While the world waits for Trump’s deadline of 8pm ET tonight, there are emergency rallies called against war on Iran today and tomorrow.
We post below a transcript of Clare Lemlich talking on Iran at a Marx21 meeting March 29th.
But first, this morning Trump posted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” using language unprecedentedly apocalyptic even for him, adding “one of the most important moments” in world history could unfold tonight.
Already attacks are escalating by the US and Israel.
Last Wednesday Trump had already vowed “we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” echoing Vietnam-era pro-nuclear-war General Curtis LeMay on bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” “Maybe we take Kharg Island,” he mused, threatened that every bridge and power plant will be decimated, and insisted that he was not concerned about what is called a war crime. “We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation,” Trump posted in an echo of his A.I. post-genocide Gaza fantasy.
But Trump is now grappling with an economic crisis and unpopular war he cannot get himself out of. The Iranian quagmire displays both the weakness of US imperialism, and the terrifying remaining strength of its military to reap destruction and death internationally. The attack on Iran also demonstrates that, whatever Trump’s promises to MAGA against “forever wars,” war abroad, demonization of foreigners, and increased repression at home go hand in hand. Of course, we saw signs of this already with the US backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza leading to attacks on free speech under the Biden administration. Instability continues to grow. Many in the Pentagon and the ruling class think there are more rational ways to manage US domination and imperialism. At the same time, there are those in the administration who would welcome a nuclear strike ushering in end times in the Middle East.
We are posting Clare Lemlich’s talk below as background. And we urge everyone to join the protests against the war in your area. Some are listed here by ANSWER: https://stoptrumpswars.org/ But there will be others.
50501 is backing local protests, but phrasing them as Congress must pass War Powers Resolution… pressure your local reps.
Whatever political differences we may have about the nature of the Iranian regime, on one hand, or about US capitalism and the Democratic Party’s co-defense of US imperialism on the other, socialists should join with others in protest against the attacks. We need to build towards an open and democratic united front, and a growing and disruptive movement against this unpopular war. Trump’s defeat on this could be a tipping point against his whole agenda. All out against the war, and build for May Day.
The US War on Iran:
transcript of a talk by Marx21 member Clare Lemlich, March 29th
Yesterday marked a month since the Israeli attack that began the war on Iran, Yemen joined the war in late March. Because these are the Trump years everything feels very amplified and confusing and unpredictable, and there are ways Trump is dealing with Iran that other presidents might not. In general Trump is continuing the supremely American tradition of bombing the Middle East which is a promise to create more bloodshed and chaos in the region.
When Israel first reported their “preemptive strike” and said that they’d killed the authoritarian leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei, I didn’t believe it until another source confirmed it — because it’s just such a blatant illegal attack on an independent state, such a huge escalation of imperial tensions, and the strategy from the US the last decades hasn’t been all out war but rather negotiations/sanctions, and who can trust anything Israel says? But it was of course true! Retaliation from Iran was obviously quick hitting US bases in several countries across the Middle East creating a wider regional war.
Western intervention
Israel attacked right after a round of negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program which had allegedly been going well but Iran still refuses to get rid of their program. It was open to some concessions but Israel used that as a pretense anyway. Iran uses nuclear technology for domestic purposes only and there is no evidence they are building weapons, much less that they pose a threat to Israel and the US. The US is the world’s main nuke holder anyway aside from Russia and who has dropped a nuke on people in the past? Only America. The only country in the Middle East with nukes is Israel. Nevertheless Israel used the nuclear weapons as a smokescreen to launch an all out attack — it’s really giving “weapons of mass destruction” as the pretense for the invasion of Iraq again.
I remember during the invasion of Afghanistan arguing with my mum who had taken the liberal feminist position that invasion would be good for Afghan women and girls living under the Taliban and it came from a very genuine place of care for the repression people were facing, but also mixed in with Islamophobic ideology that gave cover to the war. Thankfully there is much less of that for this war, one poll I saw said only a quarter of Americans support the war — which is good news for us as socialists. That means there is a significant social base out there for a new anti-war movement.
I think that stat indicates that we’ve witnessed enough Western intervention in the Middle East to know that women’s liberation doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun, despite the propaganda that tries to get us to back our own ruling class’s war. All the evidence from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria is that Western intervention creates more carnage, more sectarianism, and more of the problems their populations want to be freed from. The massacre of girls at that school and the toxic rain that Western strikes created by targeting oil infrastructure sadly underscore that point.
If you support the protests on the ground in Iran, you actually can’t support the bombs from the sky — because they set back any gains the Iranian people have made, first by driving people into the arms of the regime as a defensive measure, and then by empowering the most reactionary elements of the opposition, which is cookie cutter what the US does when it’s trying to find a local ruling class that will do its bidding — it’s literally how the Taliban was created, they wanted a counterweight to Soviet influence in Afghanistan so they funded anti-Soviet mujahadeen groups and the Taliban is what they got. Then they did a bloody war against the monster they’d empowered, and the Taliban was even stronger when they withdrew! That’s the true legacy of Western intervention.
Regional war/economic toll
The Iranian bombs are just starting to touch oil infrastructure in the nearby Gulf states which have become major centers of capital not just through oil but tourism, finance, etc and who have so far rallied behind the West.
For a time both sides avoided hitting oil and gas precisely to avoid the situation we’re in now, but Israel kindly bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field hoping it would cause power outages and pressure for regime change. In retaliation Iran has destroyed some Qatari oil infrastructure — it will cost billions and take years for the industry to recover.
Iran has two real assets against the US and Israel’s massive military might: its arsenal of missiles and drones that it is sending to the Gulf states and its control of the strait of Hormuz, which a quarter of global oil flows through. Sometimes when we talk about war for oil there’s this perception that America wants all the oil itself and Americans are like a special gas-guzzling people. But the oil that goes through Hormuz isn’t oil that the US needs particularly, it mostly goes to China and Japan and other parts of Asia, but America wants to control who does and doesn’t get the oil.
Iran limiting oil’s movement creates speculation of prices and we are all seeing that at the gas pump. One report said the price is up 40%, which makes sense because oil has been $110 a barrel — double what it was before the war. There’s a famous gas station in LA that had it at almost $9 a gallon this week. So desperate, Trump even lifted sanctions on Russian oil — who don’t forget we are also at war with in Ukraine. He also lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, weirdly!
The longer Hormuz is closed the more inflationary pressure there will be, interest rates will go up, economic growth will go down, it may even lead to a recession. Already there is a fertilizer shortage which obviously has huge implications for food production. Trump is already facing a massive cost of living crisis. A NYT article mentioned that, “A frustrated Trump pressed General Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, about why the US could not immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” — you can just imagine him there like a baby demanding they reopen what his own war closed.
That is what’s behind the ceasefire deals Trump has tried to make, which apparently included Iran giving up its nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions — so what they couldn’t get in negotiations they wanted to get with bombs. Naturally, Iran wants more than a ceasefire to open Hormuz or even consider anything about its nuclear program, it needs an end to the war. We have all seen what a ceasefire overseen by Israel means, no ceasefire at all.
Israel is the US’s client state but it also goes quite rogue as we’ve seen since October 7. Israel has its own expansionist interests and is using Iran as an excuse to wage wider war on Lebanon. They believe their ability to get away with genocide in Gaza has reset the balance of power in the region. There’s a little bit of antisemitic conspiracy that floats around the Iran stuff because externally it can look like the tail is wagging the dog and Israel is calling the shots and is the locus of power which is just a little jump to worldwide Jewish cabal. Certainly Israel has its own interests, and the Israeli far right in particular has its own aims, but Israel exists to discipline the Middle East for American ruling class interests, we are not being dragged into a regional conflict, we administer the regional conflict.
US weakness
Wars are costly — it already costs $2bn a day in American taxpayer money — and they’re dangerous and we know they’re not about liberating anyone, so why is this happening? In a very immediate sense both Trump and Netanyahu have elections coming up and have serious popularity crises. Trump has failed to deal with the cost of living crisis and his implication in the Epstein files is helping crack his traditional base. Politico had an article yesterday about younger MAGA men turning on him over the war. He is definitely not living up to his promise of ending forever wars. He started two new ones! A war is a welcome distraction from his sinking approval figures at home.
But it’s obviously more than one election cycle. Some of Trump’s people have weird apocalyptic fantasies rooted in right wing Christianity, some see it as a war for Western values, and the US companies have their own profit motives, but the overarching fact is the US’s power is in a long period of decline and this is the latest attempt to reassert some dominance.
After WWII the US ruling class did this through neoliberal institutions like the IMF and the World Bank that would restructure the economy of weaker countries and through NATO to militarily have its cronies fall in line. The Soviet Union collapsed and the US was the last superpower standing, but since then many more smaller imperial blocs have emerged, namely China but not only — the US has had to deal with hostile governments in the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, etc.
They tried invasions in the early 2000s and they went catastrophically, then they went back to “diplomacy” with Iran especially under Obama. Now Trump is tailing Israel in some ways pursuing a much more direct conflict type of imperialism, but still very much in the same vein as Trump’s brief invasion of Venezuela, he wants to do a quick little strong arm show of force to depose a leader and control their oil. It’s volatile, we don’t know whether Trump will react to failing at this war by declaring victory quickly and trying to get it out of the news cycle a bit like Venezuela — even though there was no regime change. Or will he escalate the war as Israel would like. It’s hard to say — on Wednesday they offered a ceasefire but 48 hours before Trump was threatening to seriously target oil infrastructure, it’s very unpredictable.
Ultimately they want to stop Iranian money going toward resistance organizations that fight against Western interests, they want a friendly client state like Israel and they want to restructure the Iranian economy so that it’s favorable to American interests, specifically they want to control the flow of oil. They are losing those battles right now.
So what can be done?
The question always is what is to be done in the face of this massive escalation of war. I was sitting on the floor in my living room with a close friend/comrade last night complaining I didn’t know what to say about that in my talk today because in the abstract we know what we need — an international anti-war movement that can see an ordinary person in Iran is no different than an ordinary person here, and we all have more in common with each other than Trump or Khamenei or any other world leader.
On the other side of the bombs, Iranians have a long history of workers’ struggle for democracy, first in the 40s and 50s when the movement unseated the foreign owned oil companies and nationalized the industry. They brought down the British-backed monarchy in 1979 — in fact they had democratically controlled workers councils running the oil sector during the revolution, that was how much power they had. As revolutionary socialists that is what we always look towards, democracy that comes directly out of the working class and shows of power that reminds the ruling class we are the people who make society run.
The government in Iran has been losing much of what support it had for years. There have been waves of demonstrations in Iran, including more middle-class forces supporting the reformist electoral opposition and protesting fraud; union protest and strikes; resistance to ethnic oppression; the explosion of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement sparked by young women and Kurdish communities; and different waves of protest by poorer workers against inequality and reduced subsidies, like the January rebellion which was drowned in blood. Recently, we have seen more economic complaints from the small merchant class, which had traditionally been the center of government support outside the elites in power. The civil society movement that has emerged the last few years doesn’t have deep inroads with labor yet, but the potential for that is there. But the attacks by the US will pull many back into defensive support of their government, while entrenching the more repressive elements of the regime.
Diaspora
To finish I’ll just say a little bit about the diaspora — people may know that LA is one of the biggest concentrations of Iranians outside the Middle East. There have been anti-war demos called with significant Iranian community involvement alongside the left, but most of the community-led protests there are a decent amount of American and Israeli flags and people are celebratory, they’re sympathetic to Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah. The Shahs ruled in a monarchy installed by the West that was in power before the revolution in 1979, before the conservative Islamist state that we know today took power, so they want a restoration of the monarchy and think America will help with that. In fact at CPAC, the conservative conference, they had Pahlavi speak about making Iran great again! Or if they’re not monarchists, they want a liberal democracy in Iran and still think America can help with that. Many of the people carrying these flags at the demos left after the revolution and haven’t been back to Iran since, they have illusions in Western intervention and don’t really represent the Iranians that live in Iran — which is a pretty common situation of immigrant communities in the West.Yet there are many Iranians opposed to the regime and the war, and as it progresses more are turning against Trump’s plans.
I live in a densely Armenian neighborhood and there is a large section of people who identify as Iranian Armenians, so people who are ethnically and culturally Armenian but come from areas across the Armenian border that are now Iran. So the shop keepers, Uber drivers, and my neighbors are very switched on to what is happening and I take a sneaky oral history every time I interact with them. The most common thread is that people think it will lead to a war in the US, which I was a little surprised by. Multiple people in my community have told me about the food they’re stockpiling and preserving in case Iran bombs California.
My Iranian friend told me her female cousins danced in the street for the first time after the first Israeli bombing because they’ve only lived under a repressive form of Islamic law. I wouldn’t call them pro-intervention in a simple sense, but they were pleased that the stalemate ended and something was changing. Some Iraqis felt that way after 2003 and those hopes were dashed very quickly as I think they will be here, especailly as the war drags on.
Conclusion
So things are pretty volatile at the moment, I think we all feel it. The economic fallout from this is already huge and may get bigger, some people are comparing it to the 1970s that also had an oil crisis and period of high inflation and low economic growth. That time, it led to an uptick in class struggle because when the system inflicts pain, people will always fight back. The way we fight back isn’t pre-determined and it’s our job to build the class fight against war and imperialism in whatever modest ways we can.
Marx21 US 