No war with Iran – the main enemy is at home
rs21 •rs21 condemns the bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States, an act of aggression that they falsely claim was a ‘pre-emptive strike’.
As socialists in Britain we must stand in solidarity with the Iranian people and will support the campaign against the use of British military bases in this attack and oppose all British military, intelligence and diplomatic complicity in the attack on Iran.
We support the right of Iran to defend itself against imperialist aggression and demand Britain’s exit from NATO along with the severing of all military, economic and political ties with Israel.
The British press and government have tried for 40 years to justify acts of war against the Iranian state and its people on the grounds of the abuses committed by the Iranian government. Western powers seek to delegitimise governments abroad, positioning themselves as defenders of human rights, all while overseeing the genocide in Gaza and a violent imperialist world order. We have seen this many times before.
The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that imperialism can not bring, and has no interest in bringing, greater democracy, only putting in place regimes subservient to Western interests.
A bloody history of intervention
British bombs and bullets have destroyed and degraded human life and freedom throughout the world for the better part of half a millennium. From the ethnic cleansing of Ireland in the 1650s to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of this century, war in Iran is part of a long pattern of aggression.
Most recently, British spy flights and bombs continue to enable the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the support of both the Tory and Labour governments. British warships took part in the bombing of Yemen in Operation ‘Prosperity Guardian’, entering into direct armed conflict with forces supporting the Palestinian struggle.
Any claim that the abuses of the Iranian government justify sanctions, assassinations, and bombings are nothing more than a smoke screen for the US and Israeli desire to break resistance to the Zionist entity known as Israel and enforce western hegemony in the Middle East.
The main enemy is at home
rs21 supports the call from the Stop the War Coalition for protests against the attack to be organised in every town and city.
We call on everyone to join the demonstrations demanding an end to the attack on Iran and for the British government to condemn the attack and refuse to allow any British bases to be used in the assault.
1 comment
The condemnation of the bombing is correct. The demand to end British military complicity is correct. These are not small things and rs21 deserves credit for mobilising quickly.
But this statement has the same structural problem as Your Party’s CEC statement, issued the same week: the Iranian people appear only as victims of imperialism. The regime that is, at this precise moment, using wartime emergency to accelerate the arrest and execution of the workers, women and democratic activists it was already hunting before the first bomb fell, is mentioned only as something Western governments cynically invoke to justify their aggression.
That framing isn’t wrong exactly. Western governments *do* cynically invoke human rights to justify aggression. We’ve seen it in Iraq, in Libya, everywhere. The lesson is real.
But the conclusion rs21 draws, that therefore the abuses of the Iranian government are essentially a smokescreen, evacuates Iranian democratic struggle from the picture entirely. The women who built the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising didn’t do so as cover for Pentagon strategy. The trade unionists in Haft Tapeh weren’t tools of the Zionist entity. They were fighting their own oppressors. They still are. And the regime is using the war to go after them harder.
Revolutionary anti-war politics opposes the bombs *and* stands with those fighting the theocracy. Not as a balance between two positions: as a single, indivisible internationalist commitment. The sentence that would have made this statement qualitatively different wasn’t written. Your Party made the same omission. The convergence is worth noting.