Is U.S. preparing another war—on Iran?

Israel on June 2 carried out military maneuvers over the eastern Mediterranean. As many as 100 F-16 and F-15 jets supplied to Israel by the Pentagon were involved alongside Israeli helicopters with long-range fuel tanks. The F-16 is a jet fighter also equipped to carry a wide variety of air-to-ground missiles, rockets or bombs.

The target of the exercise was 900 miles from Israel, roughly the same distance as Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz. Numerous news accounts said the maneuvers were a rehearsal for an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

What was Washington’s reaction to Israel’s blatant threat to commit aggression and violate international law with U.S.-supplied weapons?

Two days after the war move, President George W. Bush held a press conference in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Bush tried to deflect criticism of Israel’s military moves by saying, bizarrely, “Iran is an existential threat to peace.” He might as well have said, “Bring ‘em on!”

Yet another war?

U.S. imperialism is already bogged down in highly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it is pressuring and bribing other countries to put up troops that the Pentagon can’t provide, short of reinstating the draft and igniting a rebellion among the youth of this country.

Every “sweep” or bombing by U.S. forces, with the inevitable widespread death and destruction that powerful weapons cause, just stiffens the resolve of millions of people in these countries and throughout the region to resist the invaders.

The people of the U.S. have turned decisively against these wars. They remember the lie about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” that Bush used to bulldoze support from Congress and the media and which paved the road to invasion.

The U.S. has recently bombed within Pakistan in the name of Bush’s fictitious “war on terror.” It has sponsored an Ethiopian-backed invasion of Somalia, backed up by the CIA and ships of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, including the humongous aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower.

Yet the warmakers in Washington are now brazenly organizing an international campaign of intimidation against Iran, laying the basis for a possible air attack on yet another country. While the Iranian government is taking all these threats very calmly, the potential for the threats to turn into actual aggression is real.

On June 23, undoubtedly after much pressure from Washington, the European Union announced it was imposing sanctions on Iran, including a freeze on the assets of the Melli Bank, the country’s biggest.

Iran has done nothing wrong

The excuse given for all this warlike activity against the country with the world’s fourth-largest known oil reserves is that Washington “suspects” it has a nuclear weapons program. This is such a huge lie that the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammad El-Baradei, has threatened to resign if Iran is attacked.

Here are the facts:

Back in 2003, the Iranian government signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Under that treaty, it has the right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes.

According to the IAEA, which has carried out many inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, there is absolutely no evidence that it is building weapons. Iran has said publicly many times that it has no weapons program and needs to develop nuclear power for the day when its oil starts running out.

With the world demand for oil rising every day, this is a real possibility that all oil-producing countries face. Iran, however, is not a small sheikdom like Kuwait (2.5 million people) or a desert kingdom like Saudi Arabia (27 million), but a country with more than 65 million people and a developing economy that needs energy. Its oil reserves are about 83 percent of Iraq’s, but its population is almost two and a half times as large.

It is not surprising or sinister that it would want to invest in diversifying its energy sources now, at a time when its oil sales are still ample and command a strong price.

On the other hand, everyone knows that Israel does have nuclear weapons. Jane’s Defense Review, which is considered the most authoritative source in the world on this subject, says Israel has up to 200 nuclear warheads and that its nuclear weapons program began in the 1960s. Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, was abducted by Israeli agents in 1986 for revealing details of this program to the world media.

Israel, unlike Iran, has never signed the non-proliferation treaty or joined the IAEA.

So why isn’t Bush saying that Israel is an “existential threat to world peace”?

Israel is the tail, not the dog

Some rabid anti-Semites in the U.S. say this is because Israel dictates U.S. foreign policy. This is saying that the tail wags the dog. The truth is that the non-Jewish ruling classes in the U.S. and some European countries, especially Britain, have long regarded a Zionist settler state in the Middle East as a potent ally in their struggle to deny the Arab and Persian peoples control over their land and most valuable economic asset—oil.

That is why the U.S. has bankrolled the state of Israel to the tune of $102 billion since 1948. By the Pentagon’s standards, it’s been a cheap way to project U.S. imperialist power in that part of the world. By contrast, the war in Iraq has cost more than $531 billion in five years—and that’s not counting the future costs of disabled veterans and other “collateral” expenses.

Oil companies, the huge transnational banks linked with them and their associated think tanks—like the Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission—have been dominant players in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. They have produced many of the political figures who have persuaded the government to launch wars over this lucrative commodity.

Today, workers in the U.S. are hurting badly over high oil prices. The imperialist war policies of the Bush administration have contributed mightily to this—by creating havoc in Iraq, by the Pentagon’s consumption of vast quantities of oil and by creating an atmosphere akin to panic in the futures markets.

But where is the political opposition to all this? Not in Congress. No one is rising to condemn Bush for using Israel against Iran. No one is linking the oil companies’ record profits—in a time of recession—to U.S. wars of aggression in the Middle East. No one is telling workers here that their enemy is not Iran or Iraq, but ExxonMobil and BP.

In the presidential race, Barack Obama says he’s for negotiations with Iran’s leaders while reiterating his unconditional support for Israel. John McCain goes even further and rejects diplomacy. But diplomacy, it should be said, is only another tactic in imperialism’s overall strategy of world domination. If talks don’t produce the results the imperialists want—in this case, Iran’s capitulation—what comes next? Neither imperialist party rules out military action against Iran.

All this leaves any hope for real struggle against the warmongers on the shoulders of the masses of people themselves. Turning from passive opposition to active resistance is needed more than ever.

For information on mobilizing against a new war on Iran, see www.StopWarOnIran.org.

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