Iran: Stop the war!

Launching a new series of books, our counterpart-but-with-so-many-differencesSocialist Worker says they are for those who “cheer at the US and Israel facing humiliation after they launched the war on Iran”.

But Badr Al-Busaidi, the foreign minister of the profit-swollen autocracy of Oman, is nearer the truth about the war than the cheering would-be Marxists. “A catastrophe”, says Al-Busaidi.

A catastrophe for profiteers wanting to get their supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, either way, and that worries Busaidi. It is also a catastrophe for the workers and farmers across the world facing higher prices for those supplies as the profiteers try to recoup.

A catastrophe for workers in the Gulf states under Iranian bombardment, most of them ill-paid migrants. A catastrophe for seafarers.

A catastrophe for the working people of Iran. They have been forced into even deeper poverty and danger as their rulers organised what they claim is the most lavish state funeral in history for Ali Khamenei. They are less able than ever to assert themselves against the IRGC military machine which increasingly dominates the country.

A minus for Netanayahu and Trump is not necessarily a plus for us. Israel hasn’t got exiled would-be monarch Reza Pahlavi in to rule Iran. But then even Trump never thought it would. The war has given Netanyahu good cover to pursue “humiliation” and even “catastrophe” for the people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

Trump is floundering. Maybe in the end he will have to find some new “spectacular” to distract attention from a deal with Iran which gives it no less than Obama’s 2015 JCPOA.

But that sidestep will still leave the working people of Iran war-battered and suffering.

If the now-renewed war, after the collapse of the “Memorandum of Understanding” published 15 June, escalates back to Trump’s threat of 7 April: “A whole civilisation will die”, then it will be many times worse. The fact that Trump’s war is unpopular even among his supporters in the USA is some protection against that, but only some. And Trump’s electoral difficulties do not outbalance the suffering of the workers and farmers of Iran, so that we should “cheer” the outcome.

Neither Khamenei nor Trump, but workers’ unity! Stop this war!