En Passant

We do not yet have all the answers about this latest attempt, but those who would slaughter innocent men, women and children must know that the United States will more — do more than simply strengthen our defenses. We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland.

- Barack Obama after the failed bombing attempt on Northwest Airlines. 

The day after the failed Christmas Day bombing,  US special forces, in the guise of assassinating Taliban fighters, attacked a den of ‘terrorists’ in Kunar Province in Afghanistan. They killed 8 school children and 2 other civilians, according to US puppet Hamid Karzai. The civilian death toll is likely to rise as the Afghan Government investigates.

Apparently it is OK to kill kids if you are the American ruling class.

However if you are a Nigerian radicalised by this sort of barbarity and wanting to return in a some little way what US imperialism does daily, by opting for the dead end path of individual terrorism against ordinary working people, you are a terrorist. 

Let’s be clear. The biggest terrorist by far is Barack Obama.  

He heads a military which US workers fund to the tune of $659 billion a year, a brutal machine that has killed 1 million Iraqi civilians, tens of thousands of Afghanis, and already hundreds in Pakistan and Yemen.

US imperialism cares nothing about kids.  They are dispensable in its quest to rule the world, and as a concomitant of that, to  keep the other main imperialist, China, in its place, second behind the US and complaint in some way to American capitalism. 

Copenhagen shows that this compliance strategy is a failure, which probably only means a greater and greater reliance on military means to subdue the growing military and political strength of China.

The problem is that US strength and stability depends in part on the continuing growth of China as an economic power.

The two imperialisms are locked in a dance of death.

The dead schoolkids in Kunar Province are the logical consquence of this chorus of killing.

Afghanistan is partly about the larger American strategy of encircling China with regimes friendly to the US and, as  needed, US troops.

Such is the degeneration of Obama as President that his hypocritical ‘killing kids’ comments could just as easily have come out of the mouth of George W Bush, or, with some minor modifications, Osama bin Laden.

Obama continues Bush’s military expansionism precisely to defend and extend the empire and reinforce its base – US capitalism. He commands a force ten thousand times stronger and more brutal than that of any of the islamists he condemns.

Instead of the Nobel Peace Prize Obama should be on trial in The Hague for his crimes.

The fact that he isn’t, and that he commands the most brutal killing machine in the world, destroying the lives and livelihood of hundreds of  millions across the globe, will continue to see some islamists attack ordinary working people in the West.

They don’t understand that the ruling classes of the West are the enemy of those people too.

To stop terrorism, the US should stop being a terrorist. 

It won’t. The logic of imperialism drives it to kill kids and to justify this as some sort of macabre defence of realm.

Only turning this upside down world right way up – democratic working class revolution  - can stop the murder of the innocents.