BRITAIN’S Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has just revealed the policy of the British government on Iraq – or has he?
He said that Iran must be persuaded to co-operate over its nuclear programme ‘by peaceful means’.
He added for good measure: ‘nobody is talking about invading Iran’, reasoning that ‘Iran is not Iraq’.
This has been taken to mean that Iran has not been weakened by 13 years of the most vicious UN sanctions, as was Iraq from 1990 to 2003 when 1,500,000 of its people died from lack of food and medicines, and when the whole country outside Kurdistan was deliberately starved.
As everybody knows a bully is always loth to attack the fully fit. They want them weakened first.
However, before the assault on Iraq, the British government was singing a similar tune, saying that war was not inevitable, and all that it was seeking to do was disarm Iraq of its non-existent wmds, and once that was done there would be peace.
The whole world now knows Bush and Blair were using fake intelligence about wmds and Iraq’s supposed attempts, via Niger, to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons to prepare the way for war.
For at least one year before March 2003 the British government was committed to going to war against Iraq alongside the US, it was just a matter of seizing the right moment to invade. Now a similar scenario is being worked on once again.
Iran says that it has the right to have a nuclear programme for peaceful means, since its oil resources are fast depleting.
The US and the UK say that Iran is intent on making a nuclear bomb and because of this allegation it cannot be allowed to have a nuclear programme and nuclear research.
The same countries have meanwhile allowed Israel to secretly amass over 200 nuclear weapons, and both India and Pakistan, two of its allies, have recently acquired nuclear bombs without even a protest from Washington and London.
The US and the UK are seeking to draw up a new imperialist law or diktat. No country, outside of them and their allies can be allowed to acquire a nuclear programme.
The US, Britain’s strategic master, is prepared to go to war on this issue, and Israeli generals are already stating that they should strike Iran and bomb it into submission.
The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when asked the same question as Straw replied, that the US has no intention of taking military action against Iran at the moment.
The Israeli general Uzi Dayan has said that Israel must use its full military might against Iran.
Meanwhile, the US along with the UK and the EU is hauling Iran in front of the stooge UN Security Council where they are relying on the Stalinist leaderships of Russia and China not to veto life threatening sanctions against the Iranian people, thus beginning the slippery slope to another imperialist war.
Iran meanwhile broke the UN seals to its Natanz nuclear research facility on Tuesday because it wants to produce electricity, not because it is pursuing nuclear weapons.
The fact of the matter is that Iran has as much right as does the US, UK or Israel to develop nuclear power.
In principle it has every right to develop the same kind of nuclear weaponry that is currently being used to threaten it by the US, UK, and Israel.
The imperialist powers and their allies do not have the sole right to harness and develop nuclear power.
Having seen how the treacherous imperialist powers lied their way to sanctions and war against Iraq, the trade unions must defend Iran and declare that the first casualty of any move to war or sanctions against Iran will be the Blair government.
