Massive U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles have been raining death, destruction, and terror on the people of Iran for 10 days now with no end in sight. 

Their first strike on the morning of February 28 was carried out by Israel based on U.S. intelligence. It struck Iran’s leadership compound, killing Iran’s head of state Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials. 

U.S. military officials boast that they don’t target civilians. These are lies. Iran reports that some 3,600 civilian sites have been hit by the U.S. and Israel. Hospitals are bombed and nowhere is safe. Fourteen medical centers have been bombed.

The magnificent Golestan Palace, which dates from 1404 and is a UNESCO heritage site, has been bombed. The renowned Azadi Stadium Complex, which has hosted events from soccer tournaments to a Frank Sinatra concert, has also been bombed. According to Aljazeera,  Iran said last week that "a separate attack on another sports center killed 18 boys and girls as they were playing volleyball."¹

According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the death toll now stands at more than 1,332, 30 percent of them children.

Even more hell is on the way. The fascist Trump has “vowed to continue the war for at least another month and did not rule out the use of American ground troops.” U.S. officials said that the Pentagon is deploying even more soldiers and war planes to the region. Trump is now rejecting negotiations to end the slaughter and demanding unconditional surrender.²

A Towering U.S.-Israeli War Crime Based on Bald-Faced Lies

Trump has claimed that Iran posed an immediate threat of attack to the U.S. In fact, Iran has no nuclear weapons and no missiles that can reach the U.S., and there’s no evidence that it was planning to attack the U.S. So the claim that Iran posed an immediate threat to the U.S. is a bald-faced lie.

In fact, when the U.S. and Israel attacked, Iran was in the midst of negotiating—peacefully—with the U.S. After the war began, the New York Times revealed that all the while the U.S. and Israel had been discussing and planning an attack on Iran—since December, months earlier, in fact. In other words, the claim that the U.S. “suddenly realized” Iran was about to attack and had to protect itself was complete bullshit.

The Trump regime never presented any evidence that Iran was preparing to preemptively attack the U.S. (or even on its Middle East bases). But it has been spinning out one lie or rationalization after another for its preemptive war: that this was a war for regime change, or a war to wipe out Iran’s missiles or its nuclear enrichment program.³ (For a detailed chronology of the fascist Trump regime’s ever-shifting lies and rationalizations, see The Guardian, Trump’s ever-changing rationale for war on Iran – how the story has shifted, March 7.)

The biggest lie of all, which even Trump now seems to have dropped (at least for now), is that the U.S. wanted to help the Iranian people get free of their repressive regime. To be clear, the Iranian regime is a vicious, highly repressive regime—a fact we have exposed week in and week out ever since it came to power more than 45 years ago. Those who do rise up against it should be supported. 

Here it’s worth noting that many of the regime’s fiercest opponents inside Iran—including the Communist Party of Iran, MLM, as well as many others—not only oppose the regime, but also fiercely oppose the U.S.-Israeli war against the regime. But even more fundamentally, as we say in an important article elsewhere in this issue, is the crucial point that:

the whole history and present role of U.S. imperialism in relation to Iran has been in fundamental opposition to the basic interests of the Iranian people, and has been responsible for horrendous suffering inflicted upon them. A major factor in enabling the rise to power of the reactionary Islamic regime in Iran was the role of U.S. imperialism in overthrowing the popular (and not Islamic fundamentalist) Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, installing in its place the bloody regime of the Shah and fully backing that regime of the Shah for decades (a regime which, along with its ongoing brutal repression and torture, not incidentally also slaughtered thousands of Iranians who rose up against it, in the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s). Nothing good can come from the actions of the U.S., along with Israel—and those, like the son of the Shah, who act as agents of those bloodthirsty forces.

So, no—the reasons you have been given are NOT the reasons.

The Real Reason That Trump Is Slaughtering People and Risking Global Nuclear War

The real reason is that Iran is a major country of nearly 100 million people, located at the center of a region which is crucial to world trade and energy production. Further this region itself is home to over half a billion people. Iran has in recent years drawn increasingly closer to both Russia and China, the main imperialist rivals of the U.S. in the world. In recent years, Iran has been weakened by Israel’s military onslaughts against its allies in Gaza and Lebanon (onslaughts which were fully backed by the U.S.) and by the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran last June. In January massive popular demonstrations shook the country and were only repressed with the murder of thousands of people. 

The U.S. and Israel thought they could use Iran’s relative weakness now to go in for “the kill,” and so they took a gamble. And that’s just it—it’s a huge gamble with huge stakes, including the real possibility of nuclear war among imperialist powers and quite possibly the extinction of humanity. If there were no other reason to make revolution and bring in a whole new world without the exploitation and oppression that drives this madness—and there are in fact many reasons to make such a revolution—this alone would be reason enough.

To quote the revolutionary leader and thinker, and architect of the new communism, Bob Avakian:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

What Does It Say About This System That Neither Party Will Condemn War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity?

The Democrats have made a stink about the fact that Trump didn’t get congressional authorization before going to war on Iran. Democrats have also criticized Trump for “wasting taxpayer money,” for putting U.S. troops in harm’s way, for having “no plan” in Iran, even for abandoning his promise to “bring down costs for Americans.” 

So, again, ask yourself: at a time when over 1,300 Iranian civilians have already been slaughtered in just one week, what does it say that no leading Democrat has condemned the U.S. attack on Iran for what it really is—a war crime and crime against humanity!?!

And it gets even worse. Some Democrats who have criticized the war as “illegal” are still ready to OK another $50 billion for the war on Iran! “I need to know the goals and the plan,” says former CIA analyst and current Democratic congresswoman Elissa Slotkin. “I don’t rule anything out… . I mean, we’re in it [a war].” 

The question here is why, once again, are the Democrats failing to oppose an outrageously unjust and unprovoked war—a crime against humanity—one with possibly grave consequences for all of humanity—for what it is? Because the driving purpose of the Democratic Party as an institution is to “serve and protect” this capitalist-imperialist system and the dominant position of the U.S. within that worldwide system of exploitation and horror. Yes, they have differences with their fascist rivals over HOW to do that—sometimes quite bitter differences—but their calculation, their ultimate yardstick is, again, what serves America’s domination over the capitalist-imperialist system worldwide. And their differences with the Republi-fascists ultimately revolve around that.

Who Is the Biggest State Sponsor of Terror in the Middle East? 

The Trump regime has denounced Iran as the Middle East’s and world’s leading state sponsor of terror. Now, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives recently overwhelmingly passed a bill calling the Islamic Republic of Iran "the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.” The vote was 372 to 53, with the overwhelming majority of Democrats supporting it.⁴

Leading Senate Democrats agree:

“Democrats have deep concerns about what comes next in Iran, how long strikes will last and the ways constitutionally mandated congressional approval was ignored by the Trump administration. Yet on the substance of the action itself—like killing Iran’s supreme leader and disrupting the regime’s ability to solidify a nuclear program—there is support for the result… ‘I’ve long said that the Islamic Revolutionary regime in Iran is a terrorist regime. I do not for a second have any grief over the passing of the ayatollah and real hope at the prospect that there will be some different or new regime,’ Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told MS NOW on Tuesday.” [Emphasis added]

Before answering this, let us just note that a major “liberal” figure of the Democratic Party has just signed off on the assassination of the head of a sovereign state. Yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a reactionary, extremely repressive and oppressive theocracy, that has used terror as a weapon across the Middle East and in Iran itself.

But the biggest terrorist? The country that has spread by far the most depraved and vile terror across the region? Hands down that “achievement” goes to Israel. Israel, which was founded on the terror of the 1948 Nakba, which drove over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. Israel, who has terrorized the more than five million Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank for some 59 years. Israel, who is continuing to carry out a depraved, Nazi-like genocide in Gaza. Israel, who has spread terror across the region for years—in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and elsewhere.

Right now Israel has launched a war of terror and death on the people of Lebanon—even as it continues to bomb Iran. On March 2, Israel launched a preplanned mass bombing attack on southern Beirut and other areas thought to be sympathetic to the Iranian ally, Hezbollah.⁵ In southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, Israel has demanded villagers evacuate their homes and move north past the Litani River, 18 miles from Israel’s border. Millions of Lebanese are fleeing their homes in terror. Families have been forced to grab their belongings and loved ones and rush out of targeted suburbs, often being forced to shelter in the street. 

Lebanese officials report that at least 400 people have already been killed, including children, another 683 wounded, and some 517,000 displaced from their homes so far.

And Israeli leaders brag about terrorizing whole populations and carrying out genocide: Israel’s fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich praised Israel’s new war on Lebanon, and threatened to reduce Beirut’s southern suburbs to rubble, as Israel had in Khan Younis, Gaza.⁶ 

Since its founding, the state of Israel has served as a major and crucial means of U.S. domination of the Middle East against other imperialist powers as well as anti-imperialist movements in the region. This is the state that is the U.S.’s closest ally in the Middle East—under Democrats and Republicans. This is the terror state with which the U.S. is waging war against Iran, in order to violently reshape the entire Middle East and impose their total imperialist domination.

What Is Urgently Called for Now

The Iranian people urgently need to be free from the brutal, and often murderous, oppression of the Islamic Republic. But this cannot come about through U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles. It can only come about through the heroic actions of the Iranian people in their millions aiming to break the chains of imperialism, ultimately as part of emancipating humanity. So it’s crucial to support THAT struggle and not get played by one or the other oppressive power. 

The focus now, for people in this country, has to be to resolutely oppose “our own” rulers and the massive war crimes they’re carrying out in Iran, along with their Israeli henchmen. This is what’s before us—and every individual and every group should be measured by what they’re doing to make this opposition massive, determined, and visible.