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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.18, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The U.S. imperialist ruling class is sending more young men and women to patrol the Middle East region. Wherever you look, another unit from the Pentagon pops up. Defense Secretary William Perry offered yet another detachment Jan. 8. This one is to patrol the Golan Heights--an area of Syria seized by Israel in 1967--should there be a pact involving pulling back Israeli troops.
Some of these detachments have arrived with no or little publicity, and didn't require the usual propaganda barrage justifying them as protectors of "human rights" or "peacekeepers." They simply extend the empire Wall Street and Washington are building in the region. It's an empire of oil.
Should U.S. troops go to the Golan, this new injection of military personnel will be only the latest step in the Pentagon's occupation of Arab, Iranian, Turkish and Kurdish lands. It's hard to keep up with each deployment, but as of Jan. 8, the United States has:
o About 10,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines in and around the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Most are on 26 U.S. ships.
o Another 5,000 U.S. and other Western troops are in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states training and directing local puppet troops. Some of the ships and planes are stopping ships going to and from Iraq and daily threaten military and civilian targets in Iraq with bombing raids.
o Some 500 U.S. troops--of 1,900 total--are the biggest element in the so-called Multinational Force and Observers patrolling the eastern Sinai, a part of Egypt occupied by Israel since 1967.
o U.S. forces are also the biggest contingent in an 80- airplane unit that includes British and French troops at Incilrik airbase near Adana in the south of Turkey. They also patrol and threaten Iraq. They are supposed to be helping the Kurds in Iraqi territory, but they help the Turkish regime oppress Kurds in Turkish-controlled territory.
o The Pentagon still has hundreds of technicians and specialists in Kuwait, taking care of U.S. equipment left since the Gulf war. This force can be quickly expanded.
o A few dozen U.S. military "observers" are stationed in both Lebanon and the Western Sahara.
Are these troops directed against governments in the region that dare a little independence from Washington--like Iraq and Iran? Are they a warning to imperialist rivals like France, Japan and Germany to watch their step? Are they the officers of a vast police action against potential revolutionary upheavals in Saudi Arabia or Egypt? The answer seems to be: all of the above.
When the truth about what was happening in Vietnam finally reached large numbers of people in the United States, a popular chant in the huge anti-war demonstrations was: "Big firms get rich, GIs die."
Now, when there is still time to stop the next war, the demand must be: U.S. troops out of the Middle East!
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