The bombs started falling on Tehran and 14 other Iranian cities on Saturday, February 28, as President Donald Trump launched an unconstitutional war on Iran. Administration posturing about wanting to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which experts say the country was far from being able to do, has been replaced with a variety of other explanations, including a desire to give the Iranian people the chance to establish a new democratic government.
The people of the U.S. and people around the world ask, “Why this war now?” Some argue the answer is that Iran is the last force standing in the way of U.S imperialist control of the resources of the Middle East. For years, Iran has thrown obstacles in the way of the goals of the U.S. and its allies in the region, including its support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militant forces.
The war can also be seen as a new major distraction from what many see as Trump’s failed economic policies in the United States.
Some experts fear that the war now lays the groundwork for claiming a national emergency to use as an excuse to interfere with and even cancel the coming elections.
But when it comes to the main strategic aim of pushing Iran out of the way of the advances of U.S. imperialism, it is important to keep in mind that the U.S. has had to watch as Iran sells oil to China, its long-term strategic adversary. Until the recent attacks on Venezuela and the stepped- up U.S. embargo of Cuba, Iran was a supplier of goods to those countries too. The destruction of Iran would serve to allow the U.S. to put a political and economic chokehold not just on its much bigger adversary, China, but on many other countries around the world.
And for Trump, there are perks he gets from the war. He and his family are making money, hand over fist, from deals with Middle East enemies of Iran, including Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar.
The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, and others have reported, for example, that Trump has pocketed as much as $500 million from cryptocurrency deals with Abu Dhabi. According to the Wall Street Journal, $187 million of that has already gone into Trump’s pockets.
There are multiple deals with the Saudis, including $2 billion in capital commitments to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The Saudis have agreed to turn their city of Jeddah into a major commercial center for Trump, complete with another skyscraper named after him.
There are commitments of $500 million to Trump from the United Arab Emirates. In a sense, it can be argued that Trump may be paying them back by destroying Iran, their long-time enemy.
Unelected billionaires who care little about democracy or free elections in Iran or here at home were behind the planning of this war. Billionaires met for months with Trump over dinners at Mar-a-Lago. Even the “negotiations” in Geneva to ostensibly hammer out a deal with Iran on the development of nuclear materials were handled by real estate moguls, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, not by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his teams.
Trump has said he won’t rule out ground troops and that American soldiers would be killed—something he had said would never happen when he campaigned for office. That death count has already begun, with three said to be killed. The Iranian death toll has reached over 500 and counting.
In order to avoid the constitutional requirement that Congress approve any war, Trump is falsely claiming Iran was close to producing a nuclear weapon to attack U.S. assets or personnel in the Middle East, if not the U.S. itself. That, he says, left no time to go first to Congress.
Even if Congress approves a war powers resolution limiting his power, he is expected to veto any such measure.
The Communist Party USA is among many U.S. organizations calling for mobilization against Trump’s war on Iran and has urged everyone to call or write senators and demand that they support S.I, Res. 59, which directs the removal of U.S. Armed Forces from Iran “that have not been authorized by Congress.” Senators can be reached by calling 202-224-3121.
“U.S. and Israeli governments, over multiple decades, have charged, without material evidence and contrary to their own intelligence services, that Iran seeks a nuclear weapon. This repeated lie tries to justify the aggression,” the party said in its statement.
“Strikes have been reported across Iran, including Tehran, Isfahan (a major nuclear site), the holy city of Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. Lorestan and Tabriz…….An Israeli site on a girl’s elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, killed between 41 and 50 people.”
The party statement also said, “The U.S. working class does not benefit from forever wars being waged in our name by the U.S. government of billionaires.”
The party also aimed its demands squarely at the U.S. Congress: “We demand our congressional representatives immediately exercise their constitutional authority to stop this latest atrocity, stop funding the war, and stop the president from violating his oath to the Constitution.”
On the war front itself, Iran has continued to launch retaliatory strikes against the countries from which U.S. bases are attacking Iran, including Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Israel itself.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps also claimed to have fired four ballistic missiles at the U.S. aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln, though it was unclear if these struck their target. It is the first anti-ship missile attack on a U.S. aircraft carrier, according to the Socialist newspaper Morning Star, by any country in history.
Intense and presumably deadly bombing of Iranian cities continued all day on March 1. Trump declared on social media that the bombing would continue “all week.”
The attacks by the U.S., and specifically the killing of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have been condemned around the world as violations of international law. China accused Trump of “trampling on the purposes and principles of the UN charter and basic norms of international relations.”
Leaders of the British, German, and French governments condemned Iran, instead of the U.S., for retaliating and called for it to return to negotiations. How that request makes sense given Iran was at the negotiating table when the U.S. began its attacks is, of course, far from clear.
Communists in Iran and Israel have joined in condemnation of the attacks on Iran:
The Foreign Secretary of Iran’s Tudeh Party told the Peoples World by phone that “the Tudeh Party of Iran condemns the blatant aggression of extensive missile and air strikes by the racist Israeli government and the United States.”
The party, in its official statement, declared: “This aggression against Iranian soil, which will undoubtedly result in the loss of lives by our compatriots, and the destruction of the country has been welcomed by forces such as pretender to the throne Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq, which is undoubtedly condemned by all the freedom seeking forces of our country.”
“The military aggression of U.S. imperialism and the Israeli government is not a harbinger of Iran’s freedom from the yoke of the current tyranny and dictatorship but is an attempt to destroy Iran as a capable regional country and replace the current government with a dependent and despotic regime.”
The Communist Party of Israel (CPI) and the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) denounced what it called “the war of aggression launched by Israel against Iran,” and warned that “it may ignite a large-scale regional or global war.”
Israel is not only an instrument of global American imperialism, but also a partner in its efforts to impose American imperialist hegemony over the world and its natural and economic resources, the CPI warned.
The CPI also said that the Israeli government might use the war as cover to “intensify massacres and crimes of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and in the West Bank, and to expand fascist onslaught and the rise of racism in Israel.”
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
