The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 26th April 2013
THE TERROR attack on the Boston Marathon last week horrified Americans who are still not inured to the random, and almost daily, violence that so typifies decadent US society today. Three people died and 282 others were injured when two bombs exploded during the race. Two suspects were later gunned down by the police after they killed a cop and hijacked a car. One is dead and the other is seriously ill in hospital.
The two men were brothers, Muslim Chechens, from a Russian autonomous republic in the Caucasus that was wracked by civil strife for over a decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The violence was led by local warlords and Islamic terror gangs that were armed and funded by reactionary Arab oil princes with the blessing of US imperialism that sought to detach Chechnya from the Russian federation to gain control of the strategic oil pipelines that straddle its territory. The violence continues with terror attacks in Russian cities by Islamic fundamentalist groups from Chechnya and the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan.
We now learn that Russian intelligence had informed the US authorities that they had identified the two brothers as potential terrorists but the FBI ignored it.
It’s not hard to see why. American imperialism uses the “war against terror” as a pretext for imperialist intervention and brands anyone who stands in their way as part of an “axis of evil” while it uses terror all the time to get its own way.
Most of the time it comes from the air with US terror bombing and missile attacks that wreaked death and destruction on countless civilians in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in recent years. But some of it comes from terrorist movements nurtured and sometimes actually created by the CIA to do the Americans’ dirty work in the countries targeted for destabilisation and “regime change”.
The United States has become a safe haven for any extremist willing to do their bidding or whose interests coincide with those of US imperialism. Anyone who had committed acts of terror in Cuba or against the Cuban government is welcomed in the United States and, despite Russian protests, Chechen extremists are given sanctuary in America.
Sometimes it backfires on them as we’ve seen with the Al Qaida movement. Osama bin Laden was a tool of the Americans when the imperialists were working to bring down the people’s government in Afghanistan that was an ally of the Soviet Union. When bin Laden turned on his former mentors with disastrous consequences they had to kill him.
While the motives for the men behind the Boston Marathon bombing remain unclear what is certain is that when the Americans play with fire they certainly will get burnt.