Down With U.S. Provocations Against Iran!

U.S. imperialism is again rattling its saber against Iran. Alleging that on January 6 Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz threatened three U.S. warships—part of the vast, nuclear-armed U.S. armada off the coast of Iran—President Bush declared that “there will be serious consequences if they attack our ships, pure and simple” and warned that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.” The Bush administration has threatened Iran since 2002 as part of the “axis of evil,” listing it along with several other countries as a potential target for a nuclear first strike. This latest imperialist provocation occurred as Bush set out on a tour of the Near East, in part to rally Arab states against the “Iranian threat.”

When the Pentagon released its video of the patrol boat “incident”—showing unarmed speedboats in the vicinity of the warships, with audio spliced in saying, “you will explode”—the Iranian government denounced it as a fabrication. Tehran then released its own video of the incident showing an Iranian patrol boat issuing a routine request for identification, with a routine response from the U.S. warship. The U.S. government’s story has increasingly unraveled, as even the Pentagon later admitted that it didn’t know where the audio “threat” came from. Whatever the facts of the incident, the real provocation is that U.S. warships are patrolling off the coast of Iran and threatening the country. As our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain stressed in a statement issued after Iran seized 15 British army and naval personnel near the Iranian coast: “We do not know what the British forces were up to at the time of their capture, but we do know that the imperialists are the aggressors and this semi-colonial country is in their crosshairs” (reprinted in WV No. 890, 13 April 2007).

Having overwhelmingly given the Bush administration the green light to carry out the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Democrats today join the Republicans in declaring Iran to be a “threat.” All the major Democratic presidential candidates—Clinton, Obama and Edwards—have likewise made clear that “all options are on the table” against Iran. In fact, a common criticism of Bush by the Democrats is that the occupation of Iraq has been a distraction from effectively confronting Iran.

In the event of an attack by the U.S. imperialists or the nuclear-armed Israeli state, it is in the interest of the international working class, including working people in the U.S., to take a side for the military defense of Iran without giving an iota of political support to the reactionary Tehran regime. The pretext for the threats against Iran had been its supposed nuclear weapons program, which even U.S. intelligence agencies now say was abandoned in 2003. We say, in the context of U.S. threats, Iran needs nuclear weapons to deter an imperialist attack. U.S. hands off Iran! All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now!

It is the task of the multinational working class in Iran, leading behind it all the oppressed, to overthrow the Persian-chauvinist, clericalist regime through socialist revolution. Key to this perspective is the forging of a Leninist-Trotskyist workers party. Such parties must be built throughout the Near East—forged in struggle against all forms of fundamentalism and nationalism—to unite the proletariat in struggle against the imperialists as well as the region’s capitalist rulers. For a socialist federation of the Near East!

In the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries, the rapacious imperialist rulers must be swept away through workers revolutions. The true enemy of working people, minorities and the oppressed in the U.S. is the U.S. bourgeoisie. The ruling class that is today threatening Iran is the same capitalist class that has slashed the pensions, health care and jobs of America’s working people while shredding democratic rights through the reactionary “war on terror.” The struggle against imperialist war must be part and parcel of a struggle against the entire system of capitalist exploitation and oppression. The Spartacist League is committed to forging the workers party needed to lead the struggle for workers revolution in the heartland of world imperialism.