Fascist Trump/Pence Regime Threatens Attacks,
Increases Deadly Sanctions Against Iran
NO to U.S. War on Iran! NO to Increased Repression
within Iran!

| revcom.us

 

Since his decisive defeat in the elections, Trump and his regime have outrageously stepped up military threats and killer sanctions against Iran. Last week, Trump reportedly was walked back by close advisers from ordering an immediate attack on Iran—but is continuing to look at different options, including cyberattacks in Iran and hitting Iranian allies in the region.1 This came after Trump had fired his secretary of defense Mark Esper and made other changes in top U.S. military command.

Any U.S. attack on Iran, under any pretext, would be totally illegitimate and extremely dangerous—and could escalate to more devastating wars in the region and beyond.

Whether or not Trump launches a military attack, the sanctions that his regime has carried out against Iran for the past few years are having horrific consequences for the masses of people in that country. Because of the deadly squeeze on the economy, unemployment and inflation have skyrocketed. Iran has been blocked from importing needed medicines and medical equipment. This made the situation even more devastating when the COVID pandemic hit Iran earlier this year.2

And now, when Iran—like many countries around the world—is going through a new wave of massive COVID infections and deaths3, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, declared on November 18, “Throughout the coming weeks and months, we will impose new sanctions on Iran...” As in the U.S., the Trump/Pence regime’s actions are directly causing tens of thousands of needless pandemic deaths in Iran.

The increasing sanctions began after Trump, in 2018, pulled the U.S. out of an international agreement with Iran that limited Iran’s nuclear development.4 This was a major change in U.S. policy toward Iran from what it was under Obama. Biden says that he intends to get the U.S. back into the agreement.5 While Trump’s moves over the past several years heightened the immediate danger of U.S. war on Iran, the Democrats’ approach has nothing to do with peace or the interests of humanity. Both are based on the predatory interests in the region of the U.S. rulers to dominate a strategically vital part of the world that has key oil and energy resources. The U.S. aims not only to plunder those resources but, even more, to gain leverage over rivals like China and even allies like Japan and Europe (and to contend with local powers like Iran that also seek to project their influence in the region). To do this, the U.S. has directly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, sponsored wars and coups by puppets and proxies in many more countries, and carried out drone assassinations all over the region. In the past three decades alone, millions of ordinary people have died in that region over these conflicts, with the vast majority of these murders “made in the USA.” 6 These wars and war crimes stem from a system, U.S.-dominated capitalism-imperialism—a system that grinds up the lives of billions of people all over the globe.

To be clear, there is nothing progressive about the theocratic Islamic regime ruling Iran, which is utterly reactionary and has committed vicious crimes against its people. For more on the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran, see sidebar.

Along with a whole trail of horrific crimes and repression, this recently includes the shooting down of more than 100 protesters during a people’s upsurge in late 2019,7 and backing of other reactionary forces in the region,8 even while the crimes carried out by the U.S.—in the Middle East and around the world—far outweigh what the Iranian regime has done and is capable of.

Revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) makes clear the actual nature of and relationship between these forces:

What we see in contention here with Jihad [Islamic fundamentalism] on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade [increasingly globalized western imperialism] on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.

While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these “historically outmodeds” has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system, and in particular the U.S. imperialists. (BAsics 1:28)

What Is Needed Now

People in the U.S. must make clear: Trump, keep your hands off Iran! This needs to be part of being in the streets to demand that the illegitimate fascist regime GET THE HELL OUT!

People in the U.S. should also stand with the oppressed of Iran in their struggle against the reactionary regime ruling over them, and as they suffer immensely from the effects of U.S. sanctions. An important factor in Iran is that there is an actual revolutionary party—the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist Leninist Maoist)—that is working to bring forward a movement for a real revolution.9

As people protest the urgent danger of U.S. war on Iran, there must be a spirit of digging into why this system wages war after war, generation after generation, under both Democrats and Republicans—and how we can get to a radically different, better world. There are answers, at this website and in the works of Bob Avakian. We invite everyone to get into and dig deeply into this.

 

1. Trump Sought Options for Attacking Iran to Stop Its Growing Nuclear Program, NY Times, 11/16/20; ALERT:Trump Considers Options for Military Attack on Iran. No U.S. War on Iran! Trump/Pence OUT NOW!, revcom.us, November 16, 2020. [back]

2. Medical Terrorism—American Style: U.S. Sanctions and Military Threats Escalate Iran’s COVID-19 Death Toll and Threaten the World, revcom.us, April 6, 2020. [back]

3. Iran struggles with Covid-19, U.S. sanctions and collapsing economy, NBC News, October 19, 2020. [back]

4. U.S. Imposes Crippling Sanctions on Iran: A Major, Dangerous and Utterly Illegitimate Escalation, revcom.us, November 5, 2018. [back]

5. Biden Wants to Rejoin Iran Nuclear Deal, but It Won’t Be Easy, New York Times, November 17, 2020. [back]

6. See these articles in the “American Crime” series at revcom.us:

7. Islamic Republic Shoots Down More Than 100, Injures or Arrests Thousands More, revcom.us, December 2, 2019. [back]

8. For example, Iran backs Shi’ite militia forces in Iraq and various groups in Lebanon and Syria. [back]

9. The following are a selection of statements from the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist Leninist Maoist) that have been posted at revcom.us in the past couple of years.

Iran Drug SanctionsThe sanctions that the Trump regime has carried out against Iran for the past few years are having horrific consequences for the masses of people in that country. Sanctions against medicines critical to people caused great suffering. Here pharmacists scan shelves for drugs depleted by sanctions, June 2019. (Photo: AP)

Islamic Republic of Iran: A Thoroughly Reactionary, Religious Fundamentalist Regime Ruling Despotically Over the People of Iran

Editors’ Note: We are posting the following short piece on the Islamic Republic of Iran, adapted from an article previously published at revcom.us, as background for our readers. We will continue to update soon and encourage readers to keep checking this website.

****

In 1978-1979, millions of Iranians, from all walks of life, rose up to overthrow their king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah was hated because he was a ruthless tyrant who enforced U.S. domination of Iran.

Iran is a large country located at one of the world’s most central military and economic crossroads. It has vast oil resources. In 1953, the U.S. CIA put the Shah back in power to prevent Iranians from taking control of their oil and destiny. The U.S. organized the Shah’s secret police—SAVAK—which he used to brutally suppress any opposition. In 1976, Amnesty International reported that the Shah’s regime had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.” Revolutionaries and communists were especially targeted. Under the Shah, Iran was built up to serve U.S. imperialist interests. It was a source of oil. Its economy was opened up to U.S. investment and trade and shaped to serve global capitalism. And the Shah spent billions turning Iran into a U.S.-directed military outpost.

All this led millions of workers, peasants, women, students, intellectuals, and middle- as well as upper-class Iranians to grow to hate the Shah, and then get drawn into the revolution. The Shah tried to drown the uprising in blood, and thousands were attacked, beaten, even shot down in cold blood. But this backfired. It deepened people’s hatred and contempt for the Shah and fueled the revolution that overthrew him.

The people’s dreams for liberation turned bitter when the revolution was hijacked by Islamic theocrats led by Ayatollah Khomeini. During the revolution, these clerics posed as opponents of tyranny and foreign domination. They claimed they represented the revolutionary people’s highest aspirations—for liberation, political freedom, a better life, and an end to suffering.

In fact, these religious leaders opposed the Shah because they felt he was undermining Islam, traditional feudal social relations, and the role of the clergy by too closely linking Iran to the U.S. and foreign capital. So they joined and worked to lead the revolution in order to reassert and strengthen Islam’s grip on Iran by instituting Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic theocracy ruled by clerics. Islam and Iran’s Islamic clerical establishment and institutions have historically been key pillars of Iran’s oppressive ruling structure. This is why they did not suffer the kind of vicious repression under the Shah that was the fate of radicals, revolutionary nationalists, communists, and others. So the religious forces around Khomeini came into the revolution with a lot of power, organization, and social influence. When it became clear the Shah’s rule was crumbling, the U.S. and its allies saw Khomeini as their best chance for preserving U.S. influence and preventing the revolution from becoming more radical. There were revolutionary communist forces in Iran who were trying to lead the revolution in a liberating direction—including many students abroad who courageously dropped everything to return to Iran to join the struggle. However, these forces were unable to prevent the Khomeini forces from seizing power after the Shah’s regime fell and then hijacking the revolution.

After the Shah’s regime fell in February 1979, millions of Iranians wanted the revolution to continue. Yet after Khomeini and the clerics took over and founded the Islamic Republic of Iran, they moved to violently crush their opponents—especially radicals and communists—and monopolize all political power. The new regime quickly re-imposed reactionary religious laws, ideology, and morality, especially the total subordination of women to men at every level of society. On March 8, 1979, tens of thousands of women and their supporters protested new laws forcing women to wear the veil. They were violently attacked by regime thugs and police. The new regime forcibly maintained the oppression of nationalities like the Kurds. While refusing to continue the Shah’s role as a direct U.S. outpost in the region, the Islamic Republic did continue Iran’s economic subordination to global capitalism overall.

The Islamic fundamentalist regime jailed tens of thousands of opponents. In the summer of 1988 alone, thousands of political prisoners, including many communists, were executed after trials lasting only a few minutes. To this day, the Islamic Republic remains a brutal and reactionary dictatorship that denies the Iranian people their most basic rights. “A religious autocracy replaced the despotic monarchy,” the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) (CPI (MLM)) sums up.

 

 

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