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Last night the U.S. military launched nearly 5 dozen cruise missiles at Syria from U.S. Navy ships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. This was a U.S. response to chemical attacks against civilians allegedly ordered by Bashar al-Assad. The Democrats and Republicans are united in their support for U.S. imperialism. Hours before the attack Hillary Clinton “came out of the woods” to say that the U.S. should conduct air strikes against targets in Syria. Today stocks in Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, war profiteers who make hellfire missiles, have been rising. The war profiteering companies U.S. officials euphemistically call the “defense industry” are full of alchemists who know the right mixtures to turn blood, horror, displacement, and human misery into profits. It is difficult to formulate an adequate response, beyond our general stance against imperialism and militarism, when there is so little information to go on beyond U.S. State Department statements and corporate media reporting based on those statements. However the following are some short initial thoughts from Black Rose – Central Illinois. This is not a definitive position paper or anything so official, but simply an initial reaction.

Re: those missiles:

The source of the chemical attack is still contested. There’s something called the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity (in which tribunals of US officials are overdue). The United States continues to support extremist militias in Syria and Saudi Arabia’s decimation of Yemen. Remember that the U.S. war on Iraq produced ISIS. Trump’s decision is an extension of a legacy of atrocious U.S. foreign policy in that region that continued under Obama (for example, ‘surgical’ drones) who received the Nobel Peace prize. Over the course of both of Obama’s terms as President, the U.S. dropped thousands of bombs on the people of Syria. We must see last night as a problem of U.S. imperialism and not merely a problem of any one specific president be it a Democrat or a Republican. Wars are invariably never meant to secure the lives of women and children. They reinforce a global patriarchy and solidify borders. Refugee populations are increasing and being refused elementary conditions of existence, while missiles get launched in the name of people suffering. Before you know it, CNN politics will be debating Trump’s nomination for Nobel Prize. The launching of these missiles also can’t be seen disconnected from the interests of resource extraction industries in their relentless pillaging of indigenous lands around the planet.

Our commitment is not to Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime, Putin’s murderous Regime, Trump’s murderous regime, or any state. The state is terror everywhere. Our commitment is to the people who, like us, resist state violence and work to organize just, egalitarian, free societies. We fight for the abolition of state borders and for the free movement of people. It is the cruelest hypocrisy for U.S. President Trump and his ideological friends in Europe to close borders and shut doors to Syrian refugees, cutting off all options of escape, only to then launch missiles at them. Smash fortress Europe and smash fortress USA. We work toward a world without states, without imperialism, without capitalism.