[D66] Washington’s rush to indict Iran over Saudi attacks | wsws.org

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Washington’s rush to indict Iran over Saudi attacks
By
Bill Van Auken
wsws.org
7 min
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Casting itself once again as the world’s judge, jury and executioner, US
imperialism is recklessly hurtling toward yet another war in the Middle
East, with catastrophic implications. This time, Washington has seized
upon Saturday’s attacks on Saudi installations as its pretext for war
against Iran.

The reaction of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to these attacks,
which have cut the kingdom’s oil production by almost half and slashed
global daily output by 6 percent, was as noteworthy for its haste as for
its peculiar wording.

The indictment of Iran for attacks that set off a series of fires which
devastated two oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia came without a
shred of supporting evidence, outside of the bald assertion that there
was “no evidence” that they were launched from Yemen.

Yemen had to be discounted, according to the secretary of state’s
predatory logic, because the Houthi rebels, who control most of the
country, had claimed responsibility for the attacks and had a clear
motive—given the kingdom’s near-genocidal war against Yemen’s civilian
population—for carrying them out. The US mass media has by and large
echoed Pompeo’s allegations as absolute truth. On Monday night,
television news broadcasts quoted unnamed intelligence sources, citing
unspecified evidence, claiming Iranian responsibility for the attacks.
No doubt this “evidence” will prove just as compelling as that of the
Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam and “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.
These same media outlets have made virtually no mention of Saudi crimes
in Yemen.

For the last four and a half years, Saudi Arabia has waged a
near-genocidal war against Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country. The
violence has claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 Yemenis outright—the
greatest share through a relentless bombing campaign against civilian
targets—while pushing some 8 million more to the brink of starvation.

Washington is a direct accomplice in this bloodbath, providing the
warplanes, bombs and missiles used to carry it out, along with
logistical support and, until the end of last year, mid-air refueling
that allowed Saudi bombers to carry out uninterrupted carnage.
Meanwhile, the US Navy has helped enforce a blockade that has starved
Yemen of food and medicine.

If what the Yemeni Houthis say is true, that they sent a swarm of 10
weaponized drones to attack the Saudi facilities, then the action was
clearly an act of self-defense, far less than proportionate to the
slaughter inflicted by the Saudi regime against Yemen.

Meanwhile, Washington’s new ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly
Craft, repeated the charges against Iran on Monday before a United
Nations Security Council meeting on Yemen. Providing no more proof than
Pompeo did two days earlier, merely repeating the formulation that
“there is no evidence that the attacks came from Yemen,” she described
the damage to the Saudi oil installations “deeply troubling.”

Like the government she represents, the UN ambassador—the wife of
billionaire Kentucky coal baron Joe Craft and a top Republican
donor—clearly finds the spilt oil of the Saudi monarchy far more
upsetting than the spilt blood of tens of thousands of Yemeni men, women
and children.

On Saturday night, President Donald Trump made a call to Crown Prince
Mohamed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, offering his
condolences and unqualified support to a man exposed as a cold-blooded
murderer. Bin Salman is responsible not only for the grisly
assassination and dismemberment of the Washington-based journalist Jamal
Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul nearly a year ago, but also
the beheadings of at least 134 people in just the first half of this
year, 34 of them political activists slaughtered en masse on April 23.

Trump subsequently announced that the US was “locked and loaded” to
avenge Saudi oil with military force. (This was a variation on his
assertion in June that the Pentagon had been “cocked and loaded” when he
came, by his own account, within 10 minutes of launching devastating
attacks on Iran after it shot down an unmanned US spy drone over its
territory.)

It there is, as Washington claims, “no evidence’ that the attacks were
launched from Yemen, one could, with equal if not greater justification,
observe that there is likewise “no evidence’ that they were not launched
by the US itself, or by its principal regional ally, Israel.

If one proceeds from the age-old detective maxim of Cui bono? or Who
benefits? Tehran is the least likely suspect. There is clearly more to
Washington’s rush to judgment than meets the eye.

The attack on the Saudi oil facilities provides a casus belli desired by
a major section of the US ruling oligarchy and its military and
intelligence apparatus, which is determined to prosecute a war for
regime change in Iran. Such a war would be the latest installment in
Washington’s protracted drive to reverse by military means the decline
of US imperialism’s global hegemony, in particular by claiming
unfettered US control over the world’s energy reserves and the power to
deny them to its rivals.

The thinking within these layers was expressed in an editorial published
Monday by the Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of US finance capital.
The Journal warned that Iran was “probing Mr. Trump as much as the
Saudis. They are testing his resolve to carry out his ‘maximum pressure’
campaign, and they sense weakness.” It disapprovingly cited Trump’s
failure to launch airstrikes in June following the downing of the US drone.

The Journal approvingly cited calls by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
for bombing Iranian oil refineries in order to “break the regime’s back”
and suggested that Trump “apologize to John Bolton, who warned
repeatedly that Iran would take advantage of perceived weakness in the
White House.” Bolton, a long-time advocate of bombing Iran, resigned as
Trump’s national security adviser last week reportedly over differences
on policy toward Tehran.

The attack on the Saudi oil facilities also provides leverage for
Washington in corralling the Western European powers—the UK, France and
Germany—behind US war aims. Signatories to the Iranian nuclear accord
that the Trump administration renounced, they have made feeble gestures
of countering Washington’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime in an
attempt to salvage their own imperialist interests. While thus far
failing to endorse US charges of Iranian responsibility, they could, by
means of the attack on Saudi Arabia, be swung behind the US drive to war.

Israel and its beleaguered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also have
ample motive to stage a military action aimed at provoking war with
Iran. On the eve of today’s Israeli election, the threat of a major war
with Iran serves the political interests of Netanyahu, whose political
fortunes are inextricably tied to the escalation of military conflict in
the Middle East. The Israeli state, moreover, had become increasingly
concerned over an apparent cooling of the appetite of the ruling
monarchies in both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for a
confrontation with Iran.

Recent drone strikes against Shia militias in Iraq that had allegedly
received Iranian weapons were, according to a report by the web site
Middle East Eye, staged by Israeli drones operating out of bases
controlled by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the main US
proxy force in Syria. A similar covert US-Israeli collaboration could
easily have produced the attacks on the Saudi oil installations.

Whatever the exact circumstances of the attacks on the Saudi oil
facilities, they are being exploited for the purposes of dragging the
American people and all of humanity into a war that can rapidly escalate
into a regionwide and even global conflagration.

US strikes against Iran carried out under the pretext of retaliation for
the attacks on Saudi Arabia can trigger Iranian counterstrikes, sending
US warships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf and wreaking havoc on
American military bases throughout the region.

The prospect of thousands of US soldiers and sailors dying as a result
of Washington’s conspiracies and aggression carries with it the threat
of the US government assuming emergency powers and implementing
police-state measures in the US itself in the name of “national security.”

This would, by no means, be an unintended consequence. The buildup to
war is driven in large measure by the escalation of social tensions and
class struggle within the United States itself, which has found fresh
expression in the strike by 46,000 autoworkers against General Motors.
There is a powerful incentive for the US ruling class to direct these
tensions outward in the eruption of military conflict, while creating
the pretext for mass repression.

The threat of a US assault on Iran paving the way to a third world war
must be answered through a politically conscious and independent
intervention of the working class to put an end to imperialism and
reorganize society on socialist foundations.

Bill Van Auken