By Prof. Jose Maria Sison

Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee

April 19, 2017

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) condemns the escalation of wars of aggression by the US on a wide range of theatres under the new US President, Donald Trump, very early in his presidency.

Before becoming president, Donald Trump called the war in Iraq as a “big, fat mistake” and vowed not to go into military misadventures abroad like Bush and Obama had done before him.

And yet only four months into his presidency, Donald Trump has already embarked on military misadventures abroad committing one war crime after another. In March alone, more than 1,000 civilians died as a result of air strikes by the so-called US-led Coalition in Iraq and Syria.

Barely a month after his inauguration, not satisfied with the aggression long carried out by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, Trump authorized the Navy SEALs to attack a village in Yemen killing an eight-year old girl and 24 other civilians including women and children. The operation complete with air strikes from helicopter gunships razed houses to the ground where families cowered in fear.

Trump bombed Yemen in just one week in March more than Obama had done in a year. Five million people in Yemen are on the verge of starvation because the US and its allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are blocking all land routes, airports and the coasts preventing food supplies from coming through. This is virtual genocide and a serious war crime that is largely being ignored by the western media.

Trump has escalated coalition air strikes in Iraq where a growing pattern of high civilian casualties has been reported. A bombing raid on March 27 in Mosul killed around 200 civilians. Amnesty International has charged the US military of failing to take the necessary precautions to prevent civilian deaths in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.

Trump has approved the relaxing of the rules of engagement by the US military in Somalia that is bound to result in the increase of civilian casualties. The US has been conducting a shadow war against so-called Islamists since 2007 in the strategically-located country at the Horn of Africa using Ethiopia as proxy. Obama had regularly used drones from US bases in neighboring Djibouti to strike at al-Shabab militants.

On April 5, Trump ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles to be fired into a Syrian airbase based on a false pretext, killing scores of civilians in a nearby village. One month before that, US drones fired Hellfire missiles and dropped a bomb on a mosque in West Aleppo where 200 people were praying killing 40 and injuring another 120.

But there has not been an uproar in the UN and from the “international community” especially from the “civilized countries” of the West that are quick to condemn Assad of “war crimes” that he has not even committed. No attention has been paid to the evident false flag operation of the CIA-directed White Helmets and jihadists who simulated a chemical attack and murdered children in the process. Neither has there been concern about the US attacking a sovereign state, with a mutual defense treaty with the nuclear power Russia.

Trump approved the dropping of the most powerful non-nuclear bomb available in the US military arsenal on a complex of caves and tunnels in Afghanistan supposedly being used by ISIS terrorists. This is the first time that the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, known as the “mother of all bombs,” has been used in combat. The bomb is capable of devastating the area around its landing of a radius of more than 1.6 km.

Trump praised the US military for a “very successful” mission. He further confirmed that he himself authorized the US military he called “the , greatest military in the world” to do their job. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai called it an “inhuman act, a brutal act against an innocent country, against innocent people, against our land, against our sovereignty, against our soil and against our future.”

Trump has boasted of sending what he calls an “armada” of battleships to intimidate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and has threatened to make a preemptive nuclear strike against that country. The US Navy strike group is composed of the nuclear-powered flagship aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, two destroyers and a cruiser accompanied by submarines.

The DPRK has responded by saying that it is prepared to counter the US war provocations and has focused its nuclear sight not only on enemy bases in South Korea and the Pacific but also in the US mainland. It celebrated the 105th birthday anniversary by highlighting the people’s resistance to US imperialism and displaying the all-round achievements of the DPRK, including its nuclear capabilities for self-defense and deterrence.

Russia and China have dispatched intelligence-gathering vessels from their navies to chase the US Navy strike group to monitor the fleet’s movements and to send a clear warning to Washington against any precipitate action. Any kind of US aggression against the DPRK with the use of massive conventional or nuclear weapons has grave implications and consequences, especially to China, which has a treaty of mutual aid and cooperation with the DPRK and which would also suffer not only from nuclear fallout but also the flood of refugees from the DPRK.

Trump is now flagrantly running counter to his electoral campaign promise of avoiding the high cost of aggressive wars and making America First by reviving and protecting US manufacturing. His actions show that he is completely in the pockets of the military-industrial complex (in fact he is an investor in Raytheon missiles) and is pliant in the hands of the so-called deep state that is at the service of his own class, US monopoly bourgeoisie.

All these saber-rattling and bellicose actions coming from the US are not a sign of strength and confidence but of an imperialist power on a steep decline and in desperation in an increasingly multipolar world. Such a moribund imperialist power can become more reckless and aggressive in the use of naked force in a vain attempt to retain its hegemonic position.

In recent decades, after the end of the bipolar world of the Cold War, US imperialism has proven itself as the super-terrorist power, killing and wounding millions of people and destroying their homes, livelihood and social infrastructure. It has devastated countries in Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia), Central Asia (Afghanistan), the Middle-East (Iraq and Syria) and North Africa (Libya). It has subverted elected governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America, bullied small nations everywhere, destabilized whole continents and violated many of the universally accepted norms of conduct in international relations.

The ILPS condemns the imperialist policies and actions of the superterrorist US and its demagogic, deranged and destructive president. The US is culpable for the violation of the national sovereignty and democratic rights of peoples, the wanton plunder of their human and natural resources and the rise of state terrorism and imperialist wars of aggression. The ILPS calls on all its member-organizations, allies and the broad masses of the people of the world to fight and defeat US imperialism through various possible and necessary forms of revolutionary struggle. ###