The US Air Force on Sunday withdrew its entire fleet of bombers from RAF Fairford and returned them back to their home base in America.
This abrupt and unannounced move, which clearly caught the UK government by surprise, was confirmed by a Pentagon spokesperson who told the media: ‘While operational security precludes us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real time, we can acknowledge now that all US bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States.’
The hasty nature of this withdrawal was underlined by the fact that some of the bombers had only arrived at Fairford less than a week ago.
While the official statement gave no concrete reasons for this abrupt pull-out, the New York Times reported that two unnamed US officials had attributed it to new threats regarding an ‘Iran-backed plot’ to target the base.
This latest unfounded and unsupported claim of Iranian plots follows on from the hysteria whipped up recently over the alleged terrorists arrested on September 27.
Five men, all British nationals in their mid-20s and from London, were arrested on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offences. The five then became the subject of an intensive investigation by counter-terror police and security forces to find evidence of explosive materials and links to Iran.
Despite forensic examination of the three vehicles involved, and their homes in London, no traces of explosives were found and neither were any links to Iran. All five were released on police bail as was a another young man, holding dual British and Iranian citizenship, who was arrested a few days later.
The total collapse into farce of the narrative pushed by Labour leader Andy Burnham and US president Donald Trump that this was a ‘terrorist’ plot by Iran hasn’t stopped them from carrying on with unproven allegations.
Trump immediately jumped in following the arrests to claim that the US had ‘full knowledge’ of the dastardly plan, and he attacked the UK police for releasing them on police bail.
Presumably, if they had been arrested in the US they would have been banged up while ‘evidence’ was produced. Trump clearly doesn’t regard the UK as a safe area for the deployment of bombers used in the illegal war on Iran.
The UK isn’t the only area that US forces are fleeing from. On Sunday Iran’s leading Revolutionary Guards commander, Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, said that US forces have fled and moved back to positions at least 1,000 kilometres from Iranian borders.
He stressed that for the first time no American vessels are present in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, the Sea of Oman or even the northern Indian Ocean.
Fadavi said that the Strait of Hormuz has been under Iran’s control for many months and that the US has failed to achieve any of its objectives in the unprovoked war.
Unable to accept the reality that the ‘mighty’ US armed forces have been defeated by Iran, Trump has ordered three aircraft carriers to the Middle East in preparation for a desperate attempt to rescue US imperialism from humiliating defeat.
Fadavi stressed that US vessels are ‘100 per cent vulnerable’ that all past attempts to enter the Strait of Hormuz have been met with decisive attacks from Iranian military.
The working class in the US, UK and Europe will not be fooled by attempts, widely seen as ‘false flags’, to whip up support for the war by the US and its imperialist allies – a war that is driving inflation and holds nothing but misery for workers and their families as the full effects of the oil crisis impacts on the cost-of-living.
On the contrary, workers see that Iran is not the enemy – the enemy is a bankrupt capitalist system that in its death agony is prepared to wage wars to reconquer the world, and make the working class at home pay.
The working class has the power to put an end to imperialist wars by forcing their trade unions to call general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments and bring in workers governments and socialism.
