider, for example, that the Democratic platform long favoured the kind of single-payer health care system that Sanders now advocates – and Clinton and other party leaders dismiss as utopian – but nothing was done about to achieve it.
The Democratic campaign isn’t over. Sanders is expected to do well in primaries to come over the next weeks, even if he is further than ever from stopping Clinton from becoming the nominee. And Election 2016 is likely to see continued protest against Donald Trump now that the Chicago demonstration has opened the way – and that’s not to mention the points of struggle beyond the election.
Nevertheless, 15 March has brought the test of Bernie Sanders’ real commitment to a “political revolution” closer: will he support – and urge his followers to support – a candidate who is the epitome of the two-party system against which he called on people to rebel?
It matters what socialists say and do now in preparing for the struggles ahead, when – as always – our enemies will be not only fanatical Republicans, but Democrats who claim to be on our side.

Danny Katch

Alan Maass

Fear has a good day on the US presidential campaign trail

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may have ended up in a tie in the Iowa caucuses, but the winner of the first primary contest for the Democratic presidential nomination was the socialist from Vermont.
Sanders was dismissed as a well-meaning but irrelevant protest candidate for much of last year, then <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/28/dont-vote-for-what-you-want-campaign">smeared for being too radical when he surged in opinion polls</a>. But the heir of a political dynasty and anointed choice of the Democratic establishment, who was thought to have Iowa wired for victory a year ago, couldn’t beat him.
Sanders’ showing in a “heartland” state against overwhelming odds is further evidence of the massive discontent with the political status quo in the US – and proof that the myth of America as an essentially right wing society is just that: a myth.
The results of the Republican caucuses in Iowa show a different face of the discontent with the status quo. Texas senator and Tea Party favourite Ted Cruz upset the frontrunner in opinion polls, Donald Trump, to win the GOP contest, and Florida senator Marco Rubio nearly pushed Trump into third place. Both Cruz and Trump claim to be right wing renegades, opposed to the conventional Republican Party establishment.
Cruz’s victory is the start of what is certain to be a long bruising battle for the Republican nomination.
But the more unexpected outcome is that the Democratic race will be drawn out, too. Sanders will almost certainly win the next primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday. He’s still a long shot to win the nomination of a party whose leaders are dead-set against him. But his campaign – based on calling attention to widening inequality, growing poverty and social injustice – is changing the shape of Election 2016.
Monday supposed to be the day that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush – remember him? – took the first steps toward coronation as the next in line for the American throne.
Days after Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83550_Page2.html">Politico reported that both Clinton and Bush had a cadre of backers</a> who were already discussing 2016 before the votes were tallied on Election Day.
Two years later, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/wall-street-republicans-hillary-clinton-2016-106070">Politico quoted Wall Street executives licking their chops</a> at the prospect of a Bush-Clinton election. “If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary, we would love that, and either outcome would be fine”, one Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer confided to a Politico reporter over lunch.
But the party insiders and Wall Street executives have lost their confident grip on this election.
On the Republican side, the first- and second-place finishers in Iowa, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, are generally loathed by party leaders. Not because the GOP establishment objects to either one’s right wing fanaticism, including their sickening racism and sexism, but because their open bigotry harms the image of the first party of American capital – and, probably more importantly, because both are willing to stab any other Republican in the back if it helps them get ahead.
Marco Rubio did much better than expected in Iowa, nearly pushing Trump into third place. That might be enough to make him the unity candidate for the party’s leadership to rally behind.
There’s a long way to go before the Republican convention, and plenty of time for Rubio or some other conventional candidate to take down Cruz and Trump. But for now, it’s a telling symbol of US politics today that the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination are two maniacs despised by the leaders of their party.
But as strange as that may seem, the shape of the Democratic contest after Iowa is more surprising in certain respects. In a state where she was supposed to have superior organisation and endless resources, Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street favorite and long-presumed nominee, couldn’t stop a formerly little-known Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist.
When Sanders announced he would seek the presidential nomination last spring, it was a clear and welcome sign of the discontent with the two-party status quo in general – and the triangulating, neoliberalified Democratic Party in particular – when he got huge crowds at his rallies and recruited hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers.
But pretty much no one – <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/27/an-faq-on-sanders-and-the-left">Socialist Worker included</a> – guessed that the wave of discontent could lift him to more than perhaps a single victory in New Hampshire, next to his home state of Vermont.
Now, Sanders’ near-victory in Iowa – and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/31/bernie-sanderss-campaign-says-it-raised-20-million-in-last-month/">the impressive $20 million that his campaign raised in January</a>, mostly from small donations – gives him a chance to win over the voting blocs in Southern states that dominate Super Tuesday primaries on 1 March, where Hillary Clinton has been expecting to lock up the nomination.
Like the Republican race, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Sanders first announced, the infinitely better funded and better connected Clinton almost welcomed him into the race – on the assumption that he would make his fiery speeches about economic inequality and energise the party’s liberal voting base, which would ultimately fall in line behind the “inevitable” nominee. After all, Sanders himself <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/05/problem-bernie-sanders">promised that he would support whoever the Democrats nominate for the presidency</a>, and oppose any third-party independent challenge.
But the Sanders crowds kept growing. When the Democratic National Committee <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/05/behind-the-dnc-attack-on-sanders">seemed to unfairly punish Sanders’ campaign over a mailing list controversy</a>, it galvanised supporters with a clear example of how the party leadership tilts the scales toward its preferred candidate.
In January, with Sanders continuing to rise in the polls in Iowa and nationally, panic set in. There was a wave of attacks on the Vermont socialist from leading Democratic liberals and media commentators. Sanders was criticised for a range of positions, from health care to fighting racism, but the overall message was that his identification with socialism and talk of a “political revolution” made him non-viable in the general election.
These articles were the first salvo of what will be many directed at left-leaning voters – demanding that they be “realistic” and support the strongest possible Democrat to defeat the greater evil of the Republicans in the fall.
The most direct and well-known application of the logic of “lesser evilism” comes in general elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. But the Democratic establishment wants its voters in the right mindset for the primaries, too – as the prime argument for why they should vote for the “pragmatic” choice, even though Hillary Clinton represents the kind of compromising that the party’s base is fed up with.
These pleas for “realism” are a remarkable statement about how the political system is rigged to preserve the status quo.
“In real life”, <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-18/sanders-s-siren-song-in-the-democratic-debate">claimed Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein in a typical article</a>, “all politicians in the US political system are going to come up short of their promises – not because they’re corrupt, but because the system is designed to favour of the status quo. Incremental change is all that is possible”.
This conventional wisdom is exactly why Sanders has generated so much excitement – his campaign represents hope for the opposite.
Over the coming weeks and months, some Sanders supporters may be persuaded to give in to “real life” and back Clinton – but many others will be bolstered in their conviction that a system designed to favour a rotten and unequal status quo truly does need the “political revolution” Sanders is calling for.
Sanders’ victory has demonstrated a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo – and an openness to radical talk of socialism and revolution, even when they’re used to describe far-from-revolutionary political positions that more closely resemble the Democratic Party’s liberal past. And that’s not to mention issues like foreign policy, where he is indistinguishable from conventional mainstream Democrats and even a few moderate Republicans.
Still, Sanders’ showing in Iowa blasts open the lie that America is a fundamentally conservative country – as will happen again if Sanders wins, as expected, in New Hampshire next Tuesday.
Even with a big win in New Hampshire, Sanders is still the underdog. The primary schedule is frontloaded with Southern states where Sanders will be starting from well behind – even further than he was in Iowa.
Then there’s the stark fact that one in seven votes at the Democrats’ convention to nominate a presidential candidate go to “superdelegates” – unelected party insiders <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/11/13/455812702/clinton-has-45-to-1-superdelegate-advantage-over-sanders">most of whom are already pledging their support to Clinton</a>.
Sanders will come under even more frenzied attacks from the party establishment, with plenty of well-known progressive voices enlisted for the cause. There will be an increase in slander and outright lies – but mostly an intensification of the lesser evil argument.
The more they attack Sanders and the more they rely on their insider advantages to give Clinton an edge, the more party leaders will show that there is nothing democratic about the Democratic Party.
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/01/27/pelosi-dismisses-portions-of-sanderss-tax-and-health-care-agenda-saying-its-not-going-to-happen/">House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi couldn’t have made that clearer</a> when she declared that there is “no use having a conversation about something that’s not going to happen”. She was referring to Sanders’ popular proposal for single-payer health care, a far superior system to the disastrous Obama health care law.
But Pelosi and co. are making it clear that the “party of the people” won’t fight for a real transformation of the US health care system.
“God bless all the people who have gotten enthusiastic”, Pelosi condescendingly smirked about Sanders supporters. “The fact is that Bernie Sanders is enlarging the universe of people who are paying attention to the election, and we hope that he will bring them to the polls in November to support the Democratic nominee.”
Pelosi expects Sanders to demonstrate loyalty to a party whose leaders and ideological mouthpieces are shouting for all to hear that they wouldn’t support Sanders’ policies if he somehow did become the Democrats’ presidential nominee.
And unfortunately, Sanders has made it clear from the beginning of his campaign that if he does lose the nomination, that’s just what he’ll do – support the Democratic nominee, rather than turning his campaign into an independent run or supporting a genuine left wing candidate like the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
In the most unpredictable presidential election in at least a generation, there are undoubtedly more twists to come. Sanders may continue to mount a strong challenge and provoke bitter conflict within the Democratic Party – while the Republicans potentially coalesce behind a consensus candidate.
Or Clinton could take firm control of the race after the “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses, forcing Sanders supporters to ask themselves if they are going to follow their candidate behind support for Clinton, or try to continue the fight for a political revolution that he promised.
But for now, the biggest news of the night – bigger than Ted Cruz’s “upset” or Donald Trump’s underwhelming total or Marco Rubio’s surge – was that a democratic socialist candidate fought the previously presumptive Democratic nominee to a draw.

The radical message coming out of the US presidential race

Alan Maass and Tom Gagné look at what led to the massacre in Turkey’s capital city, in an article written for US website <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>.
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The horrific bombing of a peace march in Ankara is the latest escalation of a deadly war on the Kurdish movement and the left in Turkey. Whoever is directly responsible for this mass murder, the US-backed government of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has blood on its hands.
By late Sunday, 36 hours after two explosions, apparently detonated by suicide bombers, ripped through a crowd outside Ankara’s central train station, the death toll had risen to 128, with hundreds more injured.
Thousands of people had gathered that Saturday morning for a march and rally to protest months of worsening violence, largely committed by the Turkish government against Kurdish opponents. The demonstration was called by an alliance of unions and left and progressive organisations, including the Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions, Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions, Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, and Turkish Medical Association.
“It was a peaceful demonstration”, wrote Arife Kose, a Turkish activist and member of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, in <a href="http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/41460/Peace+was+bombed+in+Turkey+-+eyewitness+report+from+Ankara">an eyewitness report for Socialist Worker in Britain</a>. “We were not carrying guns or sticks, only our banners and peace flags. Then came the explosions.”
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According to reports, the blasts occurred at the designated gathering point for the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) – an alliance of pro-Kurdish and left wing forces <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/18/the-left-advances-in-turkeys-election">whose dramatic success in the June general elections has upended Turkish politics</a> and caused a crisis for the Erdoğan government, which was denied a parliamentary majority to continue its effective one-party rule.
Last July, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/07/22/the-massacre-in-suruc">a suicide bomber struck at a gathering of pro-Kurdish youth organisations in the town of Suruç</a> on the southern border with Syria, killing 32 people. That attack was blamed on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), whose war to establish a Sunni “caliphate” has targeted, among others, Kurds in both countries – most notoriously, during the siege of Kobanê, a city in northern Syria across the border from Suruç, which Kurdish fighters successfully defended against ISIS.
But as the HDP and others pointed out at the time, the bombing coincided with the AKP government’s crackdown against the Kurdish movement and other political opponents following its election setback – and the ruling party’s attempt to rebuild popular support with scaremongering about threats to national security.
Now, with new elections set for 1 November, the terrorist violence against Kurds and the left has struck in the capital city of Ankara, and with an even higher toll.
Yet the HDP’s enemies blamed the victims of this barbaric assault. Prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu stated that the government suspected not only ISIS, but possibly Kurdish rebels and radical left groups. Veysel Eroğlu, the minister for forestry and water, went further, <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-11/turkey-plays-politics-with-terrorism-bombing">blaming organisers of the peace march for causing violence</a>. “Our people need to be careful of such provocateurs that organise terrorist demonstrations in order to incite discord in social harmony,” he said.
The government’s sickening attitude was plain from within minutes of the attack. <a href="https://hdpenglish.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/ankara-bomb-attack-to-the-peace-meeting-3/">An HDP statement issued later on Saturday</a> pointed out that “there were no police around the crime scene when the explosions occurred. The riot police arrived at the site 15 minutes later. But when they arrived, they used tear gas grenades against people who intended to help the injured”.
One man who learned from Facebook that his nephew had been killed <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-bomb-blasts-ankara-mourning-scores-killed">described how people who came to the plaza faced police violence</a>. “These are our children, and they would not let us help them”, he told a Guardian reporter. “I saw arms, legs and heads severed from their bodies.”
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-bomb-blasts-ankara-mourning-scores-killed">HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş responded angrily</a> after he was accused of exploiting the bombings for electoral gain: “Who are you to keep threatening us? We will not allow you to kill us like this, day after day. We are the ones who are dying. We are the police, the soldiers; we are the Kurds and the Turks who are dying. Your children are not the ones that are killed. That is why we are not the ones who should be held responsible, but you are”.
The next day in Ankara, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-bomb-blasts-ankara-mourning-scores-killed">more than 1,000 people came to the site of the bombings to mourn the victims</a> and send the message that the Erdoğan government must be held responsible. In Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, as many as 10,000 people marched down a central avenue to denounce the attack. There were solidarity demonstrations numbering in the hundreds and thousands in several European cities.
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The twin bomb blasts in Ankara evoke memories of past episodes of political violence in Turkey – battles between far right nationalists and left wing organisations during the 1970s, which served as a justification for the military to carry out coups in 1971 and 1980, as well as the three-decade-long war between the government and the insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), estimated to have cost 40,000 lives.
Erdoğan no doubt wanted to play on the widespread fears of a return to violence with his statement calling for “national unity” in the face of terrorism: “I fiercely condemn the hateful attack against our unity and solidarity and our country’s peace … There is no difference between the previous attacks against our soldiers, police officers, village guards, public officials and innocent citizens, and this terrorist attack against civilians at Ankara train station today”.
But there are differences. For one, the ruthless war on Kurds and the pro-democracy movement, centred specifically on the HDP now, has claimed many more victims. For another, the AKP government has a stake in the violence against the left continuing, as <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/turkey-bombing-ankara-many-will-have-seen-this-attack-coming">Simon Tisdall explained in a Guardian analysis</a>:
“Many in Turkey accuse Erdoğan of deliberately fuelling a reviving conflict with militant Kurdish groups, including the outlawed PKK, ‎in order to scare voters into supporting his law-and-order, security-first platform in the coming elections. If he succeeds, it is argued, he will seize more powers for the presidency and promote himself as a sort of modern-day Sublime Porte. Thus, it is suggested, the last thing Erdoğan really wants at this juncture is a Kurdish peace.”
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Both the HDP’s growing profile and the AKP’s crisis date in particular from <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/06/03/spring-comes-to-turkey">the Gezi Park rebellion in spring 2013</a>, the so-called Turkish Spring.
When activists in Istanbul organised a small, peaceful occupation to protect Gezi Park – one of the last remaining green spaces in the huge city, slated to be bulldozed in the AKP’s latest “urban renewal” project – the government responded with a massive police crackdown. This sparked mass protests that spread across Istanbul and then around the country. <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/18/the-left-advances-in-turkeys-election">As SocialistWorker.org reported</a>:
“The demonstrations were a lightning rod for other grievances with the AKP and its neoliberal policies, which have massively increased inequality – the richest 1 percent of Turkey’s population now own 54 percent of the country’s wealth, up from 39 percent when the AKP came to power 14 years ago …
“The following year, protests in response to revelations of corruption involving top AKP officials, with close connections to Erdoğan, threatened a repeat of the Gezi upsurge. A few months later, when an explosion and underground fire in a coal mine in Soma in the western province of Manisa killed 301 miners, the government’s callous and negligent behaviour further alienated working people.”
This set the stage for the HDP’s election breakthrough. The left wing party’s base is among Kurds, an oppressed minority spread across not only Turkey, where they account for about 20 percent of the population, but Iran, Iraq and Syria. However, because of the post-Gezi radicalisation, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/01/the-tide-turns-against-turkeys-rulers">the HDP was able to win support</a> from other religious and ethnic minorities, such as Yazidis and Armenians, as well as the radical left and secular moderates outside Kurdish areas.
This is precisely the cross-section of the population that gathered last Saturday in Ankara to march for peace.
Despite a campaign of intimidation and violence before the June general elections, the HDP was able to win 13.1 percent of the vote, easily surpassing the 10 percent threshold for a party to qualify for seats in parliament. This extra-high percentage was put into the constitution during the military dictatorship specifically to keep Kurdish and left representation out of parliament – so the HDP challenge, with its mobilisation of wider support in Turkish society, is a historic achievement.
At 40.9 percent, the AKP still won the most votes in the June election, but the HDP’s success denied the former ruling party an outright majority in parliament – and with it, Erdoğan’s plans to rewrite the country’s constitution to give the presidency greater powers.
When prime minister Davutoğlu failed to gain support from other opposition parties for a coalition government, new elections were set for 1 November – and the regime immediately intensified political repression and state violence. Its aim is to create an atmosphere of chaos and crisis – both to win votes from the nationalist right and to reduce, by whatever means it can muster, the turnout for the left wing HDP below the 10 percent threshold.
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This – along with the overwhelming international solidarity with the Kobanê resistance in northern Syria – explains why <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/14/erdogans-cynical-new-war">the AKP restarted the government’s brutal war on the Kurds</a>.
Previously, in addition to implementing various social welfare measures that gave the AKP’s centre-right political Islamism a populist sheen, the AKP won support from a war-weary society by initiating a peace process with the PKK. But now, the government has suspended negotiations toward a settlement of the conflict and intensified military operations.
In this, Turkey has the support of the US government. In return for Washington’s support for attacking the Kurds, the Erdoğan government began participating in the war on ISIS and gave the US military access to Turkish air bases in the south – though Turkey’s main sights are still set on the Kurdish armed resistance. Meanwhile, the AKP began a campaign to paint the HDP as terrorists who want to see the destruction of a “united” Turkish state.
The day after the slaughter in Ankara, the PKK announced a unilateral ceasefire in the run-up to election. Not only did the government disregard the ceasefire, but it ordered new air strikes by Turkish fighter jets against PKK positions that very day, killing 49 “Kurdish militants”, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-election-go-ahead-ankara-bombing">according to the government’s claims</a>.
When it was time for the White House to respond to the carnage in Ankara this weekend, Obama contacted not the AKP’s opponents, but Erdoğan himself, to affirm that the US would “stand with Turkey and its people in the fight against terrorism and other security challenges in the region”.
But the Turkish government’s “fight against terrorism” is responsible for the horrific attack on a march for peace. It may be that ISIS planned and executed the bombings. It’s also possible that far right nationalist groups – which have a long history of inflicting violence on Kurds and the left – or right wing elements in the security apparatus are responsible.
But even so, the AKP government is likely to have at least known that the march was in danger. For certain, its scaremongering contributed to an atmosphere of whipped-up hysteria against the Kurds – and it is now trying to exploit the massacre to justify further authoritarian measures.
As Turkish socialist Arife Kose concluded in her eyewitness report:
“I think there are two reasons for the explosions. First, the Turkish government wants to prevent peace with Kurds and to push the HDP under the threshold in the coming election. After every incident like this, the government accuses Kurdish people and the HDP of being responsible. It wants to cut the unity between Kurdish and Turkish people who want peace.
“The second reason is the situation in the Middle East, particularly Syria. The Turkish government has been very unhappy about the fact that Kurds are making gains in the Middle East. But the foreign policy of the Turkish government and its Western allies is bankrupt. So it punishes Kurds in Turkey …
“The two trade unions that helped organise the peace demonstration have called two days of strikes on Monday and Tuesday … in protest. We’ll do our best to make the strikes successful and big. We demand the interior minister, prime minister and all the officials who were unable to provide for the security of the demonstration must resign.
“We invite everyone who wants peace and democracy to vote for HDP in the coming election. And we say that PEACE WILL WIN!”
[First published at <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>.]

Tom Gagné

Why is peace a threat to Turkey’s rulers?

European governments and financial institutions have kept their stranglehold on Greece after the new government agreed to an extension of the bailout, reports <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a> editor Alan Maass.
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Leaders of the new Greek government face a deadline of today to come up with a program for implementing harsh austerity measures that the radical left-wing party SYRIZA came to power promising to end.
That’s the grim outcome of an agreement struck last week between the government and Eurogroup finance ministers for a four-month extension of the international bailout of the Greek financial system – plus the accompanying conditions that have produced years of state spending cuts; mass layoffs and labor law “reform”; wholesale privatisations; and increases in regressive taxes and fees and fares for government services.
A month ago, SYRIZA won parliamentary elections by a wide margin on the strength of its commitment to reverse these measures. Its leaders who formed the new government in Greece went into the critical negotiations with Europe’s political and financial elite insisting that they wouldn’t extend the bailout, and that they wanted to undo the fiscal and political policies that have plunged Greece’s economy and society into a deep crisis.
But the deal that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis proposed and that the Eurogroup ministers finally approved last week – after extracting yet more concessions – is nothing of the sort. It is much closer to the uncompromising position of the European elite, led by Germany’s hard-line government, that there can be no deviation at all from the austerity agenda agreed to and implemented by past Greek governments.
On most issues, the Eurogroup’s extortion – delivered with typical take-it-or-leave-it contempt for the suffering and opposition of the people of Greece – prevailed.
The Greek government is allowed to come up with a program of measures to meet the targets established under the so-called Memorandum – the commonly used name for the terms accepted by the Greek government five years ago in return for the financial rescue organised by the “Troika” of the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund.
But the Troika – though that despised name is no longer used – will have veto power over those proposals. Varoufakis has a deadline of February 23 to put forward the government’s plan. <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/eea3fdee-ba9e-11e4-945d-00144feab7de.html#axzz3SUvbrpaz">There is media speculation that the Eurogroup ministers will press their advantage</a> and demand still more, setting up another showdown.
A further commitment by the SYRIZA government “to refrain from any rollback of measures and unilateral changes to the policies and structural reforms that would negatively impact fiscal targets, economic recovery or financial stability” is also subject to being “assessed by the institutions”.
Thus, many of the immediate measures that <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2014/12/18/a-new-opening-in-greece">SYRIZA had vowed to carry out once in power</a>, regardless of negotiations with the Troika – restore the previous minimum wage of 751 euros a month, stop and reverse the privatisation of state enterprises and agencies, provide free electricity and food subsidies for 300,000 poor households – could be shut down by the “institutions”, if the government does attempt to carry them out.
The deal with the Eurogroup explicitly maintains close oversight by “foreign advisers” who will be on hand in Athens – “in other words, a cadre of privatisers present at every level of the Greek state, imposing advice on the elected politicians and reporting back to the eurozone on any non-cooperation with policies of intensified austerity”, <a href="https://livesrunning.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/when-a-pause-may-be-the-best-that-could-be-acheived/">as socialist blogger David Renton put it</a>.
By comparison, what are described as concessions by the Eurogroup ministers are less significant – and in some cases, merely a recognition of reality. For example, the Greek government will no longer be bound by a requirement, negotiated back in 2012, to run a primary budget surplus of 4.5 percent for this year – a target so absurd that even the previous pro-austerity government wanted it rescinded.
This will, indeed, <a href="http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/greece-deal-details-wrong-were-finished/3395">give the government some financial resources to fund basic measures</a> for coping with 25 percent unemployment, desperate poverty, electricity cutoffs for hundreds of thousands of homes, and other symptoms of the crisis. Varoufakis will also propose measures to increase government revenues by curbing corruption and changing the tax system to make companies and the rich pay more.
But even if the EU extortionists don’t veto these, the fact remains that the agreement with the Eurogroup leaves Greece squarely under the rule of the hated Memorandum – which is exactly what SYRIZA promised to change.
As Antonis Davanellos, a Greek revolutionary socialist and well-known figure in the Left Platform within SYRIZA, put it in <a href="http://alencontre.org/europe/le-gouvernement-dont-la-colonne-vertebrale-est-syriza-et-la-gauche-ou-en-sommes-nous-aujourdhui.html">an article published at the A l’encontre website last week</a>, as the outlines of Tsipras’s agreement with the Eurogroup were just becoming clear:
“[T]here is, on the one hand, a type of compromise that could be considered honest if it enables SYRIZA to lay out its anti-austerity program. On the other hand, there are compromises that amount to political suicide – if, for example, the Memorandum is simply renamed the ‘program’, and the Troika is renamed for some other monitoring mechanism.”
The odds were always heavily against Varoufakis and Tsipras moving the Eurogroup ministers from their uncompromising attitude. The pressure on the government grew last week when a slow motion run on Greek banks started moving faster – by the end of the week, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/20/eurozone-greece-banks-idUSL5N0VU21F20150220">withdrawals by depositors had hit more than 1 billion euros a day</a>.
Tsipras and Varoufakis built their strategy around the hope of exploiting divisions among EU governments – especially discontent with German leaders’ insistence on all-austerity-all-the-time policies – but these divisions turned out to illusory or exaggerated.
The alternative to complying with Eurogroup blackmail would have been accepting a Greek default and likely exit from the euro currency, returning to the drachma. Most people in Greece would prefer to stay with the euro, and not for sentimental reasons. <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/11/the-euro-or-the-drachma">The economic impact of “Grexit” on ordinary people would be devastating</a>, leading to an immediate currency devaluation that would make workers’ wages – for those who have jobs and actually receive wages – worth less, not to mention depriving the government of resources needed for the most basic programs.
But the question is whether staying with the euro has an even greater cost. The last weeks of negotiations with the Eurogroup make it clear that Greece will only be tolerated in the eurozone if it follows the dictates of Europe’s bankers and bosses and submits to the tyranny of their bureaucrats with veto power over every aspect of government policy.
Voices on the left inside SYRIZA and outside it argued that while a “Grexit” would have dire consequences, this uphill battle with the EU was inevitable – and SYRIZA needed to prepare itself, its supporters and Greek society for breaking with the eurozone if the new government wasn’t allowed to carry out its central commitment to overturn the Memorandum and reverse the austerity program.
<a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/06/democracy-versus-the-bankers">As SocialistWorker.org summarised the conclusion of an editorial </a>, published as the election campaign began, on the website of the Red Network, one of the pillars of the Left Platform:
“Tsipras and the others must stop saying that a left government won’t take unilateral action about the debt or other questions. If and when the Troika refuses to accept SYRIZA’s proposals, in part or in whole, the new government must be prepared to take stronger counter-measures, like taking control of Greek banks – and not just ‘by adding representatives of the state to the board, but real control by taking them over as state property’.”
Instead, during the campaign and in the Eurogroup negotiations afterward, Tsipras and Varoufakis stuck to their position that the rulers of EU could be persuaded to loosen their grip. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/greece-got-outmaneuvered">To the puzzlement of even mainstream commentators</a>, they didn’t even use the threat of “Grexit” – and its negative consequences for the EU – as a negotiating tactic.
No one can seriously dispute the case that Varoufakis and Tsipras made for the EU to take responsibility for the catastrophic crisis it inflicted on Greece and admit the disastrous effects of austerity measures that turned a recession into a full-blown depression.
Since the EU “rescued” the Greek financial system with its bailout, unemployment shot up to more than 25 percent of the population, real wages fell by 30 percent, and the country’s overall economic output has been cut by 25 percent. “And as the Jubilee Debt Campaign recently pointed out, more than half of the bailout funds went not to keep schools and hospitals open, but to repay the private sector speculators, in many cases German and French banks”, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/21/greek-warriors-battered-soldiers-white-flag-eurozone">reported Guardian economics editor Heather Stewart</a>.
Varoufakis was also right in pointing out the hypocrisy of the European Central Bank practically abandoning austerity policies for the eurozone overall with its decision for to begin a 60 billion euro-a-month quantitative easing program, while demanding that Greece keep taking the bitter pills of neoliberalism.
But to paraphrase an old saying, it’s hard to get politicians to understand something when their political standing and the profits of their country’s banks and corporations depend on them believing something else.
That was true across the EU. The German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble certainly led the campaign against Greece, but there was no support for Varoufakis and Tsipras among any of the finance ministers, including countries like Spain and Portugal that have had the same Memorandums imposed on them because of the debt crisis.
These countries may be victims of austerity, too, but the governments running them today have accepted the demands of the Troika, just as previous Greek governments did – so <a href="https://livesrunning.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/when-a-pause-may-be-the-best-that-could-be-acheived/">it would be a political humiliation if Greece managed to win concessions</a>. Plus, SYRIZA leaders have rightly made no secret of their support for radical left alternatives like Podemos, which could defeat the current government in Spain in elections later this year.
So the relentless and unanimous hostility of the Eurogroup – combined with the threat of the banking crisis becoming an outright meltdown by early this week – left Tsipras and Varoufakis with very few cards to play, so long as they refused to raise the specter of a “Grexit”.
What makes their acceptance of a rotten deal worse, however, is Tsipras’s attempt to spin the agreement with the Eurogroup as a victory. “Yesterday, we took a decisive step, leaving austerity, the bailouts and the troika behind”, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/greek-bailout-prime-minister-alexis-tsipras-says-a-battle-has-been-won-but-not-the-war-10061541.html">Tsipras said in a nationally televised speech this weekend</a>.
It’s hard to believe that Tsipras really thinks any of those three has been “left behind”. He knows full well that Germany’s loathsome Wolfgang Schäuble <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/20/eurozone-chiefs-meet-for-last-ditch-talks-to-avert-greece-cash-crunch">gave a more accurate portrayal when he smirked to the media</a>: “The Greeks certainly will have a difficult time explaining the deal to their voters.”
The Greek left, inside SYRIZA and outside it, is under no such illusions.
One of the most powerful criticisms of the government’s capitulation came from 92-year-old Manolis Glezos, a national hero for scaling the Acropolis and ripping down the Nazi flag during the Second World War, and now a member of the European Parliament representing SYRIZA.
<a href="http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2015/02/22/syriza-mep-manolis-glezos-sharply-criticizes-greek-govt-for-negotiations-handling/">In a statement posted on Sunday</a>, Glezos sounded the same themes that Antonis Davanellos had previously about not believing that the Troika and the Memorandum have been “left behind” because they were renamed. He wrote:
“For my part, I apologise to the Greek people for having assisted in this illusion.  Before the wrong direction continues, before it is too late, let’s react.  Above all, the members, the friends and the supporters of SYRIZA have to discuss and decide, in urgent meetings at all levels of the organisation, if they accept this situation.
“Some people say that in any agreement, you must make some concessions. In principle, between the oppressor and the oppressed, there can be no compromise, as there can be no compromise between the slave and the conqueror. Freedom is the only solution.  But even if we accept this absurd idea, the concessions that have already been made by the previous pro-Memorandum governments are beyond the limit of what we should accept.”
Where this kind of challenge from the left can lead – and how to organise it – will certainly be the subject of discussion on the left in the days to come.
There is a strong left inside SYRIZA, the product of years of struggle. It has plenty of disagreements, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/02/11/syriza-and-the-struggles-ahead">including about whether and how to participate in the SYRIZA-led government</a>, but also a determination that the party must stand 100 percent against the Memorandum.
Beyond that is a wider left and workers’ movement that has mobilised some of the biggest class battles of the past decade – more than 30 general strikes, the movement of the squares to occupy public plazas, “Won’t Pay” campaigns and other forms of social resistance. The size and scope of those struggles has ebbed since 2012, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/21/greeces-election-can-turn-the-tide">as the Greek left acknowledges</a>, but there have been ongoing fights, and the example of the high points of resistance to the Memorandum can inspire future confrontations.
In its first days in power, the new government rescinded the layoffs of cleaners at the Finance Ministry, who fought a months-long struggle for their jobs, and promised to reopen the ERT radio and television station occupied by workers after it was closed under by the previous government. If the SYRIZA-led government or the EU overseers – or both – try to take this back, <a href="http://www.leninology.co.uk/2015/02/syrizas-mauling-at-eu-negotiations.html">it could be a flashpoint for the struggle from below to rekindle</a>.
Plus, there is the international dimension – the political and financial institutions of Europe have been exposed once again for their cruel pro-banker priorities and utter contempt for democracy. There is strong solidarity with SYRIZA for finally confronting the austerity agenda in Europe, but that sentiment needs to be organised into a real alternative.
Such a resistance, inside Greece and elsewhere in Europe, won’t automatically re-emerge in the coming days or even weeks. But we know that there’s more to come after this first test of the SYRIZA government.

Syriza tested as noose tightens around Greece

Protest have swept the United States in the wake of a grand jury decision that again affirmed that cops can kill Blacks with impunity. Eighteen year old African American Mike Brown was killed by police in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, on 9 August. Brown had his hands raised in surrender and shouted “Don’t shoot!” when officer Darren Wilson shot the unarmed teen multiple times.
The decision to not indict Wilson comes after a series of killings in recent years, all of which have provoked outrage and demonstrations. In recent months, Ferguson, which is a predominantly Black neighbourhood in St. Louis, has been gripped by mass unrest as the community has mobilised again and again. In this article from US site <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>, Nicole Colson and Alan Maass outline the events.
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Darren Wilson has gotten away with murder – and the American injustice system sent the message once again that Black lives don’t matter.
It was long after dark on 24 November when St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch marched to the microphone and announced that a grand jury had refused to indict the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer on any charge at all for killing 18-year-old Mike Brown on 9 August.
This was the result that millions of people expected, but it was shocking anyway: a white cop who shot more than a dozen bullets at an unarmed African American teenager, killing him, was not only off the hook, but was being portrayed as a victim.
After days of rising tensions as the long-awaited grand jury decision didn’t come, people in Ferguson and around the country erupted in bitter protest. Even while Barack Obama followed McCulloch onto the airwaves to make his own statement urging peace, police fired their first volleys of tear gas and smoke grenades in Ferguson.
The media bemoaned the “violence” in Ferguson when a police car was wrecked and local businesses set on fire – without the slightest recognition of the violence that African Americans living in a city like Ferguson endure on a daily basis, directly at the hands of racist police and indirectly as a result of endemic poverty and unemployment.
Tory Russell, the co-founder of Hands Up United, <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ferguson-activist-to-cnn-police-are-the-ones-who-need-to-keep-calm/">responded firmly when asked in a CNN interview</a> if he was “urging calm” after the decision. Russell replied, “I am urging calm. I’m urging calm for the police officers to not pepper spray me, tear gas me, mace me and shoot rubber bullets … People need to urge the police to be calm. Stop hurting kids, stop traumatising our communities.”
The media vultures had their cameras trained on Ferguson, but there were angry demonstrations around the country after the grand jury decision was announced. In Chicago, hundreds of protesters took over Lake Shore Drive. In Oakland, California, in the largest protest in the Bay Area, the hastily organised solidarity demonstration drew more than 1,000 people who marched through downtown and later blockaded Interstate 580, one of the major routes through the city. Nearly 1,000 turned out to Times Square.
When McCulloch spoke late Monday, he didn’t act like a prosecutor, but a defence attorney … for Darren Wilson.
McCulloch began by complaining about supposedly “inaccurate” speculation on social media, the “trying circumstances” under which law enforcement had to conduct its investigation, and the “unfounded, but growing concern” that the investigation wouldn’t be full or fair. Then he attacked the credibility of numerous eyewitnesses to Mike Brown’s killing, going out of his way to smear any account that differed from Wilson’s, while highlighting those that corroborated Wilson’s.
All to promote the absurd claim that Wilson was under assault by Mike Brown and feared for his life.
According to the story as Wilson and his lawyer McCulloch tell it, the unarmed Brown was pulled over for walking in the middle of the street – and within 15 seconds or so started punching a cop. After being shot at twice, Brown struggled free and ran away from Wilson, but then inexplicably turned around and “charged” at the officer, forcing him to fire a volley of bullets that stopped him. Brown, now hit half a dozen times, “charged” at Wilson again, leaving the cop no choice but to shoot him dead.
Generally, McCulloch’s office presents a grand jury with a specific recommendation for an indictment and an explanation for why the evidence supports the charge. Not this time, though. McCulloch didn’t recommend a charge – and he essentially dumped every shred of physical evidence and testimony onto the grand jury to make their decision. It was a clear sign that the prosecuting attorney was washing his hands of any responsibility in holding Darren Wilson to account.
At his sanctimonious press conference, McCulloch declared that no indictment should be levelled because of “public outcry or political expediency”. Tell that to the Central Park Five – the youth of colour railroaded to prison for a sensational crime amid a lynch mob atmosphere in New York City in the late 1980s.
On the other hand, there are the cases where it’s expedient for the prosecutor to cover up for law enforcement – something McCulloch has some experience with, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-ferguson-tragedy-becoming-a-farce/2014/09/12/e52226ca-3a82-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html">as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported in September</a>:
“During [McCulloch’s 23-year] tenure, there have been at least a dozen fatal shootings by police in his jurisdiction (the roughly 90 municipalities in the county other than St. Louis itself), and probably many more than that, but McCulloch’s office has not prosecuted a single police shooting in all those years. At least four times he presented evidence to a grand jury but – wouldn’t you know it? – didn’t get an indictment.”
When you consider the fact that, according to government statistics, <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson">US attorneys were successful in winning grand jury indictments in 99.999934 percent of prosecutions in 2010</a>, McCulloch’s trouble getting them against cops looks like more than bad luck.
It remains to be seen what kind of tone the political establishment will adopt now that the grand jury decision has been announced in the Brown case.
On the one hand, sneering racists like former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani will be happy to engage in more victim-blaming. On an appearance on Meet the Press alongside Black commenter Michael Eric Dyson, Giuliani attacked Dyson for not talking enough about Black-on-Black crime. “White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other”, Giuliani declared.
Among liberals, pleas for nonviolence and patience were the watchwords – including Barack Obama, who appeared at a press conference following McCulloch’s vile grandstanding to repeat his call for calm.
Obama did raise a few facts that the mainstream media ought to acknowledge every once in a while. After celebrating the progress in racial relations in the US over a period of decades, Obama admitted that “what is also true is that there are still problems and that people of colour are not just making this up … and that the law too often feels as though it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion”.
But the media’s main takeaway from Obama’s speech was no doubt what the president intended. “There’s never an excuse for violence”, Obama declared, echoing the mantra of the press that while peaceful protest should be respected, no one should “throw bottles” or “damage property”.
On the ground in Ferguson, however, there was no sign that police or politicians understood that “there’s never an excuse for violence”.
A full week before the grand jury decision was announced, Missouri’s Democratic governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in the city, mobilising the National Guard in the hopes of choking off another explosion of anger like what happened immediately after Mike Brown’s killing – which, of course, only guaranteed such an explosion.
It was no surprise when McCulloch’s press conference was followed by clashes with police and clouds of tear gas in the streets of Ferguson once again.
The essential point missing from all the media babble last night and for many long weeks before is simple: people who suffer under the heel of police brutality and racism have a right to be angry.
They should be furious when a white police officer guns down an unarmed Black teenager and isn’t even being arrested, much less indicted and put on trial. They should be incensed at a prosecutor who pleads the case for the defence when it comes to indicting killer cops. They should be outraged at the state’s ruthless suppression of peaceful dissent and the demonisation of protesters for nothing more than exercising their rights.
And because they did erupt in protest after Mike Brown was shot down in the streets, no one is likely to forget the name of Ferguson for many years to come. The police murder of an unarmed teenager – and especially the mass uprising in protest against it – has changed the way millions of people think about racism and the police. And it has further radicalised a new generation determined to do something about it.
That was clear from the solidarity demonstrations around the US when the grand jury decision was announced.
There were protests around the Bay Area, but the largest was in Oakland – the home of Oscar Grant, murdered on a BART train platform on New Year’s Day in 2009. Swelled by contingents of students from the nearby University of California at Berkeley, where a struggle is taking place over tuition hikes, more than 1,000 people marched through the city’s downtown, chanting “Ferguson, we have your back!”
In Chicago, hundreds of people gathered, despite the frigid temperatures, taking over Lake Shore Drive for a time while chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” In New York City, hundreds of people had already come out to Union Square hours before the grand jury decision was announced.
The demonstrations were angriest in Ferguson itself, of course. When some protesters apparently smashed the windows of a police cruiser and later set it on fire, a phalanx of riot police surrounded, racking what appeared to be shotguns before pointing them at the demonstrators.
In a statement, Mike Brown’s parents said, “We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions … While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.”
A glimpse of that positive change has already been seen – in the days and weeks since Mike Brown was killed, among those who came to Ferguson and St. Louis to take action against racism and police brutality. They were participants in a fight that won’t be forgotten.
As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, wrote on social media before the decision:
“As we await the grand jury’s decision, I want to take this opportunity to say thank you – a deep, heart-wrenching thank you – to all the organisers and activists who took to the streets following Michael Brown’s killing and who refused to stop marching, raising their voices, and crying out for justice. It is because of them – their courage, boldness, vision and stamina – that the world is paying attention to what is happening in a suburb called Ferguson.
“The world is not watching because an unarmed Black man was killed by the police. That’s not news. What made this police killing different was that the people in Ferguson – particularly the young people – rose up and said We Will Not Take It Any More. Our Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. And their cry has been heard around the world.
“No matter what the grand jury does, let us remember that true justice will come only when our criminal injustice system is radically transformed: when we no longer have militarised police forces, wars on our communities, a school-to-prison pipeline, and police departments that shoot first and ask questions later. True justice will be rendered not when a single “guilty” verdict is rendered in one man’s case, but when the system as a whole has been found guilty and we, as a nation, have committed ourselves to repairing, as best we can, the immeasurable harm that has been done.”
[Todd Chretien, Danny Katch and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field contributed to this article.]

Nicole Colson

Another cop gets away with murder in the US

The US has expanded its air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), adding another element to the deadly mix of conflicts that is inflicting a terrible toll across the region.
US officials announced that their warplanes and drones – in a joint operation with five authoritarian Arab regimes – struck targets in eastern and northern Syria. This expands the war on the Sunni fundamentalists of ISIS beyond Iraq, where the US has carried out nearly 200 attacks since launching air strikes six weeks ago.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed the US targeted ISIS “safe havens” in Syria. But the missiles were aimed at cities like Raqqa, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants – where ISIS, like any insurgency, has established itself. Civilian casualties – including people who abhor ISIS and oppose its occupations of Syrian cities – are inevitable. According to a human rights monitoring group, eight civilians died in the first round of air strikes, along with “scores of ISIS fighters”.
So the US is now dropping bombs on another Middle Eastern country, to go along with a half-dozen others where American drones and aircraft rain death from the skies. Obama’s latest war is against a force that arose as a direct consequence of the disastrous occupation of Iraq – and that was initially encouraged in various ways by some of the same Arab “coalition partners” that are also bombing it now. Just as US air strikes against ISIS in Iraq bolstered the repressive Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, the murderous Syrian regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad will use the opportunity of Washington attacking a common enemy to tighten its grip.
US imperialism has created a seething mess of violence and oppression across the Middle East – and the latest escalation in the “war on terror” will only make things worse.
People around the world are rightly horrified by ISIS’s reactionary ideology and its barbaric violence against religious and ethnic minorities, as well as any Sunni who defies its rule. Obama and the other advocates for military intervention are depending on that popular outrage as they attempt to rehabilitate US imperialism and reassert American power to control the flow of Middle East oil.
But there is nothing humanitarian or moral or just about this new stage of the “war on terror” – any more than when the Taliban of Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq was the main demonised enemy of the American war machine. US military intervention will only cause more oppression – and make the world more violent.
The hypocrisies of this latest US war are multiplying and mutating so fast that it’s hard to keep track.
For one thing, there’s the ugly collection of dictators and feudal monarchies that enlisted in Washington’s latest military adventure. In a statement announcing the Syria air strikes, Barack Obama proudly declared: “We were joined in this action by our friends and partners – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar. America is proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these nations on behalf of our common security.”
“Friends and partners”? These regimes are better known, to those with the misfortune of suffering under them, as ruthless tyrannies that – very much like ISIS – tolerate no dissent whatsoever.
The sickening beheadings of reporters committed by ISIS are dwarfed in number by the executions carried out in a public plaza known as “Chop-Chop Square” in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. The “crimes” punished by beheading in Saudi Arabia include blasphemy, adultery, drug smuggling, sedition, sorcery and witchcraft.
As socialist journalist Eamonn McCann wrote in the Belfast Telegraph before the air strikes:
“There’s no chance, however, of the US bombing Riyadh to end this evil. The Saudi dictatorship is top of the list of regional allies the US needs onside for blitzing ISIS. Recently, the Obama administration distributed pictures of Secretary of State John Kerry in comfortable conversation with the leader of the Saudi beheaders, King Abdullah. The caption said that the pair were discussing what role Saudi Arabia might play in supporting US attacks on the ISIS beheaders.”
What’s more, the “friends and partners” of the US government today were yesterday “friends and partners” – or, more accurately, patrons and sponsors – of some of the reactionary jihadist groupings in Iraq and Syria that set the stage for ISIS.
This takes us back to the sectarian conflicts set in motion during the US occupation of Iraq, when the Bush administration – faced with the threat of a growing resistance that might unite Sunnis and Shias and overwhelm US forces – turned to a divide-and-rule strategy.
US authorities lured Shia political leaders away from supporting armed resistance with the promise of elections that would give them control over the Iraqi government. Shia militias essentially took over the rebuilt Iraqi Army and police, making them sectarian institutions. Parts of the Sunni resistance started to focus their attacks on Shia, rather than US forces – which prompted an armed response from Shia leaders, and the situation deteriorated from there.
The ensuing civil war was one of the bloodiest chapters of the occupation of Iraq, adding massively to the death toll caused by the US military. Sunnis were ethnically cleansed in large numbers from the capital of Baghdad and other cities. Millions of people fled the violence, many of them crossing Iraq’s western border into Syria – all so the US could maintain its grip over the country.
With this outflow of refugees from Iraq, the sectarian conflict began to regionalise – and the US and its chief allies encouraged this development, despite the threat of a bloodbath spilling across multiple borders.
Shia dominance over the new Iraq government gave Iran – the main regional power opposed to Saudi Arabia, ruled by a Shia religious elite – another ally to go with Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Faced with the strengthening so-called “Shia Crescent,” Saudis financed and supplied militant Sunni fundamentalists, often called “jihadists”, as a paramilitary challenge.
This strategy continued to play out when civil war engulfed Syria after the Assad regime turned to savage repression to put down the pro-democracy uprising that began in 2011.Saudi Arabia and Qatar backed armed Islamist groups – not just in defiance of Assad, but now as a counterweight to prevent the democratic opposition from becoming powerful enough to overthrow the dictatorship, and pose a popular alternative in a Middle East ruled for decades by US-backed authoritarian regimes.
All this took place with the quiet approval of the US government. In 2007, journalist Seymour Hersh quoted Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explaining the cynical logic for enabling reactionary Islamists with oftentimes open connections to al-Qaeda, Washington’s supposed enemy in the “war on terror.”
“It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs,” Nasr told Hersh. “It’s who they throw them at – Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”
The situation in Syria, where the US is now aiming its missiles, has yet another grotesque twist.
ISIS controls a large part of eastern Syria not only as a consequence of the sectarian conflict unleashed by the US occupation of Iraq, and thanks to the Arab regimes encouraging Sunni jihadist groupings – but also because of the Assad regime’s careful calculations in engineering a counter-revolution against the Arab Spring uprising in Syria.
Faced with a popular revolt inspired by ones in Egypt and Tunisia that successfully toppled fellow dictators, Assad turned to his own form of divide and rule. He sought to hold onto a base of support among Alawites (an offshoot of Shia Islam) and other ethnic and religious groups by portraying the uprising as the work of Sunni radicals who would carry out their own ethnic cleansing if the regime fell.
At the same time, he released more than 1,000 jihadist prisoners from Syrian jails. This was a bald attempt to shift the balance of forces inside the opposition – away from radical, secular proponents of democracy and toward the reactionary Islamists.
For much of the last year or so, as ISIS established control over cities like Raqqa and the surrounding regions, there was unspoken truce between ISIS and the regime. Both sides instead trained their weapons – with all the savagery they could muster – against other forces in the anti-Assad resistance.
That began to change after ISIS launched its summer offensive in Iraq, capturing huge areas in the west and north of the country. But most of the Syrian government’s firepower is still trained on other rebel forces. Last week, with the US government building toward air strikes against ISIS in Syria, the New York Times reported:
“Insurgents of all stripes, except for the Islamic State group, say the Syrian government appears to be stepping up its attacks on them ahead of the threatened American air campaign. Pro-government and anti-government analysts say Mr. Assad has an interest in eliminating the more moderate rebels, to make sure his forces are the only ones left to benefit on the ground from any weakening of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS...
“Islamic State activists in Homs said on [September 17] that there had been no recent government air strikes against the group, adding to opposition suspicions that Mr. Assad prefers to focus on attacking his other opponents while letting the Islamic State’s unchecked brutality argue the case to Syria and the world that his rule is the best alternative.”
The Obama administration has been careful to insist that it isn’t allying with the Assad government in making war on ISIS. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power reported that the US had notified the Syrian government about the impending air strikes, but hadn’t coordinated with it.
This led to complaints and criticism from Syria – and from Iran and Russia, the regime’s main international backers – that the US was violating international law with its attacks in Syria. For good measure, while the air strikes were taking place in eastern Syria, Israel shot down a Syrian jet, claiming it had violated Israeli airspace – in reality, the Syrian warplane had been dropping bombs on rebels.
So on paper, the Syrian regime opposes the US air strikes. But there is the stated and the real.
If US attacks do succeed in damaging ISIS militarily or loosening its grip in areas it controls, the Assad government is in the best position of any military force to capitalise. Obama claims that part of his strategy for attacking ISIS in Syria is to train rebel fighters from the so-called “moderate” opposition – but it will take the better part of a year for the first units to be ready. In the meanwhile, the Syrian regime can shore up its position in the east without a fight – while continuing its murderous assaults against rebel fighters elsewhere.
The Assad regime and its backers in Iran and Russia may have hoped to manoeuvre the US into openly cooperating with them. But they will be happy nevertheless to exploit any opportunities that present themselves as a result of the US attacks.
Obama and the US, meanwhile, know full well that the Syrian regime will likely be the main beneficiary of their war on ISIS. It shows how little they care about ordinary Syrians – whether under the boot of Assad or ISIS currently – that they have launched the air campaign anyway.
In a statement opposing the air strikes and calling for support for popular movements in Syria and Iraq, Syrian Revolution Support Bases, an international collective in solidarity with the uprising against the regime, focused on these unstated motives of Assad and the US:
“Assad has been responsible both directly and indirectly to contributing to the growth of ISIS, and until recently has not attacked ISIS positions, focusing instead on attacking the [Free Syrian Army] and civilians. Assad is now begging to be a partner in the US coalition, seizing the chance to gain international legitimacy.
“Any action seen as allying with Bashar al-Assad will lead to a backlash and exacerbate sectarian tensions. This fits well with America’s ‘divide-and-rule’ policy. We see in Iraq that the US is allying with the criminal government which is dropping barrel bombs on civilian neighbourhoods (recently committing a massacre at a school in Fallujah) and using sectarian militias which are carrying out atrocities.”
There are other factors that will play out in the coming weeks, with potentially inflammatory results. Pressures are growing on US ally and NATO member Turkey as huge numbers of refugees – some fleeing the regime’s onslaught, others attacks by ISIS – flow over its borders with Syria and Iraq. Then there is the Kurdish population, spread through Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran – the Kurds suffer national oppression, but in Iraq are close collaborators with US imperialism.
As opponents of US imperialism try to understand these tangled contradictions and conflicts, we must be clear that this latest stage of the “war on terror” is not being pursued for humanitarian purposes. As Syrian Revolution Support Bases states:
“[I]mperialist intervention will only lead to propping up the sectarian occupation regime in Iraq and the genocidal Assad regime in Syria. It will further pave the way for expanding US economic and strategic interests in the region (namely exploiting resources and supporting the Zionist State).”
As Barack Obama’s new Middle East war escalates, we need to expose the rhetoric and lies of the US government – and stand in solidarity with those challenging imperialism, oppression and tyranny, wherever they are in the Middle East.

The never-ending, ever-expanding war

The US government is dropping bombs again in Iraq on a rebel military force that arose as a direct consequence of Washington’s disastrous occupation. The warplane and drone strikes mark a new episode in almost a quarter century of nearly continuous US warfare that has brought nothing but poverty, violence and oppression to the people of Iraq.
Meanwhile, another crisis caused by the occupation is playing out in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, where Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is clinging to power against pressure, encouraged by the Obama administration, for a new government. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/10/world/meast/iraq-baghdad-tensions/">According to press reports</a>, troops and police, apparently responding to orders from Maliki, were moving into Baghdad’s central Green Zone as the week began.
The air strikes against convoys and artillery positions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) began late last week and continued into the weekend. The targets are in northern Iraq, where an ongoing offensive by ISIS fighters is threatening Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurds, the most steadfast of US allies during the decades of war on Iraq – and Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands of the Yazidi religious minority have fled, fearing the ISIS advance.
Barack Obama and his administration focused on the plight of the Yazidis in justifying renewed air strikes. In a speech announcing the operation, Obama said the US “cannot turn a blind eye” in “a situation like we have on that mountain, with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.”
Obama had the gall to utter those words after the US government’s cherished ally in the Middle East, Israel, had <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2014/08/04/the-systematic-destruction-of-gaza">spent a full month terrorizing the innocent people of Gaza</a> with the reality, not the prospect, of “violence on a horrific scale.”
The Yazidis are the latest victims of a savage civil war <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/11/11/the-roots-of-iraqs-violence">set in motion during the US occupation</a>, with the connivance of American military and political authorities. At the height of the first wave of the civil war, Sunni Muslims suffered the brunt of the violence, at the hands of Shia militias integrated into official Iraqi security forces – giving rise over the coming years to the radical Sunni fundamentalism of ISIS.
For American political leaders to say now that they are concerned with protecting religious and ethnic minorities from violence – violence they encouraged to maintain their rule during the occupation – is the height of hypocrisy. <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/cruel-american-humanitarian.html">As Middle East studies professor Juan Cole wrote on his Informed Comment blog</a>, “The United States of America has no claim on the language of ‘humanitarian aid’ to Iraq after what it did to that country.”
Pentagon officials said the air strikes last week were followed up by a parallel operation to drop food and water to the besieged Yazidis, who fled when ISIS fighters captured the town of Sinjar and surrounding areas that are home to the Christian minority. ISIS threatened to kill Yazidis who did not convert to Islam or agree to pay extra taxes.
Anyone who took comfort in the belief that at least innocent Yazidis would not die of dehydration or starvation thanks to the US operation should bear in mind the outcome of another humanitarian airdrop, <a href="http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/president-obama-re-launches-his-own-dumb-war/">as antiwar writer Phyllis Bennis pointed out</a>: During the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, US planes dropped food packages for refugees who had fled into the mountains to escape bombardment – but <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2001/383/383_07_USWarofTerror.shtml">the yellow wrapping of the packages looked identical to the cluster bombs</a> US planes were also dropping.
Even after reports of Afghan children being torn to pieces by cluster-bomb shrapnel when they tried to retrieve “food” leaked into the pro-war US media, the Pentagon stated that it wouldn’t stop using the cluster bombs, nor even change their color.
The other main justification for the air strikes is that the ISIS advance on Erbil is threatening US citizens – around 250 diplomatic personnel and military “advisers” deployed to collaborate with the Kurdish authorities who rule the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
If it truly feared for their safety, the Pentagon could get this many Americans out of Iraq in a few hours. But their presence in Erbil signifies the importance of the city to US imperialism, and to Washington’s desperate hopes in a deteriorating situation.
<a href="http://socialistworker.org/2014/06/16/why-is-iraq-being-torn-apart">The ISIS offensive in Iraq began in June</a> when a small force of some 1,200 fighters attacked Mosul, a city in the north with a population of some 2 million. The Iraqi Army had a garrison in Mosul with at least 20 times as many soldiers – trained under US supervision until the American withdrawal at the end of 2011 – but the Iraqi troops fled without a fight.
In the weeks since, ISIS took over in one town after another in western Iraq and parts of the north. The Iraqi Army has launched only one large-scale counterattack – in Tikrit last month, where it suffered a humiliating defeat with heavy casualties.
The collapse of Iraqi forces – numbering 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police in all – in the face of ISIS exposed the rot of the new regime under Nuri al-Maliki, who is now widely opposed even among the Shia political parties that dominate the Iraqi government. No one believes an Army commanded by the Maliki can stop ISIS.
US political and military leaders arrived at a two-pronged strategy: Count on the US-trained and -supplied Kurdish militia, known as the peshmerga, to stop the ISIS advance in the most important parts of the north, while pressuring the Shia political establishment to dump Maliki and form a new government that can appeal to Sunnis to renounce the rebellion led by ISIS.
Both prongs showed signs of disintegrating in early August.
In the north, ISIS forces – supplied from the huge cache of military equipment, including armored personnel carriers, helicopters and weapons of all kinds, seized in Mosul when the Iraqi Army fled – drove back the peshmerga, capturing two towns, Gwer and Makhmur, that brought the insurgents within 20 miles of Erbil. Media outlets reported widespread panic at the threat of an ISIS assault.
Obama may have focused on the Yazidi refugees on Mount Sinjar in his televised speech, but most of the air strikes have taken place more than 100 miles away, outside Erbil – with the aim of helping the peshmerga regain the initiative against ISIS.
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/world/middleeast/iraq.html">Reports on Sunday</a> indicated that Kurdish forces had pushed back ISIS fighters following the air strikes, stopping the immediate threat to Erbil. “With the support of the Air Force of the United States, we are winning now,” a Kurdish fighter told the New York Times.
But no one thinks that ISIS – now well supplied and financed, thanks to its takeovers in Mosul and elsewhere – has been defeated, which is why Obama warned that the air strikes in Iraq will likely go on for months.
US officials have been saying that they will deliver more military support to the Iraqi government, but only if Maliki is tossed out.
Maliki was installed in power during the post-invasion occupation, but even US officials acknowledge that his repression against Sunnis – including systematic assaults against a largely nonviolent movement of demonstrations and sit-ins in 2013 – created the conditions for the uprising led by ISIS. As Ashley Smith wrote at SocialistWorker.org:
“Maliki responded to the wave of protests – what some called the Iraqi Spring – with a brutal campaign of repression. He turned to tactics learned from the US occupation – neighborhoods sweeps, mass arrests and torture. Thus, the overwhelming majority of the Sunni population was driven into desperate opposition by the actions of the Maliki government.”
US officials are urging Shia political parties, in alliance with Kurdish representatives, to form a “national unity” government, which can appeal to Sunnis that they will be given a share of political and economic power if they turn against ISIS and the armed rebellion. So, <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/strategically-troops-ground.html">according to Juan Cole</a>, another aim of the air strikes was to put:
“pressure on President Fouad Massoum to pick a prime minister other than Nuri al-Maliki and form a government asap. Likewise, Washington wants the Kurds to remain within a federal Iraqi framework rather than declaring independence, and seems to be bombing [ISIS] positions for the Kurds in order to extract a promise from Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani that he will stay in Iraq.”
But Maliki – <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2014/0808/As-US-bombs-militants-in-Kurdistan-Maliki-clings-to-power-in-Baghdad">reportedly fearful that he would be arrested or assassinated</a> [10] if he gave up being prime minister – isn’t going without a fight. Despite pressure from both the US and Iran – a one-time supporter of Maliki and influential with Shia political leaders – Maliki has refused to step aside or endorse another candidate.
Over the weekend, Fouad Massoum, who was elected by the Iraqi parliament to be president in late July, announced he was extending a deadline under the constitution drawn up during the US occupation that requires parliament to agree on a prime minister within 15 days of choosing a president.
The US strategy of winning Sunnis away from ISIS is in trouble regardless of the outcome of this stalemate.
If Maliki hangs on to power, US air strikes, however limited, will be seen as propping up a regime that transformed Iraq’s military and police into a sectarian armed force used primarily against Sunnis. But if a new government is formed, the US will be under pressure to escalate military action against an uprising that may be led by ISIS, but which is supported by a majority of Sunnis, driven to desperation in a system that has disenfranchised them, impoverished them and inflicted violence against them.
Either way, as long as the air strikes go on, wider Sunni support for ISIS is likely to persist – and perhaps deepen – even if many question its religious and political views.
The renewed US air strikes in Iraq are one piece of a picture that represents what journalist Patrick Cockburn, <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/patrick-cockburn/isis-consolidates">writing in the London Review of Books</a>, called “the ultimate disaster” for the US and its schemes for the Middle East.
Though you might not know it from the Western media, ISIS is a new political force in Iraq – even its predecessor formations like al-Qaeda in Iraq didn’t exist before the US invasion in 2003. Now, ISIS claims control over about a quarter of Iraq – primarily Sunni-dominated areas in the west near the border with Syria – and parts of the north.
ISIS established a base in eastern Syria during the civil war that ensued after the mass uprising erupted against the dictator Bashar al-Assad in early 2011 as part of the Arab Spring. Faced with the threat of being toppled like Hosni Mubarak, Assad and his regime sought to divide and rule by <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/10/07/syrias-uprising-versus-counterrevolution">focusing their firepower mainly on secular forces</a> [12], rather than the Islamists, who meanwhile attacked other opponents of the Assad dictatorship as eagerly as the regime itself.
Now, however, ISIS has launched an offensive in Syria, as it has in Iraq – benefiting, once again, from the military equipment seized from Iraqi Army bases. The Syrian government responded with a counter-offensive – which puts it, and its supporters in Iran, in a strange-bedfellows relationship with the US government that claims to be seeking its downfall.
In late June, the leader of ISIS declared a new “Caliphate” that obliterates the borders of the Middle East established during the colonial period – this is why ISIS now claims to simply be the Islamic State. With its recent military conquests, it controls one-third of Syria, along with one-quarter of Iraq – “an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least 6 million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland,” Cockburn writes.
ISIS won’t be nearly as easy to dislodge as some commentators seem to think, according to Cockburn:
“The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of ISIS and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of ISIS becoming weaker and less capable of resistance: In Iraq, the army shows no signs of recovering from its earlier defeats and has failed to launch a single successful counter-attack; in Syria, the other opposition groups...are demoralized and disintegrating as they are squeezed between ISIS and the Assad government.”
US officials who believe the mass of the Sunni population will easily abandon ISIS are clinging to an illusion. After the ethnic cleansing presided over by Shia forces during the height of the Iraqi civil war, and more years of persecution to come after that, ISIS is achieving victories in the name of the Sunni population. Even those who fear ISIS’s tyranny fear the Shia-dominated regime in Baghdad – led by Maliki or not – as much or more.
As Cockburn wrote in conclusion about the architects of the US war machine:
“Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organized than the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably.”
The US air strikes open a new chapter in Washington’s war on the Iraqi people, but it is not likely to end soon, nor to end well for the US – and it will certainly not bring peace, prosperity or stability for the people of Iraq, wherever they live.
------------
First published at SocialistWorker.org

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