IN A MAJOR abdication of Presidential power, Obama has given the US Congress the task of deciding whether there should be a strike on Syria.
This is despite the fact that the President, under the US constitution, has the power to take military action without reference to the Congress, and that he had already publicly asserted that President Assad is guilty and that there must be an attack on Syria.
His military had already assured him that all of the necessary US ‘assets’ were in place, while his Secretary of State, John Kerry, had already made a series of speeches where he attacked Assad as a ‘thug’ and mass murderer, and made claims about the use of chemical weapons that the Russian leader Putin described as ‘unimaginable nonsense’.
Kerry was clearly on a regime change mission.
Then Obama retreated, and now Kerry and Vice President Biden are eating crap by the truckload.
The US media, that had been making Paul Revere-type jokes that ‘The British aren’t coming’, will now be able to extend the line to ‘and neither are the Americans’ if Congress follows the line of the UK parliament.
What has gone wrong with the great US-UK imperialist plan to remodel the world according to their requirements, that so encouraged Cameron to lead his House of Commons version of the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’?
The reason for the twin retreat is that the world capitalist crisis, the slump, mass unemployment and imperialist bloodbaths have stoked up the revolt of the masses worldwide, in every continent, a revolt that in its totality makes up a new stage of the world socialist revolution.
The workers and the middle class of the UK were determined that Cameron was not going to be allowed to repeat the atrocity of the Iraq war in Syria, the Lebanon and then Iran.
They were also spurred on by fact that while Cameron has made the bankers richer than ever they, the working class and the middle class, have been pauperised by rapidly rising prices, slashed wages and benefits, with their children robbed of their future by the bankrupted bankers and bosses, and being treated as outcasts.
It is this class war abroad and at home that made its weight felt in the House of Commons last Thursday when Cameron and Osborne were humiliated.
This class war is everywhere. Over the weekend the Egyptian army had to attack and kill a group of people who were sinking a ship in the Suez Canal in an attempt to block it off to the warships of the imperialist powers.
In the United States the masses of the people have been mocked by Obama’s printing of $85bn a month of quantitative easing, a constant money supply for the big banks, at the same time as they have seen Detroit, one-time motor capital, go bust and workers’ wages, jobs, pensions and homes with it. In fact, Detroit is the US and the US is Detroit.
Workers have witnessed Obama’s readiness to cut Medicare and Medicaid for the poor, while the alleged new jobs are all low-paid, and part-time. The US working class and the youth are suffering and they are angry. The mass movement that began with Occupy Wall Street has now developed into an uprising of the low-paid and the oppressed who are unionising and striking for a minimum of $15 an hour.
The US working class has had enough of the Republicans and the Democrats. It is this mass movement of workers and youth that has made Obama stop and think, and hand the decision on war over to the Congress.
The next week will see an eruption of the masses to stop the US going to war with Syria in favour of the class war in the US against the bosses and bankers and bankrupt capitalism.
The world revolution has reached the stage where the ruling classes cannot go to war with impunity, thumbing their noses at the masses as they do so.
In this stage of the world crisis the vital task of the hour is the building of sections of the Fourth International all over the planet to lead the developing world revolution to its victory, to put an end to capitalism and imperialism through socialist revolutions, and by going forward to the world socialist republic, based on a world economy planned not to satisfy the profit motive but to satisfy the requirements of the people.
