Stop U.S. machinations in the Middle East!

Washington and the corporate media alike have made it obvious that U.S. imperialism — and its colonialist allies in Europe — have stepped up their already intense aggression in that part of the globe where much of the world’s fossil fuels are found.

The Obama administration is carrying on a full-fledged counterrevolutionary intervention against the Syrian government that threatens great harm to the people of Syria and the entire region. U.S. imperialism and its allies have refused all opportunities for a negotiated settlement. They are moving instead to drag the Syrian people into a civil war and expose the region to the threat of major warfare.

Washington is again, as it did in Iraq, exacerbating religious and ethnic divisions to further its economic and strategic interests in this formerly colonized region, which the imperialists are trying to reconquer. This strategy even includes using armed groups similar to al-Qaeda as cannon fodder against the Syrian army and the Syrian people in the battles for Aleppo and Damascus.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said again that the Pentagon would be able to enforce a “no-fly zone” against Syria. While he claims this is not imminent, he is keeping the threat alive. That was the term used for the months-long bombing of Libya in 2011 and the destruction of that country’s infrastructure, along with its legitimate government.

In Egypt an apparently major political move has taken place. The new civilian president, who represents the Muslim Brotherhood, fired the two top generals of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Since the removal of the unpopular President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Washington is hedging its bets between the SCAF — its traditional military ally — and the Muslim Brotherhood.

While it is hard to unravel right now just what this latest move means, we do know that neither Washington nor the imperialist media have begun to attack the civilian Egyptian government for this move, as they would if they felt an immediate threat. A military strike by forces unknown in the Sinai Peninsula against the Egyptian army exposed the isolation of the military and the Brotherhood. Neither has a program to answer the growing poverty of the mass of the people. Neither represents the revolutionary masses in Tahrir Square, whose protests brought down Mubarak and who have continued to protest the SCAF.

Washington’s strategic goal regarding Egypt is to guarantee the maintenance of the 1979 Camp David accords that neutralized Egypt with regard to Israel’s military threat to the region and its continued oppression of Palestinians. The Pentagon has nurtured its ties to the Egyptian generals, whom they want on the U.S. side, just as they have with the monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates.

With U.S. direct aggression imminent in Syria and possible in Egypt, the slogans of the progressive movement in the U.S. must be: “U.S., Pentagon, NATO, stop promoting counterrevolution in Syria. U.S. out of the Middle East!”