YESTERDAY the bourgeois media reported that Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who came to office pledging that the UK would cease to be Bush’s poodle, has agreed that UK forces will support US air and ground strikes on Iranian Republican Guard bases.
These strikes will be mounted in response to alleged Republican Guard support for insurgent attacks in Iraq which the US says is killing its soldiers.
Bush is now constantly alleging that US troops are dying due to the Improvised Explosive Devices and other materials that the Republican Guard are allegedly supplying to Iraqi fighters.
US-UK military action against Iran could be far closer than most people imagine, because of this Brown secret deal with Bush.
These plans to attack Republican Guard bases are now being widely discussed in the United States, and are being seen as the roadmap to war with Iran.
The national security adviser to the Carter presidency, Brzezinski, said of this latest tactical turn to a ‘defensive action’: ‘This time round, unlike the attack on Iraq, we are going to be playing the victim’.
The scenario is that the US, to try to save the lives of its troops, is compelled to take defensive action by attacking and destroying Republican Guard bases sited in western Iran. The Iranians retaliate and the bases where they retaliate from have to be struck from the air and from the ground by special forces including the British SAS.
Major military action becomes necessary when the Iranians are alleged to have blocked the Straits of Hormuz, closing the strategic oil highway out of the Gulf.
Then the two major naval battle groups, that the US has in the region, will open up with a concentrated cruise missile assault, plus other attacks from the air on major Iranian targets, including the Bushehr nuclear plant.
As under Blair, Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence have declined to comment on these media revelations.
That there is support from the Brown government, for this plan to provoke Iran into taking military action to defend itself against US imperialism, comes as no surprise to the News Line.
Pledges of independent foreign policies amount to nothing when weighed against the fact that the UK is now too weak to defend its capitalist interests throughout the world, and can only hope to do so through satisfying the requirements of US imperialism.
As under Blair, Brown has to be with the United States right or wrong, as will the Tory party under Cameron, if it is able to take over from the Labour government.
As it is, after the much heralded withdrawal from Basra city, which was opposed by the US, the British government may be shortly forced to return the troops that it withdrew, since the Maliki puppet government is reported to be rapidly losing control over what is Iraq’s second city.
The trade union leaders, despite Brown’s aggressive imperialist policies abroad and his anti-union policies in Britain, are currently having a honeymoon with the Brown government.
The Unite trade union was apparently prepared to donate as much as £3 million to the Brown regime to fight the snap election, which the leader has now retreated from.
Workers must demand that their trade unions fight the Brown government on both its domestic and foreign policies.
The trade unions must demand that all British troops are withdrawn from both Iran and Afghanistan.
The union leaders must be made to tell Brown that workers will not stand for a war with Iran, and British forces attacking Iranian targets in support of the US, while feigning that they are engaging in a defensive operation.
Brown must be warned that if UK forces attack Iran the trade unions will take action to bring down his government.
