Suleimani Was US Capitalism's Product. Just Like Bin Laden.

Winged Sun Symbol Persepolis

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, Retired

Columnist Simon Jenkins writes in today's US edition of the Guardian, that Trump’s threats to bomb Iran’s cultural sites are grotesque. If one wants to judge events from some moralistic point of view he’s right. Great historic sites like Persepolis are no threat to America except in the mind of the demented he argues. But morality and insanity are not what is driving human society towards oblivion, Capitalism is; the so-called free-market system of production.

Jenkins reminds the reader of Bomber Harris, the British Royal Air Force commander who, like Trump and the most crazed representatives of capital occupying the reins of power in the US, believed there should be no restraint when it comes to wars between nations. But the two great world wars were wars between capitalist nations in competition for resources and colonial plunder. They were a direct result of capitalist development and its global expansion, particularly the end of the colonial era.

Of course Iran’s cultural sites aren’t a threat to America, but neither is Iran. The Iranian people certainly aren’t. Grenada was no threat to America nor was the nation of Iraq as it was before the US invasions. Iraq was created by British capitalism with its economic and global interests in mind after the first great world war and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. France installed the system of government in Lebanon with sectarian power sharing and the US, after the invasions, set up a similar system of government in Iraq that France set up in Lebanon despite its record of failure and tragedy for the people of the region. Capitalism cannot move society forward, it will only human life as we know it if left to its own resources.

The dominant reason Israel arose as a Jewish nation state, a European settler state, was as a foothold for western imperialism in the region in the era of oil.  It would be a counter to the hundreds of millions of Arabs from Syria to Algeria who, with the same language, similar culture and overwhelmingly the same religion had dreams of nationhood. This revolutionary potential had to be undermined. It was not just personal ambition that led the first British governor of Jerusalem to refer to the creation of the Jewish state as our “loyal little Ulster in the Middle East” with reference to the six northern counties of Ireland retained by the British after the rest of the country gained home rule. The industry was in the north. We can see how successful that has been in the past hundred years, sectarian division purposely constructed by the British occupation. Colonialism installed its own preferred regimes in the nation states it created, those that refused to comply were dealt with.

Jenkins claims that “Bombing Persepolis would not only be grotesque, it would be utterly counterproductive. It is grotesque if one looks at it with some sort of moral compass and it is counterproductive in the sense that it has strengthened the Mullah’s despotic rule as the Iranians and the Iraqi’s, especially Shia Muslims, have rallied round the flag. I was just talking to an Iranian friend who shared with me how she hated Suleimani as an obstacle to reform in Iran and is dismayed that the US has raised him to iconic status and given the Mullah's new life. She is now afraid to go home to visit relatives as the US might not allow her back.

It is productive for US imperialism on the other hand in that there have been massive demonstrations in Iraq in the past period against the rotten government there as well as ongoing protests and opposition to the Iranian regime. A similar situation has been ongoing in Lebanon and in all these uprisings that have been met with brutal repression, the working class and women have been prominent. Qassem Suleimani, who was a hero of the US inspired Iran Iraq war and also the defeat of ISIS, was not a popular individual among those wanting to change Iranian society and expel the theocracy; and he was not popular with the resistance in Iraq. His assassination has changed that.

Fallujah baby a product of US assault on that Iraqi city

But war has nothing to do with morality, it is about plunder, possession of the world’s resources and exploitation of them for material gain. It is why a country rich in raw materials like the Congo is poor and incapable of developing in to a "healthy" democratic nation state akin to those in Western Europe. Jenkins points to the new method of killing, the drone wars that are important for the U.S. Using drones means fewer US workers’ lives are lost and that means fewer Americans’ attention will be diverted from the Golden Globes, the Superbowl and the Kardashian’s latest sexploits toward the horrors of death and losing a family member. By explaining these events as a breakdown in morality and personalizing them Jenkins lets Barack Obama off the hook claiming he simply “….caught the bug in 2011.” That’s putting it mildly, Obama became know as the Drone King for a reason. As the top representative of US capitalism he did his job and that included murdering a lot of brown people, something that Colin Kaepernick seems to have forgotten. Saying that, I stress that I have supported and have respect for Kaepernick and oppose Lindsey Graham and all the other racists that have attacked him.  But he has his limits.

For Jenkins the capitalist system of production is the height of human civilization. Trump is simply a “belligerent”, “demented” personality that is craving war like Hitler.

This is not the issue. Jenkins never touches on the fact that we that live in a system of production, that this system of production has laws, and that, like it or not due to its very nature, we live in a world economy, a capitalist world economy. We use commodities that come from all over the world. We consume food and use products from every corner of the world as the world economy is more integrated than ever before. The problem is that within this world economy there are separate nation states, themselves a product of revolutions that brought the capitalist class, the owners of the means of producing the necessities of life, to political power. Each nation, each national capitalist class strives to increase its political and economic power with regard to its competitors in the world market place. That’s what war is a product of.  The Middle East has oil, but even before that, British colonialism developed seaports and harbors that it used as ports of call, stop off points in its journey to plunder the wealth of the Indian sub continent.

We are now at a stage where there are a few great powers with US capitalism the most powerful and heavily armed of them. But the collapse of Stalinism has undermined the global dominance of US capitalism and there is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. Trump is simply the most open and barbaric expression of this process.

Modern weaponry has made a mockery of the “legality” and “ethics” of war. Writes Jenkins. He whines about “protocols” and “treaties” being broken and ignored. His refusal to confront the capitalist economic system in which we live and embrace the view that the only alternative is its demise and replacement with a global federation of democratic socialist states based on a rational, planned and cooperative production of humanities needs, leaves him irrelevant.

If Simon Jenkins wants to know a bit about treaties and laws when it comes to capitalism he has his own British colonial history at hand but better still, he might come over here to the US and visit a few reservations.

Here is Jenkins column in today's Guardian