EDITORIAL
The USS Cole: Who's responsible?
A team of 100 FBI agents and military experts have invaded
the port of Aden in Yemen, they say, to investigate the
explosion that smashed the destroyer USS Cole Oct. 12 and find
out who was responsible for the deaths of 17 U.S. sailors.
If that's really their mission, they're looking in the wrong
place.
They should try the boardrooms of Exxon-Mobil,
Chevron-Texaco and the other big oil monopolies. They should
look at the Clinton administration and those before it that set
U.S. policies toward the Middle East. They should investigate
the Pentagon strategists who send working-class youths to
police the world for U.S. imperialism.
For there you will find those really responsible for the
death of those 17 enlisted women and men, whose pictures looked
in the newspapers like a cross-section of the working class in
the United States. More than half were people of color. They
were the people who made that ship run, like workers run a
factory.
Unlike the officers--the trained killers that fly U.S.
fighter-bombers and rain death and destruction from the
skies--these rank-and-file sailors don't aim the weapons or
push the buttons that launch them. They may have falsely
believed they were doing their patriotic duty, or maybe they
were just trying to earn a living. But their ship differed from
an ordinary factory. It wasn't the Love Boat. It was a
destroyer. It destroyed.
In particular, the Cole was set for duty in the Persian Gulf
policing the blockade of Iraq. That means its specific task was
to stop the Iraqi economy from functioning. U.S.-led United
Nations sanctions have been killing 250 Iraqi children every
week for the past 10 years. The Cole was part of a relentless
machine killing Iraqi children.
And this machine is carrying out a policy that targets not
only Iraq but all the people of the Middle East, with the aim
of controlling access to the richest deposits of crude oil and
of grabbing the biggest oil profits.
Whoever ordered these 17 sailors into the Gulf was putting
them in harm's way. And those giving the orders knew it. They
try to cover it up now by weeping at the funerals and promising
revenge against the perpetrators, but this is all a sham. Their
policies have aroused hundreds of millions of people against
U.S. imperialism and all its symbols.
It's hard to imagine a better symbol of the "sole remaining
superpower" than the Cole, or to so vividly see how it is
possible for a people's movement to strike a powerful blow
against that symbol.
To defend the interests of a handful of oil monopolies, the
politicians and generals send tens of thousands of
working-class youths into danger. It's important to remember
this when Washington goes looking to assign blame for their
deaths.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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