A bloody history. Democrats, Republicans and U.S. Hegemony in the Middle East
Richard Becker, national ANSWER organizer, writes in the magazine of The Party for Socialism and Liberation.
What unites and what divides the Democrats and Republicans with regard to Iraq?
The fierce resistance to the colonial occupation of that country has opened fissures at the top of the U.S. political establishment over the past year, bringing calls from many leading politicians, including Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, for “internationalizing” the occupation—asking other countries to provide military and economic support for the U.S.-colonial rule of Iraq.
Kerry is emphatically not calling for an end to the occupation. In fact, he and a number of other leading Democrats insist that more U.S. troops must be sent to Iraq and that the U.S. military in general is too small to carry out its “global mission.”
The failure of the U.S. occupiers to defeat the resistance, the growing death toll and the enormous cost of the war has shocked the political establishment of this country. Kerry and the Democrats are critical of the Bush Administration for not giving more of an international cover to the occupation, which they believe would open the way for bringing in tens of thousands of additional troops from Europe, India, Pakistan and elsewhere.
What there is no disagreement about among the ruling elite—whether Republican or Democrat—is the need to hold onto Iraq as part of a strategy of domination of the entire oil-rich and strategic Middle East. Control of the region has been a central objective of U.S. international policy for six decades.
The article goes on to detail how, for sixty years now, both Republican and Democratic administrations have schemed and plotted, overthrown governments, funded rebellions – all with an aim of making the oil rich Middle East a vassal state of the US.
Some say Dubya is an aberration from the norm, however history indicates he’s simply an extremist example of that norm.
As hated as the Bush Administration and its program has become, hopes that Kerry’s global policies will be qualitatively “better” can only be sustained by disregarding the history of the past 60 years.