This article first appeared in Socialist Worker. Photo by Guy Smallman.
Donald Trump’s assault on Iran is the latest round of the eternal “war to end all wars” he promises his disciples. We now know that “regime change” by bunker buster bomb is his preferred strategy.
This is imperial adventurism of the highest order. But it is also an admission of the real constraints on US power in an era of crisis. And it is confirmation of Trump’s delusions that he can escape these through sheer force of will.
The coordination between Israel and the United States illustrates the self-confidence of Israeli generals that they can continue to dictate the region’s fate.
They believe their ability to get away with genocide in Gaza has reset the balance of power in the region, allowing them to force the decapitation of the leaders of Iran.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon resumed on Monday morning, continuing the interrupted conflict with resistance group Hezbollah on the Zionist state’s northern border.
Israel’s war planners have moved from hitting their regional enemies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran sequentially—to simultaneous assaults on multiple fronts.
British warplanes and bases are right in the thick of these crimes, as are arms manufactured in Britain. Pressure on Starmer to offer direct support for bombing Iran from Britain is likely to increase.
Where and how do we make a stand against this latest terrifying manifestation of the global drive towards war?
Imperialism today is characterised by competition between the big imperialist powers, including the US, China and Russia, but also rivalries between regional powers.
In a clash between great and middle powers do we side with the regime under attack by our government, forgetting the crimes the Islamic Republic of Iran perpetrates against its people?
Or do we simply refuse to decide “between plague and cholera”—as the Arabic saying goes—and denounce US, Israeli, British and Iranian states equally?
The starting point for us in Britain must be that our government is a party to atrocities on a monumental scale. The Iranian people have a right to defend their homes and country from foreign intervention, including through armed resistance.
The enemies they are facing have no more regard for the lives of Iranian civilians than they did for Palestinians in Gaza. The methods of killing are the same—2,000 pound bombs flatten neighbourhoods on the pretext of striking military targets.
The death toll from the US-Israeli attack on a girls’ primary school in Minab, southern Iran, keeps rising and just as in Gaza, the majority are children.
But saying this is not enough.
The last two years have demonstrated the weakness of strategies that claim to confront imperialism by simply shoring up the sovereignty of middle powers such as Iran.
Iran’s rulers long ago lost their political legitimacy, sapped by deep crises and protests.
The cycle of revolt in Iran reached its latest bloody climax with the demonstrations in January this year, when huge protests erupted. A steep rise in inflation mixed with a deeper anger against the state.
But the opening drama of this cycle began in 2009.
Then protests erupted over conservative politicians’ manipulation of the vote in the presidential elections.
These mass mobilisations in the streets marked a profound rupture with the past.
The protests began as a falling-out between people at the top about how to manage society best in their interests. Yet this intersected with a growing confidence among people at the bottom of society that they should no longer put up with repression.
The following decade saw this process repeated as contradictions intensified between global, regional and internal dimensions of the regime’s crisis. Three key elements were in play.
Firstly, the Iranian ruling class’s precarious balancing act in global politics, in particular its high-stakes alternation between deal-making and deal-breaking over its nuclear programme.
Secondly, the regime’s strategy of expanding its influence within a region shaken by the catastrophe of US defeat in Iraq following its invasion and occupation in 2003.
And finally, the impoverishment of large sections of the Iranian population as economic growth tipped into reverse.
Mechanisms of economic warfare, such as the intensified sanctions regime reimposed by Trump, have tightened the geopolitical vice around the necks of Iran’s leaders.
But they do not tell the whole story. The Iranian ruling class is paying the price for the failure of neoliberal policies it has embraced with enthusiasm over the past few decades.
The Iranian regime has ruthlessly pursued the privatisation of services. It has outsourced jobs and created a two-tier workforce where new entrants work under worse conditions than their older colleagues. It has also funded the expansion of IT infrastructure and the creation of digital markets.
There is now a complex digital ecosystem meshing together foreign and state-sanctioned local apps and platforms. It has given young Iranians glimpses of a world of possibilities which their leaders now want to shut down entirely.
The uprising of 2022 gave some expression to the rage of this generation. It was triggered by the police murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, after the police arrested her for allegedly not wearing the hijab in line with government standards.
Tragically, street protests did not fuse with struggles led by organised workers and the security apparatus crushed the movement. But the regime was also forced to make concessions, essentially abandoning the enforcement of the dress code.
US and Israeli bombs won’t hasten the process of popular revolution. They will set it back, firstly by driving many ordinary people back into the arms of the regime. And secondly, by empowering the most reactionary elements of the opposition.
This is seen in the monarchists who are waving Israeli flags and cheering on the bombs. They want to swap the current regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards for the old Shah’s feared Savak secret police.
It is also critical to recognise a layer of Iranians, particularly younger people, have known nothing but the current regime’s oppressive rule.
They can be drawn towards the idea that the destruction of the old order through foreign intervention is a chance for a different future.
Many Iraqis in 2003 held the same kind of hopes at the start of the US invasion.
It was this disaster that underscored the relative decline of US military might both within the region and at a global level. This created a gap into which resurgent middle powers including both Iran and Israel expanded. Iran’s rulers benefitted from the bungled occupation of Iraq to strengthen their regional alliances.
The genocide in Gaza was among other things an attempt by Israel’s rulers to assert their dominance of this regional order. Their ambition is to ensure that the Zionist state’s position as watchdog for US imperial interests is at the top of a hierarchy where no regional rivals can challenge them.
Pointing a route out of the nightmare that is unfolding demands a strategy that mobilises the one force that can bring the machinery of destruction to a juddering halt—the social power of the people whose labour makes it work.
In the past, oil and gas workers inside Iran have played this kind of role.
In the Iranian revolution of 1978-9, mass strikes pushed back the frontier of management and state control inside the workplace.
By the time the monarchy fell in early 1979, production across much of the oil sector was not under the command of the Shah and his ministers. It was instead controlled by democratically elected workplace councils, known as shoras.
But even earlier, In the 1940s and early 1950s there were waves of organising by Communist and nationalist movements across the oil industry of the region. They shook the control of foreign oil companies and terrified the authoritarian regimes.
Tens of thousands took part in strikes that challenged the racist, apartheid-like conditions of Arab and Iranian workers employed by Western oil companies.
Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the British-owned oil fields in 1951 in this context. Oil workers in the Iraqi city of Basra launched mass strikes in August 1952 inspired by Mossadegh’s nationalisation programme. The strikes triggered a nationwide Intifada, or uprising, a few months later.
Meanwhile in Iran, events were moving fast towards a US and British-backed coup which overthrew Mossadegh in August 1953. This did not stop the oil workers’ movement spreading: some 13,000 workers launched a historic strike against the Aramco oil company in Saudi Arabia after police arrested union organisers in October 1953.
The workers of the Gulf are still divided by their passports and fragmented by their languages and religions. Arabic-speakers in southern Iran face state repression and marginalisation.
Shia communities in the oil-rich eastern region of Saudi Arabia experience sectarian oppression by the regime.
But across the whole of the Gulf, the people whose labour powers the region’s economy are united by their class. They share common experiences of labouring in the deadly heat, of accident-prone workplaces and the looming fear of unemployment.
They watch the wheezing generators and flickering lights in fear that the unbreathable, humid air will kill their children when the air conditioning fails.
They have become economic conscripts in a war against climate change that is rapidly making the region where they live uninhabitable as temperatures soar. And now imperialism has turned the skies into a battleground above their heads.
Glimpses of a similar kind of unity can be seen in the general strikes and coordinated workers’ actions across the ports of the Mediterranean over the past year.
From Greece, to Italy and Morocco, workers have stood up and refused to be party to war crimes and genocide in Palestine.
Many of those leading this movement in Italy are migrant workers who face the double threat of war engulfing their home countries and racism from the rising far right.
We need to learn from such successful examples of workers’ action disrupting Israel’s war machine in Gaza and apply them here in Britain. Factories, university research labs, ports and airfields within these islands are now enrolled into a conflict that puts millions of lives at risk.
There are already, no doubt, soldiers and dockers, factory workers and lorry drivers, researchers and computer scientists who are asking themselves how long can they continue being party to these crimes.
It is up to us to build an anti-war movement on a scale that gives some of them the courage to turn “not in our name, not with our labour” into a rallying cry that reaches millions.
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