Back Iran’s working class!
Image: Wikimedia
Pakistani mediators have announced the US and Iran have reached an agreement to end the war that began on 28 February with a devastating air attack which killed Iran’s so-called Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
A “deal” may be formally signed off on Friday 19 June in Geneva, Switzerland.
This seems to be a half-baked agreement, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the provisions of which remain hazy, only beginning to address some of the issues between the contending sides. The MoU provides a 60-day period of negotiations on outstanding matters, including the Iranian nuclear weapons programme.
US Vice President, J D Vance, apparently thinks the Arab states around the Gulf, known as the GCC, will now invest heavily in rebuilding Iran. He mentions a figure of $300bn, which is fantasy.
Apparently the US-Iran settlement will call a halt to fighting on each front, including between Israel and the Shia Islamist party-militia, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon.
Israel, which was not party to the talks and opposes the US-Iran peace, intends to continue to occupy southern Lebanon indefinitely. It is difficult to see how their occupation can be maintained without repeated military action against Hezbollah.
Iranian negotiators told Reuters that the deal specifies that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen and the US will lift the blockade of Iranian ports. The US will waive sanctions on Iranian oil for a period, release $25bn in frozen Iranian assets, and the US will accept Iranian assurances that enriched uranium will be diluted on Iranian territory and that they will not build nuclear weapons.
If those details are true and more-or-less complete this represents a serious failure for Trump and what passes for his policy. Trump, the wretched loudmouth who has surrounded himself with sycophants, failed to gauge accurately the resilience of the Iranian regime and did not anticipate the Iranian grip on the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf.
Trump’s main concern now is to extract himself from the mess he has created. He needs the flow of oil and gas through the Gulf to resume which will reduce the domestic political pressure on him caused by high petrol prices in the run-up to the US November’s mid-term elections.
However Trump also must be able to present an agreement with Iran as a victory. So he cannot openly offer Iran lots of money, or sanctions relief, without dealing with Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
In particular he can not sign up to an agreement which compares badly to the deal which US President Barack Obama signed with Iran in 2015, the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which offered Iran sanction relief in return for nuclear inspections and an agreement to limit nuclear enrichment. Trump denounced the deal and pulled the US out of it in 2018.
So will the peace hold? Quite possibly not.
When US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the assault on the Iran on 28 February they had the intention of overthrowing the Islamist regime and laying hold of Iran’s stocks of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium.
They have failed.
What they did manage, however, is to kill thousands of ordinary people in Iran and Lebanon and cause vast damage, including to Iranian civilian infrastructure. Perhaps three million Iranian workers have lost their jobs and 1.2 million people in southern Lebanon have been displaced by the Israeli invasion.
The US-Israeli war led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a big spike in oil prices and consequently inflation across the world, which has hit workers and the poor hardest of all.
Many in the Iranian leadership are now dead but the Islamic Guards (IRGC), set up to protect the clerical state, are firmly in control. During the war thousands of Iranians were arrested on accusations of disloyalty to the regime and a wave of executions of political prisoners is taking place in Iranian prisons.
According to Bloomberg Iran has reconstituted its stockpiles of missiles and drones, possibly with Russian help, since a US-Iran truce was agreed on 8 April. It currently holds about 75% of its pre-war reserves and has cleared much of the rubble from the entrances of bombed weapons dumps.
As one of the US-Israeli initial war aims was to destroy Iran’s weapon stocks, this is a further failure.
In Israel 35 people died during the war, mostly civilians and 7,700 were injured. The continued existence of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones is a real threat to Israel, a country that Iran’s regime has regularly threatened to destroy.
Netanyahu also has an interest in reviving the war. He faces an election in October and needs to consolidate his far-right voting base. If he loses the election he may well face a long-postponed corruption trial and might end up in jail.
The only force that can build a stable, long-lasting, democratic peace in the region is the working-class.
For a secular republic and workers’ power in Iran!
For a free, contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel!
For an end to this senseless war!
Comments?We welcome replies, corrections and debate pieces. Contact us