Iran’s secret weapon?

Whatever plans the Pentagon and the Bush administration have for a devastating air attack on Iran—and details have been leaked to the press for months now—they have run into across-the-board resistance. This comes not only from Iran itself and across the Middle East but from the people in Britain, whose rulers, like the Bush administration in Washington, have made it abundantly clear that they want to wipe the Iranian Revolution of 1978 off the map and return to the days of neocolonial puppet regimes, like that of the hated and bloody shah.

Iran continues to stand up under the heaviest of intimidation and threats. Even as an armada of U.S. warships remains massed along its coast in the Persian Gulf in the name of war “games,” the Iranian government has remained cool but firm in responding to provocation.

On April 4, Iran released 15 British sailors and marines who had been detained in the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq. They had publicly confessed that they were in Iranian waters when captured. The British ruling class and its tabloid press screamed that they had been forced to confess, and tried especially to conjure up lurid fears concerning the one woman among the 15.

This was hard to do, since Iranian television had already shown footage of Faye Turney shaking hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and saying, “The treatment has been great. Thank you for letting us go. We apologize for our actions.” (New York Times, April 5)

Ronan Bennett, writing on March 30 in The Guardian, a commercial paper but one that has been anti-war, ridiculed the tabloid media campaign.

The British sailors captured by Iran, wrote Bennett, “have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.

“They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly ‘rendered’ to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.”

In other words, the British were treated humanely and according to international law, not brutally and criminally as both the U.S. and Britain have done to those they have kidnapped in the “war on terror.”

Nevertheless, British tabloids offered huge sums of money for stories by the crew on how they were “mistreated” by the Iranians. Two interviews then appeared by sailors alleging they had falsely confessed under psychological pressure.

Some right-wing commentators began to complain of the crew’s behavior. They had been too “compliant” toward the Iranians. Where was the famous “stiff upper lip” that the high command could rely on in the days of the British Empire?

On the other hand, parents of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan complained that, while the sailors were being paid six-figure amounts for their stories, the parents had been barred from saying anything publicly when their children died.

The Associated Press on April 10 quoted Reg Keys, whose son Thomas Keys was killed in Iraq four years ago. Keys “said he believes the government is using the freed crew to pursue a propaganda battle with Iran. ‘When my son died, his colleagues were not allowed to speak to their families about it, let alone the press,’ he said.”

The whole thing was turning into a propaganda fiasco, so on April 9 the British government reversed itself and banned the crew from giving further interviews.

All this pointed up just how unpopular the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are in Britain. There is only scant support for any escalation against Iran.

On March 20, as U.S. warships were gathering in the Gulf, the Stop the War Coalition had hosted a People’s Assembly in London. Some 900 delegates attended, representing 175 organizations from all over Britain. Speakers included representatives of the Iraqi people, including Kurds, plus a dozen members of Britain’s Parliament. The goals were simple: get British troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and stop any war against Iran.

Coalition organizer Chris Nineham laid out a plan of massive civil disobedience in the event of an attack on Iran. (www.stopwar.org.uk, click on links for YouTube podcasts of the People’s Assembly)

Indicative of the deep split the war has produced in government circles, Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, received tremendous applause when he said: “Two million of us marched when they invaded Iraq and it was not enough. Despite us, hundreds of thousands died. Before they can attack Iran, before hundreds of thousands more die, we will actively intervene in the biggest campaign of civil disobedience that this country has ever seen. We will blockade their military airfields, we will sit on the runways, we will disrupt the supplies of weapons.”

This militant sentiment was echoed later by George Galloway, an MP who was expelled from the Labor Party over his opposition to the war and was again elected on the Respect Party ticket: “As the People’s Assembly in London agreed last week, if there is an attack on Iran, we will need civil disobedience in every community, walkouts in every school, protests and strikes in every workplace. If George Bush bombs Iran, we should bring this country to a standstill.”

In the United States, groups like the Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) and others have been calling for moving from protest to resistance. However, illusions about the Democratic Party have held back the anti-war movement as a whole from uniting around such a program. But in Britain, a Labor Party government has been the Bush administration’s closest ally in carrying out the war. Any illusions are gone. It is clear that these imperialist outrages can only be stopped by the mass actions of the people.