Donald Trump:
“It is a four week [war to defeat Iran]. Four weeks, or less” (early March)
“We’ll finish Iran off pretty soon” (late July)
“We’ve had regime change already, they’re all dead” (late March)
“I never cared about regime change [in Iran]” (June)
“We’ve totally destroyed [the Iranian] military” (May)
“Open the F------ Strait, you crazy bastards” (April)
“We control the Strait [of Hormuz]” (late July)
“[Iran will be] hit very hard [if the Strait doesn’t open] very soon.” (August)
By misunderstanding the most basic political facts about the Islamist Iranian dictatorship, US President and imperialist bin fire Donald Trump has made himself responsible for the deaths of a lot of people, and made a serious political and economic mess for himself and for us all.
The total number of deaths, across all states, due to the current Iran war, is probably over 9,000 with 47,000 injured.
Arrogant Trump messes up
Perhaps a million people in Lebanon are still displaced, southern Lebanon is occupied by the Israeli military and two million Iranian workers have lost their jobs.
Despite the well-known US military and intelligence services’ assessment that Iran had the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and shut down the passage of oil and gas tankers out of the Persian Gulf, Trump failed to plan for the possibility. Trump and his inner circle of sycophants did not bother to listen.
Underlying that error was the assumption that the Iranian regime would buckle and either collapse or come to an agreement following the devastating Israeli-US bombardment of Iran which began on 28 February. Israel was fighting to change the regime, Trump seemed to be looking for an accommodation with someone inside the Iranian state.
How either of those objectives was to be met was always unclear. Fantastic schemes have been reported: an Israeli plan to install Holocaust-denying former hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an alternative, compliant leader; a project to arm a series of small Iraqi-based Kurdish militias to invade Iran and topple the regime.
How could anyone have thought these plans could possibly work? Ahmadinejad is discredited and has no backing inside the Iranian state power, currently resting on the Islamic Guards (IRGC). And the result of a Kurdish mini-invasion would probably have been inter-ethnic civil war and massacres in a few towns in north west Iran.
It is now suggested that the project to arm the Kurdish groups was pulled because the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, objected. No doubt he did object. On the other hand Erdoğan would not have had a veto. The real reason the project was axed is that someone inside the US administration eventually worked out it was bound to fail.
The fascistic Iranian regime, which came to power in a reactionary revolution in 1979 has proved resilient, as we said it would. The clerical dictatorship, despite suffering significant losses of key leaders and being riddled with corruption, still has a cadre of people at its centre who believe in the original ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shia revolution: clerical dictatorship and export of that revolution across the Middle East.
As Sanam Vakil from the Chatham House policy institute put it, the Iranian leadership is “not making decisions on the basis of macro-economic data.”
On 8 April the US and Iran agreed a ceasefire, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), brokered by Pakistani officials. The MoU was vague and incomplete and, as we wrote, likely to fail as a consequence of that fudging. By April, because Iran had effectively shut down the Persian Gulf to tankers the price of petrol at US garages was over $4 a gallon, up over 30 percent in one month, Trump was feeling political heat in America where he was elected promising economic prosperity and to avoid foreign wars.
Trump’s approval rating in the US is now minus 25 percent (Economist, 4 August) and support for his Iran war is only 35 percent (Reuters, 6 August).
On 21 July the US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, told the US Senate Appropriations Committee it was urgent that $87bn additional funding for the Pentagon was agreed, with $67bn of that for operations in the Middle East. Hegseth claimed that the Iran war had cost $37.5bn in direct military expenditures to mid-July. 18 US service personnel had been killed and 624 wounded, as of late July.
Trump then claimed that the US is not running short of missiles. He is lying. The US started the war with 3,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles and now has 2,000 left. It will take until 2031 to rebuild its stocks.
Of the 2,330 Patriot missiles the US held in February, it now has around 800 left. And the US has used about 60 percent of its THAAD missiles.
Since April the shooting conflict has continued, spasmodically. Israel’s far-right government has opposed a settlement with Iran and continues its occupation of southern Lebanon. Iran has spread the conflict by attacking US bases and civilian infrastructure in Kuwait, Qatar and, recently, in Egypt. Iranian proxy militias in Iraq are actively helping Iran and the Houthi regime, an Iranian ally, ruling most of inhabited Yemen, is attacking Saudi shipping in the Red Sea.
Iran has targeted tankers moving without their permission in the Persian Gulf.
As a result of US-Israeli action against Iran, Saudi and the Gulf states’ economies have been damaged and disrupted by the war and their leaders have become sceptical of the US and its ability to guarantee peace and the safety of their regimes. On Friday 7 August Saudia Arabia announced a defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan which underlines that point.
On Sunday 2 August Trump again said he was calling off new strikes on Iran saying that Saudi Arabia had asked him to negotiate instead. Trump declared that talks with Iran would start on Monday 3 August. But on Monday the Iranian foreign ministry said there were no talks with the US and instead Iran was discussing with Oman a plan to open the Gulf on their terms.
Trump has been flapping around, trying to finesse the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which is his main concern because its closure has led to the surge in oil prices and is the immediate cause of political problems for him at home.
But Iran has continued to use its effective control over the Strait of Hormuz efficiently. It may well be the case that Trump will settle for some Iranian toll on ships passing through the Strait.
That will be a colossal failure of policy, will almost certainly be temporary and will break down as underlying and unresolved issues impact on any cobbled-together deal.
There is a force, however, that can bring peace and stability to the region. The working classes of Iran, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Iraq are potentially very powerful. The working class has no interest in this Islamist-Trump war.
For a secular republic in Iran
Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, for a Palestinian state alongside Israel
For Kurdish self-determination
For women’s equality
For workers’ power
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