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Who will stop U.S. atrocities in Iraq?

The latest atrocity story to reach the U.S. media from Iraq is that masked private security guards escorting several SUVs opened withering fire on a car in downtown Baghdad on Oct. 9, killing two women and wounding two others.

According to a sister-in-law of Marou Awanis, one of the murdered women, she had been using her car to taxi government employees to help raise money for her three daughters.

It was another case in which racist profiling led to bloody carnage for no other crime than DWI—driving while Iraqi. According to the Associated Press, the company the gunmen work for has been identified as the innocuous-sounding Unity Resources Group, an Australian-owned firm that employs Special Forces veterans and former police from that country, the U.S., New Zealand and Britain.

The gunmen have not been publicly identified, nor have their past records or nationalities been revealed.

This hideous incident comes on the heels of demands by the Washington-installed Iraqi “government” for compensation after another, even larger killing. Even this dependent regime is demanding that the U.S.-owned Blackwater Co. pay $8 million to each of the families of 17 Iraqi civilians massacred by its employees in September while they were escorting U.S. diplomats through the besieged and half-destroyed Iraqi capital.

An Iraqi commission investigating Blackwater says its gunmen have killed another 21 people, in addition to the 17 massacred last month, since it began escorting U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

These diplomats are so hated now that the State Department pays millions of dollars in lucrative contracts to Blackwater to provide them with private gunmen when they emerge from their bunkers to go anywhere.

Everyday news like this makes a mockery of claims by the Bush administration that it is winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and preparing that country for “democracy.”

It also exposes the Democratic Party, which posed as an opposition to Bush’s policies when campaigning for congressional seats last year but now is ready to support this war for years to come. And, when asked point-blank in one of the candidates’ debates if she would oppose an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hillary Clinton, considered the front-runner for the Democratic nomination because she has raised the most money, said no. Such an attack is a likely scenario for the beginning of a U.S. assault on Iran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran is developing nuclear power, which all the IAEA member states have the right to do, and has no facilities for making nuclear weapons. An attack on Iran would be a blatant act of aggression and would widen the horrendous war begun by Washington over control of the world’s most concentrated oil-rich area, the Middle East.

The people of the United States don’t want this war. Their votes and the polls have shown that for some time. Military recruiting has dropped to a new low, despite large cash payments for signing up. Moreover, the people are deeply repelled and worried by the government’s open defense of torture, secret renditions and spying that has been a corollary to the war.

So who wants the war? Who is it that pours immense funds into the coffers of political candidates supporting the war, making it a done deal that whoever wins in 2008, the war will go on? Who is willing to spend trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on aggression to control the earth’s dwindling fossil fuels, responsible for the catastrophe of global warming, but practically nothing on a strategy to reorganize this chaotic and wasteful economy to reverse climate change?

As the detective novels tell us, look for the motive. And in this capitalist society the motive behind imperialist aggression is as apparent, but also as unmentioned, as the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

We’re talking about those who have the most reason to defend the capitalist way of life—the capitalists themselves. Not just the oil barons, although they’re very concentrated, politically powerful and have an immediate stake in controlling the world’s oil and gas.

This is a capitalist war for profit. It’s as simple as that. They’re a small class but they dominate this society with the enormous wealth they have plundered from workers around the world.

Yet they are afraid. What they fear is class war—not the one-sided war against the workers the bosses have been waging for years, but one in which this multinational class of women and men, gay and straight, immigrants and those born here, brutalized by racist police, burdened with debt, losing their pensions and health care, say “Enough!” and refuse to be fodder for the bosses’ cannons—or their profit machine. That day is coming.