11.06.2008
War drive gathers momentum
Imperialist threats against Iran have been stepped up once again, writes James Turley
Last July, during a Youtube debate, Barack Obama (now de facto official Democrat presidential candidate) promised he would talk to the leaders of what are perceived as anti-American states - Venezuela, Cuba and Iran among them.
This rather mild pledge, in another reminder of the general state of US politics at this time, has turned up again in attempts to smear the White House hopeful as ‘soft’. Obama, for his part, is having none of it - first, he declared last month that non-specified diplomatic “preparations” would be required.1 Then last week, at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference, he went much further, claiming that “by pressuring Israel to allow Palestinian elections with Hamas participation”, and by going to war against Iraq when “Iran was always the greater threat”, administration foreign policy had made Israel “less secure”.2
Aipac has a deceptively neutral name - in fact it is the motherlode of the so-called ‘Israel lobby’ in the US. Obama was not the only candidate to give a speech at the conference, and all were gushing in their admiration for America’s most steadfast ally in the Middle East. There is little wonder that the Jerusalem Post called the Aipac conference “an expression of all that is wonderful about America and about the US-Israel relationship”.3 What with Obama’s comments and John McCain’s now infamous rendition of the Beach Boys’ 60s hit, ‘Barbara Ann’, as “Bomb Iran”,4 Americans once more go to the polls to choose between two sabre-rattlers.
Israeli politicians themselves have brought more muscle to bear on their statements on Iran, too. Shaul Mofaz, a deputy prime minister and also minister of transport, declared that war with Iran is “unavoidable” if Iran continues with its nuclear weapons programme. The statement will have been okayed not only by Mofaz’s superiors, but also by the US.
Apart from some of the more naive followers of Campaign Iran, nobody seriously doubts that the Iranian state has plans for an atomic bomb - although making that a reality would take years. Indeed, strictly on the level of self-preservation, given the scale of enmity it faces, it would be stupid for the theocracy not to seek such weapons. Both the US and Israel have the ability to fight a successful conventional war against it - although Iran certainly would not be as easy a scalp to claim as the sanctions-ravaged Iraq was in 2003 or the crippled Afghanistan before that. The only technical means of ensuring that the regime is not toppled by imperialist military intervention is through the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
This, in and of itself, is not something that Israel or the US can tolerate. The fact of Israel’s overwhelming technical superiority to all other military powers in the region has - alongside oil-producing allies in Saudi Arabia and, before the revolution, Iran - effectively underwritten US policy in the Middle East, one way or another, since the 1970s.
It goes without saying that the UK state stands at the side of the US and Israel on this. And, as in the States, bipartisanship is an essential rule once the bombs start to drop. Gordon Brown remains a fervent supporter of the Iraq war, and so are most top Labour politicians; David Cameron is guarded in his criticisms, opportunistically making hay while the sun shines as leader of the opposition, but, of course, he represents the traditional party of imperialist war.
Iraq
An immediately pressing concern for the US is the quagmire in Iraq. Since the failure of the invading forces to find serious allies on the ground after the conclusion of the first stage of the war, and the total collapse of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the US has been finding it particularly difficult to impose its will on the streets. Barring somewhat tokenistic and occasional efforts in the vein of last year’s ‘troop surge’, the US ruling class lacks the domestic support required to provide the necessary force itself, such as through conscription. Indeed, the experience of mass insubordination during the Vietnam War stands as a warning against even a limited draft.
To solve the problem - or at least postpone it - the American military has entered into alliances with various compliant militias. The most powerful of these are attached to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Dawa party; and a glance at SIIC’s former name - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq - provides a reliable indication of both groups’ political patronage. Both are funded and supported in various ways by the Iranian state.
The US relationship with Iran, then, is severely complicated by its relationship with Iran-friendly militias and parties in Iraq. Its partnership with them is one of convenience and is very much at odds with the desire to put the Iranian ‘rogue state’ in its place. For an illustration of this contradiction, we need only cite the apparent involvement of representatives from the Iranian Republican Guards in brokering the recent ceasefire between the Iraqi government and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish Mahdi militia, called in by Dawa and SIIC/Badr politicians.
Indeed, this is one of the reasons why ‘Iraqisation’ - the gradual replacement of US troops by Iraqi (puppet) forces - has been so halting. The Badr brigade itself could be fairly quickly bureaucratised and integrated into the state and, with a few million dollars of armaments from the US and the backing of the relatively powerful Iranian state, could even impose order - at least on shia majority areas. But it goes without saying that the US is very uneasy about handing power over to close allies of Iran.
There is thus a strong and compelling tendency for the US ruling class to decapitate or otherwise destroy the islamic regime in Iran. With the Tehran regime headed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and increasingly dominated by his allies from the Republican Guard, other options for ‘neutralisation’ are rather thin on the ground.
Thus, it is no accident that the US electorate is not being offered a choice on this question at all, and Obama is not even pretending to oppose a further war with Iran. As he, along with all other serious Democratic candidates, confirmed from the start of the primary campaign, no options are ruled out with regard to Iran. The stakes are simply too high.
Fighting back
Communists unequivocally oppose any imperialist action against Iran. It is transparently clear to all that the invasion of Iraq has been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people, no matter what US and British propaganda says to the contrary. On a more abstract level, it is also clear that this catastrophe has real roots in the objective dynamics of recent capitalist development and the relative decline of US global hegemony in the face of stiffening competition from China and Europe - and so any subsequent adventure in Iran is likely to have similar results.
Therefore, we reject the arguments, stated openly by liberal imperialists and elliptically by the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, to the effect that imperialism has a progressive role to play, or even that its victory is simply relatively less reactionary than that of political islam or the Ba’athist strain of Arab nationalism.
Nevertheless, the question is therefore raised of how best to prevent this eventuality - and who is likely to oppose it most effectively. This, necessarily, brings us to the Iranian state. Various strands of Marxism - notably in the orthodox Trotskyist and Stalinist traditions (the Socialist Workers Party is, for present purposes, assimilated rather to the latter) - have reverted to their old line, which demands an alliance with the Iranian state against imperialism. In the case of Trotskyism, this is dressed up in the old formula of ‘military support, political independence’; for Stalinism, it is the popular front.
The simplest objection to this approach is that the Iranian state is, even among third-world nationalist and para-nationalist regimes, very inconsistent in its ‘anti-imperialism’. It supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and maintains good relations with collaborationist parties and puppet politicians in both countries (eg, the aforementioned SIIC and Dawa in Iraq). Ahmadinejad’s faction is currently powerful in the apparatus, but in the event of an invasion other elements - the reformists, and the more senior mullahs - would be very likely to split, and attempt to cut a deal with the Americans.
This leaves the workers and oppressed of Iran - those for whom any war will be personally disastrous - as the only genuine anti-imperialist force in that country. It is a matter of great importance that anti-imperialists, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, build practical solidarity with these layers. This necessarily brings us into opposition to the theocratic, neoliberal, anti-working class Iranian regime. In every conceivable way, that regime is an obstacle to any serious opposition to war.
For this reason, formulations of support (‘military’ or otherwise) to the Iranian state are disastrous. The priority engagement of communists in Iran is not to attempt to bridge the gap between the regime of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei on the one side and the repressed populace on the other, but to side with the latter against the former.
The fallacy of the SWP’s broad-front strategy is that it imagines the single demand - no war on Iran! - can be abstracted from the general political balance of forces. It has left the anti-war movement rudderless, with its leadership acting as apologists for a repressive and pro-imperialist state. The way forward for the anti-war movement is through principled and rounded demands that take into account the more general conjuncture in which we intervene. Concretely, it means offering positive aid to our comrades in struggle in Iran - not in addition to, but as a necessary part of, total and unambiguous opposition to our own state’s war drive.
Notes
1. The Guardian May 22.
2. Jerusalem Post June 5.
3. Ibid.
4. Captured for posterity on Youtube - www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
