By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
September 11, 2009
The International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS) reiterates its condemnation of both the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent US-instigated so-called “global war on terrorism”. The 9-11 attacks killed nearly 3000 civilians. Far worse, the US has engaged in mega-terrorism involving the killing and wounding of millions of civilians, the systematic practice of abductions, torture, extrajudicial killing of suspects and other forms of human rights violations and the destruction of the social infrastructure in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere during the last eight years.
The American electorate repudiated the Republican party ticket in last year’s US presidential elections. With varying degrees of awareness, the people held the Bush regime accountable for using 9/11 to unleash wars of aggression, militarism, state repression and war profiteering, all deceitfully cloaked as a “war on terrorism”. Indeed, as pointed out in the Nuremberg trials, war of aggression is the biggest kind of terrorism because it kills millions of people.
Ironically, the US wars of aggression and the abrupt rise of US military spending have dismally failed to apprehend the perpetrators of 9/11 in a period far longer than that to defeat the Axis Powers during World War II. In fact, US super-terrorism since 9/11 has bred the further spread of al-Qaeda and similar entities as the Abu Sayyaf and Jemiaah Islamiyah where these were previously smaller or even non-existent, as in Iraq. The US-instigated “global war on terrorism” is in reality a global war OF terrorism mounted by the world’s sole superpower to grab far more concentrated economic and political power for the benefit of the monopolies in the military-industrial complex, high finance, energy, and agribusiness. These imperialist interests have reaped megaprofits since 9/11, to the detriment of the billions of working and middle-class people the world over .
The bogus US war on terrorism under the notion of military Keynesianism has failed to shore up US monopoly capitalism from its worsening financial and economic crisis. On the contrary, it has contributed hugely to the generation of the financial bubble that collapsed in the last year of the Bush regime. The American people have suffered job losses, wage cuts, foreclosed homes, abrupt price hikes of foodstuffs and other basic commodities and services, eviscerated savings and pension funds, deteriorating social services, social dislocation, repression and state brutality. The unemployed youth and colored people are being induced to join the military services and serve as the cannon fodder of US imperialism.
The current administration of Barack Obama has turned deaf and blind to the resounding people’s clamor to end the US wars of aggression and undo the grave socio-political ills unleashed by the Bush regime on behalf of the monopolies, especially the finance oligarchy. It has not repudiated its predecessor’s bogus war on terrorism but has endorsed and continued it. The Obama government has deliberately failed to prosecute Bush, Cheney and their accomplices for their war crimes, their brazen lies and deceits, war profiteering, and megacorporate crime and corruption that fuelled the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The Obama government tries to deceive the American people and the rest of the world by decking itself out as markedly different from the Bush regime, while in truth it continues the wars of aggression and occupation of foreign territories and escalate war spending and warmongering. It has proceeded with the unabated fortification of the global network of more than 750 US. military bases garrisoning the globe, the most expensive and expansive of which are those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These hundreds of military bases are worth a staggering US$658 billion and cover a total land area of almost 30 million acres. The US continues to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the prime international military alliance it controls, to areas far beyond Europe, way into the vastnesses of Central and South Asia. The US is wantonly sowing the seeds of war in so so many countries and global regions.
The Obama regime has combined extremely high military spending with the multi-trillion dollar bailouts of the very financial super-monopolies that have generated the history’s biggest economic bubbles. These twin imperial killer measures have brought the US and global economy to untold ruin. The millions upon millions of working and middle-class people have been made to bear the burden of ceaseless exploitation and crisis. Current official economic figures point to nearly 10 per cent unemployment rate in the US alone, the highest in 26 years. The reality is far worse.
As the US continues to reel from its worst crisis in almost a century, it is increasingly disposed to foment ever more ruinous wars across the world as a recourse to solving its own unprecedented crisis. In combination with the Israeli Zionists, Obama is glibly combining war threats and diplomacy to pressure Iran. The US continues to generate military tensions and play off India and Pakistan as well as Iraq and Syria against each other in order to expand US interests. It is actively engaged in the subversion of governments assertive of national sovereignty, as it has successfully done recently in Honduras, and continues to do so in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America.
In East Asia, the US continues to regard China as a large expansion area for US monopoly capital and as its main partner in the scheme of neoliberal globalization. At the same time, it seeks deliberately to undermine the national independence of China and the rule of the bureaucrat capitalists who still claim to be communists. It persists in blockading the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) economically and militarily, using nuclear blackmail and yet resenting the DPRK’s assertion of national sovereignty and right to defend itself against nuclear threats. The US continues to station and beef up its military forces in the Philippines under the pretext of fighting in the “second front” of the so-called global war on terrorism.
The unbroken continuity of the Obama and Bush administrations in the global war of terrorism is a brazen betrayal of the American people and the rest of the world’s peoples who have had enough of this deceptive monopoly profit-driven global and “endless” war under Bush. Peoples all over the globe have unmasked and continue to unmask the high deceit and are resisting with ever greater determination the intolerable suffering imposed on them by US. imperialism and its craven allies. They are resolved to build a world of justice, freedom and democracy, all-round progress and international solidarity and peace.
The ILPS calls on its member organizations and allies to denounce the US manipulation of 9/11 for imperialist purposes and to mount timely mass actions to demand an end to the US-instigated global war of terrorism, to oppose every war of aggression unleashed by the US and its allies, to seek justice and indemnification for the victims of the wars of aggression, to demand the prosecution of the war criminals and war profiteers under Bush and Obama and to fight for the pullout of US military forces from other countries and the dismantlement of the worldwide network of US military bases. ###