THE US President, George W Bush said on Friday: ‘All options are on the table,’ adding that he had not ruled out the option of using force against Iran, after it resumed work on its nuclear programme for an alternative source of energy.
He continued that, although he was working on a diplomatic solution, he was ‘sceptical’ that he would be able to find one. Iran restarted work at its uranium conversion plant at Isfahan on Monday.
The US position is that only its allies are allowed to develop nuclear energy programmes. In fact, these allies have developed nuclear weapons, and have not received so much as a verbal caution.
Outside the nuclear arsenals of France and Britain, which are constantly being modified and developed, Israel has at least 200 nuclear bombs plus other weapons of mass destruction, and India and Pakistan both possess nuclear weapons and are now testing missiles in order to be able to deliver them – without a single rebuke from the US.
Meanwhile, the US demands that North Korea gives up the nuclear weapon that it possesses, and both the US and the UK publicly oppose a Middle East free of nuclear weapons in order to support Israel’s possession of them, while insisting that no other Middle Eastern state can have them.
The imperialists and their allies are to have nuclear weapons without limitation, while those that they wish to destroy are to have none, and are not even allowed to have nuclear power.
The former Iranian President, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said last Friday that: ‘Our people are not going to allow their nuclear rights to be seized.’
Bush’s statement was made in an interview with the Israeli media. There is every reason to think that this statement was made as an encouragement to Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel has a track record in this respect. Its planes have already bombed an Iraqi nuclear power station while it was under construction.
Meanwhile, the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder has warned the US to back away from military action, saying: ‘Let’s take the military option off the table. We have seen it doesn’t work.’ He added: ‘This is why I can with certainty exclude any participation by the German government under my direction.’
There is not the slightest doubt that the Blair government will follow Bush’s lead, and support military action against Iran, in the same way as it supported military action against Iraq.
However, as the whole world now knows, the Iraq war was pre-planned, and was consciously prepared with lying propaganda that Iraq possessed wmds and was a danger to the entire world. the object was to grab Iraq’s oil.
Now the war machine is set to roll again, against another major oil producer. The stated ‘cause’ of war this time is that Iran must not have access to nuclear power, even as an alternative source of energy.
The root cause is again the deepening world crisis of the capitalist system, and the strategic need of the imperialists to grab Middle Eastern and Central and South Asian oil resources.
A minor cause is that many US military leaders consider that ‘severely curbing’ Iran is the only way that the US will be able to retain full control of the puppet regime in Iraq, which contains many pro-Iranian movements.
British workers, and the workers of the world, are to pay an even heavier price for the refusal of the British trade unions to bring down the Blair government over its alliance with Bush to attack Iraq.
Faced with a British government that will support US military action against Iran, the trade union leaders must be forced, by their seven million members, to take action to stop a war with Iran by bringing down the Blair government, and bringing in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies.
