[D66] Oppose Trump’s criminal war against Iran!
A.OUT
jugg at ziggo.nl
Mon Jan 6 07:36:38 CET 2020
wsws.org:
Oppose Trump’s criminal war against Iran!
6 January 2020
The World Socialist Web Site categorically condemns the January 3
assassination of General Qassem Suleimani at Baghdad’s international
airport.
The drone missile strike that killed Suleimani and nine others is a
blatant act of murder, prosecutable—if the criminal statutes were
enforced—under both international and US law.
The murder of Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps Quds Force, widely regarded as the second most important figure in
the Iranian government, has been met with massive demonstrations in both
Iraq and Iran and is widely seen in the Middle East as a US declaration
of war against the entire region.
The Iranian government has vowed retaliation. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
Iran’s supreme leader, said that the country would take “forceful
revenge.” Given the level of popular anger, to do less would risk losing
control within Iran itself.
In Iran, the crowds gathering to honor Suleimani and the others killed
in the attack—in all, five Iranians and five Iraqis were murdered in the
drone missile strike—have been estimated in the millions as the funeral
cortége has made its way from Ahvas to Mashhad and finally Tehran.
In Baghdad, over 100,000 people marched in protest against the
assassination, chanting “Death to America!” in what has been described
as the largest public demonstration in Iraq since the overthrow of the
monarchy in 1958.
Under the weight of this immense outpouring of popular hostility, the
Iraqi Parliament voted overwhelmingly Sunday for a resolution demanding
the expulsion of US military forces from Iraq. While US Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo indicated that Washington would ignore any Iraqi order
to withdraw, the 5,000 US troops currently deployed have abandoned their
ostensible mission of training Iraqi security forces, for fear the Iraqi
soldiers will turn their guns on their instructors, and are preparing
for attacks.
President Donald Trump has responded to Khamenei’s statements with a
series of increasingly frenzied threats delivered via Twitter. He first
claimed to have selected 52 targets in Iran, “representing the 52
American hostages taken by Iran many years ago.” These included, he
said, sites important to “Iranian culture.” Such an attack would add to
the list of the US government’s illegal acts.
In subsequent tweets, the US president vowed to hit Iran “harder than
they have ever been hit before,” and declared that his Twitter
pronouncements served as “notification to the United States Congress
that should Iran strike any US person or target, the United States will
quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner.
Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!”
Trump’s wild threats are calculated to inflame the situation and leave
the Iranian government, which is under immense popular pressure, no
choice but to take violent retaliatory measures. This might appear to be
sheer madness, given the consequences of a war with Iran. But it would
be the height of political naïveté to believe that the attack on
Suleimani was ordered by Trump in a personal fit of anger.
The order was given by Trump with the deliberate intention of provoking
war. There is a method to this madness. It is an attempt to find a way
out of the increasingly desperate crisis of American
capitalism—international and domestic—through spectacular acts of violence.
The Suleimani assassination is not an isolated event, but rather the
start of a new war. It marks a dividing line between a “before” and an
“after” not only in the Middle East, but internationally. Future
historians will treat this state crime with the same significance as the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.
No one should make the mistake of underestimating the consequences of
war with Iran. The development of the conflict will rapidly acquire
global dimensions. It will be only a matter of time before the logic of
the conflict—which affects the vital interests of countless states on
the vast Eurasian land mass—draws numerous countries into the vortex of
war. Neither the Russian nor Chinese government will be able to accept
American control over Iran. The Indian government will not be able to
stand by while Pakistan is totally destabilized by the American-Iranian
conflict.
Moreover, the American military—despite all the trillions of dollars
that have been squandered on armaments—is not prepared for the mass
resistance it will encounter. Having been unable to impose its will on
Iraq and Afghanistan, even after decades of war, the United States will
find that war with Iran leads to military and political catastrophe.
Why, then, has the Trump administration embarked on this disastrous course?
First, the decision to launch a war against Iran is bound up with the
rolling out of a new strategic doctrine in 2018 based on a shift from
the “war on terrorism” to the preparation for wars arising from “great
power competition.” The imposition of a colonial-style puppet regime in
Tehran and control over the Persian Gulf’s energy supplies is seen by
Washington as an essential preparation for war with Russia and China.
Significantly, in the recently passed trillion-dollar military budget, a
budget for world war, the Democrats and Republicans removed language
that would have required the US president to seek congressional
authorization before launching a military attack on Iran.
Second, and no less significantly, the reckless decision for war
reflects the desperation of the American ruling class over the growth of
class conflict within the United States. Its anxiety over the
intensification of social anger and rise of anti-capitalist sentiment is
compounded by the fact that the entire American economy is dependent on
unlimited money-printing, known as “quantitative easing,” carried out to
prevent a general collapse of the financial markets.
The American ruling class is well aware of the revolutionary
implications of the crisis, and it is this sense of ultimate danger that
underlies the reckless character of its actions. Faced with the
accumulation of interacting and intractable economic, social and
political crises, the Trump administration is gambling on war, not only
to divert and distract the public, but also to legitimize the
intensification of state repression and attacks on core democratic rights.
It is hardly an accident that within hours of the murder of Suleimani,
heavily armed contingents of militarized police were patrolling the
streets of major American cities.
The situation that now prevails in the United States—and, for that
matter, in all the major capitalist countries in Western
Europe—resembles that which existed in Nazi Germany on the eve of World
War II. By 1938, Hitler’s regime, having accumulated massive and
unsustainable debts to keep the economy afloat and finance the military
buildup, saw war as the only way out of the impending disaster. One
historian described the situation confronting Hitler as follow:
The only “solution” open to this regime of the structural tensions
and crises produced by dictatorship and rearmament was more dictatorship
and more rearmament, then expansion, then war and terror, then plunder
and enslavement. The stark, ever-present alternative was collapse and
chaos, and so all solutions were temporary, hectic, hand-to-mouth
affairs, increasingly barbaric improvisations around a brutal theme.
[Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, by Tim Mason (Cambridge, 1995),
p. 51]
American recklessness has created division and consternation in Europe.
Heads of state and foreign ministers all talk of “de-escalation,” even
as their own governments are frantically building up their armed forces.
The thuggish US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned the Europeans
for not having “been as helpful as I wish that they could be,” adding,
“The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we
did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well.” Everyone,
of course, knows that this is a lie and that the attack can only produce
a new bloodbath. Nevertheless, despite their misgivings, European
governments, mired in crisis, are lining up behind the Trump administration.
The US media is, as always, working to create a war psychology within
the American public. Even those who express qualms about the
implications of Trump’s action invariably couch their timid criticisms
in denunciations of Suleimani as a “bad actor” and even “terrorist,”
supposedly responsible for killing hundreds of US troops.
This is all a pack of lies. Suleimani directed forces that defeated both
Al Qaeda’s US-backed affiliates in Syria and ISIS, Washington’s
Frankenstein’s monster, in Iraq. He is not implicated in the crimes that
resulted from the US war of aggression in Iraq, which killed over a
million people and produced such horrors as the massacre in Fallujah and
the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib. As for American soldiers who died in
Iraq, their blood is on the hands of the Bush administration and the
Democrats who supported sending them into a “war of choice” based on lies.
In its New Year’s statement, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
The movement toward a Third World War, which would threaten mankind
with extinction, cannot be halted by humanitarian appeals. War arises
out of the anarchy of capitalism and the obsolescence of the
nation-state system. Therefore, it can be stopped only through the
global struggle of the working class for socialism.
The new decade is not even a week old, but already this warning has been
vindicated.
The International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site
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