The assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani by Trump may stumble the U.S. into WWIII and garner condemnation from the Democratic opposition and especially from some Democratic presidential candidates. But make no mistake, their objections are tactical and political, not strategic or irreparable. The Democrats are as committed to propping up the declining US imperialism as the Republicans. Their votes in both houses including those of 188 Democrats\u00a0 granted Trump the unfathomable sum of $738bn<\/a> for war spending.<\/p>\n Trumpsters may play attorney and claim the assasination was nothing other presidents have not\u00a0 done, reaching all the way back to Yamamoto. The truths excluded from this reasoning are the experience of Trump lived by anyone who is not among his base, plus the who and the what he is. Trump has inflicted great misery on the victims of international reaction, principally abroad, but also upon the poor and working poor at home. He is credibly a rapist, demonstrably a racist enemy of Latin Americans\u00a0 and a Muslim-banning Islamophobe, as evidenced today by his target list of Iranian cultural sites. What he is is a Bonapartist with fascistic ambitions and values. He hopes to inspire his followers to make him President-for-life and make his programmatic wishes operative. His followers seek to make the war danger his free pass from impeachment on \u201cpatriotic\u201d emergency grounds. Others, like John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu, seek the total war itself, and have since the early \u201890s, at least. We have never seen the Democratic Party resist any war, so far as their majority voting record shows. Their first definition is as partners with the Republicans in maintenance of the superstructural parliamentary excrescence atop the dictatorship of Capital. Their objection to killing Soleimani boils down to timing.<\/p>\n President Obama regularly worked from \u201csecret kill lists\u201d <\/a>\u00a0and conducted assassinations with no audible objection from any significant wing of the Democratic Party. Rather they heaped applause and adulation upon him for his \u2018wise surgical methods\u2019 of assassination despite the \u2018occassional\u2019 incidents of collateral damage where civilians die by the thousands<\/a> as victims of the Great Game<\/a>,\u00a0 under the guise of counter-terrorism.<\/p>\n As comrades wrote\u00a0 in Redrave<\/a> in July, 2018:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a lot of confusion about Trump\u2019s behavior in Helsinki. Is he crazy, a traitor, or dupe of Putin? Nah. It\u2019s not that hard. It\u2019s still about the Great Game for Eurasia<\/a>. Trump is picking a fight with China which is the main economic threat to US imperialism. China has said it will ignore the sanctions on Iran. Trump wants to test the loyalty of Putin to Xi in the hope of weakening the China\/Russia bloc. He wants a new deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Today these Democratic wanna-be campaigners trip all over each other mustering their moral and legal indignation when Trump applies the very same\u00a0 methods Obama honed and which they just weeks ago funded. And like Clinton before him, Trump attempts to get impeachment off the public\u2019s mind with a missile strike. A leading Republican Senator says China is a far greater threat to the U.S. than Iran, and Democrat criticism can\u2019t be heard over the crickets. Perspective is important here; the policy of proxy war with Iran, now on-again, now off-again, was not supposed to lead to inter-imperialist war with the China\/Russia bloc, with Iran\u2019s allies. Trump has sought to break Russia from its bloc with China (and not incidentally, personally profit from the deal.)<\/p>\n We say you will not smash Trumpism with Democrats! We are told to judge a person not by their words but by their actions and this\u00a0 applies equally to political parties. The anti-war rhetoric from the Democrats today is totally disingenuous; their hypocrisy is exposed from every angle. They are impeaching Trump because he threatened to abandon the western imperialist bloc\u2019s strategic project, the post-Maidan Ukraine regime.<\/p>\n Trump, just weeks ago, was impeached by the House for abuse of power and\u00a0 obstruction of congress<\/a>. He was not\u00a0 impeached for his many crimes against the workers, the poor, and the oppressed at home and abroad. He wasn’t\u00a0 impeached for gutting of the EPA, OSHA, and social programs such as food stamps, nor for bullying and incitements to violence, nor for his embrace of rabid racists, nationalists and fascists at home and authoritarian thugs abroad. No, the Democratic Party could only find unity around impeachment when their leading candidate and imperialist planner<\/a> Joe Biden (author of the Biden Plan to redraw the map of the Middle East) became a target of Trump\u2019s mafia-style arm twisting of the Ukranian President, who the bipartisan congress had allocated\u00a0 funding for the purchase of U.S. military hardware. Hardware to be used against the Donbass insurgency that has been ongoing since 2014, following the rightward trajectory of the Ukranian Maidan.<\/p>\n The Independent <\/a>recognises, five years on, that although the Maidan\u2019s initiators were Europhiles seeking entrance to the EU as liberal democrats, the far right gained leadership on the streets and\u2026,<\/p>\n \u201c…In the months that followed, as a shell-shocked nation came to terms with its revolution, these nationalist groups claimed a chunk of the political vacuum. To this day, they continue to occupy key positions in and around government, and without clear popular legitimacy. The interior ministry\u2019s links with the far right<\/a> continue to be one of Maidan\u2019s most troubling legacies.\u201d<\/p>\n The liberal humanitarians who form a large piece of the base of the Democrats are well known supporters of international human rights and provide shade and cover for imperialism trying to smooth its \u2018excesses\u2019 but not challenge its power. As regards Ukraine their hypocrisy is again brought into focus by far right attacks on Romany people as reported by Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty <\/a>,<\/p>\n \u201c…That these far-right extremist groups have been awarded grants from the Ukrainian government is likely to be of great concern to Kyiv’s Western backers and leading international human rights organizations, four of which published an open letter to authorities on June 14 (2018) decrying what they called a sharp spike in political violence from these groups, who they say pose a great danger to Ukrainian democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n From 2014, while the bi-partisan courtship of the ultra-right Ukraine regime was being led by the late war hawk, war criminal and imperialist darling Senator John McCain, Trump was just launching his presidential campaign and sorting out (or not) his business prospects and ongoing relations with Russian oligarchs, Russian mafiosi and Putin. Can we smell conflict of interests?\u00a0 Consider a March Washington Post<\/a> article:<\/p>\n \u201c…for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. … the Bayrock Group<\/a>, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.\u201d<\/p>\n The Financial Times<\/a>, loyal as it is to its own ruling class, is not shy about applying journalistic scrutiny to the Russian money sustaining the Trump empire.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Financial Times has been investigating the money behind Trump Toronto for 10 months. Legal documents, signed statements and two dozen interviews with people with knowledge of the project and the money that flowed through it reveal that the venture connects the US president with a shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.\u201d<\/p>\n Clearly there is a split in the ruling class here, and the Supreme Court is obscuring it, burying the Deutsche Bank loans\/money laundering case until spring, i.e., after the impeachment embarrassment. Republicans, in the main believe their party can repair the split in the future and are content to hold onto power now. But U.S. allies can see this rift and that Trump would risk wrecking\u00a0 NATO if it benefits himself and his Moscow bankers, VEB and VTB, i.e., Putin.<\/p>\n Does the tail wag the Dog ?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Russia has made noise declaring the illegality and immorality of the Soleimani offing. And the number of psychiatrists who say Trump is unhinged is mushrooming. But we see things differently, and so will you when you pull up to the gas pump.<\/p>\n Why Trump appears to be so irrational is his amateurish attempts to hide the decline of U.S. imperialism relative to its emerging rivals. This decline forces Trump to engage in risky military adventures and destruction of the ecosphere that will ultimately blowback at home not only for the ruling class but for his populist base when U.S. troops get killed in such adventures. So his need for such adventures shows his Bonapartism is well on the road to fascism.<\/p>\n Trump has been in regular communication with Foreign Minister Lavrov and with Putin. There is little likelihood that the Soleimani killing surprised them. Trump needs to change his image at home,<\/i><\/b> and hopes you won\u2019t notice that he drove the anti-government protesters from Iranian streets, proving his claim that he does not seek Iranian regime change<\/i><\/b>. Killing Soleimani has mobilized the pro-government \u201cpatriots\u201d to rally around commemorations of their martyr. Trump hopes you won\u2019t be too sore about the gas price he just drove up and you will rally round the flag as Iran threatens retaliation, which can be immediate, long delayed or any time!. As he sends another brigade to Iraq, his message to you is, he is bringing U.S. troops home! He is wagging the dog to preserve the Khamenei theocracy against the revolutionary uprising of the Persian masses. Khamenei has had to kill over 1500 and jail tens of thousands recently, but Trump solved his problem and Capital\u2019s with one missile. Solved, that is, for the moment.<\/p>\n Ruling class thinking about whether this move was sage or \u201cunhinged\u201d is mixed, however. They cannot be too happy when one result is a vote of the Iraqi Parliament demanding the expulsion of U.S. troops. And while Pompeo declares that Iraq is a safer place without Soleimani, NATO allies have suspended their military training missions and are withdrawing them now.<\/p>\n No foreign leaders are sleeping through and not seeing what this means: The U.S. rulers have NOT solved the world crisis of capitalism signalled by the crash of 2008, and the demand for U.S. expulsion from Iraq is just the latest index of how far the powers of U.S. imperialism have diminished. The big boss appetites for increasing their world market shares are thus whetted in every imperialist country. And meanwhile U.S. capitalism has to worry how unpopular a new Middle Eastern war could be and become! Allies, already wary of Trump\u2019s attitude towards alliances, NATO in particular, are not rushing to support such a war. Watching and worrying also are the sections of the U.S.A. where the military is the biggest employer. These are also the most usually jingoistic, and are also the bulk of Trump\u2019s base, something the latest polls of the troops show they are not a part of now, if they ever wer. Our ruling class and all their class internationally know that Trump\u2019s base of support can turn against him should too many neighbors die for his glory.<\/p>\n In a\u00a0 NY Times Jan. 4th opinion piece, Jon Stevenson<\/a>, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies explains how the Soleimani killing is a strategic blunder that shows how the U.S. foreign policy is broken, and that broken is the process of oversight and review provided by informed strategic planners. Serious foresight, he argues, would have considered the possiblity that this would trigger a new round of terrorism and the potential for\u00a0 Hezbollah, \u201cthe A Team to Al Qaeda\u2019s B Team\u201d to venture out of the Middle East. The ruling class is concerned because, \u201c…Mr. Trump\u2019s move looks like either an impetuous act of self-indulgence or, somewhat more probable, a calculated attempt to bury his domestic political troubles.\u201d<\/p>\n Newsweek <\/a>speaks for most liberal quarters expressing the fears of the mental health community,<\/p>\n \u201c…Following the attack that killed Soleimani<\/a> in Baghdad, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Bandy X. Lee<\/a>, told Salon:<\/a> “This is exactly the kind of dangerous event we foresaw as Donald Trump’s response to the impeachment proceedings, just as his pulling troops from northern Syria was a direct response to the announcement of an impeachment inquiry.”<\/p>\n \u00a0Spotlight Center Stage, Inter-imperialist Conflict<\/b><\/p>\n The U.S. ruling class, since the middle of the Obama presidency, has been turning the focus of the military ship of state away from counter-terrorism and toward the emerging imperialisms of Russia and China. The Pacific pivot and support of Ukraine\u2019s absorption into the EU was their strategic orientation. Crushing the Syrian Revolution and the spread of the Arab national revolution could be left to the Russians assisting Assad and the Iranians whose forces did the yeoman’s piece in crushing ISIS. The U.S. ruling class now needs to re-exert U.S. imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. It is a necessity given the strategic importance of the region, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions and the growing strength and dominance of Russian\/Chinese imperialism. But there is a \u201crational\u201d imperialist policy and then there is the loose cannon that runs counter to strategic U.S. interests.<\/p>\n The Democrats feigned outrage over the killing of Soleimani (losing no sleep over Obama\u2019s drone strikes) and really were upset that Trump kept them out of the loop and did not seek Congressional approval for assassinations. They have a \u201cbetter\u201d means of killing and maiming abroad. They see him losing a trade war with China and taking Russia\u2019s side against Ukraine and attempting to get reluctant allies to take more defense spending out of the wages of their workers. To make a flip side of his coverup \u201choax\u201d song, his obstruction of Congress, the Democrats now spin Trump in power should be made to appear as the masses\u2019 major problem, and that before his \u201cincompetent\u201d (says Biden) amateur act they had a\u00a0 deal with Iran.<\/p>\n