IRAN on Tuesday fired a shot across the bows of the imperialist powers when it threatened to halt the vital oil transport route from the Gulf to all parts of the planet by blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that ‘not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz’ if imperialist sanctions designed to seriously damage the Iranian economy are imposed.
The Western powers recently unveiled new sanctions against Tehran following a UN report that said Iran had carried out tests related to ‘development of a nuclear device’.
Further measures are being considered to target Iran’s oil and financial sectors and have brought a furious response from Tehran.
The Strait of Hormuz links the Gulf – and the oil-producing states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to the Indian Ocean. About 40% of the world’s tanker-borne oil passes through it.
The US maintains a naval presence in the Gulf, largely to ensure the transport of oil remains open, and Bahrain is the headquarters of its Fifth Fleet.
US State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said: ‘I just think it’s another attempt by them to distract attention from the real issue, which is their continued non-compliance with their international nuclear obligations.’
However, Iran’s navy has been staging wargames in international waters to the east of the strait.
Iran has got every reason to be alarmed about the intentions of the United States and the imperialist powers, who are currently seeking to intervene in Syria, using Turkey and its marshalling of hundreds of Libyan counter-revolutionaries to start a Syrian civil war.
It is ironic that Iran’s refusal to defend Libya against the NATO onslaught, has now boomeranged against it.
NATO’s NTC ground forces are now being used in Syria, with the object of not only removing the Assad regime, but also preparing a new onslaught against Iran and Syria’s ally in the Lebanon, Hezbollah.
The imperialist plan is to smash Assad and Hezbollah to greatly strengthen Israel before going on to mount an attack on Iran itself, using the old well-worn lie from the Iraq war, that Iran is acquiring weapons of mass destruction, a charge that the Iranian regime, like the Iraqi regime before it, is repeatedly denying.
In fact, the Iranian regime has got every right to defend itself against the war drive of the imperialist powers.
This is why Iran’s current warning that it will close the Strait of Hormuz should not just be laughed off as a joke, that Iran would never dare to do.
If the imperialists do not halt their action inside Syria, and do not give up their plans to organise a new civil war in the Lebanon for the benefit of Israel, Iran has every right to defend itself against the imperialist powers by bringing their world economy to a halt, by cutting the oil supply at Hormuz in what would be a more powerful blow than any nuclear weapon could deliver.
In fact the imperialist drive against Libya, then Syria and Iran has the same source as the drive of the US and UK ruling classes against their own working classes.
The source of these twin onslaughts is the raging and deepening world crisis of the capitalist system.
Former world crises led to the First and Second World Wars to redivide the world amongst the imperialist powers, but ended in revolutions.
The current crisis is driving the imperialists to civil wars at home and imperialist wars of reconquest abroad, of the type that we saw in Libya.
Faced with these twin attacks, the working class and the youth of the west are beginning to grasp that they have more in common with the anti-imperialist masses of Iran, Libya, Syria and Palestine, than they have with their own ruling classes.
In fact, the enemy is at home. Workers in the West must form a common front with the workers and poor of the world to smash capitalism and imperialism to take the world forward to socialism. This is the only way forward.