AT a press conference on Wednesday evening, US president Joe Biden announced that American imperialism was prepared for an all-out war in the Middle East to protect its client Israeli state from any retribution over its illegal attack on Iranian territory.
Last week, Israel launched a missile attack on the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital Damascus, in a targeted assassination of seven Iranian military advisers, including three senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, killing a total of 12 people.
Under international law this embassy is recognised as being Iranian territory.
This was the first time that Israel has directly attacked Iranian territory, although it is far from the first time it has launched missile attacks on Syria and Lebanon, and it marked a massive escalation in a war that the Zionist state and its imperialist backers are preparing for in the Middle East region.
In response to this flagrant contempt for any international law, the Iranian government issued its own warning that it would not sit back without responding.
Earlier on Wednesday, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: ‘When they attacked our consulate area, it was like they attacked our territory,’ adding: ‘The evil regime must be punished, and it will be punished.’
It was just hours after this statement that Biden told the press: ‘We also want to address the Iranian threat to launch a significant – they’re threatening to launch a significant attack in Israel,’ before going on to say: ‘As I told prime minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again, ironclad. We’re gonna do all we can to protect Israel’s security.’
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant made it clear that what was being prepared was a war throughout the Middle East, saying that any military action against Israel will be met with ‘decisive action against the territory of whoever attacks our territory, no matter where it is, in the entire Middle East’.
This commitment to US military forces going to war against Iran, and to plunge the entire region into a war to defend the genocidal Zionist regime, flies in the face of all those reports in the bourgeois media that Biden is going all-out to hold back Israel from its strategy of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza.
This statement was just a front, a desperate attempt to placate the massive support for Palestine and the demand for a complete ban on arming the Zionist regime.
Now the gloves are off and Biden has spelt out the real intention of the imperialist nations to go to war to defend the beleaguered state of Israel, which is in a crisis over the failure of the Netanyahu regime to crush the Palestinian resistance.
Defending the right of Israel to kill over 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and launch murderous air strikes in any country it wishes, even at the cost of setting the entire Middle East ablaze, is an absolute imperative for US imperialism to assert its domination over the region and all its mineral wealth and strategic importance to world capitalism.
In this war drive the US will have the full support of the Tory government in the UK.
The day before Biden’s declared war intentions, Tory foreign secretary David Cameron was in the US reiterating Israel’s ‘right to self defence’, the well-worn justification for all the crimes committed by the Zionist regime.
With the Tories preparing to add its military support to the US war-drive against Iran, the responsibility falls to the working class in Britain, which overwhelmingly supports the Palestinian struggle, to act.
Workers must force the TUC to end its shameful silence on Palestine and the imminent threat of an all-out war engulfing the region – a war the Tories will demand be paid for by the working class.
Instead of sitting on the sidelines, the TUC must be forced to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
A general strike to bring the Tories down in support of Palestine and to end the imperialist war drive, will be supported by working people across the US and Europe.
The working class has the power to end all imperialist wars with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This is the only way forward!
