by
Bill Van Auken
Events
of the past few days have made it clear that US imperialism—working
in close tandem with its main ally in the Middle East, Israel—is
set on a course of direct military confrontation with Iran.
Barely a
week and a half before the May 12 deadline for President Donald Trump
to announce his decision on whether or not his administration will
renew a waiver of unilateral US sanctions that were shelved as part
of the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu staged a theatrical presentation claiming to have
“proof” that “Iran lied” about its nuclear program. He went
on to express confidence that Trump would “do the right thing,”
i.e., scuttle the nuclear accord—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action, or JCPOA—that was reached between Iran and five major
powers: the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.
Trump
hailed Netanyahu’s theatrical presentation as confirmation that he
had been “100 percent right” in his denunciations of the nuclear
accord as a “horrible deal.”
In
reality, international nuclear experts, European representatives and
even ex-Israeli intelligence officials all dismissed Netanyahu’s
performance as a farce. The Israeli government, which claimed to have
stolen hundreds of thousands of files from Iran, produced not a
single shred of evidence that Iran has engaged in any form of nuclear
weapons program for the past 15 years, much less that it has violated
the terms of the JCPOA. Repeated reports by the International Atomic
Energy Agency, including one as recent as February, have established
that Tehran is abiding by the stringent restrictions on uranium
enrichment and intrusive inspections regime imposed under the
agreement.
Netanyahu’s
performance recalled nothing so much as Colin Powell’s 2003
presentation of what he described as “evidence, not conjecture”
of Iraq’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” used to
justify the US war of aggression against Iraq a month later. Powell
at least told lies that purported to substantiate American false
claims of Iraqi malfeasance; Netanyahu presented nothing.
The
Israeli presentation—delivered in English—was stage-managed in
direct consultation with Trump, with whom Netanyahu spoke shortly
before going on the air, and the new US secretary of state, Mike
Pompeo, who had met with him and other officials in Tel Aviv the day
before.
Behind
all of the chaos and scandals of the Trump administration, what has
clearly emerged in Washington is a war cabinet, with the elevation of
John Bolton to the post of National Security adviser and Pompeo’s
confirmation by the Senate, with the indispensable support of the
Democrats, as secretary of state. Both are fervent advocates of war
against Iran.
Bolton
has described the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran as a “massive
strategic blunder,” insisting that US policy should be one of
“ending Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution before its fortieth
anniversary,” next February. Regime change in Tehran, according to
the new national security adviser, should be promoted through direct
military action. “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” was the
headline of an opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times shortly
before the agreement was reached on the JCPOA.
The
US-Israeli war against Iran has already begun. Strikes carried out by
US-supplied Israeli F-15 fighter jets on Syrian military bases on
Sunday night killed as many as two dozen Iranians. It marked the
fifth round of such Israeli attacks on Syria since September. All of
them have been aimed at the assets of Iran. Along with Russia, Tehran
is the main ally of the Assad government, which Washington and its
allies have sought to topple in a seven-year-old war for regime
change.
Reports
from Israel have also indicated a major redeployment of tanks, troops
and armored personnel carriers to the country’s northern borders
with Syria and Lebanon.
“On
the list of the potentials for most likely live hostility around the
world, the battle between Israel and Iran in Syria is at the top of
the list right now,” a senior US official told NBC News Tuesday.
The
intimate collaboration between Washington and Tel Aviv in preparing
such a war has been made evident by the extraordinary flurry of
meetings between top-level US and Israeli military and security
officials flying in and out of both countries’ capitals. This has
been supplemented by the dispatch of Pompeo, before he even set foot
in the State Department, to the Middle East, where he not only
consulted with Netanyahu and other officials, but also met with Saudi
and Jordanian officials in an attempt to solidify a bloc of
reactionary monarchical Arab regimes behind the US-Israeli war drive.
Behind
this drive to war lies not any supposed concern about an Iranian
nuclear threat—Tehran has no bomb and never initiated any real
program to produce one, while Israel’s own arsenal includes an
estimated 200 to 400 nuclear warheads. Rather, what are at play are
naked imperialist interests.
As a
regional power, Iran stands as an impediment to the drive by US
imperialism to assert its hegemony over the oil-rich and
strategically vital Middle East.
The
European powers are increasingly at odds with Washington. After the
visits of France’s Macron and Germany’s Merkel apparently failed,
despite their obsequiousness, to persuade the Trump administration
not to blow up the Iranian nuclear accord, discussions between them
and British Prime Minister May over the weekend apparently centered
on whether or not there was any prospect of salvaging the agreement
without the US. There are both the fear of a major regional war
spilling over into Europe in the form of violence, political crisis
and a renewed flow of refugees, as well as definite profit interests
at stake.
While US
banks and corporations have been largely locked out of the Iranian
market by continuing nonnuclear-related US economic sanctions,
European interests, including the French oil conglomerate Total, have
signed lucrative agreements. Most of them have produced little thus
far because of fears that Washington will upend the nuclear accord
and begin sanctioning foreign firms doing business in Iran.
Filling
this vacuum, China has forged significant economic ties with Iran,
including a recent $10 billion line of credit from the Beijing
government for Chinese firms to launch infrastructure projects,
including power facilities, dams and transportation hubs. Beijing
sees Iran as a key segment of its “Belt and Road” mega-project,
linking China to Europe, and is anxious to shift a growing share of
its oil imports from regional producers like Saudi Arabia that are
aligned with Washington. In 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping and
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced plans to increase
bilateral trade to $600 billion over the next decade.
In Iran,
as elsewhere, US imperialism seeks to counter the decline of its
economic domination through a turn to military aggression. While the
European capitalist powers have joined in US military actions,
particularly with the participation of the UK and France in the April
14 missile attack on Syria, their hopes of reaping a share of the
booty from imperialist intervention can never be realized by serving
as the tail of the American dog. Inevitably, they must turn to their
own rearmament for a struggle of each against all for the redivision
of the world. This process is already well under way.
To the
extent that Washington has sought to placate Europe with the
postponement of the implementation of trade war tariffs and that it
has ratcheted down, temporarily, tensions on the Korean peninsula, it
is to better concentrate war preparations in the Middle East.
The
drive toward a war between Israel and Iran, beginning in Syria, is
unfolding in tandem with the continuing US military intervention in
that country, which is evolving into a confrontation with
pro-government force backed by Iran and Russia.
Defense
Secretary Gen. James Mattis Monday indicated that the more than 2,000
US troops presently deployed inside Syria would not be going anywhere
anytime soon. “We do not want to pull out before the diplomats have
won the peace,” he said. “You win the fight—and then you win
the peace.”
The
reality is that the US military force, augmented by proxy ground
forces based upon the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, is staying in place
to secure an American zone of influence consisting of approximately a
third of Syria’s territory on its northeastern borders with Turkey
and Iraq. The area also contains the country’s oil and gas
reserves. From their supposed mission of fighting ISIS, this US force
is now turning to confronting attempts by the Syrian government,
backed by Russia and Iran, to regain control of this territory and
its resources.
With
Russia also in discussions with Damascus on providing advanced air
defense systems to Syria, the prospect for a clash between Russian
forces and those of the US and Israel are steadily growing.
The
developments in Syria and the threats of confrontation with Iran
constitute a grave warning to working people in the US and throughout
the world. Driven by the crisis of its system, world capitalism, with
America’s ruling class and its military in the lead, is preparing
for a world war that would be fought with nuclear weapons.
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