Response to Obama’s Speech: Accelerate the Antiwar Movement!

International Action Center Statement
 Response To Obama’s Speech:

Accelerate The Antiwar Movement!
The President’s speech Tuesday night repeated all of the lies the United States has been telling about Syria to justify war — and shows that war may be delayed, but is not off the table.

The biggest lie being told right now is that Assad agreed to give up his country’s chemical weapons because of the United States’ “credible military threat.”

What has really happened is that the warmakers in the Pentagon, and their backers on Wall Street, ran into a gigantic brick wall of resistance. They were forced to back down for the time being.

They wanted to go to war right now. But when Kerry said on Monday, “All Assad has to do is give up his chemical weapons,” Syria and Russia called his bluff.

Backing up this move was mass sentiment against war and an anti-war movement that sprang up overnight.

At that very moment, the U.S. was desperately looking for a way out of its stated plans. It was clear that Obama would not get approval for an attack on Syria in the House. And internationally the White House was not getting support, either.

As soon as Obama saw a way out, he took it. This was a tactical retreat – one that gives the anti-war movement more time to mobilize.

It also gives the warmakers more time to mobilize. The goals of the 1% have not changed one iota. They just couldn’t wage the war they wanted when they wanted.

The direction of the competing proposals in the UN Security Council and Congress is to put Syria in the same position as Iraq in 2003. The United States will demand compliance and, like Iraq, it won’t matter what Syria does – the U.S. will claim it is not complying.

Now is the time for the anti-war movement to demand the unilateral disarmament of the Pentagon. The United States has the world’s largest stockpiles of conventional, nuclear and chemical weapons. Right now babies are being born in Fallujah, Iraq, with staggering rates of birth defects because of exposure to depleted uranium used by the U.S. military.

As much as the world is against war, the profit-hungry demands of the 1% constantly compel it to go to war. The U.S. wants complete domination of the Middle East and its vast oil resources. And the 1% wants to break up the alliance of forces that have the capacity to resist the dictates of the United States and Israel.

Only the peoples’ movement can stop war, which the U.S. will try again in Syria later. The struggle continues. The anti-war nerve touched by the latest announced attack was unemployment, poverty, the just-announced cuts in food stamps, Trayvon Martin, low wages, students’ debt burdens and furloughed workers.

All those issues remain, and so does the need to fight for “Money for jobs, not for war!”