THE New Yorker has published an article by award winning journalist Seymour Hersh, that claims that the US administration of President G W Bush is planning an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities using nuclear bunker busting bombs, as its principal attack weapon.
The article reveals that the propaganda line is almost a replica of the one that was used against Iraq, in 2002-3.
Saddam Hussein was said to be the biggest danger to the world since Adolf Hitler.
Now the White House team around Bush is declaring that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad is a potential Adolf Hitler.
Hersh quotes a senior Pentagon adviser that ‘this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.’ The unnamed adviser goes on to describe the war planning as ‘enormous, hectic and operational’.
Iran has already been put under 30 days notice by the UN Security Council to end its nuclear programme. Now we know that while the US has been saying publicly that nothing has been either ruled in or out as far as Iran is concerned, it is actually at a very advanced stage of planning to attack Iran’s nuclear sites with nuclear weapons, as a prelude to regime change in Tehran.
There is no doubt that the Labour government whose foreign secretary, Straw, has ruled out war with Iran, will quickly rule it in, as soon as Bush gives the word.
It is to be Iraq all over again, but this time the resistance to an attack will be ten times greater and, will have the maximum affect on oil flow and on the super inflation of oil prices.
To claims by US military people that big ground forces will be required to effect a regime change in Iran, the Rumsfeld gang have fallen back on the old failed Iraqi line, that a continuous bombing campaign will create the conditions to force the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs. This policy failed in Iraq and it will fail in Iran.
However, the Iranian leadership in its majority seems to be underestimating the crisis of capitalism and the desperate measures that it is driving the imperialists to embrace.
It considers, that after the Iraqi debacle, the US imperialists will not dare to strike at Iran, and that Iran is in a strong enough position to be able to talk to the US about the situation in Iraq, where the US is desperate to establish a national unity government.
The Iranian leadership is now saying that such talks might lead to talks about other issues, ie might lead to talks and US concessions concerning the Iranian nuclear programme.
What is being implied is that if Iran assists the US in knocking the Shi’ite leaders into the required US shape, (many of them spent decades in exile in Tehran), then compromise can follow over Iran’s nuclear programme.
The truth of the matter is that if the Iranian regime acts to ease the critical plight of US imperialism in Iraq, the pay back will be an even speedier attack on Iran.
This is the time for the organising of a common front against imperialism, stretching from the peoples of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine to the workers of Britain, the EU and the United States.
The Blair and the Bush administrations are at their most unpopular precisely because of the war against Iraq.
Workers in the metropolitan capitalist countries will be furious about the plans to attack Iran.
The enemy is at home. Workers must demand and force the leaders of the trade unions to bring the Blair government down and to bring in a workers’ government that will withdraw all British troops from Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan.
Only such a government, that will put an end to British imperialism, can defend the interests of British, Arab and Iranian workers and play a major role in bringing peace and socialism to the region.
