THIS week US imperialism ratcheted up its preparations for an all-out military war against Iran.
On Monday, Donald Trump’s national security advisor and warmonger-in-chief John Bolton announced that the US aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, at the head of a battle group of warships was being deployed in the Gulf specifically to target Iran.
On Tuesday, it was revealed that B-52 bombers were being sent to the region as well. Bolton justified this military build-up by claiming that the US was acting ‘in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings’ about Iran and promising ‘unrelenting force’ against it.
Naturally, Bolton couldn’t specify what these ‘threats’ were as the US hadn’t invented them as yet.
While Bolton was making the military preparations for war with Iran, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo was conducting a surprise visit to Iraq to whip the Iraqi government into line behind US imperialism’s drive to smash Iran and set off a conflagration that will engulf the entire region and draw in Russia and China – all designated as US ‘enemies’ by Trump.
Pompeo spent four hours with Iraqi leaders instructing them that America did not ‘want anybody interfering in their country’ and that they must protect US troops stationed in Iraq. The arrogance of Pompeo is astounding.
The only countries that have interfered with Iraq have been the imperialist powers led by the US and Britain who bombed Iraq to pieces, carried out a brutal and illegal occupation of the country and were responsible for the murder of millions of Iraqi men, women and children.
In the process, they spawned and funded terrorist groups like ISIS to carry on their illegal wars of regime change in Syria and Libya.
Pompeo is clearly worried about the increasingly warm relations between Iran and Iraq following a historic visit to Iraq by Iranian president Rouhani in March and his visit was to tell the Iraqis to fall back in line.
Pompeo jumped from Iraq to London, arriving in the UK yesterday to lay the law down to the hapless Theresa May and hand down the latest instructions from the White House.
A year ago, Trump unilaterally tore up the international agreement between the US and other nations with Iran under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear programme in return for a relaxation of economic sanctions. All the other parties to this agreement, including Britain, agreed that Iran had scrupulously complied with this agreement and refused to join the US in tearing it up.
Despite this purely verbal opposition to Trump’s decision, the US has browbeaten these nations and companies into tamely following the new economic stranglehold, aimed at Iran’s oil exports, by using threats of legal action in the US against any company or country trading in Iranian oil.
Certain countries, including China and India, were exempt from these sanctions but last month, Trump announced an end to all exemptions and his intention to halt all oil exports from Iran and economically strangle the country unless it submits to US rule, i.e. carries out a regime change.
With US imperialism strutting around the world dictating to every other country, including supposed ‘allies’, that they must obey and join a war against Iran, the scene is rapidly emerging for a military confrontation that could easily turn into a nuclear one.
The Iranian government has responded defiantly to these war preparations. This week, it notified the five remaining signatories to the nuclear deal that it is suspending some of its commitments to curtailing nuclear developments with the aim of ‘safeguarding the Iranian nation’s security and interests’.
The Iranian government and people will not allow their country to be taken over by US imperialism and its tame puppets in Europe. In their determined fight against US imperialism, they will have the support of the working class and oppressed people of the world.
There is only one solution to imperialist war and that is for the working people of the capitalist world to decide that their enemy is the ruling class at home, and that it must be destroyed along with imperialism as a whole, through the victory of the world socialist revolution.