A WHITE HOUSE official warned yesterday that the US military is 99 per cent certain to launch a massive military attack on Iran ‘to obliterate the regime’ after Donald Trump slammed the UK’s deal to ‘give away’ the Chagos Islands and its strategic military base to Mauritius, Asios media reported.
‘Don’t give up Diego Garcia,’ Trump declared after Starmer denied the US military the use of RAF bases in the UK to strike Iran.
A Trump adviser said: ‘The boss is getting fed up. Some people around him warn him against going to war with Iran, but I think there is a 90 per cent chance we will see kinetic action in the next few weeks.’
For its part, Iran refuses to be bullied by US imperialism’s military threats and could close the vital oil transit route through the Straits of Hormuz if attacked. Oil prices have already jumped four per cent on Wednesday due to the crisis.
Iranian Foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, warned :‘If Washington wants to test the military option it has tested before, we are ready for it’.
Meanwhile, 50 years after the UK illegally deported the Chagos population, and dumped them in Mauritius to clear the Chagos islands of people to construct the US military airbase, Diego Garcia, four Chagossians landed on the atoll of Peros Banos on Tuesday to reclaim their land.
An ‘advance party’ of four British Chagossians, led by First Minister Misley Mandarin, has vowed to establish a permanent resettlement on Île du Coin, part of the coral atoll of Peros Banhos.
The group sailed 2,000 miles across the Indian Ocean before landing on Tuesday, marking the end of 50 years in exile.
However, in marked contrast to the UK’s permission for the US military to use the air base for war, the British Foreign Office condemned the four for their actions, describing the journey as an ‘illegal, unsafe stunt’.
In May, PM Keir Starmer agreed to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The Chagos islanders who returned to their homeland won a legal battle yesterday against eviction orders issued by the British Government.
Misley Mandarin, the Chagossian first minister, and three other islanders who travelled to the archipelago have been granted a temporary right to stay on Île du Coin.
The group were served with deportation orders by the Foreign Office on Wednesday by police officers in a patrol boat, warning that they could face three years in jail if they did not leave the island.
But on Thursday, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Chagossians, granting them at least another seven days on the island to ‘file their papers in court’.
Fuelling this war drive to illegally seize and control the world’s oil and natural resources for US capitalism, is the huge indebtedness of the US state with its $38.5tn debt and with the dollar in free fall, now valued at $US 5,000 an ounce.
Yesterday a major crisis emerged in the shadow unregulated banking system in the US when the giant Blue Owl investment bank, one the world’s largest, blocked investors from withdrawing money from one of its flagship private credit funds as panic spread over the crisis in the shadow banking industry.
New York investment firm Blue Owl scrapped plans to let investors withdraw their cash from its $1.7bn (£1.3bn) fund, saying it would repay them in quarterly installments over an extended period instead.
It has $307bn worth of investments (debt) in its OBDC II fund, mostly invests in middle-market companies in the US, currently numbering around 180.
Blue Owl’s sudden crisis follows the collapse of two heavily indebted US companies, First Brands and Tricolor, resulting in banks losing billions of dollars in bad debts, including Santander and Blackrock, and threatens another world banking crisis of 2007 Lehman Brothers proportions.
Facing the imminent threat of all-out war in the Middle East and beyond, and another global financial collapse, the working class must organise to overthrow the madhouse of capitalism.
In the UK, and elsewhere, workers must follow the example of the Palestinian nation and rise up in an indefinite general strike to bring down their bourgeois governments and organise workers’ governments to bring in socialism.
These governments must nationalise the industries and the banks and organise a planned socialist economy to massively raise the living standards of the working-class and put an end to imperialist wars. We must build the revolutionary leadership now! Join the WRP and Young Socialists today!
