Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
When protests began in Tehran on 28 December, western populations were deluged with footage and commentary aimed at convincing us that a movement of popular street protest was gathering momentum. These ‘popular protests’, we were told, were met with brutal repression by an ‘illegitimate regime’. And, on cue, we were presented with an ‘alternative’ leader: the son of the shah (king) who had been deposed in 1979. Apparently without any irony, ‘Crown Prince’ Reza Pahlavi was presented by his British sponsors as the leader of a rising ‘democracy movement’.
So far, so par for the regime-change playbook. But things from that point did not go according to the imperialist plan. Iran exhibited unsuspected capabilities and resilience, tracking down users of Elon Musk’s Starlink network, who had been given the terminals by western intelligence agencies in order to receive instructions on fomenting chaos and terrorist violence on Iranian streets.
Once again, while a Hollywood-style psyop aimed to stir up emotions and convince its audiences that black was white and white was black, the truth was diametrically opposed to the imperialist media machine’s carefully constructed narratives.
The protests initially began as a result of steep inflation and a sudden currency collapse, which had a huge impact on bazaaris (small shopkeepers)―a crisis that US treasury secretary Scott Bessent has admitted came about as a result of deliberate manipulations by western financiers. That is: the Iranian shopkeepers’ troubles were a direct result of an ongoing economic war whose aim is to make life as difficult as possible for the population.
Open admissions of illegality
As President Donald Trump announced his intention of “protecting the protestors” (agents), and swore that his government would launch bombing raids if the number of dead passed 500, western media gleefully egged him on by claiming ever higher casualty numbers (1,000, 2,000 … 36,500!), at the hands of the Iranian state. In reality, some 3,000 people were killed, the vast majority by west-backed terrorists.
There followed six weeks of military brinkmanship as the USA amassed a growing air and naval force in and around the region, alongside highly-publicised threats and ‘negotiations’ in which it was demanded that Iran give up all right to the development of nuclear weapons (which the country’s leaders have repeatedly stated they do not want)―and then that it also sacrifice its civilian nuclear activities, terminate its ballistic weapons programme and cut off all support for liberation forces across the region.
This combination of stick and carrot―regime-change attempts, economic sabotage, military threats and psychological operations combined with ‘negotiations’ and proffered ‘concessions’ if the targeted country will fall into line with imperialist diktat―is a playbook we are becoming far too familiar with. As in the case of Venezuela, however, the new twist is the open admissions of criminality―to the extent of bragging about activities that were previously carried out covertly (since they are, in fact, illegal under international law, even if they are standard practice for imperialist powers).
Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and others publicly declared that the violence in Iran was being stoked from outside, and that Israeli Mossad agents were embedded among (ie, directing) the ‘protestors’.
‘Women’s rights’ as a pretext
Western media are keen to convince the wider world that imperialist meddling in Iran is purely altruistic: We’re on a mission to free Iran’s women! But it is clear that the Iranian people themselves do not consider that women’s rights begin and end with religious or cultural clothing or customs.
Moreover, we cannot help noticing the glaring contradiction between this concern for the ‘human rights’ of Iranians and more than two years of burying the human rights of Palestinians under the rubble of Gaza. Nor has it escaped our notice that the imperialists began their latest war on Iran by massacring 165 innocent schoolgirls in Minab.
As communists, we are in favour of the separation of religion and state. But this is a matter for the Iranian people to resolve without outside interference. As anti-imperialists, we must recognise that modern Iran has done far more to liberate the mass of working-class and peasant women and children from poverty, ignorance and feudal servitude, and to modernise Iranian social and economic life, than did the previous regime of the puppet shah and his western big oil handlers.
Today, illiteracy has been wiped out and women are represented in all the professions, making up more than half of university graduates. The average Iranian woman now has better security, better education, and a higher level of culture than the average working-class British woman. Workers of both sexes are far better off there than in most parts of the oppressed world, and even in much of the imperialist world.
Bikinis and hairdos are not the primary concern of ordinary people in a society faced by the choice between imperialist servitude and sovereign development. There are bound to be women in Iran who would prefer to go without traditional head coverings, but there are also many who view them as a rejection of west-imposed ‘values’. It is, after all, just possible that most Iranian women do not consider the consequences of receiving this particular freedom from western hands―such as seeing their families impoverished, their society destroyed, their bodies commodified and their daughters forced in large numbers into sexual slavery―to be a price worth paying.
In fact, polls today show that a higher proportion of Iranian women than Iranian men want their government and military to fight the USA and Israel to the bitter end, with no suggestion of compromise, and definitely no surrender to the imperialist warmongers!
Iran’s predictable response to US war
In the early hours of 28 February, and under cover of ongoing negotiations, the USA and Israel initiated an all-out blitzkrieg against Iran, launching missiles from ships and planes across the region and murdering any political or military leader within their reach, including the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed at home with several members of his family.
This act on its own has outraged the Iranian masses and cemented national unity, bringing millions to the streets in mourning and defiance, and with the demand for revenge on their lips. The imperialists are actually bragging about having murdered a simple-living, highly respected 86-year-old man whose entire life was dedicated to the cause of his people’s freedom, and who was revered not only by Iranians but by shia muslims all over the world. Moreover, it has been revealed that he chose to stay at his home office rather than taking to a shelter that was not available to every one of his compatriots.
Let nobody be in any doubt: this is an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign nation―the highest crime against humanity. In law and according to every progressive tenet, Iran is in the right and deserves our full support in its just war of self-defence.
President Trump has more than once expressed his “surprise” at the robust response of Iran to US aggression. Yet it has long been clear what would happen if hostilities were reignited. Last June, the Iranians allowed the Americans an off-ramp when Israel started a war and then begged for a ceasefire, but they made it clear: this time, we have limited ourselves to defensive measures; next time, we will go on the offensive, and we will be targeting the entire machinery of US regional domination.
And so it has transpired. Iran has proven itself to be well equipped with both intelligence and precision munitions. It has undoubtedly had technical support from both Russia and China on the intelligence front, just as many years ago it had help from Syria and the DPR Korea when it began to develop its missile and tunnel warfare programmes.
By targeting the radar for US and Israeli missile defences first, Tehran has essentially blinded the aggressors. And by saturating their air defences in the early days of the war, it has depleted the missile arsenals of every US regional ally. Iranian drones can now be seen flying unmolested in the skies over Tel Aviv, which formerly possessed the world’s most complex and expensive layered defence―and this is despite the active participation of US, British and French fighter jets in Israel’s defence.
US bases, soldiers and ‘embassies’ (ie, spy hubs), CIA stations, and the big tech data centres used for AI intelligence processing have all been hit by Iran right across the Gulf. And it is notable that the destruction of many of these military assets has been celebrated by ordinary workers. Saudi forces have already had to be sent over the ‘Friendship Bridge’ to help quell a nascent uprising in the small island statelet of Bahrain, where the destruction of the USA’s Fifth Fleet naval base was followed by mass rioting in support of what is widely seen as a region-wide war for liberation from imperialist domination.
The vital Strait of Hormuz has been closed to all US-aligned shipping, causing panic in markets and big spikes in energy, shipping and commodity prices, all of which are set to rise higher in the weeks to come. The inflationary consequences will inevitably impact working people worldwide, and no blustering assurances from Trump can alter the fact that the USA has started something it is not in a position to stop on any but the most humiliating terms.
Meanwhile, the zionist state is also suffering serious blows. Genocidal Israeli politicians, soldiers, bases and infrastructure have all been successfully targeted, while a plan to invade Lebanon under cover of the war backfired spectacularly, bringing the Hezbollah resistance force back into the fray after 14 months of meticulous observation of an entirely one-sided ‘ceasefire’. Ordinary people in south Lebanon are suffering greatly, having no air defences to save them from brutal Israeli bombardment, but the resistance is already inflicting serious damage on the IDF invaders and on their settlements in the north of occupied Palestine (aka Israel).
Iraqi resistance forces also joined the war from the first day, targeting US bases on Iraqi soil, while mass demonstrations outside the vast militarised US ‘embassy’ in Baghdad had to be repelled with live fire as the protestors started fires and tried to break into the hated compound.
The complicity of comprador stooge regimes from Beirut to Baghdad, Jordan to Bahrain are once again being highlighted to the mass of angry Arab workers, and the imperialist-backed elites who rule over them are increasingly exposed, with their US sponsors incapable of providing adequate air cover, never mind with troops to quell rising unrest.
Panic in ruling circles
The constant changing of supposed motivations (freeing women; stopping nukes, make that all missiles; making Israel safe; destroying resistance; taking control of the oil …) and projections (the war will last a few days, a few weeks, a few months, as long as necessary; there will be no boots, there will soon be Kurdish, Syrian, Azeri, somebody’s boots on the ground …) from US politicians are emblematic of a spreading panic amongst the strategists as the promised short war, easy victory and swift regime change have all failed to materialise.
The longer the war goes on, the worse the aggressors’ position becomes, both militarily and economically. Meanwhile, Iran has planned for a long war of attrition and has made its aims and objectives crystal clear: the complete evacuation of US troops and dismantlement of all its military infrastructure in the region, and the complete surrender of Israel.
Moreover, it is very clear that the White House is under considerable pressure from US financiers. Just as the blatant under-reporting of US casualties (Iran claims 500, the Pentagon claims six!) is aimed at preventing a mass rebellion of US workers, Trump’s pronouncements about the state of the campaign generally (we’ve won; we’re about to win; it’ll definitely be over very soon; there will be no protracted war) can be read more as PR statements aimed at calming the markets than as reflections of reality.
The increasingly rabid behaviour of US imperialism and its allies and proxies is not a sign of strength, but of desperation. Faced with global capitalism’s worst-ever economic crisis, with Nato’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Russia in Ukraine, and with its total failure to destroy the middle-eastern Axis of Resistance, the US ruling class is trying to convince the world that it remains militarily invincible and economically supreme.
Maintaining confidence in the dollar and in the US economy is becoming harder by the day as various anti-imperialist nations, led by Russia and China, work steadily to build alternative trade routes and payment mechanisms that are beyond the reach of western monopoly control.
We should be clear that the ultimate targets of imperialist warmongering are Russia and China. Only the destruction of these countries’ sovereignty and their dismemberment and looting by western corporations could bring about the influx of wealth that would allow for a ‘reset’ of the crisis-ridden global capitalist economy.
The financiers are hoping to repeat the bonanza that saved their system in 1991, when western corporations moved in to feed on the wealth of the former socialist nations. In their ‘grand chessboard’ plans, Syria (that bastion of anti-zionist and anti-imperialist sovereignty in the middle east) was a ‘stepping stone’ to Iran, and Iran and the DPRK are ‘stepping stones’ to Russia and China.
The openly-declared aim of the imperialists is to isolate and pick off the nations of the anti-imperialist bloc one at a time, each time targeting the one that seems to be weakest. This was, in fact, the reasoning that led Nato to provoke its war against Russia, which the imperialists believed to be a weak link in the chain that would quickly fall to their economic and military assault.
With the spectacular failure of that calculation, and with their economic crisis exacerbated instead of ameliorated, the imperialists are more desperate and more reckless.
What now?
For us in Britain, we should be clear that our own government is fully complicit in this illegal, aggressive war, no matter the verbal contortions of Sir Keir Starmer. British bases in the Indian Ocean, Cyprus and Gloucestershire are all being used, and British jets and naval assets have been deployed.
In the situation we now face, it is urgent that we redouble our efforts to rebuild both our trade unions and our antiwar movement, which are tied hand and foot to the imperialist Labour party and led by unaccountable career bureaucrats. Without mass organisations that really serve our interests, it is very difficult for workers to bring about the change we need, whether that be decent pay, conditions and services or an end to imperialist warmongering and domination.
Making common cause with the Iranian people today means organising ourselves to demand an end to all British military, propaganda, diplomatic and economic warfare against Iran, as well as opposing all Britain’s support for the zionist regime in Israel.
And it means building a really anti-imperialist antiwar movement that is able to harness our collective power to stop the British ruling class joining the bloodthirsty US imperialists in rampaging across the globe.
Rebuild our mass working-class organisations!
No cooperation with the imperialist war machine!
Victory to Iran!