[D66] US threatens war in the Persian Gulf

[Antid Oto]

US threatens war in the Persian Gulf
31 December 2011

The Obama administration’s bellicose stance towards Iran is setting the stage
for a dangerous slide towards war in the Persian Gulf. Having provoked Tehran
with legislation for what amounts to an oil embargo, the US is threatening Iran
with military action if it retaliates by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.

The press immediately added fuel to the flames by backing Washington and
vilifying the Iranian regime. An editorial in the New York Times on Thursday
fully supported the Obama administration’s threat of military action against any
Iranian attempt to block the Persian Gulf. The editorial condemned Iran for “its
recklessness and its contempt for international law,” declaring, “This is not a
government any country should want to see acquire nuclear weapons.”

Other sections of the media went one step further, giving voice to the clamour
in ruling circles in the US and Israel for a pre-emptive attack on Iran to
destroy its nuclear and military facilities. The Wall Street Journal editorial
seized on the tensions over the Strait of Hormuz to warn of the dangers of an
Iranian regime “fortified by a nuclear threat,” concluding that it would be
“better to act now to stop Iran.”

The cynicism is staggering. Having waged wars of aggression against Afghanistan
and Iraq and backed the NATO bombing of Libya, the US is now deliberately and
recklessly raising tensions in the Persian Gulf by threatening severe penalties
against any foreign company doing business with Iran’s central bank, thereby
effectively blocking Iranian oil exports. It is hardly surprising that Tehran
has reacted to an act of economic war that would collapse its already fragile
economy.

The US and Israel are already engaged in a dirty covert war against Iran’s
nuclear and missile programs that involves computer viruses, bombings and
assassinations. Any one of these illegal acts of sabotage and murder could have
precipitated a slide into military conflict. The US has not only drawn up its
own detailed war plans, but is arming its allies in the Gulf against Iran. The
White House gave great media prominence on Thursday to a huge $30 billion arms
sale to Saudi Arabia, including 84 of the latest F-15SA fighter aircraft.

As for the Iranian “nuclear threat,” it is necessary to recall the lies about
WMDs that were used to justify the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The modus
operandi of the Obama administration, acting with the bipartisan support of
Congress, is no different. Dubious and dated “evidence” is being deliberately
distorted and magnified, with the complicity of the new International Atomic
Energy Agency chief, Yukiya Amano, into claims that Iran is building a nuclear
weapon. Tehran’s denials are dismissed out of hand.

The media is silent on Washington’s rank hypocrisy in demanding an end to Iran’s
nuclear programs while fully backing the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle
East—its ally Israel, which is notorious for its wars of aggression. The glaring
double standard only underscores the fact that Obama’s belligerence towards Iran
is no more about the “nuclear threat” than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were
about “terrorism” and WMDs.

US aggression against all three countries has been driven by longstanding
American ambitions to consolidate its dominance over the region. Iran not only
has its own huge oil and gas reserves but forms the strategic bridge between the
energy-rich areas of the Middle East and Central Asia. US imperialism has never
reconciled itself to the loss of American hegemony in Tehran that followed the
overthrow its ally, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The Bush administration
backed away from more aggressive action against Iran only because the American
military was bogged down in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now the Obama administration is exploiting the political upheavals in the Middle
East to refashion the region in line with its strategic and economic interests.
Having ousted Gaddafi in Libya, the US and its allies are applying similar
methods to Syria, where oppositional Sunni factions, supported and armed by
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are exploiting popular discontent to force out the
pro-Iranian regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The anti-Assad
opposition is now pushing for foreign military intervention along the lines of
NATO’s war against Libya.

In neighbouring Iraq, the US and its regional allies are fanning sectarian
hostility to the Maliki government, which rests on Shiite parties sympathetic to
Tehran. Washington is exploiting the Sunni-based Iraqiya coalition as a means
for pressuring, or if need be refashioning, the Iraqi government to distance it
from Iran. At the same time, the US maintains a studied silence on the
repressive measures used by its Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia, to suppress
political opposition to their autocratic regimes.

The central focus of these machinations in the Middle East is the Iranian
regime, which is regarded in Washington as the key obstacle to American
ambitions—despite its efforts on more than one occasion to reach an
accommodation with the US. In 2009, the Obama administration was centrally
involved in orchestrating the international cacophony in support of the failed
“Green Revolution”—a movement largely composed of more privileged sections of
the Iranian upper middle class. Now US military plans are being dusted off.

The relentless intensification of tensions always poses the danger of
precipitating conflict, even if at a particular point in time it is unintended.
A war against Iran, a country that is crucial to the geopolitical calculations
not only of the US, but also major rivals such as Russia and China, inevitably
risks escalating into a far broader regional and international conflict with
catastrophic implications for humanity.

The driving force behind the eruption of American militarism is the economic
decline of the United States, now compounded by the worsening global economic
crisis. The only social force capable of preventing the slide into new and more
horrific wars is the international working class, through the overthrow of the
bankrupt profit system and its outmoded nation-state system and their
replacement by a planned world socialist economy.

Peter Symonds

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/pers-d31.shtml