Beginning in 2012, the Obama administration funneled billions of dollars in arms and other equipment to Islamic fundamentalist proxy forces in Syria, including the Al Nusra Front, a terrorist breakaway organization from Al Qaeda. The illegal US intervention has been aimed at overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, an ally of both Iran and Russia and the Middle East, and installing a puppet regime loyal to Washington.

The illegal US and European intervention in Syria has led to a protracted civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and contributed to the greatest refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War. Since 2012, it has repeatedly brought the US and European powers to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.

In March, 2003, the world watched on with horror as the US-led “shock and awe” bombing campaign lit up the nighttime sky of Baghdad with billowing clouds of flame and smoke. This campaign and the bloody ten years of occupation that followed had a devastating impact on what was once among the most advanced societies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions were made homeless. One million Iraqis are estimated to have died.

The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, illegal under international law developed in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. The Bush administration employed increasingly brazen lies, centered on the claims that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). The Democratic Party supported the war, while the Obama administration, which came to power in 2008, opposed any prosecution of the war criminals who had prosecuted the illegal war of aggression.

On October 7, 2001, Washington and its NATO allies launched an illegal full-scale military assault against the Islamist Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda bases in the country. From the outset of the invasion, the WSWS exposed the lies of the Bush administration that its invasion was an act of self-defense in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.

The war, which has spanned more than 18 years and is the longest-running war in US history, has killed over 175,000 people in Afghanistan, by conservative estimates, with hundreds of thousands more wounded, and millions driven from their homes. The cost of this “endless war” has reached roughly $1 trillion. At its height, the Pentagon was squandering some $110 billion a year, roughly 50 percent more than the total annual US federal budget for public education.

Beginning in April, 1999, the major imperialist powers launched an unprecedented multilateral war against Serbia. NATO, led by the United States but including forces from Britain, Germany, France, Italy and other allied countries, rained bombs down on the tiny country, the largest fragment of the former Yugoslavia.

The nominal pretext for the war was the conflict in Kosovo, a Serb province with a predominately Albanian population. A separatist movement, closely linked to gangsters and drug smugglers, received backing from the US and Germany and arrogated to itself the grandiose and misleading title of the “Kosovo Liberation Army.”

In December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved by the Stalinist regime led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The destruction of the Soviet Union was the outcome of the anti-socialist and nationalist policies of the ruling bureaucracy, which confirmed the warnings of the Trotskyist movement of the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism.

In the wake of the dissolution of the USSR, US imperialism concluded that it could now offset the challenge that American corporations faced from rivals in Europe and Japan, which had been growing since the 1970s, through the relatively untrammeled use of the US armed forces.

In November, 1991, the ICFI held a World Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism, in Berlin. The ICFI's initiative to hold the conference was taken in response to the launching of the First Gulf War by Washington, the declaration by US imperialism of its “unipolar moment,” and the march toward the restoration of capitalism and dissolution of the Soviet Union.