In an interview just aired on CNN Wolf Blitzer spoke to the respected US columnist Seymour Hersh of the "New Yorker". Hersh says that the US is already launching attacks on Iran from across the Iraqi border by Special Forces. Hersh also claims that the US has now changed tack in relation to Iran. Where previously the focus was on taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, the US is now looking to take out those Iranian facilities providing support for Shia groups inside Iraq.
Hersh has set out his ideas in a new edition of the New Yorker entitled "The Redirection". Already according to Hirsh the US military under orders from Bush has drawn up plans for an attack on Iran to be udnertaken within 24 hours of being given the go ahead. Such plans should be ready for implementation any time onwards from this Spring. That explains why the UK is withdrawing its forces to defensible positions in the South, and to the Iran/Iraq border ready for any come back both from an invasion of Iran, and from the US attack on the Shia forces of Sadr.
Hersh also expounded another explosive piece of information with echoes of the Iran/contra scandal. According to Hersh US policy is now definitively to undermine the power of the Shia. Using vast slush funds from money sent to Iraq, the US is now with support from Sunni states like Saudi Arabia funding Sunni terrorist organisations for the sole purpose of them attacking Shia militia groups. According to hersh this is the explanation for John Negroponte resigning. The move which is apparently being ochestrated by Dick Cheney is seeing amongst other things funding being channelled through the lebanese Government to at least three Al Qaeda linked Sunni groups in Lebanon for the sole purpose of building up these groups to attack Hezbollah. This comes on top of known funding being sent by the same sources to Fatah to enable them to militarily confront Hamas.
The US has apparently decided that they dropped a bollock in invading Iraq, by opening the door to Iran, and its links with the various Shia organisations in the region. The US now intends to try to reverse the damage done through an all out campaign against Shia organisations including those in Iraq, to prevent them from becoming any more powerful or taking over more governmental positions.
This once more demonstrates that you cannot isolate the fight against imperialism by trying to pick and choose where to oppose its remit, and where to remain silent. The question of the long term consequences of a principled opposition or lack there of to the role of imperialism in Iraq, is no longer so long term but is a question of "Now". The US occupation is and always has been a bridgehead for further US imperialist intervention in the region. That intervention is no longer a hypothetical question that could be deferred to the future, but one that socialists have to adress "Now".
A principled opposition to US imperialism in the Middle East given its inevitable meddling into the affairs of other states, and likely war against Iran - Hersh says that it is likely now to be the US not Israel that attacks Iran because if Israel felt the need to attack the US would almost certainly feel compelled to do so - requires that socialists demand now, what they always should have demanded that US and other imperialist forces get out "Now".