Trump Says Iran Violating Nuclear Deal:
An Ominous Move, A Gangster Escalation

October 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

U.S. war ship off Strait of Hormuz, August 2016.

Who Again Is the World’s Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism?

On Friday, Trump denounced Iran’s Islamic Republic (IRI) for a litany of actions—some real, some made up—going back to 1979, and called the regime “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a power which has fueled “conflict, terror, and turmoil throughout the Middle East and beyond.”

Trump’s twisted “America First” history lesson turned history upside down. Who is actually the world’s leading state sponsor of terror? Who has done more than any other power to fuel “conflict, terror, and turmoil?”

Iran is an oppressed country that has been dominated and/or threatened by British and U.S. imperialism for well over a century. It’s now ruled by an oppressive, reactionary Islamic theocracy which has carried out terrible crimes against people in Iran and across the region. But those crimes pale in comparison with the death and destruction the United States of America—the world’s biggest exploiter, oppressor, and dominator—has rained down in the Middle East, not to mention the rest of the world.

Just to take a few examples from the Middle East alone, it was the U.S. after all that gave the green light to and supported the barbaric 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq, including by helping Iraq obtain and use chemical weapons. That slaughter left over a million dead or wounded. In the 1990s, the U.S.-UN sanctions on Iraq killed over 500,000 children through starvation and disease. Since 2001, the U.S. has directly or indirectly killed more than a million people in the Middle East with its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its interventions across the region, and helped create the worst refugee crisis in history. And it’s the U.S. that’s now backing the Saudi Arabian campaign of mass starvation, death by cholera, and murder by U.S.-made bombs being waged against literally millions of people in Yemen, including children.

So who again is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism?

For humanity to advance beyond a state in which “might makes right”—and where things ultimately come down to raw power relations—will require, as a fundamental element in this advance, an approach to understanding things (an epistemology) which recognizes that reality and truth are objective and do not vary in accordance with, nor depend on, different “narratives” and how much “authority” an idea (or “narrative”) may have behind it, or how much power and force can be wielded on behalf of any particular idea or “narrative,” at any given point.

Bob Avakian, BAsics, 4:10

On Friday, October 13, in a bellicose, fascist speech, Donald Trump condemned and threatened Iran, then refused to certify its compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement it signed with the U.S. and other major world powers. This is a serious and dangerous U.S. escalation.

Under the nuclear deal, Iran agreed to radically scale back its nuclear development and enrichment programs, making it impossible for it to develop the capability to make a nuclear weapon for at least 10 years. In return, the U.S. and other world powers agreed to lift their crippling economic and financial sanctions. Every single party to the deal, including the Trump/Pence regime up until now, has confirmed that Iran is complying with the agreement.

The U.S. president is required to certify Iran’s compliance every 90 days. And this is what Trump refused to do on Friday, claiming Iran had committed “multiple violations” of the agreement, and that it was not “living up to the spirit of the deal.” These are lies.

And that wasn’t all. Trump made new demands on Iran—over its missile program and to extend the agreement—that are not part of the deal. He demanded Congress write legislation to impose new sanctions on Iran if his demands were not met. These moves would violate the nuclear agreement, and if carried out could kill it. And Trump made clear what would happen if Congress and U.S. allies didn’t take action to his liking: “Then the agreement would be terminated. It is under continuous review and our participation can be cancelled by me as President at any time.”

Trump’s Ominous Move and Gangster Escalation

Trump’s threat to tear up the Iran nuclear deal is ominous.

This deal, between reactionary global powers and a reactionary regional power, was the product of escalating U.S. and Israeli military threats and years of punishing U.S. and international sanctions. It was put in place to prevent Iran from having the ability to develop nuclear weapons, and, from the U.S. standpoint, to maintain its control of a region long crucial to its global dominance and power. In this context, it was also aimed at interrupting the gathering momentum toward a possible U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which the Obama team felt could endanger U.S. interests. The U.S. also hoped the nuclear deal could lead to greater Iranian cooperation with—and acquiescence to—U.S. objectives in the region and globally.

Yet since the deal was signed, war and turmoil in the Middle East has in many ways intensified, and U.S. and Iranian needs, interests, and ambitions are clashing sharply. In Iraq, where Iran has gained great economic leverage, U.S. and Iranian-backed military forces are maneuvering for dominance, even as they sometimes cooperate against ISIS. In Syria, Iranian and Russia military intervention has, so far, kept Bashir al-Assad in power, outraging the U.S., Israelis, and Saudis. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia, a crucial U.S. proxy in the region, is mired in a protracted and risky war against Houthi rebels, who are loosely aligned with Iran.

All this poses great challenges to America’s domination of the region. The core of the Trump/Pence regime feels Obama was hesitating, even retreating, in the face of these difficulties and that the Iran deal epitomized this. They’re determined to reverse what they see as a major drift, and if necessary bludgeon and bomb their way through these contradictions—existing treaties or agreements be damned.

When Trump says Iran isn’t “living up to the spirit of the deal,” this has nothing to do with the text of the agreement. It’s Trump attempting to expand the scope of the deal to encompass Iranian actions that get in the way of America’s bloody stranglehold on the region.

This is what drove Trump’s warlike indictment of Iran’s Islamic Republic, and his new strategy for aggressively confronting Iran and rolling back its influence. This included sanctioning Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key pillar of the regime; working more closely with Israel and Saudi Arabia to directly assault and undermine Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen; and countering Iran’s missile program.

A Pentagon spokesperson stated that in light of Trump’s announcement, the military is reviewing the “full breadth” of its Middle East actions—including troop deployments—in order to find ways to counter Iran and its allies. One Iran expert told Democracy Now!: “The buzz [in Washington, DC] is that there’s going to be a very significant ramping up, an escalation, in the region against Iran, potentially including shooting down Iranian airplanes, sinking Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf, targeting Iranian troops or Iranian-allied troops in Iraq and in Syria.”

Trump: Consolidating Fascism, Heightening the Likelihood of Catastrophic War

Trump’s threats against the Iran deal reflects his fascist regime’s determination to rip up anything standing in the way of forcibly imposing “America First” gangster domination of the entire globe—if need be, even the strategies, treaties, alliances, and political norms through which the U.S. has exercised its domination over the last 70 years.

Tearing up the Iran nuclear deal and escalating U.S. aggression against Iran would be an utterly illegitimate act of military—and implicitly nuclear—brinksmanship that would put a region of hundreds of millions, indeed the world, at risk!

As revcom.us analyzed last week, Trump’s actions toward Iran mark “the further consolidation of the fascist regime and fascist program, in the international sphere.” And further:

While we can’t say with certainty how any one situation will turn out, we can say that if this regime remains in power the probability that the U.S. will end up in a war that will either begin as, or become, nuclear is greatly heightened. Trump’s threats and intentional unpredictability make a miscalculation or “accidental” war much more likely and trifle with the lives of literally billions of people. Indeed, what Trump represents and is doing qualitatively heightens the danger to humanity, including the very future of humanity.

What more reason do we need to flood into the streets on November 4, and stay there until this murderous fascist regime which threatens the whole planet is driven from power?

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Trump Says Iran Violating Nuclear Deal:An Ominous Move, A Gangster Escalation

Trump’s Ominous Move and Gangster Escalation

Trump: Consolidating Fascism, Heightening the Likelihood of Catastrophic War

Trump Says Iran Violating Nuclear Deal:
An Ominous Move, A Gangster Escalation