Category Archives: Iran

The imperialist war against Iran

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Before looking at the ceasefire in the imperialist war against Iran, including its breaking just announced as this is written, we should note the hypocrisy.  The Israeli attack on Iran was a flagrant breach of international law for which Russia has been widely and repeatedly condemned, with the horrendous war supported and prolonged by massive injections of weapons and funding from western imperialism to Ukraine.  The unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia have significantly impacted on the living standards of the working class in Europe, which has committed to massive rearmament that brings us closer to an even greater conflict.

In Gaza, the attacks by the imperialist proxy involve genocide while imperialism has defended Israel’s actions as self-defence and provided the means to implement it.  Opposition to genocide has been criminalised across Europe and the US and equated to terrorism.

The attack on Iran by Israel and then the United States has been defended by posing the issue as Iranian possession of nuclear weapons it doesn’t have, which Israel does. Iranian aggression is condemned while ignoring Zionist aggression in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran.  Immediately after the Israeli and US attacks the leaders of the European Union called for restraint, de-escalation and for Iran to enter negotiations; ignoring that Iran had never left them, that Isreal and the US had torpedoed existing talks, and that both had just escalated attacks that were against the sacred international law the European leaders said they were defending in Ukraine.  While media focus was on Iran Zionism continued its genocide in Gaza.

There would seem no reason to believe anything the imperialists say, except of course part of the left has accepted their rhetoric in relation to Ukraine, fully supporting the imperialist proxy and the provision of massive financial and military resources.

These wars are hardly unconnected and it is widely understood, even to the consumers of the dumbed-down coverage of the BBC and RTE, that behind them lies the growing conflict between the United States and China, also expressed in the trade war by the US intended to weaken China and its allies and further subordinate its allies in Europe etc.  The eruption and now sudden attempt at ending (or rather suspension) of the war against Iran is inexplicable without understanding this.

This has not prevented sections of the left taking the side of one camp or the other in the inter-imperialist conflict while still claiming either to be against ‘campism’ or against all imperialism.  The really stupid find themselves both supporting the actions of Western imperialism while verbally denouncing it for not doing enough in Ukraine and doing too much in Palestine and Iran.  Apparently imperialism can play a progressive and reactionary role at the same time. Some reached the bottom with their opposition to the dictatorship of Assad leading them to welcome the victory of a new dictatorship of western backed Islamist terrorists.

The attack on Iran was thus one consequence of this conflict with the support of US imperialism vital for Israeli action against its regional rival, which is aligned with Russia and China, if not in the formal or tight relationship that the West has with Israel and Ukraine.  Of course, Israel has its own agenda but it is subordinated to that of US imperialism, with differences mainly arising over secondary issues of method and presentation.

Left supporters of Ukraine among the left will share in its defeat by Russia, having abandoned an independent position, while the left supporters of Russia and China have suffered their own through the defeat of Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria and the weakening of the Iranian state, again without signalling a socialist position in relation to them.

The attack by Israel, agreed and supported by the US, was intended to remove the potential for Iran to recoup some recent losses to its ‘axis of resistance’ and to degrade its position so that it could no longer present as a potential rival hegemon in the region.  Having done this it might be possible to enable regime change, or more likely simply wreck and ruin the country.  The pivot to China, which has been declared as US policy would thus go through west Asia.

US interests require that war with Iran should be a stepping stone and way station to pressing on China and not an obstacle, while for Israel the point about Iran is that it is its immediate and main rival.  The interests of the US and Israel are not therefore identical.  For the US, weakening Iran weakens the alliance that encompasses Russia and China, in doing so revealing its lack of coherence and strength, but Iran is not a threat to the US and there is no principled reason that an accommodation could not be found with it, where Iran to accept its role as a subordinate to the United States.

It is quite possible that the US strike on Iran’s nuclear sites have not achieved the complete success claimed by Trump but that this is less important than the Israeli weakening of Iran’s overall military capability and the deterrence to further escalatory response by a chastened regime.  Claims have been made that the US attack took something of the same form as the retaliation by Iran on US bases – that they were telegraphed and performative to prevent escalation but enough to allow Trump to claim victory while Iran could claim to maintain the credibility of its military deterrence.

The initial attack by Israel achieved significant effects but it has not neutered Iranian capacity to strike back, while the Iranian response has been to demonstrate this capacity while seeking not to provoke a US intervention.  The difficulty is that Israel, just like Ukraine, has an incentive to seek such escalation in order to further involve the US in the war; so we are left with the media obsession with the decision making process of the moron that is Donald Trump and his administration about what exactly it intends to do.

Iran is a very large country with nine times the population of Israel.  That Israel can attack it is solely due to its client status of the US.  While the US could provoke a war with Russia by using the bodies of Ukrainians, Israel cannot invade Iran and neither can the US, not without a war on a scale dwarfing that of Iraq.  Even a campaign of missile strikes and bombing would weaken the US in relation to the resources it can leverage against China.

In this dynamic the unambiguous losers are the people of Iran, oppressed by a brutal theocratic regime, and assailed from outside by imperialist sanctions, missiles and bombs.  They had no say in starting the war or in responding to it but, like the rest of us, can immediately only seek to protect themselves and seek a way to deal with their own ruling class and its state.

The responsibility of socialists is to oppose the imperialist attack on Iran and to demand that their own countries stop supporting it, including the ending of all support to the Zionist state.  This is true in the US, UK, and EU; and also in Ireland where the weasel words of the Irish government are simply a different flavour of hypocrisy to the rest of the imperialist bloc it belongs to.

The point of solidarity with Iran is not to support the reactionary regime and its state but to protect its people and to create the conditions in which the Iranian working class can carry out its own regime change.  Only the working class around the world has a united interest in ending imperialist war, which cannot be done by supporting any of the rival capitalist powers, which in doing so surrenders its political independence. Ending the war through such a movement would have very different consequences to a temporary reprieve arising from any imperialist imposed ‘peace.’

A World going to War and the resistance (2 of 3) – Two proxy wars

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Western imperialist support for the Zionist state and its genocide in Gaza has exposed its hypocrisy to millions across the world but the developing war against Iran exposes what lies behind this support.

The repeated provocations against Iran, involving assassination of leading figures and terrorist attacks in Lebanon have in each case been designed to provoke an Iranian response that would justify further Israeli attacks and increased intervention by the US.  The US has been saying two things during this Israeli escalation: promoting a ceasefire that will release Israeli hostages but that will permit continued Zionist aggression thereafter, and repeated declarations of support for the Zionist state, backed up with more and more weapons plus financing for a deficit that is forecast to be almost three times that expected before the war but will turn out to be even greater. 

The Western media repeats ad nauseum that the US has been struggling to prevent regional war and that it has also struggled to rein in Zionist bellicosity.  What it also occasionally reports is that a new ‘reformist’ President in Iran is seeking to improve relations with Western imperialism in order to reduce sanctions against his country, and that this is why Iran is deliberately seeking to prevent escalation in its responses to provocation.

If the US wanted to rein in Israeli aggression, it would not supply the weapons that allows the Zionist state to carry out genocide, invade Lebanon and attack Iran.  It would not supply the finance that allows the Zionist state to finance “the longest and most expensive war’ in its history, according to its finance minister.  In other words the US is lying and the Western media parrots its lies, which are reported as news and then recycled by its talking heads and columnists as the truth.

Since the real enemy of the Zionist state and threat to its regional hegemony is Iran, the target of escalation in the war – through the invasion of Lebanon with the purpose of smashing Hizbollah – is the organisation’s patron.  Since the Zionist state is the projection of US/Western imperialist power in the region the main enemy of the US is Iran, because behind it is Russia. And behind it – China.

The invasion of Lebanon and attacks on Iran are not something the US opposes but is its proxy war against Iran and Russia.  Israel is thus playing the same role as Ukraine is playing in the war against Russia, which is why the US has supplied weapons and financing for both and why the Western media displays its bias in favour of both. 

However, even the Western media is increasingly reporting that Ukraine is losing the war while trying to determine what can retrieved from the defeat.  Anyone relying on this media would be surprised by this turn of events having been fed a diet of Russian failure and Ukrainian valour and success.  The story now is very different.

In the Financial Times its reporters quotes the head of the Washington office of the European Council on Foreign Relations thar “we are losing the war” while the rabidly pro-imperialist Economist editorialises that ‘If Ukraine and its Western backers are to win, they must first have the courage to admit that they are losing’; rich coming from that publication – given the lateness to recognise it themselves.  Even now it ventures a cunning plan for victory, of sorts, through yet more money to build up a Ukrainian arms industry, which is admission that Western imperialism can no longer supply Ukraine with their own weapons, not least because they are needed to kill Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians.  

Having advocated and heralded previous escalation by imperialism, The Economist sees no need to explain its own failure but simply supports yet more escalation and a plan even less credible than the one concocted by Zelensky.  

Both publications provide ample evidence that Ukraine is failing and that the views of Ukrainians themselves are changing, making them less willing to fight the proxy war, never mind ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’.

“Most players want de-escalation here’ says a senior Ukrainian official, while one Ukrainian commander states his fear of a “forever war”, and another officer notes that “if the US turns off the spigot, we’re finished.”  In The Economist yet another drone commander states that “the West and the United States in particular have an unequivocal responsibility for the deaths of Ukrainians.”

Both publications note the increasing corruption of the Ukrainian state: the forced mobilisation “is perceived as abusive, worse than if you are a criminal” according to the director of the Kyiv Centre for Economic Strategy.  “It tears people apart.  The real enemy is Russia, but at the same time they fear a corrupt, abusive enrolment office doing the wrong thing.”  The effect on the front reported by The Economist is that ‘many of those drafted into service are ill-suited to fighting: too old, too ill, too drunk.’  It notes that there is no clear path out of the army, making ‘being mobilised seem like a one-way ticket to the morgue’.  It states that 5-10% are absent without leave despite prosecutions and that ‘fewer than 30% of Ukrainians consider draft-dodging shameful.’

The Economist also notes that ‘corruption and nationalism are on the rise’ while the Financial Times reports a governing party MP that ‘the biggest domestic problem for Zelenskyy might come from a nationalist minority opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and trained to fight . . . The far right in Ukraine is growing.  The right wing is a danger to democracy.”

Thus, many Ukrainians understand the important role of Western imperialist intervention, even if the pro-war Western left professes not to.  They understand the rampant corruption of the state, the life and death consequences for themselves, and seek to avoid them, while this left champions the defence of the state and supports the supply of weapons to Ukrainian conscripts who simply do not want to die.  The importance and threat of the far right is recognised while this left, never slow to denounce the fascist threat everywhere else, has minimised, glossed over and treated it as inconsequential.  All these failures flowing from the initial failure to understand the war as an imperialist one in which socialists should support neither side.

Both publications proffer incomplete and confused plans for ending the war, both of which appear to treat the Russian view of how it should end as secondary to their own.

What they both do, is treat the question of NATO membership as central, yet another vital element the pro-imperialist warmongers have treated as some sort of Russian excuse.  “Land for [Nato] membership is the only game in town, everyone knows it”, says one senior western official quoted by the FT.  “Nobody will say it out loud . . . but it’s the only strategy on the table.”  On the other hand the FT quotes a senior Ukrainian official as stating that “I don’t think Russia would agree to our participation in Nato.”

The gung-ho Economist supports Ukrainian NATO membership but simply glosses over the acknowledged risk – ‘If Russia struck Ukraine again, America could face a terrible dilemma: to back Ukraine and risk war with a nuclear foe; or refuse and weaken its alliance around the world.”  It fails to notice that the US has made a choice on NATO membership already (refusing immediate admission) and simply elides the risk by claiming that a choice of not giving membership would entail Ukraine’s defeat, which ‘would be much worse.’  What could be worse than a world war between two states armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons is not explained, but this, apparently, is the future promised by the prominent publication of Western imperialism.

For the moment, The Economist and Financial Times still support the war, with the former seeking to redefine victory as less than before.  However it ends, the war will have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands with many more wounded; much of Ukraine will have been destroyed; the Ukrainian rump state will be weaker, more corrupt and more subject to imperialist predation than before; the political division within the former Ukrainian working class will have been immeasurably strengthened; and both NATO and the reactionary Russian regime will remain.

These are the already known inevitable results of the war that those leftists who think victory for one band of capitalist robbers is better than the other have to justify. Socialists will remain implacably opposed to both and will not entertain the claims of these leftist pretenders that after the fighting is over they will go back to opposing NATO or Putin.

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Forward to part 3

A World going to War and the resistance (1 of 3) – Palestine and Lebanon

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Beirut Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Israel is reported to have killed more than a thousand people in its two weeks of bombing Lebanon and has now started a land invasion, which has caused a displacement of more than a million people, almost a fifth of the population.  It continues to murder hundreds of civilians in Gaza with the death toll approaching 42,000, not including many more buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings. One estimate, and not the highest, is 186,000!

After repeated provocations Iran attacked Israel with an unknown number of missiles that Israel says were mainly shot down, while video evidence claimed to show that many were successful, although it is not obvious that they hit their intended targets.  A main objective appears to have been to impact military airbases.

Iran reportedly gave notice to both the US and Israel that it was going to attack, allowing the Israelis to remove their aircraft from harm’s way, while it also said that its response to the provocations had finished.

Netanyahu shamelessly and offensively publicised his order to kill the leader of Hizbollah (and those unconnected who were near him) when he was at the UN in New York, straight after a speech in which he claimed that “Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again.” After the Iranian missile strike he warned that Iran had made a “big mistake” and threatened that it “will pay for it”.

After the continuing genocide in Gaza, the more than thousand killed in Israeli bombing and now ground invasion of Lebanon, Keir Starmer declared that he and the country he claims to speak on behalf of, “stands with Israel” and recognises its right to self-defence.  The Labour Defence Secretary John Healey said that British forces had “played their part in attempts to prevent further escalation”, which must be his way of boasting that British aircraft helped the genocidal Israeli military to stop the Iranian missiles.  The US has already sent more military into the region and also boasted of its efforts against the missilles.

No one reading this will need an exposition of the lies and hypocrisy these statements involve, told by either the Zionist leaders or their Western backers: the selective condemnation of terrorism, selective endorsement of the right to self-defence, selective concern for civilian casualties and selective condemnation and sanctions against outside invasion.  All this is obvious.  Starmer’s support and defence of the genocidal Zionist regime has played a part in the collapse of his already low popularity and that of his government – his net approval number is now minus 30 and his government less popular than the one that has just been shredded:

More demonstrations are taking place and planned across the world, following the mass walk-out of delegates to the UN at the start of Netanyahu’s speech.  The pathetic role of the Irish delegation was clearly exposed by their staying in their seats to listen to the latest catalogue of lies that insults its listeners.

The Irish people have an opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to genocide and the attack on Lebanon through a march on Saturday.  The support declared for it reveals widespread support but also the depth of much of it. What is the purpose of this demonstration and the campaign generally? Is pointing out the hypocrisy of the government and its actions anywhere near enough?

The purpose, it would seem, can only be to put pressure on the government to take action but the repeated demands on the Government by some opposition TD’s have only been met by revelations that it will not even enforce its own laws that might somewhat inconvenience the transport of weapons to Israel – allowing flights over Irish airspace without any question.  The governing parties are riding high in the polls and are busy bribing the population with their own money in the budget – their money and that amassed as a tax haven for US multinationals. If putting pressure on it is the objective, the question must be asked – what pressure?

The political voices of these 160 civil society organisations supporting the demo have been demanding various actions from the Irish government for a year, with no success beyond its hypocritical statements that rival those of the other Western powers.  After a short time, this reveals not the power of public opinion but its weakness and that of the solidarity campaign that seeks to mobilise it.  It reveals the political poverty of demanding that the Irish bourgeoisie do something that is not in its interest.  If you expect they will do so you are naïve at best and if you don’t you are fooling your supporters and yourself.  

Look at the organisations supporting the demonstration! They include the trade unions and will probably include Sinn Fein; the party that partied with genocide Joe on St Patricks day.  Who could possibly feel pressure from such hypocrites?  The governing parties could easily turn round to the trade unions and ask – what have you done to boycott the Zionist state?

In other words, the Palestine solidarity campaign should be demanding that those who claim to support it do something, beyond supporting demonstrations that long ago revealed that bourgeois governments don’t care what their populations think as long as they can get away with it. If these governments will not take action, it needs to be taken for them, or rather – against them.

That means demanding that Sinn Fein boycott the genocidal US regime and the trade unions campaign to persuade their members to take direct action to boycott Israeli bound armaments etc. and defend them when they do.  If they don’t then their participation in solidarity demonstrations is a sham and by extension is a fraud on all the other participants who are genuinely opposed to the actions of the Zionist state and want to do something about it.

The Irish state is a very junior and subordinate partner in a Western imperialist alliance that supports the Zioinist state because this state is the West’s – primarily the US’s – instrument of power in the Arab world and beyond.  To expect that it will rebel against its dominant partners is delusional, and continual demands that it do so miseducates and misdirects everyone who doesn’t understand this. It must stop, and the campaign look to Irish workers as the means to put pressure on imperialism, starting by opposing their own state that is a part of it.

Forward to part 2