[D66] Oppose Trump’s criminal war against Iran!

[A.OUT]

https://themilitant.com/2020/01/04/swp-statement-for-the-immediate-unconditional-and-total-withdrawal-of-u-s-troops-bases-weaponry-and-armaments-from-iraq-syria-and-the-region/


On 06-01-2020 07:36, A.OUT wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66