There is a direct link between the brutal attacks by the US and Israel on Iran and the declining imperial hegemony of the United States. From the very moment we heard that Iran was under bombardment, our first reaction was profound anger. The killing of 165 children in the bombing, and the rapidly increasing death toll, are a source of deep outrage for all of us. We, of course, must explain this: why was Iran suddenly attacked while the fifth round of negotiations between the US and Iran was still ongoing, and when all indications suggested that the talks were proceeding well?
We know that the central problem confronting the US is how to restore its declining imperial hegemony and prevail in the global competition against China. Since its intervention in the Kosovo War, the US has sought, through NATO as well, to demonstrate that it is the supreme power of the twenty-first century. In attacking Iran, the US is once again issuing a challenge to China and Russia. As for Israel, every war drive initiated by the US creates broader room to intensify the genocidal policy it is carrying out in Palestine and throughout the region.
The fundamental concern of the maniacal right wing, fascistic forces gathered around Trump, along with super-capitalist powers like Elon Musk, who can be described as part of the “Epstein class,” is to prevent imperialist rivals such as China, and to a much lesser extent Russia, from taking global supremacy, and to assert that the US will remain the dominant military-industrial power for the next seventy-five years. As the US wages direct military interventions in the Middle East, it is also constructing a line of encirclement reaching all the way to the South China Sea, revealing its real objective.
For the Consolidation of Global Hegemony and the Deepening of Genocide
Alex Callinicos’s commentary on the closed-door meeting in the US quotes the Washington Post to show that there was a difference between the US approach and that of its obedient subordinate, Israel: “At Tuesday’s briefing to the Gang of Eight, made up of the leaders of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the intelligence committees of both chambers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that the timing and targets of the mission were determined by the fact that Israel was going to strike with or without US support.”
The fact that Israel had decided to attack Iran whether or not it had US backing shows that the Trump administration was, to some extent, dragged along behind Israel, and that, despite all its military showmanship, the US is an imperial power backed into a corner. Israel behaves not only like a watchdog of the United States, but at times almost like its boss. On the margins of a declining empire, sub-imperial powers can sometimes act independently. This becomes even more understandable when we consider that Israel has not retreated by even a millimetre from its objective of deepening genocide and expanding its hegemony across the Middle East.
On the other hand, both Trump and Netanyahu are facing serious crises in their domestic political arenas. Both know that if they fall from power, they will be put on trial. Both are already entangled with the courts of their own states. In recent months, Trump literally begged the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu. The latter has for a long time been wanted as a war criminal. There is an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) standing in the way of his travelling freely to any country he wishes. They are therefore attacking Iran in order to suppress their own domestic opposition and shift the agenda, drawing attention into a cacophony. But as Charlie Kimber has said, this is a violent cacophony made up of the screams of those dying in Gaza and across the region. Iran is a continuation of this. Trump, whose name appears thousands of times in the Epstein files and who is also mentioned in some sections concerning the abuse of children, according to some Democratic representatives, must be feeling pleased with himself, wearing his USA cap and getting everyone to talk about “other issues.”
The History of the United States is also a History of Bombardment
Political scientist Robert Pape believes that domestic political needs were more decisive in the US and Israeli attack on Iran. He writes, “In my view, this is connected to domestic political pressures in the United States… Donald Trump’s warlike foreign policy is tied less to any real geopolitical strategy than to internal balances within his own camp. This is true of Venezuela. It is true of Greenland. And now it is true of Iran as well. President Trump decided that the best political calculation for himself, the best domestic political calculation, was to bomb Iran.”
But no cacophony can conceal the fact that we are now faced with an imperialist power in crisis, one with its back against the wall. Before turning to that point, we should briefly discuss the question of “supporting” the Khamenei regime.
The question of how to strike a balance between the criticism of external intervention and criticism of the Iranian regime has once again come into play, as it has during a whole series of imperialist interventions. This is a debate that surfaces with every US invasion. As Howard Zinn recounts in his powerful book, the United States has repeatedly justified its wars with lies: out of “love of humanity and freedom” in the 1898 occupation of Cuba, in order to “educate, uplift, civilize and Christianize” the Philippines, and “by God’s grace do the very best we could by them” in the 1899 occupation of the Philippines, because “the military coup in Grenada endangered American students” in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, to “protect US citizens and put Noriega on trial for drug trafficking” in the 1989 invasion of Panama, to “help the people and government of Vietnam win their independence” in the US war on Vietnam, and, in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, to “bring democracy to Afghanistan” and to “prevent Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction from threatening the entire world.”
In reality, however, the US occupied Cuba to protect its commercial investments, the Philippines to secure a power base against China, Grenada to prove that the region was governed by the United States, Panama to rebuild its sphere of influence in Central America, and Vietnam in part to avenge the humiliation of defeat. In the case of Vietnam, internal US correspondence shows that the country’s strategic significance, especially in relation to Southeast Asia’s rich natural resources such as rice, rubber, coal, and oil, was the real determining factor. In the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the main force driving the United States was its effort to offset its declining economic power through military terror and to demonstrate to the whole world that it still stood at the peak of the imperialist pyramid.
The “Civilized” West’s Sheriffs Bring Democracy to the East
Now US imperialism, together with Israel, is brutally attacking Iran, a country that has been kept under embargo since 1979. Faced with this attack, there is no option to remain neutral. Of course, to avoid any misunderstanding from the outset, we should begin by stating the truth about the Iranian regime. For us, it is beyond dispute that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a brutal, ruthless, freedom-hating and misogynistic collection of killers. In addition, we have not forgotten the fact that the Iranian regime has crushed the popular uprisings and struggles of its own people in an extremely bloody manner. We know the women, LGBT+ activists, workers, and the thousands killed in protests under the crushing weight of Khamenei’s dictatorship, as well as the Kurdish activists who have been executed.
Yet the shared memory of the left, and of humanity as a whole, remembers very clearly the lessons of past experience. US imperialism bombed and occupied Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan by using the dictatorships, repression, and anti-democratic practices in those countries as a pretext, while presenting itself as the bearer of civilization and democratic values. But none of the interventions carried out by the United States and its allies produced democracy as a political outcome. On the contrary, they tore apart the social fabric of the countries they targeted, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and legitimized violence. For example, if Iraq had not been occupied, there would not have been torture centers such as Abu Ghraib and we would not have witnessed emergence of an organization like ISIS.
Charlie Kimber, who since the beginning of the attack on Iran has been offering anti-war activists perspective and points of orientation through timely reminders, cites in one of his recent messages an interview with Robert Pape, the University of Chicago political scientist and author of one of the most widely cited books on the history and effects of aerial bombardment. According to Pape, “The current bombing has almost no chance of leading to a positive regime change in Iran… Since the First World War, many countries, including the United States, Britain, Israel and Russia, have made dozens of attempts to impose regime change through the use of air power… these interventions have systematically led to two results. First, the existing regime remains in place. Of course, leaders are killed, but they are replaced by people who look very much like them. More importantly, we see a process of radicalization among the new leaders, who tend to become more aggressive and more inclined to adopt harsher measures, including military ones.”
In the days when the US occupation against Saddam’s regime began, one of the most serious debates around us was about the fact that Saddam was a dictator. The dictatorial character of a regime was being used to legitimize the occupation of that country by the US and its allies. At the time, we used to argue through the analogy that Iraq was, at most, a bloody neighbourhood gang, whereas the United States was the real mafia organization controlling all the gangs across all the neighbourhoods. To think that the murders, bullying, and theft of a neighbourhood mafia could be solved by the intervention of a Godfather who robs every neighbourhood, organizes rape, commits murder, and seeks to organize every kind of crime, was only possible by overlooking several crucial points.
The first pro-intervention argument was based on the idea that the United States was the cradle of democracy, that it possessed a regime incomparable to Iraq’s. Yet on the other side of the coin of US democracy stood on the shoulders of a bourgeoisie built on genocide and a narrow two-party system. Also, it is worth remembering that the US ruling class is the only one ever to have used the nuclear bomb. Its emergence is based on a history of slavery that turned Black lives into hell, a racism whose effects still continue, and a foreign policy so aggressive that it has not passed a single day without war. The neocons may have been more persuasive with Bush on the question of the US ‘democracy’, but the MAGA movement and Trump have already stripped away the cover that lay over it. The Epstein files, meanwhile, once again showed what kind of regime of capital is in power.
Of course Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and he committed many crimes against humanity, above all the Halabja massacre against the Kurdish population in Iraq. But for US imperialism, the largest and most organized murder organization in the world, to punish Saddam Hussein through systematic lies did not mean the punishment of a dictator. It meant the humiliation of all the oppressed people of Iraq and of all the peoples living in the region. When the power at the top of the imperialist pyramid can bomb any country whenever it pleases, it becomes very clear that such a country will grow dependent on military intervention as a means of remaining at the summit, and will gain confidence in acting accordingly.
There are striking historical experiences in which this tendency was reversed. The US imperialist attack on Iraq was met by a massive anti-war movement, Turkey was prevented from opening a war front, and in the longer term, after the attack began, the United States was defeated. In the Vietnam War too, the occupation’s failure to proceed as the US had wanted generated both a huge wave of anti-war protest at home and the worldwide upsurge of 1968, along with a revolutionary explosive potential triggered in response to the massacres in Vietnam. That potential still exists today. The question, of course, is whether organized anti-war forces have the capacity to globalize a united resistance together with the organized working class, and turn that potential into real action.
Neutrality, Third Campism, and the Obsession with Political Purity
Another source of confusion created by the US-Israeli war on Iran concerns Lenin. Yes, you read that correctly, Lenin. According to some commentators, when the US and Iran confront one another, the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary defeatist approach, which gave concrete form in the midst of the First World War to Liebknecht’s principle that “the main enemy is at home,” should be copied exactly. On this view, they argue that the right course is to build a third way through this cut-and-paste anti-war stance.
But if we remember that Lenin’s most important characteristic was his concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and his insistence on advancing revolutionary politics in ways that concretely defend the interests of the working class and the oppressed within those conditions, it becomes possible to grasp that the principle of revolutionary defeatism turns into an empty tin can in a colonial context or under conditions of colonial occupation. During the First World War, Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism meant that the working classes of the imperialist countries should defend peace and struggle against their own states, so as to prevent workers from different countries slaughtering one another on the battlefield in national uniforms for the benefit of their respective ruling classes. It meant that the workers of each country should fight to end the war by turning against their own state.
To adopt, without modification, the stance Lenin proposed against an inter-imperialist war between powers of equal or roughly comparable strength and spheres of influence, under conditions where the Trump-Netanyahu gang is deepening an attack on a country that has been subjected to heavy sanctions for decades, is to fall into Trump’s trap. There can be no explanation for equating the power and capacities of the Iranian state with those of these two forces, when one of them is a man on the verge of being tried for sexual abuse, the other is a war criminal guilty of genocide, and they wage war with the resources of states, one the world’s super-military power, the other nourished by that power and organized as a machinery of crime designed to perpetuate massacres.
What is being described here as third campism is, in fact, the echoing of imperialism by various political forces in Iran that are trying to turn US aggression into an opportunity to carve out autonomous political space, even to the point of being called personally by Trump. So-called third campism, in the context of the US-Israel war on Iran, means pretending to remain neutral while turning the process into an opportunity to overthrow the regime with US support, and at the same time trying to justify this political orientation through Lenin, thereby subordinating the revolutionary anti-war tradition to Trump’s regional ‘regime-change’ operations.
If only the United States were in the picture, you might be able to sell this claim to those whose eyes are dazzled by the infinite civilizational light of the Western world. But once we recognize that Israel is the driving force of the attack, the whole strategy collapses. Whoever tries to turn developments into an opportunity as part of Israel’s occupation and bombardment commits the greatest betrayal in the hearts of the world’s peoples. Those who cannot see that converging with the genocide in Gaza would mean becoming a small forward outpost of Israel, itself a regional frontier garrison of the United States, achieve nothing by taking refuge in Lenin, who defended an uncompromising politics of resistance by the working classes and oppressed peoples against imperialism. It only cheapens political debate. And imperialism is the most dangerous, the most tense field of all, one that cannot be watered down.
This debate also makes clear why neutrality is impossible. Gramsci was right to be furious with the indifferent:
I hate the indifferent. I believe, as Frederich Hebbel did, that ‘living means taking sides [being partisan]’. No one can exist merely as a human being outside society. To live truly is to be a citizen, to take sides. Indifference is the loss of will, parasitism, cowardice. To be indifferent is not to live. That is why I hate the indifferent.
Indifference is the dead weight of history. It is the millstone tied around the innovator’s neck; it is the inertia in which the brightest enthusiasms are drowned; it is the swamp that surrounds the old city and binds it more tightly than its strongest walls, better than the valour of its warriors, because it swallows the assailants within its murky vortices, it decimates them, it disheartens them, and sometimes it makes them abandon the heroic deed.
Indifference is a powerful force in history. It operates passively, but it operates nonetheless. It is fatalism; it is the thing that should never be relied upon. It is the thing that overturns programmes, ruins the best-conceived plans; it is the raw material that rises up against intelligence and all that crushes reason.
Today, in concrete terms, this means that the interests of the world’s working classes and oppressed peoples lie in bringing US-Israeli aggression to an immediate end, in raising the whole world to its feet in revolt against conditions in which every sign of catastrophe is beginning to reveal itself with unmistakable clarity, and, as far as possible, in acting to ensure that the United States and Israel suffer a military and political defeat. Those who want to keep their hands clean should withdraw from the political field. The very fact that a sociopath like Trump, who with all his lawlessness embodies the collapse of the neoliberal consensus, holds in his hands the possibility of unleashing thousands of nuclear bombs shows the hollowness of neutrality, and of those hygienic approaches that completely turn Lenin upside down in their interpretation.
Iran’s Theocrats vs the Theocrats of Israel and the US
This debate, of course, does not unfold independently of the discussion around Islamophobia. Before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Islam moved to the top of that state’s list of ideological enemies. The intellectual production centres of all the imperialist capitals began an ideological propaganda campaign through analyses that set the darkness of Islam against Western civilization. The aftershocks of this propaganda shaped perceptions of the Arab Spring, of organizations such as ISIS and the FSA, and most recently of the Sharaa government. To those who have swallowed this propaganda, the United States appears more civilized, Iran more barbaric. And not only Iran, every right winger in the West codes whoever lies to their east as an ignorant people living in darkness. One commentator mocked the arrogant Orientalist attitude that imagined no one beyond Austria could even read or write. The effects of this propaganda were also visible among opponents of Israel who, because the leadership of the resistance in Gaza is carried by an Islamic organization, believed that Hamas was the reason for Israel’s genocidal occupation, and who therefore refused to make solidarity with Palestine a central political priority, at least until the global intifada decisively won this argument made it impossible to remain indifferent.
Once the militarist, top-down, enlightenmentist, orientalist, and nationalist conception of secularism that long shaped Turkey’s social fabric combines with the Islamophobia that has become hegemonic globally, interpretations of the Middle East are filtered through the lens of these two currents, which are highly porous and easily fused. Those who supported the Palestinian resistance when it was led by the PLO, and who may still recall the organic political ties forged in that period, now extend only grudging support to the Palestinian resistance of today, approaching it with suspicion simply because it is led by a different political organization. In Europe, the United States, and South America, the energy, scale, and political depth of Palestine solidarity mobilizations were achieved to a large extent through a difficult and persistent struggle against exactly these ideas, ideas that still hold sway over sections of the left opposition in Turkey.
The fact that the regime in Iran is a mullah regime, that its leader is also the supreme religious authority, and that the clerical caste occupies ruling positions within the state, of course shapes the approach of Islamophobes. Israel’s attack on Iran has reignited this debate. Can a theocratic dictatorship like Iran be defended? If Israel and the United States want regime change, how can we defend this regime? Should we really find ourselves on the same side as a regime that kills women and has executed many Kurdish opposition activists? The answers given to these questions, and even the questions themselves, are among the greatest obstacles preventing large masses from mobilizing in the streets against the Israeli attack, and then the US attack, on Iran.
The monarchist right within Iran is also placing exactly this perspective at the centre of its opposition to the regime. In other words, Pahlavi monarchism, which today has gained strength within the Iranian diaspora with the support of Israel and the United States, is almost a mirror image of militarist right-wing nationalism in Turkey. It is possible to see the same poisonous ideas there too, anti-Arab racism, anti-Kurdish racism, Islamophobia, all of them. And as this debate unfolds, a broader contempt toward the peoples of the Middle East also finds room for expression, while Islamophobic tendencies, asserting that every kind of political action by Arab peoples is reactionary by nature, once again display their dominance.
It must be noted that Iran is a capitalist state dominated by a ruling class in which ultra-conservative clerics, followers of Shiism, one of the major branches of Islam, hold decisive power. Yet, it is a capitalist state, just like the United States, Turkey, India, or Germany. Iran has been seeking to become the leading power in the region, and it has severed all relations with Israel since the Shah was overthrown in 1979.
Islamophobia does more than legitimize the bombing of poor peoples struggling to survive in conditions of hardship, it also obscures the US ruling class, which weaponizes religion in the service of its massacres. Two days ago, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered a speech that revealed colonialism for what it is: “not a rational being, but naked violence.”
What he said, one after another, was truly horrifying: “President Trump puts America and Americans above everything else. He does not hesitate, and our soldiers do not hesitate… America is launching the deadliest and most precise air power campaign in history, regardless of what so-called international institutions have to say. B-2s, fighter jets, drones, missiles, and of course covert weapons… No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building swamp, no democracy-building exercises, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we do not waste our time or our lives… We are no longer defensive. We are warriors. We were trained to kill the enemy and break its will. Through the fire, the criticism, the fake news, through everything. We are unleashing you because you are the finest, the strongest, the deadliest fighting force the world has ever seen. May Almighty God protect you and extend His sheltering arms over you.”
This is an unparalleled speech in the way it lays bare the arrogance of MAGA imperialism, its insatiable appetite for brutality, its view of peoples as mere grass to be trampled underfoot, and its supremacist worldview that openly issues the command for massacre and unceasing killing. Nor does it refrain from the spoiled audacity of calling on Almighty God to protect an army of killers. This very same secretary had previously said that he regarded US support for Israel as a “religious duty.” Let us also remember that some US military commanders who represent the same ideas were the subject of complaints for telling soldiers that “this war is part of God’s plan.”
Still worse, the US ambassador to Israel expressed the point shamelessly. Speaking in an interview with the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, was asked whether, according to the Bible, Israel had a claim to the whole Middle East. He answered that Israel had a right to the territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, including lands in Syria and Iraq.
It is unacceptable to remain indifferent to the attack on Iran by the most advanced military power in the world, acting together with Israel, a state that for the past 26 months has repeatedly bombed countries such as Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon, and equally unacceptable not to oppose this attack through a broad wave of anti-war mobilizations because of the nature of the regime. We must clearly criticize this political stance, which has paralysed certain sections of the opposition. The bombing of any country by the United States and by Zionist Israel, a pirate state, can never be legitimized in any way. It cannot be brushed aside with mere condemnation, nor can it be discussed away with “buts” and qualifications. If there is to be a regime change in Iran, it must be carried out, as in the past, by the Iranian people themselves, by Iranian workers and women through their own action.
The following words by the Iranian novelist Sahar Delijani are extremely important, and clear enough to bring this debate to a close: “I was born in an Iranian prison. I have felt the crimes of the Iranian regime in my very bones. But that does not mean I want my people to be bombed, maimed, and their homes reduced to rubble. If your vision of liberation depends only on the destruction of innocent lives, what you are pursuing is not freedom.” While supporting the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom, we must at the same time take a clear stand against the US-Israeli bombardment.
Regime Change, the Kurds in Iran, and the Peace Process in Turkey
The calls coming from Kurdish organizations in the region increasingly show that they are evolving toward an exaggeratedly puppet-like position in relation to the United States. The regime’s severe repression of Kurds in Iran, including executions, is a reality. But when the United States and Israel are dropping bombs on one people’s heads, to imagine that another people can seize this as an opportunity, achieve success, and win freedom reflects a naïve trust in imperialism.
Looking to US intervention for salvation is not a correct political stance. The suffering endured by the Kurdish people across all parts of the region is very clear. In Iran, the regime’s treatment of the Kurds, and its inquisitorial approach toward Kurdish activists, have of course left no ground on which Kurds could possibly align with the regime. To struggle against the regime in Iran is a necessary political task, and one in which every opponent living in Iran must determine their own strategy and tactics. But holding telephone conversations with the shameless Epstein associate named Trump and moving in coordination with the rulers of a genocidal state like Israel, may create the impression that certain windows of opportunity are opening amid the sound of bombs. Yet being remembered with this stain in the memory of peoples who have suffered for years under the destruction wrought by imperialism and Zionism will inevitably carry a heavy price.
The pace, rhythm, timing, and overall trajectory of the peace process in Turkey became even clearer with the attack on Iran. In his parliamentary group speech, Devlet Bahçeli [the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, the electoral coalition partner of the AKP since the coup attempt in 2016] said: “I believe the importance of the internal front, and the value of national unity and solidarity, have now been much better understood and clarified. It is both impossible and irrational to isolate our country from, or think it separately from, the horrifying calamities that have befallen our neighbouring country Iran. Those who sneered at the goal of a terror-free Turkey, do you now see more clearly what we are doing and what we are aiming for?” From the very beginning, we have emphasized that, however different the proposals, the decision by İmralı [aka Öcalan. The prison island where Öcalan has been kept since 1999 is used to refer to him] and the state coalition to initiate the peace process was also being advanced as a precaution against the impact of political upheavals that would unfold in the region, especially in Syria.
The bombing of Gaza and many other countries in the region by Israel, the deepening of the Israeli occupation, the perpetration of genocide before the eyes of the world, Trump’s return to power in the United States, regime change in Syria, and finally the heavy bombardment of Iran, all created the possibility that autonomous structures under US and Israeli control could take shape. From İmralı’s point of view, these conditions could be overcome through democratization in Turkey, a peaceful reconfiguration, and a series of consecutive moves in that direction. From the state’s point of view, however, the disbanding of armed forces was placed on the table as the priority for a more minimalist orientation. Why Öcalan wanted to move quickly became visible once again with the attack on Iran.
Even if these were the fundamental conditions in the background of the process, expectations regarding it differ profoundly between the Turkish state and İmralı, and between the ruling bloc on the one hand and the DEM Party [the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party] and the Kurdish people on the other. The Kurds, in all their components, are saying that a series of steps must now be taken. In the views attributed to Öcalan over two consecutive days, he emphasized both that he found the parliamentary Peace Commission Report [the Report shared in the General Assembly on February 18] very positive and that there should be no further delay in taking practical steps.
Government spokespeople, for their part, are making positive remarks about the process, yet at the same time the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is assigning a new task to the Kurds. By saying that the process for a terror-free Turkey also means a “terror-free region,” and that this includes Iran as well, Hakan Fidan has increased the doubts about the process. Of course, no state official is expressing any openly negative view of the process, and Fidan too is speaking in a much softer tone than usual. But even if the dynamics that initiated the peace process are the political storms beyond the borders, what will determine whether it reaches its conclusion is whether the steps taken domestically will satisfy the Kurds. For this reason, at the very least, the concrete proposals contained in Articles 6 and 7 of the Commission Report should be swiftly implemented by parliament.
This is, without doubt, also connected to how Turkey will respond to developments in Iran. The attack on Iran, Maduro’s abduction from his own country, the embargo on Cuba, the killing over the past year and a half of the leaders of many resistance organizations, and finally the killing of Khamenei and the Iranian leadership, will be met with fear and panic among the ruling classes of all countries, and especially at the level of state leadership, bringing security concerns to the fore. Governments that become excessively consumed by this anxiety will turn directly toward repressive military and police measures, under the name of a security-based approach. The peace process cannot withstand Turkey moving in such a direction.
The bombing of Iran, and Iran’s response to these bombardments by attacking all the regional countries that host US bases, will have shattering effects on the world economy and on the geopolitical strategy of each country individually. The rise in fossil fuel and gas prices will drive inflation upward and accelerate impoverishment in every country, while at the same time a greater share of resources will be spent on strengthening war machines. Since the war machine also serves as a tool for disciplining social opposition at home, the preference of governments for this easy path functions in ways that serve the priorities of the ruling classes. But Turkey must never choose this path. To prevent that, those who want peace in Gaza, Iran, and Rojava, and also in Turkey must act immediately. That is the only way to ensure the peace process succeeds and a series of Kurdish demands are implemented.
If energy prices keep rising, if the state becomes unable to subsidize rising oil prices, and if a deeper economic impoverishment takes hold, then our most important task will be to bring together the anger against war with the anger against poverty. That is why it is so important for those who want peace, and who support the peace process, to start building strong anti-war networks now within the broad workers’ struggles that may develop.
Another First of March!
Trump is shamelessly calling for regime change in Iran. So are his ministers and Netanyahu. It has become clear that this attack will not end in a single day with Iran raising the white flag. But we need to recognize that the military superiority of the attacking side, the United States, is incomparable to Iran’s. While the aggressors are seeking regime change, the Iranian regime is trying to prolong its survival for as long as possible.
The depth of political and social polarization in Iran is very clear. As Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi puts it, “Many people harbour a deep and visceral hatred of the regime. Years of economic mismanagement, corruption, repression, and squandered opportunities have eroded the social contract. The uprisings of recent years, including the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and the horrific massacre of thousands of demonstrators in January, have laid bare generational, class, and ideological divisions that appear almost impossible to overcome.”
External interventions against dictatorships can indeed mean that “those who look upon religious institutions with hatred may nevertheless feel revulsion when they see foreign jets flying across Iranian skies and hear explicit declarations that their state will be destroyed… Anger toward the regime may be temporarily pushed into the background beneath anger toward the aggressor. What appears in peacetime as an irreconcilable rupture can, under bombardment, take the form of a fragile solidarity.”
That is why imperialist bombardments have never succeeded in building democratic regimes in any country, nor in winning the approval of workers and peoples crushed under dictatorships. The same will happen now. We do not know whether the dictatorship in Iran will emerge from this aggression strengthened by it. But one thing we do know: neither the Iranian regime nor US imperialism is an invincible armada.
The United States is not invincible. It was defeated in Vietnam in 1973, and in 1979 it was defeated in Iran, where it proved unable to protect the Shah. In the previous election, Trump was defeated by the resistance of the American people, above all through the Black Lives Matter protests. The US occupation of Iraq in 2003 is an example of total failure. Yesterday’s ‘terrorist’ by the US standards, Sharaa, is today the president of Syria.
Today, Trump is entangled in a contradiction in which he faces resistance both from another wing of the ruling class within the United States and from the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets in Minneapolis against ICE violence. Just a few months ago, the MAGA camp lost New York in the elections to a migrant. As for the region, it is worth noting against those who have lost their belief in people’s ability to make history that as early as 2011, the Arab Spring shook the whole region through the masses’ own action. Tens of millions of workers and poor people rose up against dictatorships that had been considered unshakeable.
Now we have to build a united and mass movement against the war. We need to place anti-war struggle at the centre of all our political activity. We were able to do this on 1 March 2003, during the struggle against the war in Iraq, when the AKP government suffered its first defeat. The massive campaign we built, which also overcame the secular-religious divide that had peaked with the 28 February coup of 1997, became the organizational expression of the people’s determined opposition to war, and countless organizations, groups, platforms, and unions mobilized in every city. Before the invasion of Iraq, we had refused to allow the United States to use Turkey as a staging ground for its bloody assault. The war motion did not pass in parliament.
Of course, we are in different conditions now. Political polarization continues, even if it has taken sharper and more varied forms. We are not yet able to bring hundreds of thousands of people together. But today we know that hundreds of thousands are reacting to the genocide in Gaza, and that they are also enraged by the destruction of Iran neighbourhood by neighbourhood with expensive bombs. Moreover, whereas in the early 2000s there was a global anti-capitalist anti-war movement, this time there is a tremendous global Palestinian intifada that, over the last two years, has grown wave after wave, filling ports, railways, and city squares. The movement for freedom and solidarity with Palestine finds expression across all movements.
With the attack on Iran, this effect continues to unite the oppressed in every sphere, from the struggle of students raising their voices against conscription measures introduced in Europe as an extension of deepening security policies, to the left opposition that won the elections in New York, from the struggles of dockworkers to artists who seize every opportunity to raise their voices against Trump, from the struggles of Indigenous peoples against the climate crisis in settler-colonial states to the trade union movement. Just recently, young people in Germany who took to the streets against compulsory military service expressed the following spirit: “Today we took part in strikes and protests against compulsory military service in various cities! While cuts continue in youth services, health, and sport, those in power want to force young people to wage the wars they are preparing. At the same time, they have been supporting the genocide in Gaza for more than two years, and now the war on Iran, which violates international law. No to compulsory military service, no to support for war, no to preparations for war!”
Seeing and grasping the unbreakable linkages among the aggressors is the first great step the oppressed must take in order to stand up to the ruling classes. That step has already been taken.
It took some time for the war lies used during the occupation of Iraq to collapse. Yet, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, the Pentagon itself acknowledged that Iran posed no imminent threat or attack capability. Even so, the United States and Israel struck Iran and killed 165 students at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Primary School in Minab. If anyone other than the US and Israel had carried out such an act, they would have been condemned across the world for weeks. In Iran, tens of thousands, in tears, bid farewell to the children at a mass funeral. The slaughter of children across the region continues without pause. Israel has massacred at least 20,000 children in Gaza. As Tariq Ali said, Israel is bombing Lebanon, and Trump struck an Iranian ship returning from India, aiming to kill 180 sailors. But the lies have already collapsed. Millions of oppressed people are making the connections. “The ICE killers in Minneapolis share the same mentality as the pilots bombing a stationary target in the Indian Ocean.” Even if not immediately, every day of the aggression against Iran will increase the number of those, in the organized working class, in women’s struggles, in Black and migrant resistance, everywhere in the world, who connect the struggle against capitalism with the struggle against racism and imperialism, and who see the links between the genocide in Gaza and the attack on Iran. Now is the time to give voice to discontent with the war, to articulate the anger, and to organize against the US-Israeli aggression that is burning and destroying Iran.
If we were Iranian socialists, we would not welcome US bombs with enthusiasm. We would work for an uprising of the workers’ movement against the bombardment and against Zionism. At the same time, we would struggle against the repression imposed in Iran by the regime of the mullahs, against a state that has made a habit of bloodily suppressing mass action, and we would explain that the fundamental source of the problem lies in Iran’s ruling class and its hierarchical organization of class rule. The only difference is that we would do this indirectly. We would fight directly against the bombardment of Iran, knowing that this direct struggle would indirectly strengthen the people’s own self-activity and trigger a storm capable of toppling the regime in Iran as well.
When Lenin opposed the military coup organized against the Provisional Government in August 1917, he was taking a political stance not in order to defend Kerensky, the head of the government, but in order to preserve the right and the possibility of continuing the struggle against Kerensky. Kerensky’s government had already effectively signed the death warrant of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Repelling US aggression would provide the kind of inspiration to the oppressed of the whole world that the workers’ movement which overthrew the Shah in Iran once gave. From Gaza to Syria, this would supply a driving force for revolutions from below across the whole region.
All the polls show that, even within Trump’s own party in the United States, a majority opposes the war. Without losing time, we must build a global anti-war movement, spreading from the United States to Turkey and from there to the rest of the world, one that opposes both the genocide in Gaza and the burning and destruction of Iran, and whose backbone is formed by the working class, women, LGBT+ people, youth, and racialized minorities and migrants. What we need is a new March 1.
Our political perspectives:
- No to the US-Israeli war on Iran!
- Stop the genocide in Gaza!
- From Iran to Gaza, from Minneapolis to Rojava, we stand with the oppressed everywhere!
- Trump and Netanyahu have added yet another crime to their record of war crimes. We will not forget those who lost their lives in the attack on schoolchildren, and we will fight to ensure that they are tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- Today, people can see the connection between Trump’s attacks on Muslims, women, and LGBT+ people, the hostile state policies targeting Black people and migrants, the economic policies that allow figures like Elon Musk to increase their wealth by stealing from the rest of us, and the fact that vast sections of society are denied the most basic rights, including healthcare, work, education, clean drinking water, and housing. We must make these connections into the binding ties of the anti-war struggle.
- As those who are fighting against the ongoing genocide in Palestine, we demand an immediate end to the US-Israeli military aggression against Iran. We also demand that Turkey end all military cooperation with the United States and declare that it stands with oppressed, bombed, and genocided peoples.
- Just as none of Trump’s plans can be accepted, the Gaza Plan must also be rejected. We demand that Turkey play no part in Trump’s Gaza Plan!
- In the speech in which he announced the order to attack, Trump called on the Iranian people to overthrow the regime after the bombardment. US imperialism, murderous and shameless in equal measure, is now trying to seize control of the freedom struggles of the peoples of the region as well. It is trying to stain the Iranian people’s struggle against the oppression of the Iranian regime. Freedom in Iran will not be won through US-Israeli bombs, but through the struggle of working people from below. At a time when war in the region shows every sign of spreading, it is of vital importance that workers in Turkey and in all countries take to the streets and become the central force of the struggle against war.
- Freedom in the region can come through workers’ struggle, and war can be stopped by mass workers’ movements. We must build a movement like the one created by the millions who took to the streets against the occupation of Iraq in 2003. From Gaza to Iran to Minneapolis, we stand with the oppressed.
- Turkey out of NATO! Close the US bases!
Şenol Karakaş
