DOWNING STREET denials that there is a meeting today of top military, state and government officials to discuss the implications of a US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities are being taken with large pinches of salt everywhere, since it is common knowledge that such an attack is being prepared and will be mounted much sooner rather than later.
The product of such an attack will be rather like a worldwide Tsunami, as oil prices double and treble, wrecking entire economies, and as Iran retaliates politically, economically and militarily, and is supported by mass actions from the anti-imperialist peoples of the world, not just the Islamic peoples.
The British posture that it knows nothing, hears nothing and sees nothing concerning the preparation of this new imperialist war, will not save Britain and British capitalist interests from the whirlwind. Blair has already made clear where Britain stands in his ‘forward with the war’ speech to the Australian parliament, and US planes will be flying to bomb Iran from the British colonial island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In fact, the current trip to Iraq of the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw and his US companion Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice is to help prepare the coming attack on Iran by organising the kind of Iraqi government that will be able to keep southern Iraq under control during it.
The US ambassador Khalilzad has already passed on Bush’s message to the majority Shi’ite party group in the ‘assembly’ that he will not have Jaafari, the Dawa Party leader, as puppet PM, and that he wants the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army militias dissolved.
As is well known, Iran did not stand in the way of Bush’s attack on Iraq, and in May 2003, the leaders of the SCIRI, the Dawa party and the Badr Brigade returned from exile in Iran, from where they had supported Iran in the 1979-87 war.
There was a deal with Iran, and Britain was able to run southern Iraq by kind permission of the pro-Iranian parties. The plan to bomb Iran has brought this arrangement to an end.
As well, Bush is angry that the Mahdi Army, which took part in two uprisings against US troops, now supports Jaafari
US ambassador Khalilzad has made much of the fact that under the puppet Shi’ite dominated government, death squads have flourished, assassinating Iraqi secularists by the thousands.
However, the US and British armies have their own death squads in the new ‘armed forces’ of the country so he is not opposed to these in principle.
The US imperialist worry is that when Iran is bombed, southern Iraq may rise up, unless it has a leadership that will keep order.
This is why, after the farce of two general elections under occupation, Bush has stepped in to instruct the puppets as to what government he requires, and which of them is in, and which of them is out.
The US wants a government where the pro-Iranian Shia politicians will be in a minority, and where the armed movements of the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army will be wound up.
What Straw and Rice are doing in Iraq, is greasing the way for the attack on Iran by seeking to establish a government that they hope will be able to keep order in southern Iraq, when the bombers start flying.
The US bombers will be flying any time from the end of the 30 day period that the UN Security Council has given Iran to give up its nuclear programme.
British workers are very angry with Bush and Blair as the anti-Rice demonstrations have shown.
They must now organise for, and force the TUC to call, a general strike to bring down the Blair government and bring in a workers’ government. This will end the war in Iraq and stop the war on Iran by withdrawing all British troops from Iraq, the Middle East, the Gulf and Afghanistan.
If British workers show the way, there is no doubt that the US, French and German workers will follow their example and deal body blows to imperialism and imperialist war.
