PRESIDENT Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton has stated that the United States is exerting ‘unprecedented pressure on the government of Iran to change its behaviour.’ In fact, as everybody knows – including the US ruling class – the leaders of the Iranian revolution have no intention of changing their behaviour, ie of bending the knee to the US and its allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Trump is seeking to destroy the Iranian economy and the lives of millions of Iranian people, so that the US, along with Saudi Arabia and Israel, can organise a counter-revolutionary uprising and then intervene to ‘save these ordinary people’ and the ‘democratic opposition’ from the economic and political catastrophe that US imperialism has created.
The signal for intervention will be that the US has discovered that Iran is on the brink of producing a viable nuclear weapon and the means of delivery. This will be straight out of the Tony Blair cookbook that was used to start the 2003 war with Iraq.
The US ruling class also created the conditions for regime change in Iraq with a savage economic blockade – carried out under the cover of the UN. This UN embargo destroyed the Iraqi economy and cost the lives of over a million Iraqi men, women and children who could no longer receive adequate hospital treatment or food. When questioned about this inhuman tactic of starving and murdering children in particular, the US ruling class had the gall to publicly defend it.
On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright, the Democratic administration’s Secretary of State, defended the deadly all-embracing UN sanctions against Iraq on the US ‘60 Minutes’ show. Lesley Stahl asked her: ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright replied, ‘We think the price is worth it.’
Bush replaced Clinton on January 20, 2001, and immediately supplemented the UN boycott with the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction which Blair enlarged on saying that they could be used in just hours.
The only answer to this desperate threat was the UK-US invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought absolute chaos to the Middle East. The intervention failed to produce a single weapon of mass destruction, instead, it produced hunger, starvation, civil war and then ISIS, and the US-UK destruction of Mosul!
Bolton follows in the Albright tradition when he told Fox News on Monday, shortly after Trump signed an executive order reimposing many sanctions on Iran, that it was to levy ‘maximum economic pressure’ on the Islamic Republic.
‘Our policy is not regime change. We want to put unprecedented pressure on the government of Iran to change its behaviour. And, so far, they’ve shown no indication they’re prepared to do that.’
The Iranian people will be starved in order to create the conditions for chaos. Then the likes of Bolton will replay the WMD card with a pre-emptive invasion.
The second wave of sanctions that will hit Iran on November 4th will aim to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero, as claimed by US officials, bringing the country close to bankruptcy. However, the indomitable Iranian people will never give way or surrender to the imperialist powers.
The working people of the world, particularly the working people of the UK and the USA, must now show that they have learnt the lessons from the Iraq war.
The first is that their leaders are telling yet more lies about the crisis and the situation. The second is that the war danger comes from the UK and US ruling classes. The third is that their enemy is at home – it is not in Iran or anywhere else. The fourth is that even million-strong demonstrations were not strong enough to stop the war on Iraq.
The trade unions of the USA and the UK must tell their imperialist governments that any attack on Iran will be met with general strikes to stop the war abroad and start a class war to remove the reactionary governments at home!
