THE decision of the Iranian leadership to unconditionally free the fifteen British sailors and marines, who trespassed into Iranian waters, and also to leave the people of the world to make the judgement on the whole episode, constitutes a great victory for the Iranian revolution and for all the oppressed peoples, over imperialism.
Iran has delivered a huge blow against, and completely exposed all of the imperialist propaganda about the ‘axis of evil’, and the Blair-Reid tall story that the world is at the mercy of tens of millions of Muslim fanatics who do not value life, who are inhuman, and is involved in a life and death struggle with these ‘ghouls’, in which anything goes, including getting rid of our basic rights, and legitimising torture, ‘shoot to kill’, mass murder, and the latest tactic, Kamikaze attacks on alleged terrorists.
The unconditional freeing of the 15 British soldiers, who were engaged in an aggressive war in Iraq and threatening Iran, and their comfortable and friendly treatment while they were under arrest, will lead millions to once again compare their treatment to the fate of those who fell into the hands of the US army at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and the fate of Baha Mousa who died from 94 body wounds inflicted on him by British troops, who treated him as a human football for 24 hours while they held him as a suspect.
Imperialism consciously seeks to dehumanise its soldiery. This is an essential requirement for carrying out the tasks set for them by the Bush and Blair administrations – that of reordering the world and occupying whole nations, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people, as in Iraq, in order to enslave them and steal their oil, gas and other natural resources.
Look at the record of the Bush and Blair regimes.
In 2003 Bush and Blair lied their way to war with Iraq in the guise of seeking to rid that country of weapons of mass destruction, which it did not possess.
They occupied Iraq and are currently seeking to privatise its oil industry using the puppet government that they installed to do so.
They are now seeking to move onto tackling Iran, using the legitimate Iranian aim to harness nuclear power for peaceful purposes as their cause of war.
Those who have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis without even blinking an eyelid, have been saying that Iran cannot be trusted with nuclear power, when they are the only countries in the world that have actually used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Japan was on the point of surrender in World War II.
In fact, it is well known that they have a plan to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities with tactical nuclear weapons deployed by Israel!
Now, the whole world can see that it is Bush and Blair and US and UK imperialism which is the axis of evil.
The world must now act on this knowledge, to prevent the imperialists expanding the Iraq war into Iran and into Central Asia.
In Britain, we are now entering the season of trade union annual conferences, concluding with the TUC Congress.
Emergency resolutions must be passed at all of these conferences demanding the withdrawal of all British troops from the Middle East, the Gulf and from Central Asia, and for reparations to be paid to the people of Iraq for the vast damage done to Iraq by the US and UK imperialists.
Such resolutions must insist that if the British government refuses to withdraw its forces as requested, the trade unions will call a general strike to bring the Blair or Brown government down in order to go forward to a workers’ government that will carry out the withdrawal of troops as just one of its socialist policies.
One of the first actions of a workers’ government will be to put the Blair Iraq war cabinet on trial for war crimes.