Ten Years After the Iraq Invasion, Protest Drones in April

The Obama administration employs lethal drones for illegal targeted attacks around the world – notably in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, where hundreds of civilians have been killed. The United States military sends drones to spy on many other countries to establish contingency targets when secret decisions are made to advance U.S. corporate economic and/or strategic interests; the U.S. reign of terror ceaselessly expands. Countries that pose no threat to the United States are demonized by the corporate media – supplied by CIA-manufactured horror stories – to prime public opinion to accept the unacceptable.

The latest war threats are directed at the people of Korea, Syria, Iran, and Mali. To deny mandated democratic elections following the post WWII imperial division of Korea, the U.S. engineered the devastation attendant to the 1950-53 Korean War – killing some 4 million North Koreans to maintain the U.S.-directed division of the country and the still ongoing U.S. occupation. This included the successive installation of hated dictatorial regimes that destroyed the resurgent labor and popular movements in the south. The south was transformed from a Japanese colony to the neo-colonial status imposed by the might of the American occupation armies.

Today’s threats against North Korea, among the poorest U.S. beleaguered and sanctioned nations on earth, are unrelenting. The latest and most serious provocation is the staging in mid-March of ominous U.S. “military exercises,” close to Korean skies, including a simulated nuclear attack on North Korea via armed B-2 and B-52 bombers, among the most powerful weapons of mass destruction in the world. The U.S. acknowledged that the North Koreans are not preparing for war, but not before demonizing Korea’s president whose response was to partake in a North Korean “military exercise” wherein he went aboard an unarmed small Korean craft to a small island off the North Korean coast. Fundamentally, the U.S. military build-up in the North China Sea and the militarization of the Pacific region is designed to defend U.S. economic interests against its competitors.

The U.S. is already waging war on Iran with brutal sanctions and a virtual embargo that cause terrible hardships, including a substantial fall in the standard of living of the Iranian people. U.S. surveillance drones openly fly in Iran’s air space, a deliberate provocation. Along with its proxy, Israel, the U.S. government issues a barrage of threats to attack Iran, manufacturing unproven accusations that Iran poses a nuclear threat. Israel has attacked an Iranian site. As with the U.S.-engineered 1953 coup that replaced Iran’s democratically-elected government with the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi-dictatorship, the real U.S. objective is Iran’s oil and the cessation of Iranian oil exports to U.S. competitors. Similarly in Syria, another important oil producer, U.S. sanctions, political maneuvers, “indirect” military aid to selected Syrian opposition forces favorable to U.S. interests, and threatening military intervention are aimed at a “regime change” that advances U.S. military and economic objectives. The U.S. is discussing sending drones into Syria as the next step in offering direct military support to opposition units. Israel has also attacked sites in Syria and threatens further action.

Africa, the source of great mineral resources and wealth to exploit by the West in competition with other countries growing in economic/political influence, is another frontier for the U.S. military. The U.S. recently sent 3500 troops and military supplies to 35 African countries, many ruled by compliant dictators and announced plans to build a drone base in Niger, the first such site in Western Africa. This base can be used for surveillance and possible attacks against the Sahel, Central and West Africa. Mali is particularly targeted because of internal divisions created by the colonialist oppressors in the first place and the valuable resources of gold and the discoveries of oil and natural gas.

UNAC’s position on all these matters remains unchanged. No to U.S. intervention, sanctions, wars and occupations! Self-determination to all oppressed peoples and nations!

Along with the escalating threats of global war is the necessity to quell dissent and progressive social movements at home. There is an increasing militarization of police departments and surveillance orchestrated by the Department of Homeland Security. Stop and Frisk laws and Draconian drug laws send millions of working class youth, particularly youth of color, to the burgeoning and increasingly privatized for profit prison-industrial system. The border wars and the criminalization of immigrants are used to divide the working class. The targeting and demonization of Muslim communities intensifies U.S.-promoted Islamophobia, victimization and the fake war on terror. And of course, those who peacefully challenge the system, like peace and civil rights activists, labor, Occupiers, and others, are spied on and accused of aiding terrorists.

New laws like the National Defense Authorization Act are introduced by the Obama administration to normalize even the killing of American citizens, anytime and anywhere, if the President says they are a threat to national security. The right to due process and other liberties are quickly being stifled. Drones are proliferating as a major tool for surveillance along with digital spy systems. They can also be armed to kill individuals and groups.